Body Bags and Bags of Weed
Even though I was against the “war” in Vietnam, when serving in the Army in Okinawa during the war my objection was against the killing not only of OUR young G.I’s but the Vietnamese people as well. We were not invited by the Vietnamese people to as Dick Gregory said, “Force Democracy down their throats at the point of a bayonet.” I was living off base in my own apartment in downtown Naha in the red light district and my military duties were light to say the least from a time standpoint. Only had to show up for IG Inspections (once every 6 months) but for the four hours a night 6 - 10 PM, Monday - Thursday I did work driving around in a jeep with Captain Estes, himself a dope smoker, checking security at the Machinato Depot on base for theft, thieves and other nefarious cat burglars that may appear. After our shift we usually ended up at this on base BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters) for a few joints to get the end the shift and begin my day which was mainly all night. The rest of the time was all mine. Time to party hearty and make use of the liberal sexual activities that presented themselves in strip clubs, massage parlors and of course the various dope parties at the apartment. The warehouses held cigarettes, military vehicles, supplies, ammo etc. ...But... mostly what we looked for during our security inspections were locals and our own G.I.s breaking into the security depot cages that housed the fresh body bags filled with young men from Philly, Detroit, Atlanta, L.A. you get the picture, sent from Vietnam before shipping to Tokyo for identification and the homeward bound trip to wives, parents, siblings, girlfriends and beer buddies. The thieves (and we caught many) were making off with their valuables, money, jewelry, medals, etc from the corpses. When we caught a local Okinawan (few) we would turn them over to the Okinawan police for prosecution. Out of our hands. When we caught an American GI robbing them, well things were a little different. With our .45’s drawn, locked and loaded we’d apprehend them and were supposed to take them to the military police for prosecution ...which we did...evidence and all for upcoming trial and stockade time. Unfortunately for them was the fact that they were clumsy and everytime each one seemed to forget how to walk down stairs and fell down the concrete steps injuring themselves getting all bruised and bloody. The MP’s would take it from there. Later we’d show up at their court martial to testify. One thing about military justice….not one was found NOT GUILTY. I may have been against the war and the killing, but damned if I was gonna let these punks dishonor our own dead and rob their families of what few possessions they had at the time on them. The dead soldiers, my own age had already given up a lot...the rest of their lives! On the lighter side of my military equation was that I was also involved in dealing marijuana, LSD and opium on the island...LSD from my old friends in the Bay Area and opium from Thailand and Vietnam. I’d get the weed in Thailand personally on various trips there and the opium from GI’s I knew in Vietnam. Piece of cake. Now the trick was getting it some back home so I’d have my own personal stash. The problem was solved one day in downtown Naha when I went looking for a present for my mom and came across these beautiful tall Japanese dolls. By accident the head fell off when I mishandled it, but discovered the dolls ceramic body was empty space. I bought dolls for Mom, my two grandmas, various aunts and extras to pass out when I got home. I carefully removed all the heads, filled them with weed and opium balls and had them wrapped carefully and then shipped stateside. When I was released from the Army I made the rounds of family who proudly had the dolls on display in living rooms. When left alone in the living room it was time to empty the treasure into a bag in mybackpack. I made a lot of family visits and also had the ones I sent for giveaways later that my parents kept, box sealed in the basement at their house. Not only did I have a good supply of the best stuff around, but barter material for other drugs such as LSD and mescaline. One thing I learned as a Boy Scout...be prepared..and in the Army I learned “No Weed Left Behind!”
