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Published: September 8th 2013
FIELD TRAINING EXERCISE
This is what passed for work in the 5th Engineers. The next day a bit of heavy weather blew in and several men were injured building a bridge in the dark.WE CAN’T GET ‘EM UP
We can’t get ‘em up,
We can’t get ‘em up this morning.
We can’t get ‘em up,
We can’t get ‘em up,
We can’t get ‘em up all day.
We called the planes that took us home “Freedom Birds” and America we called “The World”. The World held everything that was dear to us. Our Freedom Bird lifted off from Bien Hoa Air Base under red alert status. A major Viet Cong attack was considered to be imminent. It was another civilian charter, but this time the senior flight attendants were all male. Once again Thobe was a couple of days ahead of me. The freedom Bird touched down for refueling at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. What a lovely island that was. It was hard to believe that such heavy warfare had taken place there during WWII. From Kadena we flew directly to Travis. Soon as we got off the plane some of us dropped to the ground to and kissed the parking ramp. All of us loved our country but
LOUIE MONTANTI
Louie bought a Corvette after he got out of the army. I hope he did well as a civilian but he needed a velvet fist to guide him and doubt that he found one. we had not yet learned that America had turned against us. We were taken back to Oakland Army Depot, quickly processed through, and issued new Class A winter uniforms. We were still wearing our jungle fatigues and boots. Me and two other guys found a guy just going off duty who offered to drive us for twenty dollars each across the bay to San Francisco International Airport. He made a fortune doing that every day. I should have gone to the bus depot downtown though. The first flight going to Santa Maria did not depart for 16 hours; the bus ride would have taken 6 hours. The final week of my tour had been a busy one because of the elevated alert status and I had taken little sleep. I found a place in the terminal to get some supper and was sitting at the counter waiting for it when a whole tray of silverware was dropped on the floor. Six of us scattered throughout the dining area dove for cover. Our nerves were frazzled. After supper I found a USO place that got me into a bunk and I slept soundly for ten hours. They rousted me out in time for a shower and some breakfast before my flight departed. During breakfast the silverware was dropped again and four other guys dove for cover. This time I heard laughter and realized it was being done on purpose. It was a way of taking a cheap shot at us; embarrassing us in public was funny to dishwashers I guess. Those turds wouldn’t make a pimple on a soldier’s chapped ass.
Thobe might have been a couple of days ahead of me, but I outranked him. Both of us still had another year and a half to serve before our enlistments would be up. Thobe carried orders home assigning him to Fort Hood. My sorry-assed orders were for Fort Leonard Wood again. We both were given another 30 days of leave to readjust to going places after dark or diving for cover when startled by a noise. The first day at home I had changed out of my dress uniform but could not wear civilian clothes comfortably and put my jungle fatigues and boots back on. I went with my dad to purloin some firewood he had staked out nearby on land that been cleared for construction of a new sheriff’s sub-station. Thobe came over before lunch and we began swapping stories. Most of it was bullshit, of course. After a week or so Thobe grew restless hanging around town and decided to cut his leave short and report in early at Fort Hood. We shook hands and grinned at one another again. When he rounded the corner in the old blue pickup he was borrowing from his brother I thought that I had seen the last of him. After he was gone I began to get restless too, but I was in absolutely no rush to get back to Fort Leonard Wood. I decided to take the bus up to Auburn for a visit with the Forsbergs, and then go over the hill to Reno for a visit with my recently widowed gramma. She was living with Bud Irwin’s mom and stepdad. A nice old lady took a seat next to me when the bus stopped in San Francisco. Her last name Milhaus and she was on her way back home to Grass Valley. I mentioned to her that I was a soldier and had just returned from Vietnam. She told me that was such a terrible war and we should get out of there and her nephew was just the man to do it. Her nephew was our new President Richard Milhaus Nixon.
