The Army Diaries - Prelude to a Prey Lewd

Kent State - "Red rover, red rover, let the National Guard come over...."

Mike had spent the past few years on the road, on the streets, bummed and beat, not to mention rowing his boat far from the shore of childhood, on an ocean littered with row upon row of skids.

In Hawaiian Hallelulia Honolulu, Mike was marooned, beached and burnt by the sun, later left naked, Sunset Stripped on the go-go road of Lost Loss (Los?) Angeles...no angels, just lots of loss...hot stilleto heel trampling, (hey, some people pay good money for that~!) while scientifically sampling a cadre of the population well versed it seems in fornication, hipsters and hookers, posing as poets while at the same time injesting suggested digestible and copious amounts of chemistry designed for better living in the social science anthropological Haight-Ashbury, The Haight! Too hip for it's own good, North Beach in San FranFriskyCo with it's teasing trannies in training bra's with full magnums of boobs to tease and tempt the teenage tramps.

The year was now 1968....Kent State was still a couple of years away but the protest path had been broken and was heading straight to the political crossroads of the campus, Mike was now entering the political forest and would soon become a pathfinder. But...just where would this path lead?

Mike's old friend, and manic mentor, a terrific beatific hornblowing Honolulu cabbie who took the young runaway under wing and tutelage, Doc Yucatan, had burst forth into Mikes life with the force and impact of a white-hot light-blinding hydrogen detonation..

Eventually, Doc became a mellow fellow and morphed into the shape of a desultry dream catcher, migrating from the palm frond frontier of an island paradiso, he found comfort in settling into the azure, silver and turquoise chanting mandala of the crazy Navajo of Nuevo Mexico.

Doc visited an old Korean war buddy there, a Navajo-Mex mix art gallery owner, named Gallegos, no first name, just Gallegos, and he led Doc on a personsal journey, deep into the mirage of the desert where you don't find the peyote, but where the peyote can find you, as it did him. From then on, his spiritual headress was of the Peyote Coyote, Doc, with Mike along side, breast feeding his zen tao persona of the haiku hobo, scouring the desert together looking to mentally if not physically, if it were possible, to screw one or two of the deserts psychedelically delightful cacti muses...the islands to the mainlands...Hawaii. Mike never thought Doc would ever leave that tropical fruit basket he had called home....but then....

In early 1967, Doc's wife died, and his legitimate and numerous bastard spawn were scattered like seeds on the wind. eastward and westward, northward and southward. Doc was alone now in his mind, so he sold the cab, the house, and said "Aloha" to Hawaii and Hola to Taos, New Mexico, dibbling and dabbling in far-out far-Eastern philosophy and further out in anarchic arts. Mike and Doc couldn't wait to see each other after so long a lapse, so a trip was planned. (They would soon have cravings for cantina's and sexual senorita's S.O.B. or South of the Border, Bard and Pard, down Mejico way...Mike wrote about those adventures in his book, "The Peyote Coyote", so no need to go into them again for an orgasmic peek under brown skinned skirts in this diary diatribe by the same prose scriber.

Mike hadn't seen the wiley wizard of oddity cab driving pirate for a couple of years, Doc was now flying into San Francisco from quirky Albuquerque, so Mike, along with John, his Berkeley buddy, coaxed the wheezing, mechanically arthritic V-Dub camper to the airport south of the city and picked up Doc for the reunion of two haiku hobo's plus one, a not so cerebral cerebellum celebraton. St. John of the VW, the part time messianic Mechanic, the Tao Te Chi of the Times....and no, Taos is not the plural of Tao, that would be Tao's....Haiku times two equals Tao squared...or Wen = Wu...Wen and Wen equals Wu....confusing confucian math especially when Tao does not equal two....Tao and Tao = Four, however, as does two plus two....They all had dinner in North Beach, downed many a cheap brown bagged ragged bottle of any port in the storm port. the fog had rolled in earlier and the drunken fog was talking in a slur, loud in the bar on the beach where drunk fogs hang out with other drunken weather elements, so John (the human) bid adieu and disappeared through the fog (not human), over the Bay Bridge to his side of the looking glass, Berkeley...Mike and Doc headed to Mike's apartment in the Haight and smoked and talked of old times all night long....both of them drunker than the friggin' fog and the night would find them even foggier by morning, not to mention drunker.

The next morning they walked along the Embarcadero."Know this, boy. Ya'll been doing too much in the field of drug research, self-inflicted experimentation and all. Downers, uppers, opium, grass and hash. You're a walkin' pharmacuetical dictionary from A-Z. You're becoming a goddamn Nazi concentration camp experiment destined to die in a cold water bath. So many fuckin' drugs we'll have to start calling you "Sandoz!" ranted Doc with the exuberance, though not the eloquence, of a young fair haired prince named Arthur yanking Excalibur from it's stone encasement...Mike looked incredulously at him. "Wait, wait just a damn minute here Doc. If memory serves me, the memory fueled with a few high octane is that it? Right?" Doc, inhaled deep, and handed the joint back to Mike. "Damn straight boy, damn straight, save ye braincells, the ones that is left, and all the fumes in the gas tank.

"Damnit Doc" Mike said, "You gave my that first joint in your old raggedy ass cab and taught me that only amateur hustlers use a rollin' machine. We scored together, got high together, sold weed together, and now you're saying Dorian Grey had better get a grip," as he exhaled long and satisfied. Only Doc could talk about the dangers of drug abuse while smoking a joint and actually pull it off so it seemed nat'chul, as smooth as a transvestite doing his/her best Dusty Springfield on the stage at Finocchio's..."I Only Want to be with You" dancing and prancing.


"That was then boy. The past. You was younger, and I was too, though old to you no matter what age we both get, ones always ahead of 'tother until one of us crosses the finish line to vainglorious victory in Valhalla, amen, brother, ah-men. See, the days, the days is different now. You've been mixing dope up in different disguises, in concoctions I can't even figger anymore, and besides, you're almost out of that childhood you keep bitchin' about missin', well you ain't missed it, it was always there, but damn boy, grow up. There's a war on an all, kids gettin' kilt, people getting tear gassed and kicked assed, and all you think about is gettin' high, well it's high time you put down the pipe and the rolling papers and get straight. You know, the times they are a changin' as they say," and Mike knew Doc was right.

He was 20 now, almost and had to clean up for the debutante ball of maturity. From dope fiend to dope free but how. Politics, yeah, the war sucked and he had been involved in some early demonstrations about rights, civil and sexual, and now the war was heating up. The country starting to splinter. "Yeah," said Doc. "That Vietnam, were that a woman would be one prime hot piece of ass the way we fuss over it," and her commie red negligee, sheer and sexy for the times. If war was sex, then Vietnam was the generational generator powered Vaginal Machine sucking our country's politicians and generals into her moist opening deeper and deeper, content with being red, white and screwed.

The Viet Minh. What a vixen she were. She was explosively sexy in a Pentagon sort of way and was a mighty morsel that fed the wheelchair bound wounded living on giant gulps of morphine and it's subsequent dreams. She was a tempting tasty treat of a whore, hard to resist for that crazy uncle from out of town, the one that no one talks about in the family and is the one shunned at familial gatherings. "Youbetcha! Why, it's jes' my crazy old Uncle Sam.

Hell, he had spent decades pimping out Lady Liberty as a soiled dove, and political prostitute of The Demon, Cracy in war after war after war from the brothels of Montezuma to the whores of Tripoli," A tip of a Panama Red hat and a bust your balls canal greeting as Teddy of the Big Stick Tribe yelled "Bully, bully" all the way home. Sans a redcoat revulsion and revolution, sans the twin's WWI and II, America has for the most part been seen, analyzed and concluded by "foreign" eyes, as the Ugly American.