Frank Gutch Army Nuggets
(Photos: Frank and I at his home in Oregon enjoying beer and wrestling ha) One guy that clearly stands out is a plaid shirt wearing Oregon logger type who was a writer. I write too. Must have been the chemicals we both fortified ourselves with. Frank Gutch Jr. you may have heard of him as he has not been mentioned all year in a sexual assault case in Hollywood by Reese Witherspoon, although she has a restraining order on him. He was and is Numero Uno buddy and quite “Frankly” got me through those days by covering my ass from the brass. Frank and I met while stationed in 1970 at Ft. Lewis, Washington and were both Company Clerks at the Headquarters Company. Think, Radar O’Riley on M.A.S.H. One day a young GI had done a tour in Vietnam, re-enlisted and came to us to fill out paperwork to go back for another tour to as he said, “To Kill me some more gooks” Frank and I working for the military underground he as an organizer and me as a writer for the Ally underground newspaper decided we would fill out the paperwork for him except instead of Saigon, we were going to send him to Germany where he couldn’t get his wish. He signed the papers, not reading them (we were counting on that) and they were approved. Frank and I made sure we were scarce that day as we didn’t want to get napalmed by this redneck. (He was pissed and looked for us all day until he was ordered to report to his shipping out station. We figured we saved a few lives that day from the Ugliest of Americans!) Frank and I were shall we say heavily into LSD and marijuana. Me more so and the day we were to have our barracks inspected by the General I was already on a boat on a river finding looking glass ties. Sure enough, stockade time for me if caught. I passed out and Frank, McCarthy and Will picked me up and locked me passed out in a basement closet. I missed the inspection and the stockade. They eventually called in amedic friend of ours who said by rights I should be dead..but lived to bang a gong anyway...Thanks Frank. He’s written about this as well…. On another time, Frank, me and three other guys went camping and doping on Puget Sound. We were quite loaded on Orange Wedge acid and when we finally crashed listening to the waves and the campfire still crackling I was awakened by screams. Seems in my drugged sleep had rolled into the campfire and my sleeping bag was a blaze. Frank awakened and grabbed the bag with the others and dumped me ablaze into Puget Sound. A hell of a way to wake up I mean to tell ya...again..Thanks Frank…. One Friday night Frank and me and others went to Seattle for two and half drug saturated days in the U District. Along for the ride, were Red, Morgan, Ed, Kelly, McCarthy (the crazy one) and myself. We each had a hit of Sandoz red at noon when we arrived (that evening around sunset we had another hit of Sandoz red, one cap of mescaline and throughout the evening with the ladies we met at the crash pad we all enjoyed smoking 2 dime bags. The next day, we all had more acid and went to see the premier of “Woodstock” first going to the Ave to score more acid. Six hits of purple double domes at $3 bucks each. McCarthy was so stoned he stood on his seat doing the Joe Cocker song singing along. Frank and I got him to sit down and shut up but I wanted to do the Who impersonation! Afterwards we we smoked more dope and scored more acid in the morning on the Ave. Blue flats for $2.50 each for band of outlaws. We went to the Spacearium and Planetarium spacing out on space then to the Space Needle. I was rushing fast on the elevator and when we got to the top I thought we were in a flying saucer. I told Frank that and he believed me. We had to head back to Ft. Lewis so scored some green flats $3.00 a hit smoked a joint and took the bus back. Yep...Frank was a friend...a brother I never had and a guardian angel ..lets face it...Frank was the man!!
Tripping Out with Frank Gutch Jr.
Not counting my many trips to outer space in search of virgins on Venus while at the same space in time avoiding the drag queen rest areas of Uranus at all costs for obvious reasons I’ve been able to make many inner space spaced out trips thanks to the clowns of chemistry. No need for Joan Jett Jet Packs or Link Wray Ray Guns set to stun. Inner space travel involves no booster rockets unless you consider amphetamines as a fuel injection to the 12 cylinder 400 horsepower of a good dose of LSD or Mescaline with a peyote chaser to prime the pistons of perception. Take that Aldous Huxley! I readily admit to the self rape of my own brain cells as chemicals fucked with my own reality. Forget the Three Rings Circus of Saturn. Many from the Deep Deliverance South think they are an interstellar NASCAR track. Hell, get rushing on a couple of purple double domes and head for the Space Ship parked in downtown Seattle. The first time I was there was in army with a friend of mine you may know...a Mr. FranK Gutch, a bastard child of Capt. Beefheart (“It’s a blimp Frank!” We went to the Space