The Vietnam Reader (41 page)

In my sophomore year I had had it with school. I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do. School was boring as hell and I was floating along in a state of limbo. About Christmas, I got word from home that Johnny Kane had been killed over in Vietnam. I couldn’t believe it.

Johnny was the Ail-American boy. He held the state record for the high hurdles. He was the quarterback of the Wilcox High School
football team who led Wilcox to an undefeated season and the Class C championship. He was about three years older than me. Even though I was just a punk kid, he was always nice to me. I really liked Johnny Kane.

Johnny and I ended up going to state colleges that were rivals, so I got to see him play football in college. After he graduated, he went into the Marine Corps, became a second lieutenant and then went overseas.

For some reason, his death really affected me. I said to hell with it. Instead of going to class one day, I went down to the Army recruiter and talked to him. I was totally unimpressed. The guy was promising me the world and I couldn’t believe it. So I went over to the Marine Corps recruiter. This guy was everything you thought a Marine was supposed to be. All creases, squared away, he looked like a rock.

“Well, I’ll tell you quite frankly,” he said, “you join us, you’re going to Vietnam. No bones about it.” I figured that was true for the Army, too, but the Army recruiter wouldn’t tell me.

I also had been kind of brainwashed since I was a kid. My father had been a Marine in the South Pacific during World War II. Although he never talked about it all that much, when I was in the second grade I had his web belt and his Marine Corps insignia. I always felt the Marines were elite. If you’re going to do something, you go with the best—like playing for Wilcox High. We always had a reputation for being smaller than the other teams, but we were faster and our attitudes were better. We beat people on attitude.

What am I going to do? I’d rather be over there with motivated people, people who’ve got their shit together, as opposed to being in a paddy with a bunch of zeroes who don’t even want to be there.

Not that I really wanted to be there. Yet when I found myself right in the prime age and a war was going on, I knew that I had to be part of it. It was my destiny. It had always been meant for me to do this thing. It sounds strange, but once it happened, I knew somehow, somewhere the handwriting was on the wall.

I
COME
from a conservative Republican area. I was brought up in a strict, anonymous, nomadic suburban environment, where privilege was part of our legacy. We had our boats. We had our recreation. We had our stability. We had our fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year jobs guaranteed to us as soon as we got out of college.

I never felt I belonged there, but I never imagined I’d end up in Vietnam. I was in undergraduate school and my deferment ran out. I’d spent some time in Brazil—my junior year abroad. I had thought I was going to get a full year of credits and I didn’t get them. During the extra year of college I had to go through, my Draft Board advised me that they had changed my classification from 2S to 1A.

So I thought, I’ll just go back to Brazil or I’ll join the Peace Corps. But I really got hung up on finishing school. I had it in my head that if I went off then I’d never come back to school and get my degree. It was a real adolescent attitude. That degree was my working papers, my union card.

ROTC on campus had started a new crash program for guys who had never taken ROTC, but who wanted to go into the service as officers. All I had to do was stick around for one more year and take nothing but ROTC courses, and I’d get a commission. I said to myself, “Fuck it, I don’t want to go in and peel potatoes. I don’t want to be some private. I’m basically antisocial and I hate authority. If I go in that position, I’ll just get in trouble and end up in jail. I might as well get myself a little autonomy, a little anonymity.” I wanted to be left alone and to have my own way. So my last year in college I was an ROTC major.

I was a fuck-up. My hair was always too long, my uniform was always dirty. I wasn’t consciously rebellious. I just couldn’t take it seriously. I couldn’t sit in class and talk about war the way they were talking about it. It wasn’t that I was an intellectual or into politics. I had a strong moral upbringing with my Catholic background. I was very influenced by the lives of the saints, and by Christ, his example —more than I’d like to admit probably. I believed it in a way, you know? I’d talk about the Geneva Convention and how absurd it was to try to talk about the legality of war. I thought it was silly to try to reduce
what was essentially an immoral experience into a question of legislation.

I remember having to go out to this athletic field and march around in a baggy uniform, feeling like a complete asshole. Older than the other guys, not taking it seriously, I was very aware of my expedient motives in the whole thing. I was afraid of the experience of being just an average grunt. I was doing what I had pretty much done all my life, using my wits to get over. I had this kind of contempt for the other guys going through all the military paces, who were seeking this power and leadership, who wanted to move other guys around like chess pieces on a board.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this small delegation of campus SDS outside the gate of the track field. I felt a tremendous affinity for them. That day, I had a very strong image of me literally slogging through the field, dragging my ass, going through the paces, but having a secret identification with those demonstrators. But they came from an entirely different world than me. For better or worse, I was part of the American experience and I thought there was no way I could bridge the gap. I guess I felt that I wouldn’t be accepted, that I was a different species.