The Sixties, tie-dyed nirvana, with a twinged sunrise of purple-haze to lead the daily parade of altered-states and altered-egos of the double dazed, and not one, let alone 76 trombones to lead the procession down Mainstreet U.S. of A., eh?

Old enough to kill, but not old enough to drink or vote, now that is teetotaling totalitarianism of the highest parental and political degree. Alice had her restaurante, Phil Ochs ached, Mr. Dylan wanted to know the answer my friend, and Country Joe did the bodybag rag while Jane, the Fonda fond of Hanoi, annoyed the hardhats and hardheaded men of construction sites and Merle the Pearl Haggard himsef', that damned Okie from Muskogee...where sandals are not considered manly footwear and they don't take their trips on LSD...rotgut moonshine maybe so's you beat yer wife near half ta death, me'be and that little cousin of yorn, all of 13 now, shore starts to look good all filled out and all. Yep, these were the pious Americans...middle Americans..middle finger Americans...the ones you see on the Opry stage and audience. Goddamn love it or goddamn leave it....or just bloody Goddammnittttt!

The era was a ruanway train, fueled by dissent and a rather large needle full of a propensity for protestation. Draft cards and bra's burned side by side, with the bra's the bigger attraction, I'll grant you.

Ok, number 0004 going up in flames does not, I repeat, does not have the imaginative visual appeal of a massive 44-double D going up in heat and flames and shooting full into the sky like a Fourth of Jew-lie rocket! Twin silo's unleashed for peace and equality. Freedom for Freidan...and glorious Steinham and that cute little bunny tail of hers.

Doc was making sense. Yeah, not just grow up and get off the dragstrip of drugs, but fight the war...from within..not on the streets, but within the military body itself, a liberal cancer eating away from within, eroding it, weakening the khaki green machine, toppling the Pentagon, not merely levitating it, then in the end...end the war...bring about the peace...and get ready for the next one...a real fucking "Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" moment....great plan...but apparantly the planets weren't aligned properly or something, and the lesson learned? Never make plans to join the military to bring it to it's knees while stoned....inhale...now, raise your right hand...do you swear allegiance to the United States of America? "Well, no, not sure, why?" "Why, you stupid fuck....you're in the Army now!!!"


Chapter One

Now, there was not a chance in hell for a great escape from the grip of the times. Without realizing it, nor desiring it, Mike was now an official card carrying member of the political Ice Age..more affectionately known by the old timers, as the Cold War. The coldest war that crept at glacial speed towards the finish line, not well defined, nor very refined last man standing standoff. It was a social gala with and ugly undercurrent and tones that were muted browns, hide in the forest deer hunting season browns. It was deadly and it was dangerous and quite frankly, Mike didn't want to be a collaterally damaged casualty in its wake.

Doc Yucatan was right all along...Mike had to take immediate action to extricate himself from the boggy quicksand of killer drugs and killer rock and roll that he had stepped into, sinking gradually at first, then faster at last.

A spindly pine tree swamp of swirling emotions. The desolate swamps he had known as a kid in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Only explorers, and real hunters went into it's bosom. Back in there were old bears and large antlered deer who had managed to find the secret fountain of old age by going deep into the womb of the protective cover of Mother Natures forest.

That forest was a euphemism of maturity, or at least the pathway to it for Mike. Now, goddamit..maturity was pounding on the door, loudly, the dreaded knock of the Russian KGB in the dead of the night to spirit away the luckless inhabitant to the tortures of the Lubyanka deep within it's walls.

"I hear you knockin' but you can't come in...." so sayeth the song, by Prince Richard the Little. It was a mistake, but make no mistake, it was not a mistake, but fate. Yes, Mike was/is a boomer, baby boomer they call them. A child of the Sixties propelled into the whirlwind of the times from the starting line in 1948. These were the times, that some in future, the boomers who would dwell in the future of the 21st Century, all grown up and grey would refer to as the good old days. The Fifties and the Sixties, the twin cities of Peace, Love and Understanding.

The vision was blurry, the memory blocking out the unpleasantness of the times, but the roadsigns still pointed the way.

Cars had big fins and lots o' chrome. Bill Haley was rockin' around the clock, carhops were rollerblading royalty and the suburbs were squeeky clean and so damn bland. Boomer kids said things like "gosh" and "gee" and "thank you ma'am/sir".

Guys opened the door for girls and never called them broads or chicks. Everybody's mom was June Cleaver in disguise and Ozzie Nelson was everyone's dad.

Life was good in the "good old days". The cold sterility of the Berlin Wall generated megatons of political heat and yet, was nothing more than a concrete barrier, keeping the coarse fabric of Communism a safe distance from the ideological stains of Capitalistic encroachment, and not just some arbitrary, invisible line in the sand dividing East from West. It was the personification, in concrete and barbed wire of course, of a political prophylactic, and if either side was going to get oral, it was simply in the form of rhetoric.

As riotous as it was, We knew who the enemy was, and they knew who we were. Godlike vs. godless. Dogmatic dogfights for the hearts, minds and souls of the masses. Stars and Stripes vs. Hammer and Sickle. The soft, sexy silk of red, white and blue democracy trying to shred the Reds, and their burlap fabric of the Iron Curtain.

The 1960's were peace and love and all was groovy. The gentle smoke of marijuana wafted, and it was a time of free love and make peace not war. Surfers ruled the beach, V-dubs plyed the tie-dyed highways and by-ways, and life was bitchin'. Today, planes are used as destroyers of buildings, armies are small cells and secretive and one fanatic can bring down a plane of innocent people with a shoulder rocket missle. Damn! I Miss The Cold War!

After the first geiger counters went ballistic in the aftermath of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the war ended and stopped dead in it's tracks. Victory in Europe, and Victory in Japan led to victorious romps under the bedsheets in the Levittown bedrooms of America. Rosie was ready to put down her riveter and have at it, as the GI's discarded khaki in favor of civies, glad to be alive and ready to rock n' roll and sweat up the sheets.

One year after America lowered the boom and dropped the bomb, the sperm and egg launched their own sexual version of D-day, landing on the bedsheet beaches, and Operation Baby Boom was underway. The year was 1946. The first year of the Cold War that would lead to the first two decades of the newly emerged Boomer Generation, the teen-angst laden 1950's and the rock n' roll harmony of dissent that typifies the 1960's. Two decades that were as different from one another as Abbott and Costello.


Europe, in her post-war makeup was a twisted art gallery of broken metal and architectural ruin. Her once striking beauty, now faded like an aging stripper who had listened to one too many rimshots and far too many bad burlesque jokes. Japan, Germany's samurai accomplice and partner in crime, lay still and quiet as a dormant possum, being eaten alive by a flesh eating irradiated beast of victory that spew hellfire from the sky.


Cordons of colonial possessions fell from the centuries old grip of wizened old Empires, who lost their hold, and grip on the new realities, as old men will do as age and times move on well beyond them.


Got Ghandi? India did, and tossed off the British yoke and won her independance in the bargain. Israelis rolled up their sleeves, and using shovel in one hand and a fully loaded carbine in the other, managed to carved out a place in the desert, and established an oy vay kosher kibutz of a society smack dab in the middle of the Promised Land of Milk and Honey.


The French too, tried to hold on to Empire and colonial rule with an antiquated Devils Island attitude, but by 1954, that would too would go up in Napoleonic smoke, when in a modern day version of Waterloo, they would get souffled in battle at a place called Dien Bien Phu. The times they were a changin', and although the flames of the conflagration of the big war were still smoldering, there was just enough political spark left to ignite the fuse that would lead to the powderkegs that would be the defining flashpoints of the next two decades. Democracy and Dictatorship were about to put on the ideological boxing gloves and go at it ... again!


