CUE: The Letter, THE BOX TOPS
There are letters and there are letters. There are those that often make such changes in a young man's life that he always remembers them. He remembers the way the envelope felt in his hand when he took it from the mailbox and the sound it made as he ripped it open. These are often letters that announce that he has been accepted into the university of his choosing, or telling him that he has won a coveted scholarship. Sometimes the letter is penned in the delicate hand of his sweetheart, telling him that she will be his bride or even that she never wants to see him again. These epistles are often life changing and always kept in the memory as stark reminders of those moments. In my case, I don't think I saw the letter at all. In fact, I have no recollection as to ever having seen it, but it changed my life all the same.
Summer ’69 was warm and promising. I was starting my second season working as a stuntman in the gunfight shows at the Six Flags Over Texas amusement park. It was one of those perfect jobs where I got to play cowboys for a living and no one called me silly or irresponsible for doing so. In fact, I was paid pretty well for falling off buildings and trains and the like. I was sitting in the sun one afternoon, cleaning my pistol and watching the crowds amble by, when a pretty young girl came out of the Crazy Horse Saloon to tell me that I had a phone call from my father. I was a bit panicked. My family never called me at the park. I was convinced that someone must be close to dying. As it turned out, that someone was me.
“I have a letter here for you.”
My father's voice was flat and unusually devoid of humor. I thought maybe it was the sound of his voice in the phone that made him seem so strained. It was not.
“It's from the president of the United States.”
My heart skipped a beat. In those days, every young man who was out of school and healthy stood a pretty good chance of getting his draft notice. I had already been called for a physical and had been simply ignoring the fact that the other shoe was about to drop. I listened to my father's voice read the letter to me over that beat-up phone in the back of the Crazy Horse Saloon. When he came to the last words, they burned themselves into my memory so that I can hear them even today.
“You have ten days to report.”
I walked out into the crowded street and looked about me. The festive decorations of the amusement park seemed suddenly very dear to me. I listened to the speakers that played western movie music all day long to add atmosphere to the western sets, and I realized that I would not hear them again for a long time.
“You have ten days to report.”
The words kept bouncing around in my head. How can they expect a man to wrap up his entire life in only ten days? In actuality, my life was so trivial that it only took a few hours to wrap it up. I can honestly say that I don't remember everything that happened during those fast ten days. I remember a party or two and one really bad hangover, and then I was riding on a plane bound for my part in history. It was a part I neither asked for nor shirked but experienced along with millions of others. I have often wondered what happened to that letter.
My family background was military in its very nature. My grandfather had run away from home and joined the US Cavalry at the tender age of sixteen. He chased Pancho Villa to Vera Cruz and went to France with Pershing in World War I. My father, who was my grandfather's only son, joined the Marine Corps to be a pilot in World War II and was a member of the storied VMA 121 attack squadron during the Korean conflict. Some of my earliest memories are of life on Marine bases and knowledge of the intense pride my family felt in military service.
By summer ’69, my family was faced with a bit of a split in their sentiments about the conflict then raging in Southeast Asia. Their loyalty to the country and their pride in our armed forces was uncompromised, but their desire to see another son put in harm's way was shaking their resolve a bit. When I took my leave of my aging grandfather, he was stoic and unusually silent. When we hugged at parting, he began to shed tears. I had never seen that before. It troubled me, and I confess that I was taken aback by such forceful emotion coming from that old and usually very hard man. It would be decades before I understood that moment. My grandfather had shouldered arms and carried the flag through the last cavalry campaign in American history. He had traveled across the ocean to survive midnight raids, bayonet attacks, and poison gas in a great effort they called the war to end all wars. A generation later, he sent his only son, twice, into the same madness. Now he was watching a third generation put on the uniform and leave home following the same kind of promises. It would be long after his death that I came to realize that the tears he shed were not for me. They were for all of us.
Basic training has not changed all that much since the days of George Washington and the Continental Army. It is a simple and direct attack on the individuality of the human. The need to take any number of individuals, from any number of backgrounds, with any number of beliefs, and mold them into soldiers who have an undying love of country, an indisputable subservience to authority, and the physical stamina to march through hell and back, is a monumental task. When you throw in the fact that it must be done and done well in eight and one-half weeks, the task seems insurmountable. The odd fact is that the army has been doing exactly that since Baron von Steuben drilled the first American soldiers during the winter at Valley Forge. Basic-training stories are the staple of a serviceman's memoirs and are the subject of any number of Hollywood epics involving the military. They all center on the iron will of the drill instructor and can be summed up in a Caesar-like quote: “I came, I saw, he conquered.” It is pretty much the same for everybody. The only thing I will mention here is my sad case of decision making that will lead me to the rest of this saga.
Upon arriving at Fort Bliss, Texas, the whole bunch of new recruits were subjected to a battery of written tests. After each test, the group would be herded outside for a smoke break, and then, in time, some names were called and a smaller number of future Sad Sacks would be marched back inside to take more tests. This continued until there was only a small group left. This reduced number was marched off to another building where they were given the officer's qualifying test. I was a part of this last group and was told that I had qualified for Officers Candidate School (OCS) if I did well enough in basic training. This sounded great and led me into a trap that I sort of laid for myself.
During basic training, those of us in the OCS group were occasionally called away from training and given psychological tests and interviewed and questioned ad infinitum about our loyalties and the state of our patriotism. When we graduated from basic training, we were called in and seated at a table. Impressive looking papers were placed in front of us, and we were instructed to sign them. Being curious by nature, I asked what the papers meant. The officer in charge smiled and told me that one was a discharge as a draftee and an enlisted man, and the other was a contract. The contract stated that I was volunteering to serve three years after the date of my commission as a second lieutenant in the infantry. I took all this in and then began to ask more questions. I asked how long it would take to get this commission. The answer was nine months or more. I asked if this meant that I would be sent to Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader. The answer was yes, at least once. I asked what would happen if I didn't sign. I was told that I would remain an enlisted man for two years in whatever assignment I was given.
I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it didn't take me too long to add things up and figure out that if I signed the contract, after the nine months it took to get my commission, I would have to serve three years, and I was going into combat as the head of a rifle platoon. If I didn't sign anything, I had only two years to serve in whatever job they might give me. Only 10 percent of the army is involved in combat. The other 90 percent stacks C rations and washes underwear and the like. The odds simply made my mind up for me. I refused to sign and was sent back to the ranks and assigned a military occupational status of 11B. In military jargon that's Eleven Bravo, and it refers to the light weapons infantry. I took a deep breath and was sent straight as an arrow to killer school at Fort Ord in California. From there the next stop would, in all likelihood, be the Republic of South Vietnam. I often wonder where I would have ended up if I had made the other choice. I certainly wouldn't have gotten shot at any more than I did with C Company, and at least someone would have called me “Sir.”