From Reno I flew up to Spokane to visit family there. My uncle, Dick Oliver, was in the Air Force and had recently completed a war tour himself. He was a boom operator in KC-135 tankers. As Dick was returning to Fairchild from his tour in Thailand a close friend was killed in a crash landing at Wake Island. Hell, anyone who had ever landed there came close to crashing. The loss of a friend caused him to retire after a twenty year career. On his last day in the Air Force I went with him out to Fairchild and had a final beer with him in the NCO Club before he became a civilian. He dropped me off at the Spokane airport on his way back to town, and I proceeded on toward my new posting. I was about to use up every last minute of my leave.
My travel itinerary called for a connecting flight in Kansas City. At the Kansas City airport the shit hit the fan for me and three other soldiers. Military personnel often travelled on standby status because it was cheaper. To do so we were required to wear our Class A uniform. I had come off my Spokane leg and was moving down the terminal toward my connecting gate. A short distance ahead of me there were two Marines, a sergeant and a lance corporal, going along easily. Behind me a petty officer in the Navy was coming along. The sailor was a black man about half the size of a blimp hangar. We approached a congregation of war protesters blocking our path. The sergeant stopped in front of them. I eased up on his right side facing outward and the lance corporal took his left side facing outward. The sailor closed up facing outward on my right. The homeliest woman I ever saw in my life approached the sergeant and called him a murderer and baby killer and spit squarely on his chest then stepped back to gloat. A scraggly haired hippie was standing beside her smiling upon her with adoration. The sergeant calmly asked the woman if that guy was her boyfriend and she smiled warmly in his direction and nodded that yes he certainly was her boyfriend. The sergeant stepped forward with his left foot and popped that hippie asshole so hard with a right elbow beside the ear that dogs six counties away over in Columbia yelped and ran under the porch. The hippie dropped like he had been pole axed and the sergeant bent over and grabbed him by his scraggly hair and jerked him back up on his feet, used the scraggly hair to wipe the spittle off his uniform, then reached clear down below his shoestrings and fetched that poor bastard an uppercut to the chin that came through all the power of his legs. I never saw a man hit so hard before or since. The way that poor devil lay twitching on the floor made me wonder if he had a broken neck. The girlfriend dropped down beside him blubbering. It was not what any of those protesters expected to happen and it stunned them into silence. Airport security officers quickly hustled the four of us out of there and we were taken into an office out of sight and allowed to make statements. The Marine sergeant simply stated that if the woman had spit in his face he could have marched on, but that wasn’t what happened. She spit on the uniform and that cannot be tolerated. All of us nodded in agreement. Security held us in the office until it was time for our flights to board and then escorted us onto our planes. The leader of the security detail asked the sergeant if he wanted to press assault charges against the homely girl for spitting but he just shrugged and said she was within her rights. I learned from that Marine sergeant how to handle myself should such a situation arise again. Do not take an insult personally and tolerate no disrespect to the uniform.
The trip to Fort Leonard Wood culminated in assignment to the Third Platoon of Company B in the 5
th Engineer Battalion (Combat). It was a battalion that had a proud lineage dating back to before the Civil War. We were the figurehead for engineers in the entire Fifth Army, but by the time I got there we had pretty much hit rock bottom. With my promotion to Spec 5 came a change in my Military Occupational Specialty from heavy equipment operator to senior powderman. The 5
th Engineers did not operate a quarry and had no use for demolitions of any kind. Once again I found myself being added to the roster of excess personnel. When I got to the unit my commanding officer called me in for an interview to discuss where I thought I should be assigned. I told him that what I had been hoping for was duty in the Engineer School where I could pass along my knowledge and experience to recruits, but since I was here and not there I would like to be given a demolition squad. He seemed to mull that idea over for a few moments but I saw his eyes roll up towards the back of his head. He said a demo squad would not be likely because we had no facilities for it and demolitions was not part of the mission. I suggested to him that we could build the facilities and that demolitions would surely be useful to the mission. His eyes rolled back in his head again and he punched my ticket to a line platoon. In the organizational structure of the unit it was private’s slot. I hauled my duffel over to the Third Platoon barracks, found an empty bunk upstairs and settled in to make new friends. From that day onward my service in the military and my personal life for the next several decades would begin to spiral downward.