The Japanese, who had occupied the Korean penninsula for the duration of the war, saw the haiku handwriting on the wall and surrendered to American might and power in 1945 south of the 38th parallel. The forces north of that line surrendered to Stalin. The demonic forces of demarcation were already loosed from the genie's bottle and a new dawn was about to emerge. The soul searchers of Seoul worried heavily about the prognotications from Pyongyang. Tensions mounted as Asia began turning itself upside down and in 1948 the north declared the formation of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

Then the hammer and sickle came crashing down with a fury, causing Maoist mayhem on mainland China when communist forces dealt a fortune cookie of defeat to Chiang's Nationalist government, forcing them to flee to Formosa. The players were now on stage. Dress rehearsal was over, and now..it was showdown showtime. It was just a Manchurian Candidates matter of time before trouble would began to brew like an fully loaded semi-automatic teabag.

The unforgettable Forgotten War raged on from 1950 to 1953 when a tense truce forced the cessation of intrusions and the tug of war for geographic supremacy ended in a stillborn standoff.

The push for Pusan and the inching towards Inchon was put on hold and the uneasy cease-fire let the battlefields clear and gave the dead respite and time to rest quietly.
In a similar and corresponding surreal turn of events, also in 1945, the occupying Japanese forces in Vietnam ended their 5 year occupation and surrendered in a to-the-victor-goes-the-spoils fashion, and as a result, the barndoor was left open and communist backed Ho Chi Minh assumed the power of the proletariat in the North.

The French, were now trying desperately, and in vain vanity to retain the colonial control they had excercised since they assumed control of the rice paddy empire of Vietnam in 1861. Croissant politics weren't what they used to be, and the jaunty beret was knocked off their heads.

The French were dug in deep, deep in the mud at damnable Dien Bien Phu, engaged in a fierce tug of war over the Pastry Republic's struggle for life and death in southeast Asia, when they were ultimately dealt the dead man's poker hand of defeat by the forces of the Vietminh in 1954. They had suffered not just a Waterloo, but a varifiable junglesque version of Dunkirk. The forces of ideological darkness were afoot, Holmes, and the Bolshevik hounds of the Siberian Baskervilles were baying at the moon, fangs bared and howling with delight.

The traveling medicine show that would define the American period would open to standing room only crowds in Vietnam, and would usher in a new era for the nation. As the curtain rose, it signaled the beginning of the end of life for over 50,000 youth of the land of the free. Not just dead and dying, but the untold numbers of MIA's and POW's. Hellhole Hanoi and Sinister Saigon, unknown to most before the 1960's, were now part and parcel of every suppertime newscast in the country, and were more familiar to most Americans than Dubuque, Iowa.

Vietnam in the 1960's, unlike Korea in the 1950's, brought Hardhats and Hippies to the brink. Rednecks with red veins bulging righteously red, white and blue threatened the commie-pinko-fag-peaceniks with a new brand of black and blue patriotism. My Country, Right or Wrong. My Country, Right or Left. Love It or Leave It. Make Love, Not War. Peace in our Time.

Battlecry's of different sides of a divisional and generational line. Along with the acrid smell of a napalmed Nam, we had the homefires cranked up too. The Burn Baby Burn smoke of urban-ghetto fires of civil rights and civil disobiedience, wafted and joined forces with the defiant flames of dodging draftcards and the size 38D cups of liberated bra's. The John Birch Society was replaced by Black Panthers, and June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson were unceremoniously replaced by Gloria Steinham and Angela Davis.

Korea had quiet, head nodding in accension acceptance, if not clearly defined lines of support. You just kept your mouth shut in those days. Vietnam, on the other hand, had numerous and vociferously vocal voices of opposition. Jane Fonda went to Hanoi and did her impersonation of Tokyo Rose. The right sang "God Save America", while the bard of the Bay Area, Country Joe McDonald sang songs about the disastrous bodybag policies of the generals and the Washington politicos..."and it's one, two, three..what are we fighting for, don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam!"

It was clear by now that the race for space and nuclear superiority here on Terra Firma, and the rush to stop any more dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia was coming to a confluence and creating a fissure in the divided camps of Them and Us, whoever Them and Us were. By the mid to late 1960's the lines that were once blurred were now clear and concise, and both sides were now ready to get down and dirty and downright bloody. This time the bloodshed wouldn't be confined in the faraway fields of Vietnam, but right here in the streets of America.

The Democratic Un-Convention in Mayor Daley's Chicago in 1968. A police riot and rampage of pissed off proportions, of such billyclub violence and teargas intensity, it could only be measured on a Richter scale, went unabashedly unabated for hours. Provacateur provocation was a possibility, though not proven, but the end result was an inevitable headbangers ball that left the Left dazed, pulp beaten and left to bleed on the proletarian pavement.

The PTA seemed meaningless anymore, as the schoolbell rang and announced to all that it was now time for class to commence in the school of the streets, and the Parent Teachers Association was surreptiously replaced by the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse rode off into the sunset, disappearing into the ghost mists of the past, and on their hooves, emerged the Chicago Seven.

In the words of the protest parlance of the day, "you don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 and the United States gave up the battle in 1973, and, define irony, as America was celebrating it's 200th Anniversay, a unified Vietnam was also declared. I did see a bumper sticker recently that said, "My Dad Beat Up Your Dad in Chicago in '68." A sign of the times.

It was twenty years ago today, but long before Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play, and well before Lucy launched herself into the sky with her diamond powered rocket, the Cold War Warriors were already altering the states of mind of the unsuspecting in uniform in 1953. The US ARMY was experimenting with LSD, a drug originally developed as a blood stimulant in 1936 in Basel, Switzerland. The mindset of the military saw it as a mind control drug for use on the enemy, any enemy, at any cost in a covert CIA project codenamed MK-Ultra.

Forgettabout NASA, Albert Hoffman is credited with being the first psychedelic astronaut to be put into tie-dyed orbit in inner space in 1943. Writer Aldous Huxley earned his chemical wings in 1955, and by 1960 Dr. Timothy Leary doned his spaced suit and became the equivalent of the first man on the moon with sustained flights over a long period of time.

If the 1950's gave us Disneyland in Anaheim, then the 1960's made it's contribution in the form of the Haight Ashbury amusement park of acid in San Francisco.

The dialated denizens in denim migrated to the new drug in synthesized form in 1965 and by 1967 the Fed's got fed up and declared war on the un-Fed meds. The White Rabbit had met it's share of plasticine porters with looking glass ties.

The Music too. It changed, thanks in large part to the choreography of Cold War politics waving it's conductors baton of social change. The brilliance of the Brill Building bards of the late 1950's soon lost it's shine and pop luster, and made way for a crowd of coffee house poets and songwriters trying to wake up the sleeping giant of social conscience. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, along with the New Christy Minstrels and Phil Ochs revitalized the Woody Gutherian spirit and made us all agree that it was ok to disagree, but in fact, this land was our land, America that is, and not Vietnam.

The bugle sounded, and we took our ragtag army of lost souls into the streets, street fighting men and women under a rock n' roll banner. So you say you want a revolution? Yes we did say that.

Che, Ho and Mao, had taken the place of Larry, Moe and Curly, and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin became the concrete court jesters of political change, and the decade gave us something else. Another McCarthy, Eugene was his name. Two decades had produced three prominent McCarthys just as the 1940's gave us Edgar Bergen's southern pine alter ego, Charlie McCarthy, proving without a doubt, that America was truly the greatest of all super powers.

In what other country could a ventriloquist gain fame on radio!
Reagan asked Mr. Gorbachev to tear the wall down, he did. Sgt. Pepper was shot down in cold blood on a grey New York City street in a psychotic grab for eternal fame, and people now book vacations to Vietnam.