After I graduated, I went to the ROTC summer training camp. Essentially, I tried to be invisible most of the time. I failed the marksmanship requirement. I hated guns. I pledged to myself that no matter what position I was in, I would never use a gun, I would never kill anybody. I didn’t try to fail, I was just disinterested.

Everybody else in my company was a junior in college. They had to go back and finish their last year and then they would get their commission at the graduation ceremony. I was going to get my commission after camp. I was able to use the officer’s club which was a special privilege. A buddy of mine from college who was already a first lieutenant in the signal corps would come by after the day’s training and pick me up in his Oldsmobile convertible—a big, fat luxury car, a real meat wagon. I used to feel real cocky. The other guys would be down there polishing the floors and doing all that shit. I’d put on my Madras blazer, my jeans, my tassel loafers and no socks, my buddy the
lieutenant would pull up and there was nobody who would say me nay.

It was fucked in a way, it was really fucked. I was never aware until recently how lonely I was, disengaged from my life. How alienated I was from other people, from society and community. Some kind of weird Jesuit.

I
GRADUATED
from college three days after Robert Kennedy was shot, two months and three days after Martin Luther King was assassinated, an incredible double whammy. The war was hanging there like a sword over everybody. I had been reclassified in the middle of my senior year from 2S to 1A and gone through about six solid months of really examining my feelings about the war. Chiefly, I read a lot of pacifist literature to determine whether or not I was a conscientious objector. I finally concluded that I wasn’t, for reasons that I’m still not sure of.

The one clear decision I made in 1968 about me and the war was that if I was going to get out of it, I was going to get out in a legal way. I was not going to defraud the system in order to beat the system. I wasn’t going to leave the country, because the odds of coming back looked real slim. I was unwilling to give up what I had as a home. Spending two years in jail was as dumb as going to war, even less productive. I wasn’t going to shoot off a toe. I had friends who were starving themselves to be underweight for their physicals. I wasn’t going to do it—probably because it was “too far to walk.” I wasn’t stupidly righteous, there was a part of me that was real lazy at the same time. I wanted to be acted on, and it was real hard for me to make a choice of any kind. Making no choice was a choice.

With all my terror of going into the Army—because I figured that I was the least likely person I knew to survive—there was something seductive about it, too. I was seduced by World War II and John Wayne movies. When I was in high school, I dreamed of going to Annapolis. I was, on some silly level, really disturbed when the last battleship was decommissioned. One of my fantasies as a kid was to be in command of a battleship in a major sea battle, and having somewhere
in my sea chest Great-uncle Arthur’s Naval dress sword from the eighteenth century.

One way or another in every generation when there was a war, some male in the family on my father’s side went to it. I had never had it drilled into me, but there was a lot of attention paid to the past, a lot of not-so-subtle “This is what a man does with his life” stuff when I was growing up. I had been, as we all were, victimized by a romantic, truly uninformed view of war.

I got drafted at the end of the summer. I went into a state of total panic for days. What the fuck am I going to do? I went running off to recruiters to see if I could get into the Coast Guard or the Navy or the Air Force. No way.

There were probably some strings that I could have pulled. One of the things that is curious to me, as I look back on it, is that I had all the information, all the education and all the opportunity that a good, middle-class, college-educated person could have to get out of it … and I didn’t make a single choice that put it anywhere but breathing down my neck. Even in the midst of the terror after the induction notice came, there was a part of me that would lie in bed at night and fantasize about what it would be like if I went.

The long and the short of the story is that at least half of my emotions were pulled to going. I couldn’t get into any other branch of the service, so my final choice was to enlist in the Army. They had a delayed enlistment option. It was August when I got drafted and I figured, “Shit, I don’t want to go until October.” I took the option. I spent that time at a cottage in Maine, enjoying the wonderful weather, reading books and writing dramatic farewell letters.

I’M FROM BAKERSFIELD
. It’s pretty hicky, but a lot of America is pretty hicky. I was born and raised there and that’s where I went off to the service from.

When I was in high school, I knew I wasn’t going to college. It was really out of the question. Even graduating from high school was a big thing in my family. We were originally from Mexico. My dad was a laborer. He had gone to the third grade, I think. He died when I was
five. My mom had to bring us up. I have two brothers and three sisters.

I enlisted a couple of years after high school. At the time I was young and innocent and I was under the impression that enlisting was the Ail-American thing to do.