BackToVietnam.net - A Rude Awakening

A Rude Awakening

Setup: I have previously described growing up in a suffocatingly stoic, WASP family, and how I decided to enlist in the army rather than go to college out of high school. I had been lured into imagining military service as an enjoyable adventure, and was unprepared for the shock of basic training.

Basic training was not what I'd imagined. The goal -- explicitly stated, and clearly and robustly demonstrated -- was to break down individuality and replace it with blind, unthinking obedience. Instead of the cozy cabins of my imagination, the barracks of Fort Dix, New Jersey were three story cinder block and linoleum rectangles. The mornings started whenever the day's secret plan called for our platoon sergeant to turn on the overhead fluorescent lighting and start banging on our metal lockers with a steel dustpan, or scream profanities and orders at his sleeping, dreaming charges....5:00, 2:00, 4:30, 3:15. We had a certain number of minutes to be dressed and outside in formation, and various penalties were slapped on those who failed this first of the day's tests: extra KP, running laps, pushups, etc. Once in formation, we were informed that our very existence was essentially an insult, as no one should ever have to suffer having to deal with our sorry asses, and that the army's job, as delegated to the staff in front of us, was to mold us into acceptable soldiers and, by extension, citizens. Anyone who disagreed with this assessment was invited to approach the front of the platoon and fight the sergeant. No one ever did.

The days and nights of those eight weeks were filled with intense physical training, which was painful and wearying for me but tolerable because of my high school athletics. Some, out of shape and perhaps busy professionals snatched by the draft into this sudden ordeal -- the maximum draft age was 26 -- struggled badly. There were hours and hours of aptitude tests, sitting at desks answering multiple choice questions about spatial relationships, electrical principles, automotive mechanics. For a while I felt irretrievably lost, alone and beaten down. I sometimes sat there, pencil in hand, so crippled by homesickness and fear of what might happen next that I was unable to read the questions; with the horrible shocking awareness of my new reality at the age of 17 dawning on me, all my attention and effort were directed at the effort to keep from bursting out in tears. I wiped my eyes and coughed to hide the sniffles. The magnitude of the horrible mistake I'd made was viscerally terrifying. What have I done!? Three years? How can I do this? How? I didn't know. The one thing I was clear about was that I hated army life. For a few weeks I was crushingly, utterly miserable. While I wrote letters to my parents, I never mentioned my unhappiness -- I knew better. I told them about how to clean an M14. But gradually it faded, as homesickness always does, and I emerged and engaged.

There was instruction and practice shooting the M14 .30 caliber rifle, the .45 caliber pistol, the 40mm grenade launcher, the M60 .30 caliber machine gun, and how to keep someone from killing me with a bayonet or his hands. We learned how to bandage a bullet hole. We were taught, very briefly, how to pull the pin and throw a hand grenade. There were some who had difficulty grasping the basic concept -- when the pin is pulled, you have to throw it over the wall, because when the spring-loaded handle slips past your fingers there will be a substantial explosion a few seconds later. I watched an instructor push a clueless trainee out of the way, dive to the floor, and send a dropped grenade on its way before disaster fell on us all. We were never called by name; we were either "trainee!" or "troop!" by voices filled with disgust and impatience. We did push-ups and sit-ups and ran and ran and ran. We parade marched, a ludicrous and comical parody of military precision. We marched also into the New Jersey pine barrens, 70 or so pounds of equipment on our backs in the summer humidity and heat or drenching rain, sinking into sand that filled our boots and swallowed our energy. We bivouacked in those pine barrens, pitching tents and eating C rations and battling mosquitoes. We practiced moving and setting up the entire company in the field; sleeping tents, mess tents and tables, orderly room tents and tables and file cabinets and typewriters, cooking equipment, weapons, and various chunks of mechanical gear, and then took it all down to set it up again somewhere else, maybe two days later or maybe hours later, maybe at 3:14 am. We never knew when until we were ordered to do it. At any time we might be told to stop and do 20 push-ups or run a couple of miles. We negotiated obstacle courses, climbing wooden walls and ropes hanging from towers and jumping over and into feet of mud, all spaced out over miles of running, running, running. We low-crawled under barbed wire at night with live machine gun fire streaming a few feet over our heads, red tracers sternly reminding us to stay down. And there were classes, often with primitive 16 mm video tailored to the lowest common denominator: how to brush our teeth, how to wash our hands; how to salute a flag you happen to be passing; why we were privileged to fight for America; the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the laws and regulations that governed us; what foods were good for us. We practiced making our beds with perfect uniformity and tightly enough that a dropped quarter would bounce up a couple of inches. We cleaned the tops of our wall lockers and door frames and the undersides of our cots so they would pass the white glove test. We organized every single article we possessed -- toothbrushes, combs, boots, extra laces, folded underwear, pens, letters, money, everything -- so that every wall locker and every foot locker was exactly the same.