The "enemy" can bring down twin towers with flying jet-fueled projectiles and blend into the national fabric and remain unnoticed and anonymous. The sand of the middle east has replaced the jungles of southeast Asia, and there's nothing to defoliate in the vast desert expanse.

Today the vision of direction may seem out of focus, cataracts obscuring the image, and a new catechism of catharsis has set and hardened like concrete in a driveway. Whirling dervish frenzies drive us damn near to madness as we try to pinpoint and figure out just who "they" are, and who "we" are anymore. Yes, it is difficult..like children playing pin the tail on the donkey, we have to be careful whose bottom we stick the pin in. It's a new era with new possibilities and new fears thrown in just for laughs.

In the Sixties, Mike was saying things, like "wow" and "groovy" and "spare change" and "peace and love", recently in the digital age of computers, cell phones and the Twin Towers, Irag and Afghanistan, he was heard to say, "Damn! I miss the Cold War! "

Chapter Two

1968...the summer after the summer of love, and 12 minutes before the eve of destruction, or at least until the song would upchuck from the bowels of analog radio's amplitude modulation.

The Sixties were a time of psychedelic prophets, psuedo-peace (What was Vietnam, chopped liver?) and lust disguised behind a mask called love. Riding shotgun with Flower Power, was a heavily loaded weapon with buckshot pellets of gloom and doom. The folk music scene...the Mugwumps...Dylan...Ochs... Sebastian...Seeger...Baez..you know, folkies...Greenwich Village, North Beach, for years the folkies had us fucked up chasing answers blowing in the wind, never finding them.

We were chasing kites cut loose from the hands of children and we watched, and the children watched as they disappeared sky-high into the atmos-stratos-spheres of fears, meanwhile, not astronauts, but held in place by gravity, we were trying to ascertain for certain just why Phil Ochs ached and we stood on the distant shore and watched helplessly as Barry McGuire was itchin' and a bitchin' with his trigger finger on the nuclear button, while a doctor with some very strangelove and a black glove was ready to SAC us with a doomsday machine. Mike had not been very political in the past, in fact never gave it a thought. He had been bum beached and sun bleached on the wiki-wiki- shores of Waikiki, when he had to ask himself, 'Why, Kiki? Why me? Why a'mia (Italian).

Mike was older now, and political waves from distant lands were cresting and crashing on his own personal shores. Vietnam...and a lot of Americans were morphing into Canadians...the eagle in a capitalist cocoon transforming into a socialist beaver with a maple leaf branch in his teeth, a rose in the furtive grinning mouth of a dangerous, fandango dancer with bananas and fruit adorning her head as a crown of jewells upon the royal head of Antoinette...before it got ginzu'd on the guillotine.

Other kids Mike's age were bobbing in the water, Halloween apples in body bag rubber rafts, and as they went into boot high muddy jungles full of Vietnamese patriots on opium, well, these American boys (patriots from the other side that also claimed righteousness, got shot down, shipped back home to be burried six feet deep in home town ground. Tri-fold flag, "Here tell he was a fag," said someone in the back row far from the open grave. "Maybe he was, but, he was an American fag! Now buried, wrapped like a sandwich in an American flag baggie.. The fag flag, but damn he could shoot them commies, left and right, bang, bang, you're dead you red! Damn shame it is, but we have to draw the line, pinko's or faggots? Cain't have neither one amongst us, so just as well they kill each other...what did ol Merle say, oh yeah, if you don't love it leave it goddamn it! Now that is as American as it gets boy! Damn that Haggard, he he, he shore knows how to sing a dang song that makes sense!"

Resolving, with the leverage of surrealistic reality, and his own drug addled mind at the helm, all reason blurred, obscured and hindered by his altered states alter ego..he became in myth and not reality..the Scarlet Pimpernel...Leslie Howard! How-weird is that Howard?

Look, he kept explaining to himself, something had to be done to stop the war, the carnage and the killing, and Vietnam was a carnival of carnage with a circus of circumstances that drew America deeper and deeper into a La Brea tarpit of politics He also looked at it as a trade off of astounding win-win proportions. He, on one hand, would be infused with just enough discipline to corral his stampedeing use of psychedelics, a roller coaster he had ridden for the past 5 years at his own private Coney Island amusement park. In exchange, he would throw himself on the sward of logic, become a cancerous and a deliriously deliterious and detrimental instrument of peace and prosperity through social democracy. The army would understand in time that he was indeed right, pin a medal on his noble Nobel chest and in the end pack up all their B-52's and go back home to Gary, Indiana and leave Saigon sighing and Hanoi less annoyed.

If you want to bring down the beast of war, and it was a beast, it had to be from the inside of the behemoths belly. It may be Godzilla, but Mike would assume the role of a khaki Ghandi, an even match (he felt at the time) against gargantuan guns and highly polished brass. Little did he know that a long strange military road lay ahead of him.

One that would be at the same time dangerous and ridiculous (as only the military can be) but never ever boring, no siree, never boring. Besides it was the Sixties...nothing boring there Amigo.

It was the Decade of Assasinations, the JFK bridge in the gap from FDR...from the New Deal to Dealy Plaza...the Sixties were shedding their cheap off the Montgomery Ward rack three piece suits faster than a three piece jazz combo could tune up in a sleepy lounge. Italian rifles had become a forensic fashion statement, that is if you're out to whack a president from the sixth floor of anywhere. Nothing at all appeared as it seemed, nothing at all was real....so just raise your right hand, repeat after me, and you're army bound boy...army bound..what a glorious day! A day to die for boy, a goddamn day to die for and you should be proud!

Inducted in Detroit he boarded a bus bound for blood, guts and glory. The other faces aboard the bus were fresh, pink, and scared, around Mikes own age, the Sacrificial Generation is always 18, 19, me'be 20 or so, but the Fatherland needs fodder for the battlefield so these ripe peaches will do just fine.

The induction center on the Detroit River was an old grand dame as forts go. Keeping a watchful eye across the river, towards Canada, where the Brits might launch an attack at any moment, which was one of the original intents to build such a bermed bastion in the first place...war of 18-this and that and another...It was old musty barracks where muskets and small balls would rule, until a hundred years later when it would be the looking glass portal for thousands to pass through from civilian and emerge a bonofide general issue of flesh and bones...since the war ended back in the Seventies with an astounding Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh victory, the old Fort Wayne has lain defunct and deactivated and on occossion has a military re-enactment of the Civil War on the parade grounds, and you can hike about the area and down to the river to fish and watch the freighters go by on their way south to Cleveland or north to Lac du Superior....the bus pulled out of the base and out of the city so familiar to him that he could hear it breath where ever he was, he could feel her heart beating, and her factories whirring and her sweet perfume of gas and oil and diesel and grit and grime ....

The pimply kid next to Mike on the bus was from Sandusky...on the shores of Ohio and Lake Erie, he was just north of 18 years of age. He stammered out a sentence, to complete a longer thought, that would need work, metal work in a bump shop for continuity. "Think they're mean?" he tossed out.

Mike just looked at him. "Who? Do I think who's mean? Surely not the bus driver, they're all nasty anyway not so's you could tell if one was meaner than the other," he volleyed. The scared rabbit in the snared rabbit's seat explained furhter. "No, no, not the drivers. They're just doing their jobs and a responsible one at that. No, I mean the sergeants at Fort Knox, the drill sergeants. Do you think they're mean?" That said it all, and broke through the wall that Mike was trying to avoid. He figured they would give them all a hard time, trying to flex their olive drab muscles and make men out of the silly putty that was heading south to boot camp.

