The Vietnam Reader (43 page)

Then they’d make you march around the barracks. When you’d get a couple hundred yards away, they’d say, “Get back to your rack. Do it!” There’d be a knot of people at the center of the door, clawing their way through to get back to their rack and stand at attention.

When you weren’t going through that, you had your recruit regs held up in front of your face memorizing your eleven general orders. It was a real mind fuck.

We had one guy drank a can of Brasso. After they pumped his stomach, they sent him away to psychiatric care. I saw a couple of guys snap. But by the time you get to the end of that whole process, you feel like you’re the baddest thing that ever walked the earth. When they call you Marine in the graduation ceremony, there’s tears in your eyes. You are thoroughly indoctrinated.

I
FOOLISHLY WENT
into the Army thinking, “Hey, with a few years of college under my belt, they’re not going to put me in the infantry.” I
didn’t see anything wrong with going to Vietnam. The only part I thought was wrong was my fear of being killed. I felt that somehow or other that shouldn’t have been part of it. And I couldn’t really picture myself killing people. I had flash images of John Wayne films with me as the hero, but I was mature enough even then to realize that wasn’t a very realistic picture.

In boot camp I didn’t meet very many patriots. They were guys that a judge had told, “Either you go in the Army, or it’s two years for grand theft auto.” Or they were schmucks like me who managed to lose their deferments. Or they were people who really had decided that the Army would be good for them in the long run.

To discourage us from going AWOL and deserting, all the new draftees were told that only 17 percent of us were going to Vietnam. And of that small percentage, only 11 percent would actually be combat troops. That eased my mind a great deal. Hey, there’s still a chance that I won’t have to go and get my guts blown out. Terrific.

At the end of our training, with only three exceptions—one fool who had gone Airborne, one guy who kept fainting and another kid who had a perforated eardrum—every single one of us went to Vietnam—200 guys.

AFTER WE GOT
in boot camp, they ask you to put down on some form why you joined the Marine Corps. I put down, “To Kill.” In essence, that’s what the fuck I wanted to do. But I didn’t want to kill every fucking body. I wanted to kill the bad guy.

You see the baddies and the goodies on television and at the movies. I wanted to get the bad guy. I wasn’t a patriot. I didn’t join for the country. I mean, I love this country, but I could have given a fuck for the country then. I wanted to kill the bad guy.

They beat the shit out of me for that in boot camp. “Who is this fucking hawg who wants to KIIILLL?” Then they’d get me. They made me go see two head shrinks. The second shrink I talked to asked me all these questions like, “Did you ever kill as a child?” I told him I had a B-B gun and I killed a couple of birds. What the fuck?

It was just harassment. Why does someone join the military but to defend the country which more often than not means to kill?

I wound up in the Philadelphia Naval Yard of all places. I got to watch wet paint dry. I started putting in requests to go to Vietnam, but I kept being turned down. I kept telling them I wanted to go overseas, so finally they decided to let me go.

I had a couple of accidents before I could leave though. I got stabbed in the heart at a black cabaret and ended up in the Philly Naval Hospital. Right through the cardial sac, nicked my lung. While I was in the hospital, I saw all these amputees coming back from the Nam. Even that didn’t stop me. I still wanted to go.

I
WAS RAISED
a Roman Catholic. When I was about sixteen I became a follower of Elijah Mohammed as a Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim. When I was drafted, I tried to explain to the Army that I did not believe in the government as a whole. I didn’t believe in the system. Why should I go out and fight for the system when my people are catching a lot of chaos from being under it—the slave mentality that our people are in?

They sent me up to see a light colonel. The Muhammad Ali decision was sitting in the Supreme Court. The colonel told me point-blank, “Either you raise your right hand or you will go to jail. One of the two. On the spot.” I’ll never forget his face, he didn’t even crack a smile.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” I told him. “I never been to jail in my life.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “Once you’re in the service and you tell them that you’re a Muslim, you shouldn’t have to go overseas. You will stay in the States.” So I raised my right hand.

From there I went down to Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. That’s when the crap started for me. A lot of officers as well as the NCOs was from the South, so they could not understand what a Black Muslim was doing in the U.S. Army, even if he
was
drafted.

I was harassed, called names. “People like you shouldn’t be in the
service.” I feared for my life out on the rifle range. Sergeants told me, “Guys like you should be dead.” So naturally, you got to stop and ask yourself, “Is this guy for real or not?” The pressure was on me.