The whole battalion was filled with Vietnam veterans serving in private’s slots. We were a recalcitrant group to manage. Our officers were fresh out of ROTC or OCS and had no leadership experience. Our senior NCOs did the best they could with us all, officers and enlisted alike, but the problem was we didn’t really have much of a mission. We did not have regular duties to go perform each day. Mostly we were being given training that we didn’t need. The entire battalion was full of excess personnel. There was no reason for us to be there except to complete our enlistment obligation. If there ever was a dead end to military aspirations the Fifth Engineers would be the super highway to it. I have a condition known as obsessive/compulsive disorder. It drove me to march forward through Basic Combat Training, and Engineer School, and on through Vietnam where I could focus on filling the kittle or blowing up rocks with high explosives. What I encountered at Fort Leonard Wood was a river of alcohol and riven by my OCD I attempted to drink it dry.
On payday we lined up in alphabetical order to receive our money and right there in front of me stood my old pal Marvin Nichols from our days in AIT. Marvin got orders out of AIT sending him to Cam Rahn Bay and the 18
th Engineer Brigade. He served with a certain amount of honorable distinction up there. He once got a traffic ticket for running a red light in Cam Rahn Bay. Hell, Marvin was from Checotah, OK. There weren’t any red lights down where he was from. He got himself infected with three different strains of venereal disease from a Vietnamese girl who claimed to be a virgin. Turns out he was allergic to penicillin, he was given a hefty dose of it and the allergic reaction nearly killed him. He had to go through a sulfa treatment and finally got cured that way, but it didn’t stop him from doing it all over again the first chance he got, by God, and with the same virgin. You’ve got to admire the pluck of a man that will complete a mission he sets out to do regardless of adverse consequence. It is a fine quality in a soldier. Marvin was assigned to the headquarters platoon and was shuffling meaningless paperwork in the motor pool. The two of us got into all sorts of drunken mischief together.
The proudest possession of any combat engineer line platoon is what they call a Pioneer Box. It is full of shovels, pick axes, pry bars, saws, and sledge hammers. All of the hand tools that heavy equipment was designed to replace. Every tool in the box was kept in splendid repair but were seldom used. Whenever they were the edges got re-sharpened and the tools got re-painted. Painting the handle on any hand tool is a sure way to cause blisters. Fort Leonard Wood now has an Engineer Museum. I would bet my bottom dollar that one of the exhibits is a Pioneer Box. Combat engineers probably still have tool boxes, but they would be filled with power tools and rechargeable batteries. They would have portable generators to light up a night job and to power battery chargers. The 5
th Engineers worked in darkness when they could be induced to work at all. In a field training exercise we once built a bridge across the Pulaski River at night during a howling blizzard. Several of us were hospitalized but only one had permanent injury. Some jackass in the Pentagon probably took great pride in our ability to build that bridge, but the man who was disabled by it probably thinks it was a pretty stupid mission. One of the bridge stringers fell on him and broke his back. The others were knocked into the river and got hypothermia.
In late May Company B was detailed to Lake of the Ozarks. We were to build trailer pads at a post recreational facility that was going in there. We didn’t build square pads that would be easy to back a trailer onto though. Job specifications called for side by side tracks that were thirty feet long and ten inches wide. We spaced those side by side tracks to the distance between the back wheels of a three quarter ton utility truck. The little house trailers that the army rented out for use on those pads tracked at a different width though. The whole idea was stupid and the pads had to be rebuilt the following summer by Company C. Our bivouac was crawling with copperheads. Backwaters in the lake were full of water moccasins. It was fun duty but we had to burn our own honey buckets. That detail came my way once. There was nothing fun about it.