"Yeah," Mike said. "They probably are, red eyes, green breath and blood for breakfast. Just like in the movies, only nastier, jest as ready to kill you and me as they are commies in Korea or Cong in Vietnam, any where there is a north and south...Why does the south always belong to America anyway, and the north to the reds?

'Course in these two cases, Red China is backing them up to the north and there's no way we could win against that! We do better picking on little nations that we know we can beat, never someone our size or larger for god sake, so do I think they'll be mean? You bet your sweet ass." ....which only pushed the kid deeper inside of himself, ashen and waxen, Donder and Blitzen, the kid was back in the womb, safe for the ime being...as the bus penetrated the dark night, a silver suppository roaring through the colon of Ohio, entering the south...the south of legend..of ol' Uncle Remus with a thatched folicle roof of snow white hair and a mouth full of pearly's all stereotypical and all jes' a tawklin' and a'tellin' of tall tales, fables and foibles of Brer Rabbit and other heir brer's, Herr Brer, Achtung!

The Ohio River valley and eventually into Kain'tuck! Howdy Ma'am's and Jesus Loves Me, yes he do! Time for some moonshine and aome barbeque..."Yes'm, I do believe I'll have the beef ribs please?" as a hush falls across the truckstop..."Wha', what did I say?" panicked. The waitress with retreads just looks askew with head tilted...

"Why, Honey. You in the south darlin', we don't have no beef baby, we have po-ak (pork for the uninitiated).." Everybody laughed and he ordered "pa-ak" (two syllables). Inbredding was a family sport and cousin Helene was really your stepchile children, and crazy uncle Ernie from Pensacola, he just loved to have his neice of 13 bounce up and down on his lap while he teased her about gettin' all growed up and all.

"Why girl, your chest is absolutely gettin' ripe for the pickin', some lucky old coon dog of a boy is in fer a real treat, yes he is. They be comin' around sniffin' soon enough girl, so..whoo wee....whoo wee...," then old unk gives out a howl, a dog in heat in the heat of the south where anything goes and nobody cares....

In later years, the Bush years, when the American public and democracy itself was am-Bushed, the video game generation of military personell would be dubbed mighty "warriors" ..you know, the Army of One! Semper Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum...look, Xena was a warrior, a warrior princess, and damn fine looking one at that...

They would march off to brass bands and come home with brass balls. When they died, they got full CNN coverage and the dead were honored...all of them volunteers and not a draftee in the bunch.

Too bad there wouldn't be a draft for those little sand wars....maybe the campus's would have erupted again and another war would go down the drain before too many got killed. The sad thing is too many died there too...after victory had been claimed. In the Sixties...it was different...you skulked through the night in the Ohio Valley to get to boot camp...quietly, quite, quite and when you came home you were called Baby Killers and some yes, were indeed spat upon. Spit on a "warrior" today and see what happens. Still they too are "killers" no matter which war it is you are looking at...it's not like we as a country has been victorious since 1945 and we had a shitload of help in that one after sitting on the sidelines for so long. Warriors?

Yeah, right...Gung ho, and Dung Ho.
The bus cut an aluminum swath through the night, crossing the Ohio River at Louisville and then slugging it's way to the gates, the waiting yaw of Ft. Knox....there's gold in them thar vaults...and bodies in them thar bags on the horizon...as the bus pulled into a stop..it dawned on all of them...they were in the Army now and there was no turning back. No retreat. Next stop...Gawd Help Us..please don't be Vietnam!

Chapter Three

The cacophony of khaki rang out, out of tune, and out of time, resounding sadly and soundly, as they, the lambs, moved to slaughter, filed off the bus, through the looking glass and into a world without Alice, but one full of malice, no holy grail, no holy chalice.

Just blood and killing on it's small universe of a mind, enough to fill a rice paddy. "Hut, hut, hut" rang the bell on the trolley of the Trolls in the green machine valley. Fresh meat rolling off the racks into the waiting arms of Upton's uptown cutters in the Sinclair yards of Chicago. "Hurry up, dickheads, line up over heah and no tawkin', line up according to size," (yelled the fat one from somewhere in the deepest of the redneck south,) which by size, meant Mike was either at the end of the line or the beginning, depending on your perspective and which end was up.

If the earth suddenly upended and stood on it's head, would the south pole now be north? Heads or tails? Snakes, and snails and puppy dog tails..that's what little boys are made of, not soldiers in this heah mans army. The military experience reinforced Mike's lifelong belief that humanity was a mistake, a gross miscalculation on someones part, not the human species, but the feces species, and America, the landfill of the red, white and screwed.

Mike had a chance to look around at the others that were on board the magic bus bound for manhood glory. All young, some educated, some not, some white, some not, some with killer instincts, most not. The barking sergeant bellowing orders had a classic neck with that oh so faint sharecroppers hue of red, not to be confused with this way, that way and Red Hue, and this same sergeant, by some ironic coincidence, hated all reds, all shades. Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, North Koreans, Russkies, Berkeley, California, Madison, Wisconsin, Boston and most of all, the Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor in Michigan, hometurf of the SDS, the Port Huron Statement and Tom Hayden who would in time be fond of, fall in love with and then marry Fonda...Jane.

"You damn maggots, get in line, perfect line," he screeched. Don't you mean in perfect alignment, like planets, stars, moon, angels on high, angels getting high, angels with dirty faces, Mike thought. No, too, much too cerebral and celestial for the one with no moons in orbit in the sergeants perpetual for rent/vacant solar system. "Momma ain't here boys, I'm your mama now," Sgt. Mother sneered, and then laughed, more of a real old fashioned down deep in the southern throat guffaw heard through sheets and hoods after torching a baptist church or unleashing snarling German Shepards at the local whites only cafe. Damn, Mike thought. This is what is protecting this country and going to mold men out of boys?

This cartoon will be fashioning clay sculptures out of the raw material of urban and sub-urban and rural post-teens who still get a rush out of girlie mags? Speaking of which, some of the boys did pack some of those magazines along with them, and they were hidden deep in the bags they toted. Probably for those lonely nights in the bottom bunk when the lights were out and everyone was fast asleep, or dead exhausted, where they could bounce the wool blanket up and down, up and down, completely hand operated, like an old turn of the century carnival ride of carnal fantasy, until they emerged from the tunnel of love and the pump went dry and limp as though a spent firehose after a good dousing. But at least...the fire was put out, until the next issue arrived with Miss July flying her twin flags high and her legs unfurled, opened just a crack for a sneak peek, and ready to raise old glory up a pole...a real red white and blow job...


They roll called, counted off, and marched off to the barracks that would be home sweat home for the next 13 weeks. In those days you didn't have grief counselors such as they do today, nor could you whine that you were to stressed out to do your "duty" and although the Sixties didn't produce the Greatest Generation of WWII, it was different...the major difference between Vietnam and todays "wars" are that at least, the dead and dying are all volunteers, and not draftees who ended up dead against their will.The country was Bush-whacked at first, and then a barrage of Barack fell from the sky...Johnson and Nixon revisited.


The barracks were a two floor wooden affair, staked on top of each other like layers in a good deli ham sandwich. In the parlance of the wonderful world of American white trash, it was a verticle, up-ended, double-wide trailer, a small Levittown for the leftovers of the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Rolling into basic training in the dead of night, the feeling of entering Buchenwald at 2 in the morning. Confusion of what is happening, and worse, of what is to come. The dread of dead of night, the fear of same, and the confusion and realization of what have I done?.

It was a nightmare in a million pieces, a jazzed up jigsaw puzzle, lights out, nights out, the dawns early arrival, more yelling, hut, hut, hut...followed by "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck" and with a faint sigh..."shit!" Fun Travel and Adventure...FTA!

