RA19739800: Preparing for War

During basic training at Fort Ord, every Wednesday was Haircut Day.

In early afternoon, we were barked and herded into formation, then double-timed to the barber shop. Once there, we would stand silently in line awaiting a five-minute turn in one of the many chairs. No conversation was necessary or welcome. All hair was removed from each young head with close-cut clippers. The need for speed was great; there were so many young men. There was less need for care or caution, because all would return on the next Wednesday, even though many left the shop each week with little trickles of blood forming at the tops of their ears, where they joined the skull. The price for this whiz-bang shearing was fifty cents, paid in advance. Like everything else in the lives of the young men, the process was efficient, ordered and directed. So conditioned were they, after a few short weeks as soldiers, that no one thought, even for a second, to complain of the rough treatment or the damaged ears.

It was the objective of the Army, within a few frenzied weeks of long days and short nights filled with exhausting physical training and unremitting psychological stress, to destroy the free will of the young men. The Army worked toward this goal with fierce diligence. Some of the new soldiers were recruits, like me. Volunteers, whose reasons for enlisting were legion. Others were reluctant warriors; draftees, whose Army serial numbers began with US instead of RA. No matter...the Army would hammer and mix and mold this kaleidoscopic assortment of young American manhood into something else, something new. Emerging from the basic training course at Fort Ord, California in the winter of 1962 were cohesive units of men capable of functioning as single-purposed machines; men conditioned to obey the commands and instructions of NCOs and officers without question, though they might later grumble and privately wonder at the stupidity they would often observe in command. Over and over, every day, in each aspect of their training the men were told that their lives depended on blind and instantaneous obedience to command. There was no relief from this theme. In sleeping and waking; in eating and physical training; in shooting and marching; in cleaning and grooming. Everything, EVERY SINGLE THING was tightly regimented and rigidly structured. The Army believed that the new thing they were creating could only be born in the ashes of ego. The few who could not or would not bend were broken. The frail or excessively weak were carried until they were judged to be beyond salvation, and those few were returned to civilian life. It was mean, it was brutal, and it was often very ugly. But in many of the young men, something unfamiliar began to stir. The more they were driven, the more they desired to be driven. As the psychological abuses and physical demands were heaped upon them with increasing intensity, determination to persevere, to succeed, and even to excel began to swell within them, both individually and as units. For many, this was the first experience in their lives that took them outside themselves, that created a higher purpose than self. In large measure, the Army knew their business, and they succeeded. Perhaps it was crude, undoubtedly it was blunt; but it worked.

Later, after the grinding crucible of basic training, there would be time for fun and friendship as well as duty. But basic training was designed to be indelible and unforgettable, and most of us would carry the marks of those few weeks with us for all the rest of our lives, and certainly through the remaining years of our Army tours.

PS - May 20, 2005 - I meant to follow this up with a later post, but never did. I prepared for war, even hoped for it in that absurd teenage male testosterone saturated world that I inhabited in 1962, but I never went.

From Fort Ord, some of us shipped to Fort Gordon, Georgia. Apparently, something in the dozens of tests we took in Basic Training said to the big green machne "Here's one who can zone out in front of a typewriter and telegraph key for hours on end translating dots and dashes into messages without going beserk." Sixteen weeks of code and learning to change transmitter coils in refrigerator-sized radio transmitters without burning all the marrow out of my bones. U.S. Army Signal Corps Training School. What a cool thing for a nearly seventeen-year-old boy. We got bright orange parade scarves to wear with our dress greens, and crossed signal flags on new brass for our lapels. We all had our pictures taken.

After Basic Training, Signal School was delightful. Anyway, the point is that I didn't go to war. In my training company, as graduation approached, orders began to come down, in groups and in little dribbles. By graduation day, everyone had received orders except me and one other hapless boy. Most of the orders were for a place called Vietnam. No one knew anything about that place at that time. We had to look it up in the library to see where everyone was going. Nearly-seventeen-year-old boys don't read the newspapers much, and there was precious little to be found in them regarding Vietnam in those days anyway. The ones who were going were joyful. It would be a nice vacation in a tropical paradise.

Two weeks passed. The company area was empty and quiet. The next incoming class of RTT operators wasn't scheduled for a few weeks. I slept alone in my barracks, stony silent now without the rowdy young men of my company who were all en route to Vietnam. Finally, after two weeks of solitude, cleaning barracks, latrines, and day rooms, the other orphan boy-soldier and I were ordered to report for duty at Pyongtaek, Republic of Korea (by way of Oakland Army Terminal) for a thirteen-month deployment with the 304th Signal Battalion attached to HQ of the Eighth Army.

How sad we were...our lucky buddies would be tanning in a tropical wonderland that we imagined would be just like Hawaii (though neither of us had been there either, or ever see a coast or an ocean for that matter.) And we were going to a place with winters cold enough to freeze the air in your lungs. A place that contained Chosin resevoir. "Frozen Chosin" to Americans who died there, and the ones who survived that icy hell while I was in the first grade at Lewis School in Ogden, Utah.

Korea was wonderful for me, but that's another story. Twice during my year there, our officers asked for volunteers to go on temporary duty assignments to...Vietnam. It seems that RTT operators were suddenly in short supply there. (What ever happened to the hundreds of our Signal School mates who had gone before us, just a few months earlier?) I thought about going, but I had learned by then that unpleasantness always followed an act of volunteering in the Army. I had my new buddies, my cozy little diesel-stove-heated Quonset hut, and a routine I could live with, so I just stayed quiet, and didn't raise my hand. Besides, an ill wind was beginning to blow up into the East China and Yellow seas from the south; rumors of death and dismemberment were just making their way to our ears from Vietnam. Rumors of war.

Why 239 Capitol Street?

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By any objective measure, it was the worst of the places I've called "home". I am drawn back to it like a moth to flame, though it hasn't existed for over forty years. When I returned from Korea in the Spring of 1964 and stood in my hot green wool uniform on the raw ground where the Capitol Apartments had been for all the days of my life, I thought my heart would stop.

I can't ever know this, but I believe my life changed course on that day. Whoever (or whatever) I was to become when I left home in October of 1962 was just a wisp of smoke in the still air. For awhile, I could see it, or sense it, hanging semitransparent in the air, but becoming more disorganized and distant by the day.

Life has taken me into the path of many interesting events, some quite spectacular and seemingly momentous. But that May day in 1964 was the nexus for me; all the eighteen years of my life seemed buried in the dirt at my feet, along with the old, crumbling bricks of the Capitol Apartments. That was my Day in the Yellow Wood.

Perhaps, somewhere in the varied halls of the universe, the Capitol Apartments yet stands guard on Electric Alley, and raucous Saturday night music from the open doors of the KoKoMo Club and the El Borracho still drifts through the summer night and into the second-floor casement window of a thirteen-year-old boy, lying awake in bed, wondering about tomorrow, the world, and his place in it. Perhaps that boy is me. Oh, I hope so.

I am 58 years of age, the lifelong mate of a sweet woman I would never have aspired to, had I been a seriously thoughtful person. I am the father of a beautiful and intelligent daughter. I have also, with my mate, favored the world with three bright, funny, and loving sons. I have grandchildren out there...my daughter made them and pampers them and grows them. I hardly know them. New York may as well be Antarctica, for all the likelihood that I will go there. All in all, I am a happy person. I may die before I write here again, so I can't leave this unsaid: It's a Wonderful Life.

It's therapeutic, making these scatchings, and disconcerting at the same time, not knowing if or when they will fall upon someone, or whether they will land like stones or like snowflakes if they do.