Down in Texas Thobe ended up as a valuable addition to the orderly room staff where he finally got promoted to Spec 5, but he retained his MOS as a senior heavy equipment operator. He seemed to have a positive genius for finding himself better situations than I could. He was more squared away for one thing. Hell. Thobe got to fly in a first class seat on his standby ticket to Texas. July 27, 1969 was my twenty-first birthday. A bunch of my pals joined me after work at the NCO Club to celebrate. All of us got drunk as hell. The next morning I woke up in unfamiliar surroundings and didn’t know where I was. It was my first experience with alcoholic blackout. Pretty soon I came to realize that I was in the damned stockade. The high fences, razor wire, and locked gates are what gave it away. As I got to looking around more closely I began to recognize that all of my pals were in there too including the CO of Company B and my platoon sergeant. Somebody finally explained to me that there had been a riot in the stockade and we were posted there as additional security. The leader of the insurrection there must have been the other half of the blimp hangar that I met briefly in the Kansas City airport. I don’t know what set that fellow off but when the guards tried to subdue him it took a whole squad of them armed with clubs. Finally they managed to snap a pair of handcuffs around his wrists, but his arms were in front. He twisted his forearms and bunched his muscles and broke the handcuff links. The riot started when he broke loose a second time. At least that is what we heard. Order had been restored and our company dismissed before lunch. On payday four days later a Spec 5 named Lonnie Gregory from the Second Platoon handed me an IOU that I had signed in the amount of $80. He said it was from the poker game at the stockade. I don’t remember any poker game but I paid my debt, and found out shortly later that I also had outstanding chits in the amount of $60 with the NCO Club. It must have been a damn fine birthday party. Ladies, I do not endorse gambling during an alcoholic blackout.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly starring Clint Eastwood had begun a run at the post theater and we had decided to attend the Sunday matinee. After the movie ended and we were filing out of the auditorium somebody tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned around it was my old pal from Vietnam, LT MacDonald. It can be a small world sometimes. He should have finished his tour at the same time I did but he decided to extend until the new crusher was up and running. He had been promoted to captain. We stopped to chat for a while; I signaled my friends to go on without me. He had an assignment to the Engineer School. I told him I had hoped to be there too and asked about the possibility of a transfer, but he said they already had plenty of instructors in the demolition school out there. We talked a bit about other men from Xom Tam or Company A that we had seen around the post. We departed promising to keep in touch but our paths never crossed again. He was the best officer I ever met.
Late in the summer my platoon sergeant, Arthur Stoner, called us together and asked if any of us could handle a typewriter. Nobody else raised their hand but me. I told Stoner, “Hell yes I can type. I am a damned fine typist too. I can type 18 words per minute with only 21 mistakes”. He told me to pack up my duffle and move it over to headquarters platoon. I would start as the assistant to the company clerk in the morning. Things were looking up; this was a PFC slot. It took a month or so for me to bring my typing skills up to the level that I had promised Stoner that I was capable of. The first thing I did was apply for a transfer to the 8
th Engineer Battalion back in Vietnam. It was the only way to get out of the situation I was in. The 8
th Engineers were attached to the First Air Cavalry Division. They were one of our elite engineer units and I thought I could get back onto a demolitions squad with them. They responded with news that they did not have need for anyone with my skill set or MOS, but could find use for me elsewhere. I wallered that bone around for a few days and Sergeant Stoner, who had served his tour with the 8th, persuaded me that agreeing to a transfer with them without assurance of MOS protection was a fine way to become an infantry grunt. I withdrew the transfer request. I respect the grunts, but the weight of equipment they carry in their rucksacks would stagger a mule. Those radio batteries alone are a special sort of burden. By then I had only a year to serve on my enlistment and figured I could stand on my head and chew bubblegum that long.