Let me describe the abode we were aboard and learned to abhor. Wood, wood, everywhere. Square posts in the middle of a highly buffed gangway, with red butt cans hung on a nail, crucified as though they were facsimile aluminum Jesus' or Jes-i, forgiving everything in sight. The can itself housed doused cigs, or fags as we called them in those days, and as the tobacco percolated with the water, a strange brown brew was formed, that gave off a toxic odor, carcinogenically unnatural in nature, naturally. All it was missing was full-moon fog rising from the swamp with things that go bump in the night, and I don't mean a darkly lit stage with aging strippers with too much whatever happened to Baby Jane make-up and shaky tits and ass for an audience of masturbators from out of town. The beds were two, one atop another, in another parlance, top and bottom, who's who? The springs were thin and old, old barbed wire no doubt from the Maginot line salvaged for just such a purpose. The mattress as thin as a homeless man run over by a steam roller and the blanket as soft and cuddly as a horse blanket or a prickly pear cactus.

The military haircut we had recieved earlier was very butch and we were completly deforested of follicles, agent oranged and defoliated and bare as an Asian forest. Just a little trim please and touch up the tropics but not too short. A bit butch doncha think Bitch? I look like a cop or worse a narc.Sampson shorn of his locks, there goes his strength, his pecker power has pettered out. Delilah wins again.The clothing is another matter altogether. Dull, drab and green.

Not that Eco-green you hear so much about today, but depressing green, for hiding in the jungles, or marching in formation in parades on base, for lying in the dirt firing rifles at defenseless targets...and Gawd, ball caps! I never understood them in civilian life, let alone in the military, at best to keep a lid on a bad hair day...or on farmers in the sun working, or ball players on the field keeping the sun shielded from their eyes to catch a pop up high fly or some other play, but regular civilians? Ballcaps have replaced balls, and as for women who wear ballcaps, it gives them balls, or the feeling of masculinity that type of female obviously craves...remember they buy the Jeep Wranglers now-a-days and the SUV's...male turf intruded upon, and absconded with.

Reville blows, no, reville sucks, at 5 a.m. an alarm clock on Meth....you hit the floor, get dressed, run outside as though an angry husband was chasing your tail for having at his wifes tail, and the gang forms up, ready to run a mile before they reward you with breakfast, such as it is...then we get ready to train, to be killers, team players, the big green machine, patriots all in the image of the forces at Concord facing off with the Red Coats...today, Vietnam today, it's not red coats, but reds, with black pajamas, and straw hats, and booby traps, and syphillis and gonorhea, and the holy might of China and Russia behind them. I had no quarrel with them, nor did a lot of the guys...they didn't do anything to us except try to free their land for their people from numerous over the ages intruders and occupiers. I might have to die for this shit?

This is none of my business. Let the Generals lead the charge and die first, set the example. Let Kennedy go in first, Johnson, any of them that started this mess. Why me...why the guy next to me....let the politicians fight it out...let them eat the bullets, leave the family behind, and die for the greater glory of a country that likes to bully and flex it's muscle for no apparent reason on the playground. Better Red than Dead I always say.


Next stop...the firing range.

Chapter Four

Vietnam, Mike thought while training. Where the fuck is Vietnam, and who the fuck are the Vietnamese, and more importantly, yes more, what are we fighting for...one, two, three, I forget the numbers, and the reasons. It's one two, three, what are we fighting for..don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam.

At a cultural aberation known as Woodstock, Country Joe MacDonald sang it loud and and sang it proud along with "300,000 of you fuckers out there!" The hook and seed of the song, "Gimme an F" was screamed at the counter culture crowd, crowded, and packed tight in true cannery row style at a whacked out wonderland of color, drugs and mud. So many came, the gates fell in Jericho fashion and it was proclaimed..a free concert.

An ocean away, another free concert was playing on the rice paddy stage of Vietnam, a divided country by external forces beyond it's control, that was also ripping to shreds the social fabric of the United States. The counter culture was encountering clashes in the streets between riotious police in Chicago and street fighting baby boomer men and boomerette women...yip, yip, hoo-ray Yippies, with Jerry and Abbie acting as it's fulcrum. They, combined, were a lefty act of leftover vaudeville of guerilla political comedy, destined to fade into the dark nightime of changing times.

The Chicago Seven, Angela Davis, jet black Panthers, wild and wooly Woodstock, hap, hap, hempy Haight Ashbury, with it's plethora of psychedelics in the chemical rainbow of a multi-colored psychotropic of cancer ablaze with a hallucinogenic explosion caused by mushrooms, pills, tablets and crumbly weed and hashish for paper and pipe.

Arlo was coming into Los Angeles carryin' a couple of keys, while numerous other Americans were heading north of the border carrying only a backpack, a pack of rolling papers and visions of a life free from war living under the maple leaf canopy of protection of the war resisters movement. Either way...we pleaded..."don't touch my bags if you please, Mr. Customs Man.


Leviathan demonstrations to levitate the Pentagon, which led to the demise of the short lived garden of Hedon spawned by the tender loving care of love and peace of the Flower Power Generation would be trampled underfoot and suffer from Flower Power Degeneration as Kent State added four more dead in Ohio to the land fills body count, (as though 50,000 plus American lives, not to mention the untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese) weren't enough to feed the hypodermic needle of the junkie needs of an addict addicted to a sense of false democracy with war machinations.


Democracy is a noble movement, but as practiced in America, it's a diluted illusion of freedom, similar to taking pure grade heroin and cutting it to dilute it's potency in order to stretch the softer product in a futher effort to increase volumn and thus, street profits. Uncle Sam is the proverbial school yard pusher of low grade democracy to countries who don't want it. Dick Gregory, Black activist and comedian stated in the Sixties regarding Vietnam.."Shit, I don't know why we have to shove democracy down the Vietnamese throat at the point of a bayonet. In my old neighborhood, if something was THAT good, we'd steal it!"

The B-52's in the Sixties weren't just some damned mindless band on the radio, and napalm was not a froo froo drink on the veranda in a tropical paradise. Hell..the Sixties were on fire with anti-war sentiment and all some of us wanted to do was avoid the draft, go up country, jump in the water and stay drunk all the time. Some of us had those options, the Vietnamese did not. It was their country being told to bend over and take it in the ass. Hell where could they go to get away, and did they want to?


The answer to the last part is no! The Vietnamese are not only one of the most effective guerilla fighting forces on the planet but with a long history of unrest and revolution, they are some of the most resiliant as well.

The "Vietnam Problem" didn't start with Dwight David Eisenhower, the golfing goofbag of Presidents, nor John F. Kennedy, the male whore of American history. The "problem", for the Vietnamese began over two thousand years ago, under the ruling thumb of a dynasty far, far away, and eventually ended with a victorious kick in the American red, white and screwed balls.

Black and blue and all we have to show for it is untold buried dead of our young and a lousy wall with names of the not so grateful dead etched for eternity or not, which ever comes first. How do those t-shirts read? Oh yeah, "I went to Vietnam and all I got was this lousy T-shirt and a body bag!" As the song goes.."be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.." Today we are more enlightened and forward thinking with Iraq and Afghanistan.."now your wife, mother or sister can also come home in a box"

Thank Gawd for liberation and equality, eh? Vietnam is an egomanical stain on the American conscience of a nation not used to loosing, a school yard bully that got it's ass kicked for once. It's never recovered it's national pride. America was born of revolution over 200 years ago, and the resultiant overthrow of an occupying force. Vietnams history goes back much further as revolution was fomented against a phalanx of formidable foes.

I will dispense with an in depth look at American involvement..that has been done to death on the History Channel, we know what happened, we know we got our ass kicked. Case closed. Move on, and now into the time machine we go for some information that may help understand the voracious determination of these Asian peoples, who believe me, if I had to go to war, I'd want them on my side!

