Category Archives: military

I was in the Army at a time when there were beer machines in the barracks, dope in many lockers, and cigarettes in our C-rations. I mostly smoked nonfilter cigarettes (usually Pall Malls) because the butts could be “field-stripped”–torn up and scattered outside without leaving a filter as litter. (I stopped smoking soon after getting out of the Army.)

In my barracks at the 95th Civil Affairs Group in Ft. Gordon, GA, you could usually tell when the old supply sergeant who lived in his own room downstairs woke up in the morning. It wasn’t his alarm clock. It was the distinctive sound of the pop-top coming off his can of beer for breakfast.

After I reached the rank of E-5–SP5, the specialist (noncommand) equivalent of buck sergeant–I got my own room upstairs, which PFCs (E-3s) Carter and O’Neill would occasionally borrow to shoot up. By that time, I was the company clerk–and everyone’s servant.

These two happy-go-lucky NYC delinquents, drafted out of Riker’s Island, were fresh back from Vietnam. After each payday, they would make a trip into Augusta to score a fix, come back to the barracks and shoot up, then puke their guts out and sleep it off. Between paydays, O’Neill would hock his stereo to get another fix, then buy it out of hock the next payday. And so the cycle would repeat at roughly weekly intervals.

After I bought a used car off a company first sergeant who was leaving, I once made the mistake of agreeing to drive the weekend junkies into Augusta to get their stuff. I took the two New Yorkers (one black, one white) and another local black guy whose name, I believe, was Miles. I parked at a KFC near a housing project and three of us waited while Miles wandered off into the projects in his slovenly fatigues–shirttail and pantsleg half out, boots half unlaced. I started to get nervous after he returned with the goods.

I got even more nervous when they wanted to make another stop, this time at a drug store to buy some syringes. At first, Carter wanted me to go in to get them, since I wasn’t a familiar face. I was to tell them I was a diabetic who needed syringes for my injections of insulin. I was reluctant, and Carter then decided to go himself, so he crossed the street in his slovenly fatigues and got the syringes.

Driving back to base, I was more than nervous. I was scared the police would pull us over for driving while military, for driving while black and white, or for some other arbitrary reason, but I don’t think we even saw any cop cars. In any case, we made it back safely, they got their highs, and they were kind enough not to ask me to make any more runs for heroin.

I entered the Army during the era of Project 100,000 (1966-1971), an attempt to enlist the military as a tool of President Johnson’s War on Poverty–and vice versa. I would call it Project Cannonfodder, but the number 1 Google hit for that term bears the discouraging subtitle, Preparing Teachers for Public Schools. (Does that mean that our nation’s public school systems now offer less opportunity for personal growth and career advancement than our nation’s military? I can believe it.)

Under Project 100,000, entrance standards were lowered in order to enable more people to qualify for the military. As Secretary of Defense McNamara declared in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 1966:

The poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this Nation’s abundance, but they can be given an opportunity to serve in their Country’s defense, and they can be given an opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of human decay.

As a result,

By [1971], 354,000 L/A [“Low Aptitude”] men had entered the Services under the program. Of these, 54% were volunteers and 46% were draftees. The men who entered under P/100000 were on average 20 years of age, about half came from the South, and a substantial proportion (about 41%) were minorities. The average reading ability of these men was at the 6th grade level with 13% reading below the 4th grade level.

In my Basic Training squad in 1969, there was a trucker from Richmond named Bragg who was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, but nevertheless a good, responsible soldier. Another soldier whose name I’ve forgotten was so exceedingly dimwitted that he had to be reminded to shower and change his clothes.

In the 95th Civil Affairs Group at Ft. Gordon, GA, two New Yorkers back from Vietnam had been juvenile delinquents. At age 17, they were each given the choice between the Army or Riker’s Island. They chose the Army, and they both ended up in Vietnam, where they discovered the dope to be far superior to what they could get in the States. O’Neill, from Queen’s, hoped to join New York’s finest, but Carter chose to go back to Vietnam’s finer grade of heroin.

A follow-up program, Project Transition, was founded in late 1967 in order to help the survivors of Project 100,000 make a transition back into the civilian workforce. I signed up for Cement Masonry under Project Transition when I was getting close to the end of my term of service (ETS date) toward the end of 1971. I picked Cement Masonry because it lasted the longest, 6 weeks (if I remember correctly). One of my fellow cement masonry classmates was a Nicaraguan journalist who spent his time in the U.S. Army as a cook because his English was so limited. Unfortunately, neither of us stood much chance of qualifying for membership in any construction union.