As assistant clerk I became a mail handler and had to go to a week of training to learn how to conduct a mail call. By and by a fellow named Louis Montanti joined the unit. He was made the assistant clerk and I was made the Training NCO. Louis was an engineering officer in the merchant marines but had gotten himself drafted somehow. He made it all of the way through AIT, but when he was ordered to Vietnam he balked. He would give the army their two years but one of them would not be spent in Vietnam. When they sent him to process out of Fort Leonard Wood he was given his full personnel file to take with him. He simply destroyed those files and when asked for them he said, “Files? What files? I don’t have them. My old unit was supposed to send them over”. They told him to take a seat over on the Group W bench until the files were found and could be processed. Louis dutifully sat on the bench for two weeks and they finally dealt him off to Company B. He was a sly devil. Me and him got into some serious mischief together when I wasn’t misbehaving with Marvin Nichols.
As Training NCO I was supposed to show training films and was sent off to a week of training to learn how to run a motion picture projector in an orderly and efficient military manner. Louie went to mail handler school the same week. When I got back somebody up at battalion noticed that I was the only one with a senior powderman MOS in their files. They sought to change that situation by sending me off for a proficiency pay test. If I failed the test they could change my MOS to something that was more to their liking. It was not a thing I wanted to see happen. I passed the test, of course, and then applied for my proficiency pay but the application was denied because I was not working in my MOS. Hell. I had been working outside my MOS the whole time I was in the army. The army had far too many men than they knew what to do with, or how to manage. Those of us who tried to be good soldiers were always getting shuffled off as excess baggage into jobs that we cared little for. Training NCO was right up there near the top of the list of duties I did not cotton to. That job was a sponge for idiotic bullshit that I had to administer. One of my programs was called NAICP. It stood for Nuclear Accident and Incident Control Program. If a truckload of spent nuclear reactor rods got tipped over along the highway somewhere near Fort Leonard Wood Company B would be notified to go secure the area and keep little green men from making off with the radioactive material. That is as far our training films went on the subject. No mention was ever found about how to safely handle, contain and store the spill, or monitor our exposure to it. Every month I would forward a report through proper military channels stating that the NAICP Program has been inactive during this reporting period. Some jackass in the Pentagon was probably eagerly awaiting that news every month. Another of my programs was called ARSTRIKE. It stood for Armed Readiness to Strike Tactically in Any Known Environment. The intention of it was that we could mobilize within 24 hours with all of our personnel, and gear, to any location throughout the world. There was no way we could have ever complied with it. It would have to be practiced over and over again and coordinated with the Air Force. The Air Force would probably prefer to expend their resources to the war effort we were already involved in. Every month I had to send up a report saying that we had participated in no ARSTRIKE activities or emergencies during this reporting period. Some jackass in the Pentagon probably eagerly awaited that news every month and presumed that we were at high state of operational readiness at all times. I was the Safety NCO and had a Safety Officer to file a report with every month, but neither one of us had any safety experience and would not recognize an unsafe situation if it marched up to us and slapped our faces with a wet hen. Mostly I showed routine training films and then told lies in my reports about who attended them. One time I asked Marvin to speak about the perils of venereal disease but he declined. Public speaking made him nervous. I did have to prepare a weekly training schedule and plan transportation requirements to those events. In the real army a commanding officer would just tell his senior NCOs what was needed and they would go do it. My job was just unnecessary bullshit that led to mass confusion. One of my responsibilities was to keep our publications current. We had a whole library of technical manuals that had to be kept up to date. Some jackass in the Pentagon actually read those manuals carefully seeking out all grammatical errors, misspellings, or wrong information in a table. All of those corrections came to my office and I had to post them to our copy of the manual. I thought it was scut work and insisted that I be assigned a publications assistant. Who I got was PFC Timothy B. Clements. Tim was a jovial Tulsa-improved Okie that quickly and efficiently cleaned up the publications nightmare and began to assume more of my routine functions including the barracks safety inspections and forging initials to the attendance reports at the training sessions.
I began to devote more time to the NAICP and ARSTRIKE Programs. I submitted a NAICP action plan in which Company B would respond to a disaster area and at a safe distance from it set up a perimeter through which trained emergency responders could pass to clean up the mess. The CO signed off on it and It started off on its merry journey to wherever such documents go; probably to some jackass in the Pentagon who still is contemplating the wisdom of trusting the fire department to do work they are well trained and equipped for. They are also fully competent to manage their own perimeter.