Needle on acid. If that wasn’t a trip in itself riding to it in the monorail we were rushing on acid through a huge silver suppository up through the colon of the city itself. Once we got to the Space Needle we boarded the elevator and the earthling who was the elevator operator, an obvious alien from the Proctology Planet we surmised, gave his speech all the way to the top...how many bolts, tons of steel, and other information of construction that only an engineering student would give a shit about..however, this creature from a Rowdy Roddy Piper film knew we came to kick chemical ass and chew bubblegum but were all out of bubblegum. Our eyes were glistening from LSD dilation and he knew it as he stared straight through us and when we hit the top floor he leaned into us with the total weight of the Space Needle and paused then inches from our faces he yelled…”Now, that’s heavy!!!” Our mouths dropped open….we had met the prophet we were sure!! God did exist and he was an elevator operator!!! Once exited we made for the bathroom, mens room, rest room whatever you call it, but who the ell rests in there anyway? As you enter the room the walls had painted brilliant orange and yellow stripes that undulated suggestively. It must have taken us 10 minutes just to get past the Sgt. Pepper Stripes to find the stand up urninals we thought were offering temples and seemed a shame to piss where incense should be billowing forth creating a cloud of spirituality while whispering “Tao! Tao!” to us in the shrill voice of Allen Ginsberg as the toilets howled as William Burroughs shot up a hot shot of Marseilles heroin he scored from a Tunisian beggar boy he could bugger. After the Space Needle we headed for I believe it was the Moore Theater for the Pink Floyd concert that night. Floyd? Gotta have more dope. Luckily we had plenty on us and dropped just before the show. The highlight was when a kid in the audience flipped out over the music and ran up the aisle screaming in utter terror. Medics grabbed him ...Thorazine time ladies and gents. Technically a bad trip is not funny but this kid had a keystone cops element to him we couldn’t resist. Slapstick as his mind wandered and slipped on a burlesque banana to take a chemical pratfall ala Laurel and Hardy. After the concert we went to the U District to score more dope and along with our friend McCarthy who we ran into scored...except we didn’t score acid...Mescaline? Nope..try some kind of animal tranquilizer that made the sidewalks rise into the sky as we were being swallowed by the concrete quicksand! We had little cash left so got off the streets in a panic at one of those dive downtown transient hotels where the three of us watched old black and white Dracula movies on a local tv station monster fest. Frank and I of course blamed McCarthy….ha...this was one day in the life of Mike and Frank….Inner space is so much more fun than Outer Space...it is pretty far out when you go far in!
Mama Do Right and the Three Degrees of Okinawan Sex
To the new guys arriving in Okinawa, affectionately called “The Rock” like slabs of fresh meat all wide eyed and innocent there was always the obligatory visit to Mama Do Right in the town of Koza. Also, once you had made your bones and been on the island for a month or two you got into a routine of what I call “The Three Degrees of Sexual Activity” that Okinawa offered on a silver platter. Gate Two Street and BC Street in Koza City was better than the Emerald City. Hell it was the best wide-open bar district in the town, Naha had its own district and was no stranger to either. At first though, I was fresh meat in the barracks (this is before I lived off post in an apartment and also before my drug selling days on the island so I had to live on my paltry $95 bucks a month!) The guys made you feel welcome and on our first weekend pass they took me to Koza to meet the mysterious Mama Do Right. Five dollar blow jobs in a crowed back alley shack that looked like something out of a Japanese noir film of intrigue and terror. I fully expected to get rolled any minute. Hank and Leroy, who became good friends took me to the door of Mama’s and this young 15 or 16 year old Oriental fox comes out to greet us..and take our money of course. Having just arrived a week earlier I was about to sample a celestial angel! They guys waited outside while,this young Lolita took me by the hand and removed my clothes, I mean every stitch and had me lie down on a low bed while she removed her top. Lawsy, even Elmer Gantry would have fallen to his knees and thanked the gods got this. I lay still on the bed on my back while the nymphette began to prime my pump then got up and turned the lights out so it was near as pitch black as a coal mine in West Virginia during a cave in. I was breathing hard, fast and heavy and ready to do my orgasmic imitation of a volcano when all of a sudden...sweet lips and mouth were taking me in and for ten full minutes my mind was having multiple orgasms before the physical me. Holy