DO YOU WANNA DIE?
So I got to see this commanding officer. He was a captain, a West Pointer, you call ‘em troops in the squadron in calvary. So we get up to him and he said I see, man, you can drive a truck. And they just had some trainees killed by these worthless General Motors trucks with hydro transmissions that should have never been in the military. Like they would roll over real easy. It wasn’t the drivers fault as much as it was the trucks. So he says you can have your wife back here you can throw her a party but you scratch one of these trannies I’ll see you in Nam. So, he picked three drivers and kept me for himself. You carry around a card with you that has an IQ bar but it’s a military IQ—it’s not about how you read or spell. You take a lot of tests. And they tell you, man, if you don’t do this you’re gonna be right on the bottom. So you get pretty inspired by basic training you’re all there, you’re not seeing nobody. We all had this meningitis scare. You couldn’t see people. You couldn’t go off your post.
So anyway we get I did some time there and got to know this commanding officer, this West Pointer. I call him “Captian Bucking For General” two times Vietnam. So we knew this gang pretty good, this recon gang. Know as much about the enemy as you can without letting the enemy know you exist. Take searching out their weakest link that had taken out with minimum force, basically recon. You don’t report to your commanding officer you recon, instead of every other thing in the military is report. You don’t report, you recon. This is always in your mind: know as much about your enemy. So anyway I’m there and I’m driving this truck and I’m keeping these trucks running. I knew something about trucks all my life. If these men could keep these jeeps running and none of these guys could drive these stick transmissions. So if we kept these jeeps running for the old man he looked better. So he let us do things that not everyone could do. So we could get these clutches for these jeeps because it wasn’t our maintenance, but we could do it. It’s what’s called third echelon. We sent it out, well we never got it back. So the whole time it’s on a dead line item on your old man’s card. So we’d get the clutches rebuilt and I’d sit out there and they made me a mechanic.
This Jewish guy from New York City, that ran the motor pool. He said, “Hey man, you wanna die?” I said, “Not really.” So I became a mechanic. Hey man, whatever. You knew you were gonna go because you had this year ahead of you. So anyway I go over as a mechanic. So I went on my basic leave. I went into the redwoods, hauled a load up to…my leave was driving a truck. I took somebody’s vacation and I took a load from Stockton to San Francisco to the state line, any way can’t remember the name of it. But I went to when I was with my father when I was 5 years old to load redwood plywood. So I’m looking over at those trees and said, “Hey this may be checkout time, you don’t know what you’re getting into.” So it was a thing that sticks into your mind. And look we had a little water house, we had drops, safe way stores so one of them was in Fairfax. Fairfax is where the Mamas and Papas of the song “Young Girls come into the Canyon.” Well this manager tells me, that’s the canyon. Where all these hippies are coming out.
So I had always been a straight. I never did no dope. Did a little drinking with the boys and this was before things changed, big time, ’65, ’66. I just wanted to carry a man’s lunch all my life that’s all I ever wanted to do was carry a man’s lunch, because some day I was gonna be that man. So I had this different perspective and then here all of the sudden this things coming down around me doesn’t look good. Not that it looks bad for me in my life..It’s why are we doing this? In school, the teachers knew this. It just can’t. You know when you know this from the time you are 13 years old, you just think about it a lot. So when we get over there you see these guys that represented those crosses at Arlington West, those guys they did like my father in WWII. They went in and died for their country and they pulled them out and then they put them back in. Well in Vietnam you went in and you did a year in a unit that existed, that had a history. So right away man this looks like a dang loser. YEAH that’s what they all said too. So there’s that one tombstone that I showed you of them guys that had checked out the 150 a week that was born two or three days after I had got to Vietnam, well that’s when I really found out what a dead bang loser it was because I was in the engineering unit that was gonna build roads to nowhere.
In Cam Ranh Bay, when we are leaving, I run into this long range reconnaissance patrol guy and he was with these ROK’s (Republic of Korea), these Koreans, and they go into these villages, and they knew there were VC in these villages. When you say long range reconnaissance patrol, they meant it. They stayed out with the ROK’s for a long time. One thing in Vietnam, no Charlie never mortared no ROK, because the village will disappear. These people are cruel and brutal. They’re not that far away from what happened to them during WWII and before. These people can be vicious. The Koreans were the most racist people I’ve ever seen in my life. They hate black people. Because, I don’t know, maybe it’s this thing. This guy was sitting on there with these ROK’s and said the problem with you Americans is that you’re too easy. They went in there and cut the chicken’s throat, the man’s throat, whatever they had to do to find out what they wanted to know. They would come out and tell these GI’s the problem with you Americans is you too easy.