The readiness plan I put quite a bit of effort to; making basic plans to get men and equipment as needed to a central location in response to emergency scenarios that I thought most likely to occur. At the top of my list were fires, tornadoes, and riots. Mostly they were equipment lists that I thought would be needed for each type of emergency. I tucked them away in a folder in the ARSTRIKE file. War protests were getting larger and louder. Our battalion commander could see the need for plenty of riot control training. I added it to the training schedule every week. The officers and NCOs made frequent gas mask inspections. We could possibly deploy to a riot in a reasonably prompt and efficient military manner.
Clements was a newlywed. His pretty wife was an art teacher who hated the military. Both of them had been to college and could carry themselves like college students. He thought he could drive some of the demons from tormenting his wife by taking her for a Saturday outing up to Columbia where the University of Missouri was located. They invited me along. I could pass myself off as one of the hated baby killers. One thing I took to heart from my encounter with the Marine sergeant was that if a soldier was going out amongst the citizenry he ought to be wearing civilian clothes. He might still get spit on, but could march through it, if he chose to do so, without having to defend the uniform. We had a good time in Columbia. Everywhere you looked were stoned out hippies wearing their own type of uniform: long, scraggly hair, dirty pants, tie-dyed shirts, sandals, and peace signs. Peace signs are still offensive to me; the footprint of an American chicken. I would rather be in a barroom full of wild Indians down in Checotah, OK with Marvin Nichols than in a room full of treacherous hippies. A wild Indian might crack you over the head with a cue stick but it won’t be because of wearing a uniform you take pride in.
Christmas had come and gone without much fruitcake. I spent the Holidays with my pal, Dan Foulks and his family up in St Louis. They were such warm, gracious people. I had a splendid time with them. Dan’s father is the only person I ever met who liked Falstaff Beer. He had a whole fridge loaded down with it. Dan said, “Naw, he just buys it because nobody else likes it”. Dan was our commo sergeant.
All of us took great pleasure in the annual Inspector General’s visit that came our way in January. My publications and the forged training records passed the inspection and so did Marvin’s motor pool records and we were both given a three day pass. We stopped at the FLOP House (First Liquor Off Post) and loaded ourselves down with short dogs for the trip down to Checotah. Both of us were drunk, but Marvin only ran off the road once. We whooped it up down around Checotah until Sunday night and hadn’t been sober since we left the post. It was a long drive back and both of us were a little wobbly to be behind the wheel. We agreed to take turns driving, and Marvin had the bright idea to hide our billfolds in the trunk. “If one of us got pulled over” he said, “we could tell the cops we had left our billfolds in our other pants back at the post and give him phony names, see?” Marvin could sometimes be brilliant. Marvin drove first and got us as far as Joplin where he stopped for gas. I had a couple of hours of peaceful snoozing and took over the wheel. Marvin had begun snoring raucously soon as he fell asleep and up near Lebanon a cop pulled me over for speeding. When he came up to the window he shined his flashlight around in the car and asked for my license. I pretended to look for it a while and finally told him that, “Geez, officer, I must have left my billfold in my other pants back on post”. He asked for my name and told him I was PFC Joe Piccolo. He went around to the other side of the car and woke Marvin up. Marvin could be a sound sleeper, but he was just playing possum by then. Marvin went through the whole routine with the billfold, and when the cop asked for a name he turned in my direction, gave me a wink, and said, “my name is Frank Oliver”. We switched drivers again and Marvin drove us safely and more slowly back to the post; the cop didn’t write me a ticket.