moly, this was beyond ecstatic. Soon, Krakatoa exploded with a fury followed by a lingering and of course a clean up of the region...I was spent when all of a sudden the light came on and who was the object of my orgasmic trip to Wonderland...an older woman who must have been 70 or so and toothless!!!! The old fashioned “switch!” The nymphette was the bait...Mama Do Right was not only a magician of illusion but, what the hell..proved to me sex is not just a physical feeling...it’s in our heads! All the while I am enjoying my nymphette in my mind….Mama was doing right! I emerged to mucho laughter from my new “friends” and had to laugh along with them and couldn’t wait until the next plane load of fresh meat hit the barracks and this time I could introduce them to Mama Do Right...she’s probably 130 years old by now, but bet she can still handle a new guy like a test pilot...Mama Do Right...had the Right Stuff! Now on to the three degrees of sex on Okinawa. When you get paid once a month the bars and massage parlors and whore houses are ready to snag every dollar you have in your pockets. In the bars the girls are generous...a bar girl will come up to you and say…”Hey, GI, want drink? I buy, you pay!” Sounds fair to me. As for the massage parlors, you get your choice of massage girl who strips you down and places you in a steam box where only your head protrudes so you must resemble a robotic turtle. Steam steam steam ...open those pores. After the steam you get to sit on a wooden stool while she uses a wooden bucket to douse you and wash you all over then rinse. After that, hop up on the massage table, get lotioned, powdered and kneaded like a pile of soft sourdough in Betty Crocker’s kitchen and before long you’re on cloud nine especially when the back walking begins...soon you are as light as a feather and get dressed feeling like a new man. $10 bucks for a new lease on a release of tension. For $5 extra bucks you can get “special massage” by hand or for $10 more by mouth. From there you move on down the street to the various bordellos where the girls sit and are lined up as new cars at an auto show. A few T-Birds, Corvettes and the ever present Mercedes, all with warmed up engines ready to purr. Sexy bottom body portions visible thanks to short kimonos and yes, this how I met Kimiko the girl I wanted to marry, I saw her dancing in a club,she bought me drinks, you know...she bought...I paid then she took me to her mama san at the whore house and for $20 bucks she was mine for 20 minutes! That is the first degree ..a full paycheck. Degree two...mid month, money getting light as you spent the bulk of it on whores already and had a bit left over for a last hurrah except you eliminate the bar scene, the massage parlors and the better houses of sex and went instead to the back alley black market district for a cheap blow job or quicky. Degree Three….Closer to payday you are down to seeds and stems so you go to the $1.00 handjob bars where the girls join you at a table and while you buy her a drink she takes care of you under the table...wait….actually she brings you the verge..stops and asks for another drink to continue..this goes on until you are dead broke until payday three days away! Eventually through drug dealing and other activities I could afford Degree One any time I wanted..except by that time I was living with Kimiko who had quit her hooking but not her dancing...but damn angel that she was she allowed me to have one night a week out to do the scene as long as I lived by her rule which was…”Make sex, but no love her!” She was my fiance after all so why not. Sex no love...not a hard rule to live by...I tried to get my ex wives all to understand that but to no avail….but in the divorces they got the hang of one thing from Okinawa….They Buy...I PAY!
Reville Sucks This segment of the Army Diaries I kept while serving in Okinawa and Ft. Lewis is a series of random quotes over a period of almost two years in Okinawa regarding quotes collected, books read or reading at the time and where my head was at...my body was elsewhere!
(Photo: Artwork I collected from magazines and scotch taped onto the pages of the diaries...,,,this photo is about LSD-25)
September 3, 1969
Ho Chi Minh Died.
Random Dates No particular Order - (Okinawa)
On Catholicism (obviously written in an altered state of speed and weed on a three day binge..is why I don’t write poetry! I have more of these "poem-rants-anti-poems all written while in la la land)
Papal Chain Gangs forge halos and handcuffs for the prisoners of dogma.
The pious are impoverished and side track by pornography read in the dark of the rectory by nuns dressed as Green Berets
The Great Catholic Cop-Out it is
According to the underage, oversexed patrolman’s wife who is fucking her pediatrician
Damn you...Blasphemer! yells the fat woman giving the Cardinal a blowjob
“Arrest her” she screams
She caught her tossing the living crucifix into the blaze in the fireplace,
Save it! It may be too late so it won’t matter anyway..
