“But, here sign this! We can get you to Vietnam in less then two weeks, if you want to put in for that transfer,” said an E-6 Army lifer clerk working in there, an E-6 who had never been to, and was never going to, any war zone.

About 99% of the guys who went into the Army, when I did, were terrified of going to Vietnam. I wasn’t exactly terrified of it myself, the intense action and surging adrenaline aspects of war intrigued me. After all, during the year before I had enlisted into the Army, I been a Registered Maine Hunting Guide, who specialized in guiding black bear hunters. I was familiar with firearms, but we guides had to leave our guns at home when we tracked wounded bears at night, or else we could have been arrested for hunting at night. Ofcourse, by the time we found them bears, we were always hoping to find that the they had finally dropped dead from wounds which they had received from bullets fired by our paying hunters, whom we were guiding at the time. Between June 1^st and late October of 1969, I walked unarmed into the deep, dark, nighttime Northern Maine woods, while in pursuit of wounded bears, 30 or 40 times while helping other more experienced Maine Guides, and at least 15 to 20 times all by my lonesome. I dug it.

Some GIs think they will always make it through any war that they fight in without receiving any wounds, neither physical nor psychological, and without being taken prisoner by the enemy. Not me though, ever since I was a teenager in high school, I figured that I could be taken prisoner, loose limbs, go nuts or die.

I did believe in the Domino Theory, which I had been taught, early on, sometime during my school days. In case that you aren’t familiar with the Domino Theory, it stated that if the country of Vietnam fully fell into commie hands, so would its neighboring countries. Then the commies would keep taking over more and more countries that are next to or near Vietnam, till they had enough communist soldiers and industrial workers to build up enough strength and power to take over the entire free world.

I have always wanted the whole world to live free. I put my life on the line for that cause, when I enlisted into the Army.

But I was confused by the news reports I had seen about the deaths of my peers in Nam, and the protests against that war. Especially when I learned that Nam Vets were protesting against the war, I figured that they oughta’ known what was really going on over there. When I was first stationed on Okinawa as an American GI, I wasn’t sure whether or not that the war in Vietnam was helping anyone in any way. That damned war was, and the history of it still is, to say the least, controversial. Because that confusing controversy was muddlin’ my mind, when I was turned down for that inter-island transfer, I turned down the 30^th Arty Bge’s kind, generous offer to allow me to go take my chances in the Vietnam War.
The Army could only make a soldier do one overseas tour of duty per two or three year hitch, so I had the Nam scare beat when the Army assigned me to Okinawa for 18 months.

I am going to share this with you, and if you say that I’m lying, we will step outside and discuss it:

One day, a few weeks after that kind, generous offer to let me go to Vietnam, I decided to take them up on it. I had had it. It was over. I was no longer willing to pay my own way through my military service, and no more of their photo lab in a nuclear fallout decontamination chamber horse shit.

I went to the PX that evening, after dinner, and bought two cases of cold beer, then went back to my barracks. A friend, who lived in my barracks, had driven me to the PX, and when we walked into our barracks, I told my friend to go ask anyone in the day room if they wanted to drink a beer, I asked two guys coming down the stairs, when I was walking up them, to join us, told them two to check for other thirsty fellows, knocked on some doors and then went into my two man semi-private barracks room and set the beer down on the floor.

It didn’t take but a few minutes for eight or nine of my old and new army buddies to come on into my room. Every guy gratefully grabbed a beer and found a place to sit or stand and lean against something while they settled in for a welcomed session of sipping suds, swapping stories and relaxing.

Beer can tops popped, and we all took a few sips.

I allowed my guests the comfort of sitting on my bed and my roommate’s bed, he didn’t care if they sat there, others sat on the floor or leaned against a wall, and I leaned casually back against my dresser top.

“I’m going to volunteer for Nam in the morning,” I said.

The whole room shifted position slightly, with a deep, pained groan.