Louie and me piled into a car with a couple of other guys for a trip over to Southern Illinois. One of them lived over there. We decided to go over to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale for lunch and maybe see a few pretty girls. We stumbled into a peace demonstration on campus and were recognized as baby killers. We were surrounded by angry protesters and things were starting to get pretty ugly for us but some cops came along and got us out of that mess. They escorted us off campus and told us not to come back. That sort of confrontation hurt and was hard not to take personally. Many returned veterans had lost friends, brave men that we admired and respected, in the war. We resented the student protesters because none of them had ever made the smallest sacrifice in the service of their country. We resented being forcibly removed by cops and told we could not go as we pleased in our own free country. I would have preferred to have taken a beating by those peace demonstrators than to have been treated that way by the cops. Later that night Louie and me got ourselves thrown out of a honky-tonk by a different group of citizens just for the offense of being soldiers. Southern Illinois and Kansas City had damaged me in ways that the war or the Viet Cong could not.
A prolonged post office strike in Chicago was disrupting mail service. Company B was brought up to full alert status. Some jackass in the Pentagon took ARSTRIKE seriously. It would not be the first time the army was called upon to intervene with the post office. Labor unrest was not an issue I had contemplated in any of my ARSTRIKE readiness preparations. I quickly drew up a plan calling for the mobilization of our four line platoons utilizing available bus transportation from the Engineer School to the airport. No special equipment, beyond a change of clothes, was likely to be needed. Somebody further up the chain of command, probably some jackass in the Pentagon, would have to negotiate with the Air Force for transportation needs. A rudimentary plan fell into place and we even had a drill to see if it would work. It was intended that our men be housed, and fed and their medical and laundry needs be met at the Chicago Police Academy. Just the threat of Company B coming to Chicago to further jumble up the mail was enough to break the strike. The alert status was dropped, but we finally had some decent mobilization plans in place.
The army finally came to grips with the fact that they had more men than they needed. Three month early outs were being offered to men for enrollment in college or who could demonstrate that seasonal jobs were waiting. Louie was company clerk by then and he started in charging guys fifty dollars each to get them out of the army early. He had to invent jobs that did not exist for them to go to. It was a lucrative sideline for him. He got Marvin an early out to take a seasonal job making surfboards in Oklahoma. I filed my own papers to attend college and actually did. While we were busily engaged trying to abandon ship the National Guard killed some students at an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio.
Company B came on full alert again should that civil unrest grow out of control. Many of us hoped it would. We began sharpening our bayonets and making sure our gas masks were in order. If the National Guard could kill a few protesters we were hoping to kill hundreds, and were eager to do so. I made some refinements to the existing mobilization plans and went over to the supply room to requisition more tear gas, radio batteries, small arms and machine gun ammunition, body bags and personal bandages. I even wanted to bring up a dozer by truck to assist in the burial of anyone disrespecting us, our fallen comrades, or the uniform. Luckily for everyone the whole thing blew over. It would not have been very likely to end well for anyone. As much as soldiers would sometimes like to make their voices heard killing civilians for making their voices heard is not the way to do it. The military ought never to function as a political voice. Hopefully our political leaders would have the wisdom to set policies where military intervention is only used to good benefit for the citizens it protects. My cousin, Jim Forsberg, was ordered to Kent State to re-organize and re-train the National Guard. If it was up to Jim those National Guardsmen in any future battles would have heavy weapons and close air support.
Two weeks later I left the army; still proud of my service and proud of the uniform, but alienated from The World. I took the money I had saved in Vietnam out of the bank and purchased Sergeant Stoner’s car. It was a 1970 Ford Maverick, olive drab in color. I did not want to go through any more airports and determined to drive myself home instead. It might be a fine adventure. I left Fort Leonard Wood on June 12, 1970 and drove to Tulsa in my uniform. I got a motel room, shed the uniform, and hung it up on a motel hanger. The uniform still hangs on that same hanger in my closet just as it was when I took it off. On June 15 I arrived back in Santa Maria. As usual Thobe was there ahead of me. I haven’t seen the last of him yet.
Henry Leon, the high school pal that I met in Australia, turns out to have had the strongest commitment to duty of anyone else I know. He is still serving in the military. He came up through the ranks of the National Guard to attain the rank of Chief Warrant Officer and is in command of his own company. They will finally kick him out to pasture in December of 2014. He will have served his country for over 47 years.
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