Communion of the Holy has been banned..no more psalms or singing in church
Leave now...toss your halos aside and escape the confines of the concentration camp of Catholicism
“Who are the Brain Police?” - Frank Zappa
“Like a Fool, I mixed them and they strangled up my mind” - B. Dylan
Dick Gregory for President!!
“I’d rather die of heat in Canada, than freeze to death in the South” - The Band
Reading articles in Esquire from library on Norman Mailer and Jean Luc-Goddard. I’d love to be Norman Mailer and interview myself as Norman Mailer.
The plight of Society is in Society’s head - Subculture Magazine
Reading Faust and Rimbaud.
Reading Vanity of Dulouz - J. Kerouac
Reading Dostoevesky - The Idiot, Possessed.
Reading - War & Peace - Tolstoy
Reading - The Captains Daughter by Pushkin.
Reading - Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Reading article by Susan Sontag fresh back from trip to Hanoi
Just received “Nashville Skyline’album in mail.
Tell the whole wide world..my name is Johny Pissoff!” - F. Zappa
Brian Jones dead…
Reading I-Ching
Listening to Flowers and Beads by Iron Butterfy
Reading “I Am Curious Yellow” just to support Barney Rossett
Reading articles by Gore Vidal in magazine
From the breast of the media
The Dylan milk is fed,
Taken in by pink lips
By the Howdy Doody Generation
Now transformed into armies of drug washed Flash Gordons from space - M. Marino
The South China sea looks green today with a touch of whites, blues and thin lines of foamy crests sailing inland only to dissolve on shore. The Asian sky has many shades of blue with large lacy clouds blowing across beyond the horizon westward to spread shade on Chinese villages...silent..peaceful -
M. Marino Weather Forecaster
Got copy of Cavalier Magazine in mail
Great articles on James Dean, the Weird 50’s, Burroughs and William Blake
Listening to Mike Bloomfield Electric Flag.
The Army Diaries
Okinawa: December 31, 1969
(Vid is recent and the clubs more high-tech but basically they are doing what my girlfriend and fiance Kimiko did as dancer except she was a stripper not just dancer. Love at first sight)
Today is not just New Years Eve Day, it’s also payday for Kimiko and me. We’ll probably blow it all but that’s what it’s for. We hoped a skoshi cab to Koza and bought John his late Christmas present, (he had just gotten out of stockade) a hand blown glass mini hookah. After we dropped it off and dropped a hit of acid and went to a movie on Kokasai Dori in Naha to watch “The Seven Samurai’ in Japanese so Kimiko was stoned but managed to interpret anyway.
Later we went to meet Happy Jack our Okinawan connection at the Koksai Club in Naminoue to score some sunshine tabs. Righeous. Then we tripped t see Gordy and his lady Sachico. They took a room a the New Grand Hotel (Room 116) for the big night. We all got ripped and with two beds in the room we had some privacy and balled or over an hour trying to time orgasm with the New Year. Kimiko is the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met. Great stripper too. Soon if the military allows it...my wife.
January 2, 1970
Artie seems to have stolen a lot of bush from my apartment. Everyone thinks he’s CID. Been in army 8 years and still a PFC? I don’t think he is. I’d be in the stockade by now but told Tony and others to stash their stashes.
Kimiko working tonight so went with Tony, Roach and Mike G to the Naminoue bars around four. Kimiko said I could spend money on girl, but in her words, “No Love Her”
We climbed the cliffs first above the temple and lost Roach. He wandered off and got lost but ran into some guys and scored orange barrel acid from them for all of us.
We met two girls on the street by the bars. So followed them into the bar then to a hotel later. Gold shorts, big earrings and green eyes. Did our thing and as promised, “No Love Her”
Around 10 we left for the Okei Club on Kokosai in Naha, dropped green tabs and met one really spaced out, but very cool girl. Had a few drinks then I left to pick up Kimiko from work.
Kimiko is a great dancer. She wears a white short top with bells that jangle when she moves on stage. She doesn’t hook anymore and dances only since we met. Now we are planning wedding and life in USA. Military is delaying my paperwork on this and pissing me off.
