The Vietnam Reader (42 page)

IT’S JUST A
little town where I grew up. I played some football and baseball like everybody else. I was kind of a hard-ass in school. I didn’t know how good I had it then. I took little odd jobs and saved up enough money to buy an electric guitar and amplifier. I started playing in a band.

Near the end of high school, everybody’s saying, “What you going to do? What you going to do?” I didn’t know. I said, “I’m going to join the service.” After I graduated, I went into the Marine Corps. They were supposed to be the best. To me, they were. They helped me grow up. I grew up in Vietnam.

MY OLD MAN
, when the war came, he says, “Oh, go. You’ll learn something. You’ll grow up to be a man. Go.”

Shit, if my folks had to send their little poodle, they would have cried more tears over that than over me. But I’m supposed to go, because I’m a man.

THE BUS
pulls into the receiving area. There’s a guy with a Smokey Bear hat out there really looking lean and mean. He gets on the bus and starts reading this stuff off, “All right, you’ll grab your bag. You’ll get off the bus. You’ll fall into the yellow footprints painted on the pavement …”

It was really funny, a take-off from
Gomer Pyle.
The guy within arm’s reach of the Marine was laughing just like everybody else. Smokey Bear whipped around and smacked him right in the face, knocked him halfway through the window. His head bounced off the luggage rack and he reeled back out in the aisle.

Smiles froze on faces. My heart stopped. We realized, “Hey, this guy isn’t fooling around. He’s going to come through this bus and kick all our asses.” People started flying out of the door.

I came down with a couple of guys who were Puerto Rican street gang material from the big city and they thought they were bad news. They fell down the steps on top of me. We all stumble into the right footprints on the ground and Smokey marches us into some barracks and stands us at attention. He’s yelling and screaming, really intimidating. You dumped all of your stuff out on a table and he went by and just threw everything away. We were too scared to say anything to him.

I was next to this big Puerto Rican dude. Smokey catches the dude looking at him out of the corner of his eye. He says, “Are you eye-fucking me, boy? I don’t want your scuzzy eyes looking at me. You think this is funny? I hope you fuck up. I hate you Puerto Rican cocksuckers.”

Eyes in the back of his head. Smokey sees a guy’s eyes flick and he’s there to punch him in the chest, five feet to the wall and back again. My knees were shaking. “What the fuck have I gotten myself into?”

Then they march us into some barracks. Bare mattresses and springs. It’s like a concentration camp. They turn the lights on and leave us there. My stomach is in a knot. I’m lying there thinking, “What happened to my world?” Reality has suddenly turned to liquid shit before my very eyes. Kids were crying, rolling in their bunks. I’m so depressed, I can’t believe this is happening to me.

We’re there for a couple of hours. You’re in your civilian clothes and you’ve been in them for a couple of days. You feel like shit. When they march you out, all of a sudden it’s by the numbers. All your hair’s gone. You don’t even know who you are. You get a duffel bag and they’re dumping things in it. Everybody hates you and they’re fucking with you left and right. You get your shots. You stand at attention. People are passing out on their feet. Going rigid and falling on their faces and the corpsmen are laughing at them. Nobody talks to you, they scream. Nothing they give you fits. You look like shit and you feel like shit. A bunch of drill instructors put you back in receiving and that’s when the shit really hits the fan.

T
HEY STRIP YOU
, first your hair. I never saw myself bald before. Not just your goatee, but your hair. Oh, shit, no hair. I’d had a mustache, must have been since I was thirteen years old. I
always
had a mustache. All of a sudden, no hair on my lip, no hair on my chin, no hair on my head.

Guys I had been talking to not an hour before—we was laughing and joking—I didn’t recognize no more. I’m looking over there at my friend, “Joe? Is that Joe?”

“Yeah, is that you, James?”

“Yeah. Oh, shit.” It was weird how different people look without their hair. That’s the first step.

V
ERY QUICKLY
the situation becomes primitive. The leaders are automatically the biggest, the people who can physically enforce their demands. As soon as you get in the Army, they want squad leaders. A sergeant comes by and picks out the biggest guys, because he knows these are the people who can intimidate you into doing something. Everybody understands brute force. Somebody six-foot-two, 275 pounds, is your new squad leader and no matter how dumb he is, he’s in charge. The sergeant is the authority figure in the background and this big kid is the bully on the block.

For a long time, I was lost in the shuffle. Everything is relegated to strength and I only weighed 150 pounds. There were very few people smaller than me in the pecking order. It was a shock. I never really got my bearings.

The people in the Army were not intellectuals. Most of them were from working class backgrounds. A lot of them were Southerners. It was my first contact with blacks and they tended to stick together. Certain economic groups like blue-collar kids and city kids adjusted very quickly to the Army. Most of the middle-class kids like me didn’t fit into what was going on. We hadn’t had to do much on our own before. We grew up in a secure environment where a lot of things were taken for granted.

One of the ways to establish who you were—at least the way that was open for me—was language. I could speak standard English and had a large vocabulary. That made me an outsider because people didn’t like it, especially this one older guy with a heavy accent from Georgia.

I don’t know exactly why, but I got in several fights with this guy. But I didn’t have any peer group pressure. I wasn’t well liked. I wasn’t actively disliked, but nobody would step in to help me. I was on my own. This kid was quite a bit bigger than me, plus I had really lost my bearings and was sort of helpless. So there were fistfights which were quickly broken up—nothing much really happened. But the feeling of being an outsider was reinforced, because I had this antagonist all the time looking for an opportunity to get at me. I had to be on my toes. It was a whole new education.

T
HEY HAVE YOU JUMP
. You never get up in the morning like normal folk. You know, turn on the light. Okay, get up out of the racks now.

Every morning it was garbage cans going down the middle of the barracks, guys’ racks being flipped over. You panic. You got two minutes to get dressed, make your rack and fall out.

The first time that happened, you’ve gone to sleep and forgotten where you’re at. When you wake up, the lights are glaring and you hear this noise like a bomb going off. There’s yelling and screaming. You jump in front of your racks. I’m looking, man, and there’s all these little puddles. A bunch of guys had peed on themselves, they were so scared.

After a while I knew every morning we’re going to go through this routine, so I figured I’d be partially dressed. I’d get up a half hour ahead of time and get my boots on and my pants. Pretty soon, everybody was doing it. Then they would tell us, “Get undressed, get back in the racks and start all over again.”

“THE ONLY WAY
I’m going to get through this,” I said to myself, “is to do everything right and not cause any trouble.” That’s what I tried to
do, but you can’t help but get into trouble. “What’d you do in college, boy? Learn to push a pencil?”

“Yessir.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nossir.”

“You like me, don’t you, boy?”

“Yessir.”

“You’re queer for me.”

“Nossir.”

“You don’t like me?”

“Yessir. Nossir.”

“All right, ladies. You look like shit, so we’re going to do a little PT now. Bends and motherfuckers. Many, many, many of them. Begin. One, two. One, two. One, two, one, two onetwo-onetwo-onetwo-onetwo.

“Up-downs. Get up, get down. Get up, get down. On your backs. On your bellies. Get up, get down.

“Knuckle push-ups. Ready, begin. One, two. One, two. Onetwo-onetwo-one two-one two. Side straddle hops. Ready, begin …”