And then it ended, and it was time for all of us to be sent to Advanced Individual Training, AIT. Most of the enlistees headed off to be trained in their MOS: communications, cooking, mechanics, electronics, etc. Draftees, though, were largely sent to the infantry, because of attrition; the infantry were the soldiers who slogged through the mud and dust and jungle, the soldiers who could see the people they shot at, and they had the unfortunate habit of getting killed and needing to be replaced. And now I realized how my lack of attention during the enlistment process had set me up for a dangerous, short and catastrophic future. I'd enlisted for Airborne, but hadn't been told that Airborne was a placement realized only after AIT. As I hadn't known enough to specify an AIT, the army was free to choose one for me, and the default was infantry. I was granted some days of leave, spent back in Connecticut with my family, and then, following my written orders, went to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for infantry training.

But in an irony of personal history that I still have difficulty believing, the army made a wonderful, glorious mistake. A date was mixed up on my orders. Perhaps it was a typo, or maybe it was confusion in the vast machinery of sending all of us here and there. When I reported to Fort Gordon, precisely in accordance with my orders, I was two days late: the infantry training cycle I was supposed to be in had started, and it was too late for me to join. The army didn't know what to do with me. I sat around in barracks and performed menial tasks designed solely to keep me occupied. I swept and mopped. I served KP. I served more KP, rising at 4:00 am to peel, mop, wash, carry, and serve until well into the evening. I washed windows. I ran errands. I did push-ups and sit ups, getting an occasional kick in the stomach if I didn't do something right or if some sergeant was in a bad mood.

And then I was told that I was no longer headed for the infantry. My Military Occupational Specialty was not going to be 111.10, but 12B40. I was to be a Combat Engineer, and specifically a Heavy Vehicle Operator. I'd been hearing more rumors about the dangers of the life of the infantry -- one was that while all of the graduates of the infantry training I'd just escaped were sent to Vietnam, only about 40% of them came back alive. But somehow I was still too naive, too buffeted by these whiplash jerks of fate, to really appreciate the astounding good fortune that had just bathed me. I didn't laugh or yell or write home to commemorate this astounding bend in the road ....You CAN'T BELIEVE what has happened! I just shrugged and went to the other side of Fort Gordon, where I started work as a clerk in a motor pool, dispatching and recording the activities and status of the 60 or so jeeps we maintained for Military Police trainees. I spent my time doing paperwork, learning how to drive a 2 1/2 ton cargo truck -- a deuce and a half -- and a five ton dump truck, and trying to understand this bizarre turn of events. I got good at those logistical and learning tasks assigned to me, but failed utterly at making sense of anything. I still hated being in the army, but I wasn't unhappy; I got some satisfaction from doing my jobs well, and enjoyed the weekend joy rides where we took jeeps out into the base's woodland hills and trails and drove with exhilarating recklessness, seeing how far we could drive with the jeep tipped up sideways on two wheels without actually crashing. But somewhere in me I knew I was treading water. I was doing nothing. Having been yanked out of a comfortable life where I had played at being a son and a student, I was now playing at being a person in the army. I had no idea what anything meant and I had no idea how to find out. But I knew that I wanted to know more. Vietnam was still constantly in the news, and there began in me an agitating curiosity. Was this war a good idea, a necessary thing? Was it a waste, a tragedy? I was grabbed by such simplistic questions. I didn't actually care much about the answers, but asking them held my attention because something there was real. Something there was not pretense. And so, in an attempt to bring my existence in the world into focus, to try to feel my feet on the actual ground for the first time in all my 18 flimsy years, and in an act of such blinding stupidity that it will always be a wonder to me, I walked into my company's orderly room and asked for the paperwork required to volunteer to be sent to Vietnam.

Another visit home to say goodbye. My parents were proud, I guess, although I remember none of it. If they were scared or worried, they kept it to themselves. When the morning came and they dropped me off at the bus to be whisked away, there was the standard firm handshake from my father and the standard chilly almost-hug from my mother. She was also prepared with a clearly well-rehearsed line: "Watch out for low-flying bridges." With that flailing stab at levity, they sent me off.