By that time, my Civil Affairs unit had moved to Ft. Bragg, and I was transferred to Ft. Gordon’s Personnel Control Facility (PCF), where I met a different class of Project 100,000 alumni. My job was to escort soldiers in penal custody to the mess hall, to the clinic, or to military courts. Most had just come back from being AWOL, and some had been turned in by their local sheriffs, who were said to collect a bounty from the military. If you went AWOL 3 times for a period of at least 30 days each, you could qualify for a dishonorable discharge for desertion–a surprisingly popular goal. It might take longer than getting three purple hearts to get out of a combat zone, but it was a safer alternative.

I was generally the last of those on duty to volunteer to escort prisoners because I was usually engrossed in a book. My comrades were bored and eager to take a walk. But I remember once accompanying a prisoner to face an officer who tried to convince him that, no matter how much he hated the Army, he would do better to finish his term of service than to keep going AWOL. To make his point, the officer turned to me and asked, “Outlier, do you like the Army?” I replied, “Not at all, sir!” Whereupon he turned to my prisoner, “See? Outlier hates the Army as much as you do, but he’s done his duty and will get out sooner than you will.” Somehow, I doubt my example impressed him all that much.

My first thought when I got my orders to report to HQ Co., 95th Civil Affairs Group at Ft. Gordon, GA, after I finished language school in 1970 was, “Wow. I wonder if I’ll be working with civilians and can wear civilian clothes.” Little did I know that Civil Affairs was just a euphemism for what used to be called Military Government, and that my unit’s insignia showed a traditional Korean city gate on it from its first and last major deployment–during the Korean War. (Its only other component, the 42nd Civil Affairs Co., was briefly deployed to the Dominican Republic in 1965.)

The 95th CA Grp. was an officer-heavy skeletal battalion (only HQ Co. and 42nd Co.) with no critical mission, so it functioned as a holding unit for people either awaiting levy to Vietnam or just back from Nam. As a Romanian translator-interpreter, I was initially assigned to the amiable 2Lt Gorniak, who had mastered German, Dutch, Danish, and Afrikaans while in college ROTC. But, like most officers, he was assigned to one of the combat branches–Infantry, Artillery, and Armored Cavalry–and soon came down on levy to Vietnam. (His name was among the handful I looked for a couple decades later when I dragged my daughter over to the Vietnam Memorial on a visit to DC. I was relieved not to find the names, but found the experience too emotional to explain to my daughter at the time.)

Among those just back from Nam were Sp4 McLaughlin, a crazy fearless helicopter door gunner who never hesitated to step between belligerent drunken soldiers; Sp4 Blaisdell, a radio DJ with a mellifluous voice who spent most of his tour in PsyOps, eating dog and other delicacies with Vietnamese villagers; and three former juvenile delinquent New Yorkers, Pfcs Carter, O’Neill, and Melendez (black, white, and Hispanic, respectively), about which more in later posts.

We did only one field exercise: Driving south on bivouac to Florida, where we pitched tents in a wooded military reservation overrun with armadillos (called ‘turtle-rabbits’ in Nahuatl), many of which had themselves been overrun on the road. The excess of officers over enlisted in our unit meant that each of us peons had to do twice the amount of set-up and clean-up that we would otherwise have done. I remember spending one long evening in our tent listening to Sgt Kerwin tell stories and recite Robert W. Service poems. When I asked him why a person with his wide interests stayed in the Army, he said he and his family very much needed the medical benefits.

By that time, I had become company clerk, and rode in the company First Sergeant’s jeep. Just before departure, 1Sg Davis had gone off to take a shit in the woods. Unfortunately for him, he was very short and hadn’t noticed that he had squatted over the back of his own trousers. Unfortunately for me, I had to ride behind him all the way back to Ft. Gordon. (Fortunately, it was an open jeep.) From then on, his epithet was Sgt Shitty Britches.

The only official public service we performed was guarding railroad crossings while a trainload of nerve gas was shipped to Savannah for eventual destruction (perhaps on Johnston Island). We were all issued gas masks and atropine, but were not allowed to keep them on our persons so as not to alarm the populace. So we kept them in the back of our truck, knowing there would be no possible way for us to get to them and put them to use within the 7-10 seconds that nerve gas would take to kill us.

Civil Affairs was relocated to Ft Bragg in September 1971. As a short-timer, with barely 6 months left to serve, I was transferred to Ft. Gordon’s PCF–Personnel Control Facility (the brig), not Patrol Craft, Fast (Swiftboats). In December 1974, the 95th CA Grp was deactivated, and nowadays most Civil Affairs units are found in the National Guard, which I’m sure performs far more capably than the mixed bag of transients in the 95th CA Grp would have.