I didn’t actually know all of the guys, whom I was speaking to. One or two were close friends who were the type of men whom I knew I could trust beside me in combat. That is a measure that most warriors take of their brethren. A few fellows were known by me, but we hadn’t had many conversations together. A few had been on some wild time Okinawa bar hoppin’ and brothel boppin’ excursions with me. One or two I had never spoken to before. Three of those men had just gotten back from Vietnam, or had been discharged from the U.S. Military Hospital on Okinawa after recovering from war wounds, in the previous several days or weeks.

When I told them all that I was volunteering for Nam in the morning, those three Nam Vets became livid with me. One stopped looking at me or anyone else; he was leaning against the inside of the closed door to my room, and he appeared to nearly curl up into a defensive ball and almost slide down to the floor. Another Nam Vet was standing close to the first, sort of in the corner of the room near the door’s hinges; he folded his arms tight across his chest, twisted his body and looked away from me at a 90% angle, and occasionaly glanced sideways at me in sheer disbelief. The third Nam Vet looked up at me, from where he was sitting on my bed, expelled a deep, tight breath, then barely inhaled another, and angrily said, “Do you know what you’re saying? DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE SAYING? If you volunteer for Nam, and if you survive a year, IF you survive a year, then ALL that you will have done IS to survive a year, and, you will have had your buddy’s guts blown all over you, AND you’ll have to kill people you don’t even WANT to kill. Now do you REALLY wanna do that?”

My second Nam Vet buddy, who was standing there almost in the corner of my room, barely muttered single word agreements with the third Nam Vet, and punctuated his own curt, one word statements with hard, serious glances in my direction.

The first Nam Vet buddy, who was leaning against my door, never moved or made a sound. He had blocked me out. FNG syndrome. F-ing New Guys often didn’t last long in Vietnam, if a guy who had been in Nam for awhile didn’t get to know any new guys, it wasn’t so bad for him when the new guys got wounded or killed. If I was going to volunteer for duty in Vietnam and probably go off and get myself killed, for what they had devastatingly learned wasn’t worth it, then that Nam Vet leaning against my door didn’t want to know me either.

My other five or six buddies sitting and standing around there in my room mostly looked down at the floor and barely breathed, because they were, perceptively, quite uptight with me. I had bummed them out.

“No, no you’re right. I really didn’t understand. I won’t do it. I won’t volunteer,” was my reply to all of my friends in my room. Their reaction to what I had said convinced me that it would have been a foolish waste, of at least part of my young life, if I had volunteered to go to Vietnam, in the late summer of 1970.

Those eight or nine true friends of mine probably saved my life that day.

The fact that Okinawa was a safer and much more fun place to do my overseas tour, than what Vietnam was, is often thrown up in my face, when I explain to certain people about my illegal assignment to the 30th Arty Bge.

“You coulda’ gone to Vietnam; what’s your problem?”

I am lucky that the United States Army sent me to Okinawa instead of to Vietnam. This is true.

The only thing is, for me to have passively gone to work everyday, as a photographer, for the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa, and to have kept on paying out a big chunk of my personal paycheck money, to produce my excellent photographs of them, at work and play, would have meant that either I was bribing them or giving into extortion. I couldn’t have lived with that shame.

A short time before that evening in my barracks room, when I was talked out of volunteering for duty in Vietnam, I had begun to have problems sleeping. I couldn’t get to sleep until close to daybreak, and my sleep was not restful. A good, solid, restful sleep each night would have been the best possible way to get some relief from the daily insanity of being ordered to complete photographic assignments without the benefits of being given enough equipment and supplies to complete my assignments, and from my deepening, disturbing guilt which came from knowing that the photo lab I worked in negated my missile unit’s ability to respond in full to every conceivable scenario of a communist nuclear attack that the United States Government expected us to be able to respond to and, hopefully, thwart.

From that situation, it was a slow slide off the edge for me.

 

 

 

US Army.

 

Okinawa.