We got home and Danny and Aki, the Japanese Jimi Hendrix were already there with Fish, Gargano and John. He found his hookah present, thought is “household’ so they already broke it in. Aki plays in a band doing Hendrix shit as lead guitarist and is damn good. Met Kimiko through him as friend of his cousin.
Later Wolf, Semi and Goose dropped by with hash. Long night, They wanted to do speed and fuck with the juice heads...I told them goodnight and have fun. Kimiko and I were bushed and Bolding’s court martial was tomorrow and we all were hoping they would not rake him too bad. He sold weed and hash to CID agent. Upshaw also busted two days ago just by having bush on him and selling cigarettes on the black market to Casey who they are now watching. I’ll stop selling them too for awhile. Too much heat on the island right now.
That stuff when you get caught will fuck you every time.
Tonight was Kimiko night. I’l fuck around with her, she’s a machine
Up Against the Wall, Mother Fucker!
Arrested development leads to a development that gets you arrested. I have numerous ones that I openly admit too. Mainly for social protest and one as a juvenile runaway stranger in a strange land. I can’t claim to be on the FBI most wanted list, never was a serial killer and was not involved in the Kennedy Assassination, or that I will tell...they’d have to kill me if I did.
Just before I left home at 15 me and a friend borrowed my parents car, rolling it down the driveway quietly at night and starting it up and heading out down Ann Arbor Trail Road and then back towards home...I had no license, had been drinking and was speeding at 2 AM having a ball….then the flashing lights appeared in the rearview.got to my parents house and had to drive down the cul-de-sac and as I was heading up the road..cops had street blocked, guns drawn..and there were my parents awake now...I stopped got out of the car..Cop yelled for me to get down as did my friend Charlie Mankus and were cuffed and arrested and taken to jail for the night...to make a long story short...I would have rather spent more time in jail than with my parents after that stunt.
Arrest Number Two. I was a 15 year old runaway from Detroit, Michigan that landed stranded homeless eventually on the beach in Honolulu for 2 years until I was picked up by the beach patrol passed out drunk in a catamaran in front of the Reef Hotel.
I was taken to the Honolulu Home for Wayward Boys...sounds like a Spencer Tracy Father Flanagan joint, except, no Flanagan and the place was pink stucco!!!
I was there with mostly Hawaiian kids who had rolled drunk GI’s, knife fights etc. We lived in barracks surrounded by high walls with a raised patio platform for meals. We were given toothbrushes in the morning then they collected them back as I learned you could fashion them into sharp knife like weapons. You can draw blood, but be cavity free!
I only got ino one fight there with a guy named Chaiku, larger kid, part Samoan who won the battle easily, but I fought and went down in flames. I fought and that earned his respect. After that we were friends of sorts and we got along just fine. I eventually got out when my parents sent money for a plane ticket to LA then Detroit...I tossed the Detroit ticket away in LA and headed for a year on the Sunset Strip living on the streets.
When In Okinawa I lead a Moratorium March in downtown Naha in uniform and was arrested by Army MPs and sentenced to three months in the 412 Disciplinary Barracks, stockade like affair if you’ve seen “Cadence” you’ll understand. Problem soldiers all we were all there and as will happen we bonded..we had a new common enemy...the Army, thankfully my buddy John, who was my dope dealing partner would come by the stockade and toss a few lids of weed over the barbed wire fence.
Nothing like a little marijuana to be a hero. Also gave me an insight on how to bribe two young GI guards to look the other way. Dope can open doors heretofore unknown, Nest stop was Ft. Lewis, Washington where my politics got me in trouble but instead of incarceration they sent me on two TDY (temporary duty stations off base) one to Oregon and once to Boise, Idaho...which are two stories unto themselves...TDY was a party! Some punishment, eh?
One time was voluntary...a strange explanation but I had formed The Experimental Theater Workshop of Detroit. Marino, director and founder of the ETW who did nothing more in life than write this piece about those days. Writing about the past is the fountain of youth to a writer. I digress.