As a Muslim, we’re not supposed to eat pork. We’re not even supposed to handle pork, touch it. They would assign me to clean the grease trap on the kitchen grill. In the grease trap you had beef, lamb, fish and all sorts of fried foods—plus pork. I told them I didn’t mind pulling KP. I would peel all the potatoes to be peeled in the United States Army, but I didn’t want to touch pork. They did it to put me in a spot where I would have to disobey an order for my religious beliefs. I would have been brought up on charges.

Luckily, I found a Protestant chaplain who understood. He intervened and said, “Put the man on K, but let him not mess with pork. It’s his right as an individual.” The whole company couldn’t understand that.

After basic training I was supposed to stay in the States as a supply clerk or something. My orders came down for the infantry. All of us, we all went to the infantry.

Ft. Polk, Louisiana, is where they sent us for advanced infantry training. I had the same hassles all over again—”Oh, I see you’re a Muslim.” Deeper in the South I was treated like a Russian spy. They literally stood me in front of a whole company and told everybody what my religion was. “This guy is a Muslim. He cannot be trusted. If you are in training with him, watch your back.”

I tried to protest it, but there’s nobody to talk to. As soon as I say I’m a Black Muslim, everybody looks at me strange. I was sent to Army intelligence. The officers had to interview me, because they figured I was a traitor. “Are you a Commie? Are you trying to persuade black GIs to turn against the United States of America?”

Naturally, I was preaching Islam to the brothers and sisters that was there. Some of them were very interested and wanted to know a little more about what Islam was. I pulled them together a little bit. That’s what the Army didn’t like. They considered me a threat because I was always trying to pull the brothers together. I asked them, why should we fight in a war which we don’t even understand?

Once everybody finished AIT, they were sending them directly to
Nam after their leave. After my leave, I ended up back in Ft. Polk. I was under investigation by Army intelligence. They had to clear me for going overseas. They pulled me out of my company and put me in a special headquarters company.

I was a duty soldier, assigned to the orderly room, to the supply room, like putting rifles together. I was a security risk but I was putting the rifles together. Plus I was doing anything nasty they could think of for me to do. I was picking up butts off the street. They gave me a rifle bore used for cleaning the M-16 and they sent me around to clean out all the little holes in the urinals. I had to take my hand without no glove and clean out the urinal holes for each and every urinal in the company. You know how stinking a urinal is? But I did it with a smile. I said, “It’s not pork, is it.”

They said, “He’s a psycho.” They sent me to the doctors. The shrink said, “He’s no psycho. The man just believes.”

I started agitating the Army. That was my biggest thing. I carried around a book by Karl Marx, just for the hell of it. They brought the MPs in one time to raid my locker, trying to find books from the Soviet Mission or something. The only thing they found was that book by Karl Marx, that you can get in any library. In fact, I got it from the library right there on the post. They returned it with apologies.

They kept me under surveillance. I had to report once a week to Army intelligence. And there was an FBI agent there on base who was like my probation officer. It didn’t bother me going to see him. At least I got out of work. I’d tell the guy, “Please don’t send me back out there, I’ll sit in here all day long and we can talk.”

After duty hours I would preach Marxism and Islam. I was a young-blood at the time, nineteen years old. I was serious about picking up a gun and letting the fight be here. Not so much a race fight as a social type of struggle. The system was against my people. If I had to pick up a gun, let me pick it up and turn it on the system, not on somebody in Vietnam who I know nothing about. I was dedicated and serious about dying … but I didn’t know what death really was.

I had to go up and see the post commander, some two-star jerk. I
laid out my beliefs for him and told him I was willing to die for what I believed in.

“Well,” he said, “you’re going to die all right. But to hell with this fighting and dying in the streets. You’re going to die in Vietnam.” Intelligence had cleared me and my orders were cut for me to go directly to the Nam.

The assistant to the general told me, “Since you love the Vietnamese people and the Communist way so much, you are going to go out there and be with them. Boy, we going to make sure you die in Vietnam.” Everybody smiled. I was the biggest joke in Ft. Polk. Send the Commie to Vietnam.

IN THE MIDDLE
of my thirty-day leave before shipping to Vietnam, I was sitting at home in St. Louis watching television. The news flash came on that the Tet Offensive had broken out.

One of the last speeches the Army made to us before we went on leave was, “Listen, it’s pretty civilized over there. You’ll have swimming pools and snack bars and like that. You won’t have to run off the plane and form a defensive perimeter around the air base in Saigon.” But that’s exactly what the “enemy” was shooting at on the TV. People were being blown away at Ton Son Nhut Air Base.