Two-thousand and five hundred years ago, Vietnam was under Chinese control for over a thousand years. They regained independence in the early 10th Century, and complete autonomy after another century had passed. By the 19th century, the land was ripe for picking again for foreign intervention by one or another Imperialistic powers. This time the brass ring was won by France in 1854. This lasted into the 20th Century until WWII, you know, the big one, when those madcap Rape of Nanking Let's Bomb Pearl Harbor Japanese occupied what is today Vietnam.

Once hostilities had ceased, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong version of George Washington, creates the National Liberation Committee of Vietnam to form a provisional government. Japan, dow broken and beaten, transfers all power to Ho's Vietminh.

Ho declares independence of Vietnam, and wouldn't you know it, like a bad stage play, here come those bloody Brit redcoats as British forces land in Saigon to help return authority to the French. (Never mind that Ghandi was kicking Brit butt in the bid for Indian independence!) Also in 1945, the first American blood is shed, in Vietnam, when Lt. Col. A. Peter Dewey, head of American OSS mission, was killed by Vietminh troops while driving a jeep to the airport.

Reports later indicated that his death was due to a case of mistaken identity. He had been mistaken for a Frenchman. Now France got a colonial hard-on to re-exert it's power and influence over the tiny nation, and opted to go for colonial rule, only now, the rules had changed and there was no room anymore for fancy pants France!

One year after the world war had ended, the French and Vietminh reach an accord. France recognizes Vietnam as a "free state" within the French Union.Negotiations Between France and the Vietminh breakdown like an old car on the open road, and the Indochina War begins. Following months of steadily deteriorating relations, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam launches its first attack against the French.

A force of 40,000 heavily armed Vietminh lay seige to the French garrison at Dienbienphu. Using Chinese artillery to shell the airstrip, the Vietminh make it impossible for French supplies to arrive by air. It soon becomes clear that the French have met their match.
It is also important to note that Ho Chi Minh had contacted Harry Truman in 1949 for recognition, as he also did to Dwight Eisenhower when he was president. Both declined to respond. Much as what happened in Cuba when Castro took over.

Both countries looked to the "free world" for support and were refused. This country has a habit of creating it's own "enemies" so it has someone to fight to take the American people's minds off of real problems here at home such as poverty, unemployment, unafforadable health care, etc. The American government is the grand Illusionist when it comes to hiding it's own dirt in plain sight.(This is also the same country that backed Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden!)

Meanwhile, the French, well they got phucked at Dien Bien Phu in 1953, and once more outside forces prevail as the Geneva accords determined that the country be partitioned into two separate entities,the north and the south. During the cold war the north of course supported by China and the USSR (after non response from the west!) while the south was supported by the United States. This eventually burst into flames and not only gave birth to a new nation, but later some really great films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now.."God, I love the smell of napalm in the morning." In 1960's there was a cornucopia of campus teach ins, Veterans stage anti-war rallies, including those from WWII and the Korean war stage a protest rally in New York City. Discharge and separation papers are burned in protest of US involvement in Vietnam.

The Civil Rights movement joined in the refrain as CORE cites "Burden On Minorities and Poor" in Vietnam, where The Congress of Racial Equality issues a report claiming that the US military draft places "a heavy discriminatory burden on minority groups and the poor." The group also calls for a withdrawal of all US troops from Vietnam. Martin Luther King speaks out against the war, calling the US "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," Martin Luther King also encourages draft evasion and suggests a merger between antiwar and civil rights groups.

Secret negotiations and peace talks finally start to take place in Paris and stagger on for many agonizing years as the body count grows faster than a New York Taxi meter can add up the miles.

Then turn the clock to 1973..the reality check is complete. It's over. The last remaining American troops withdraw from Vietnam as President Nixon declares "the day we have all worked and prayed for has finally come." America's longest war, and its first defeat, thus concludes. During 15 years of military involvement, over 2 million Americans served in Vietnam with 500,000 seeing actual combat. 47,244 were killed in action, including 8000 airmen. There were 10,446 non-combat deaths. 153,329 were seriously wounded, including 10,000 amputees. Over 2400 American POWs/MIAs were unaccounted for as of 1973.

Today, Vietnam has become a tourist destination. French, Brits and yes, even Americans make the trip and trek post Tet. It's a land today still of rice paddies, ocean beaches and palm trees. The smells of foods and spices permeate the landscape and the open air markets, as the memories and the stench of Napalm and burning monks recedes from memory and fades into a distant past.

But remember in that shrouded past the final act as the curtain began to close...In 1975 South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh delivers an unconditional surrender to the Communists in the early hours of April 30. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin accepts the surrender and assures Minh that, "...Only the Americans have been beaten. If you are patriots, consider this a moment of joy." As the few remaining Americans evacuate Saigon, the last two US servicemen to die in Vietnam are killed when their helicopter crashes.

Mike didn't know all this at the time...all he did know is he didn't want to end up in a bodybag dying for a country that was no longer the beacon of freedom, but rather, the land of the Red, White and Screwed.

The Army Diaries - Chapter Five

The bugle blared, as the morning sun glared. Sleepy disoriented "new green troops" could only stare. Stare in disbelief .at one another, with each other amazed, in a foggy "your in the army now" kind of 5 a.m. haze. This haze however, not purple, contrary to the Gospel according to Hendrix, but a shabby grabby green, with jack boots and belt buckles of brass to hold up the pants that were yet to contain the balls of brass. "Maggots and faggots, that's what ya'll are...pussy fuckers and mother fuckers. Mommy's not here to jack you off assholes, you're in the army now, so get your ass out of bed and git yer ass outside in formation in five fucking minutes!" But Sarge, is that military time? Rushing into pants, thrusting into pants, mad dash race, pull on, lace up the storm trooper boots, ready for the Riechstag debutante ball and Goerings lipstick costume gala for brown shirts disguised as black shirts, not black panthers considered black shits by the boys in blue shirts.
A lineup of fresh groggy midwestern boy meat counting off in formation, at attention, then at ease, then you run a mile..Christ..a fucking mile at 5:15 a.m. are you nuts? Nope..not nuts, not joking..hit it pounding feet on the track, waking up with jarring motions and impacts on the ground, the wet angular morning sun in Kentucky begins to rise, a solar erection in the Kaintuck sky, as you feel the humidity already, a portent of things to come in the form of muggy and wet, enough so as to soak your uniform uniformly through and through, the soggy bedsheets of a heroin addicted hooker in New Orleans in peak August with sweat and cum mixing it up in an exotic umbrella drink for the offbeat and offcenter.
Back into formation, now, exhaling hard and breathing hard but alas...the cry of freedom..."Smoke 'em if you got 'em" ...hell yeah, Chesterfields and Kools, and Viceroys and Marlboro, you could almost tell where a cat was from by the smokes that emerged from his pocket. Midwesterners prefered filterless, while blacks prefered highly mentholated smokes that pave the passageway to the gates of hell or lungs in this case, the vernacular of the smoker. Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. Mike wondered if there were a platoon of Viet Cong somewhere deep in the jungles of Vietnam lighting up and smoking cigarettes before they get their day started killing American boys, as the American boys wake up ready to kill Vietnamese boys in a never ending round robin of dodge ball with bullets made in America, however, unlike dodgeball, where everybody jumps into the shower at the end of the game to clean up and get ready for the next class, in Vietnam, class would be dismissed and death does not allow for makeup exams. No college...no family in your future...as for a passing grade? Death equates to an "F" stuffed into a bodybag..also made in America with a young lifeless form from Montana...born in America, but died in Vietnam.
After the quick smoke which followed the quick one mile Seabiscuit run around the cinder laden track, you jump back into the barracks, a human jack in the barracks box. Popping up on command, a khaki clown with a wind up crank. Time to shower and shave now, 5:40 a.m. as you pack ten or so into the shower, more naked than in gym class..what is it about group living that they want you naked in groups at all times? Watch that guy over there if he gets a hardon in the shower, don't drop the soap, get soap on a rope.
Chow..chew...chow. Sloppin' the hogs is what it is. Lot of the kids from Georgia and Alabama, cotton pickers all with hands worn deep with ruts from the plow leaving tell tale marks, but Gawd, them boys could shoot a squirrel out of a a tree at 300 yards and have it land skinned into the kettle, or kittle as they call it in the hollar, or hollow, sleepy or otherwise, in the moonshine forests of the backwoods of the woods out back with people named "Pappy" and such guard the brew, real hillbilly sorcerers apprenti' from a fantastic Disney "Fantasia" cartoon still. Alchemist of the Rosicrucian order, mixing Zoraster with Protestantism, and watching the vine of the wild rose wrap around the cross on a riverbank near St. Croix. Breakfast, like all the meals consisted of mystery gruel that could be anything, the military cranium could dream up. More liquid in form, than solid it barely filled you up, but no matter as youd be working it off anyway in formation marching, bivouac, PT tests, diarhea, vomiting, a hand drill opening your colon or a bullet opening up your chest from a sniper high in a tree with scope near Da Nang. So what the hell, what did it matter. It was a cruel reminder of your civilian days, cruising the drive-in with a promise of greasy burgers and greasier pussy in the backseat if you got lucky. Both had a distinct taste of their own, and magic. You were in Ft. Knox know, greasy burgers are all that are in your immediate future..as for pussy? Forgettabout it. That would be awhile so just whack off in your bunk like the bunk punk above you does every night to the memory of his girl back home.
The level of academic excretions expressed by the military was as atrophied as a sumo wrestlers balls, and at the very least, amateur at best. Misplaced pronouns, misuse and abuse of adjectives, verbs minus ad's and the constant use of the word and variations of the word "Fuck." I never knew the word was so diverse.
Fuck you...Fuck This....Fuck That..Fuckin' this and that, but the scariest was Fuck Me! Talk about an unwanted invitation..no, no, really I was just joking, put that thing back in your pants or go find someone else. Honest, I was only kidding..here, how about this, fuck you, yeah, thats it, yeah, fuck you....not me, ok, maybe him..yeah, go fuck him, or you, I don't care, just don't fuck me.
However, just ask one of these khaki hacks about bungle in the jungle survivaL in the bush...that's diffrent. These cats could save your life. Remember, kill or be killed is the military mantra. General Patton however summed it up succintly as only he can do. "The purpose of the American soldier is not to die for his country, but to make sure the other poor bastard dies for his...." Then the Patman, Patton wanted to gas up the Wermacht tanks in a tag team match and roll into Mother Russia..and Russian weather can be a mother...just ask Napoleon...learned a valuable lesson there that Hitler forgot...Mother Russia smothers you alive...now Mike was training for tropical warfare in a country, not many had heard of.
Mike had plenty of bunk time to debunk the theory of ultimate Victory in Vietnam..point one is that we can't win. Point one, will not be point won. The Vietnamese soldier, regular and irrigular were training on the battleground itself under real time battle conditions, on the job training like working at a car wash and learning to handle the steam hose when you had never picked one up before. The steam hose now in the hands of a young Vietnamese was a Russian made rifle, auto and semi, loaded with Chekloslovakian bullets designed to rip through American flesh. We on the other hand were training under unrealistic conditions. Christ, bivouacing in six inches of snow..how much snow will we have to march through in Vietnam? If they had any ski lodges there we'd be packing a bottle of mulled wine and not a M-16.
Point two that America always forgets. The Vietnamese will be fighting on their soil to protect their way of life. We Americans for the most part are draftees, ripped from the neighborhoods of communities across the land, this land is your land, our land, all God's chillen's land. This battle would not be fought on the parade grounds of Fort Knox. Nor Ft. Lewis, in fact, not any fortification for that matter on U.S. soil. They would also be hiding in trees with booby traps orchestrating one hell of a symphonic war, while we were training to march in formation, in line, in the box, not out of the box. The Redcoats learned there lesson fighting the Continental Army and American irregulars. We forgot that lesson, and now Mike and the others were "training" for that special, spiritual evangelical moment where victory could be tasted and felt like fine cuisine. An enjoyable victorious romp under the covers expecting the orgasm of all orgasms, and instead left with a cheap blow job in a back alley by a hooker on her knees kneeling in the leftover wet on the reflecting puddled pavment left over by the weather and incontinent wino's."
Sitting in the outdoor bleachers on the firing range, it was introduction to Mr. Weapon time. "Men, (this is a direct quote, as written down later in the day in my journal) "Men, I know some of you is college edicated...well, when it comes to school, I ain't, ya'll might know a thing or two about civilian life, but ah'm (read: I am here) heah to teach ya'll whole bunches of stuff that could save your life in combat and in life later on"...whole bunches indeed. Whole bunches..of what? Banana's? Yes Sarge, you certainly have a lovely bunch of coconuts too. How to kill my grandmother with a bayonet will help me how later in life.
"This a'heah is an M-14 rifle. Not to be mistaken for a gun, it is a weapon. Call it a gun, or a rifle and you'll pay dearly. Your pecker is for jacking off and fun, the weapon is for killing, and damn, that too can be fun," he said. He then went into a diatribe of courtesy and parameters expected on the firing range. Mike and most of the others had never seen a firing range, heard a weapon discharge, or seen the damage a bullet could actually do. Lets face it, the first time on the fire line of a firing range when you've only hefted a Daisy air rifle in false childhood combat is a daunting affair. The weight of the weapon, the monster bullets, phallic in nature and the knowledge of the devastation this weaponry could cause almost made you want to leave the gravitational pull of the planet before you could actually master the weaponry and be responsible for killing someone or worse.
Mike and the others lined up on the ground, in the prone position asthey call it. Balls in the dust, elbows propping up the rifle, as a tripod steadies the hand. Then carefully peer down the gun barrel to the sight that sits as proud as a hood ornament at the point of ballistic exit. It's off, oh, maybe a degree or two, but that differential could be rectified and corrected in time. First,you had to fire at the targets placed 300 yards down the line of sight. Take steady aim, breath deeply, holding it in as though you inhaled the most potent pot on the planet. Now squinting, you squeeze the trigger, gentle, a virgins soft breast in your Saturday night back seat hands the rifle site a sweet pink nipple that finally discharges and smack, hits the target. Not bad, almost center. Dead center and another Commie gets wounded or goes down for the count as his stomach falls out onto the ground. Mike had never fired a real gun in his life. Now he kept hitting the target. Got him a marksmen's medal at the end of training. Not sharpshooter, he held back. All those squirrel hunters from the south were sharpshooters. They were good, but for them that was also bad. Their skills would land them ultimately in an infantry division headed for the Nam..marksmen like Mike had choices. Mike could type! Better than firing a gun, he was much faster firing off words on a typewriter then firing bullets and another human being. This would come in handy one day..many days in fact so he would eventually ets from the army intact, alive and on two legs.
After the firing range, it was back to the barracks, clean the weapon, eat, shower, a few cigs with the guys, then lights out...Today was a rush of sorts. Never knew he could even fire a weapon before, let alone hit a target. What would tomorrow bring. He had no idea as they never gave that information out in advance. Little did Mike or the others know that tomorrow as scheduled as fun with a gas mask day. Tears, what a gas? Teargas? What a bitch!! It's a gas, gas, gas....

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 27.01.2011

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