The group was formed initially as a fundraiser for SHAR House which was a drug rehab center in Detroit to get the live in residents off methadone and kick the habit naturally. I wrote the script, 6 acts, 24 characters and did all the research with my trusted theatrical compadre, Emmett. One scene was set in a mental institution and to get the feel and flavor, Emmet and I contacted the administrator of Eloise, the name for the fading state mental facility in the western suburbs of Detroit. I wanted to experience the feel of being locked up so I could write about a mental breakdown. We explained the program and as we were getting a lot of publicity about the project it was well known and the go ahead was given.
It was a foreboding building. Wailing in the background...bars and dusty dirty windows adding to the anti-ambiance. It was the stuff nightmares are made of. Greeting, greetings, exchange handshakes and now ...reality time. I was taken to the ward area where they had a line of isolation cells...the door to one was opened, heavy steel, large bolts...ah..but the best part..I had asked to not only look at the cells, but to be placed in it and in a straight jacket and locked in for an undetermined amount of time that Emmet and the administrator would determine. I would have no knowledge of the length.
The jacket on..a dinner jacket suitable for a lunatic asylum worn by a deranged David Niven with a psychosis..then the cell door slammed shut. What 5 minutes? 20 minutes? I had no idea. When I went in it was 1 p.m. when finally I emerged it was 3 p.m. Panic rose like an errant erection while giving a book report...the walls were closing in...isolated..dead silence...dark..strapped in a jacket...time ceased...suspended...alone ... adrift..with only thoughts. Gawd, hold on to these feelings..I must transpose them to paper...my actor must relay this fear and terror and project it to the back row....I must direct the actor from memory..from indelible impression that has left its mark, it's foot on my neck.
It worked and still scares the shit out of me….
The Experimental Theater Workshop that I had formed along with other activists and artists in the Cass Corridor – Wayne State University neighborhoods of Detroit were already under scrutiny from the Detroit Police Department Red Squad merely because we were producing plays that dealt with drug addiction, human and civil rights, women’ and gay rights, and the Holy Grail of Red Commies everywhere...peace in Vietnam.
Trinity Methodist Church in Detroit was a hotbed of leftist sympathy. They let the Young Communist hold their convention in the basement, the White Panthers would meet there when not in Ann Arbor, peace marches were organized there, and the Experimental Theater Workshop rehearsed there on it's stage for our various productions in theaters and activist rallies.
The Red Squad was a secret section of the Detroit Police Department. They would show up at our rehearsals at night when we held them three nights a week. One night my co-founder, Emmett was running late an ran in with a beaming smile on his face.
“They're out there writing down licence numbers!” he yelled and taking photos of the cars and people going into the building..my actors, set designers, etc.
The whole cast and crew went outside and.Emmett with camera and flash as our only “weapon”
I went over to their parked cars across the street and started writing their numbers down and then it happened I said something to piss the cops off and they began shoving then arrested us. We were taken in for resisting arrest...and disorderly conduct.
Our lawyer, a good old fashioned ACLU type, Marco, was called and came down to the station which was a colorful assortment of street thugs… we were political. Every try to explain Karl Marx to a gang banger? Good luck...we were fingerprinted...again...I should have just had copies of my prints made and passed them out like Arlo Guthreries 8 X 10 glossy's as they've been taken so many times. The Red Squad was eventually disbanded..the records however are still on file..locked away and forgotten no doubt in the basement at 1300 Beaubien Street.
In the Army at Ft. Lee, Virginia, just prior to graduation and shipment to Okinawa, the Poor People’s March was something I had to be a part of, along with my friend Dave.
Once we got to town we headed for the Washington Mall and Tent City, also called Resurrection City. Cops were everywhere, the military was there with rifles and bayonets, it looked like an occupied city and indeed it was.
We decided to go to Tent City, go in and be a part of what we felt was one solution to the problem, so brazenly we walked to the "gate" of snow fencing, past the FBI sentinels with binoculars and got a three day pass to enter (I still have this pass today, actually my daughter who is keeper of the Marino flame has it in a collection)
We went in and blended in with the cacophony of society...it was a smorgasbord of racial diversity, the poor from all corners of the country. The deep south, the west coast, the rustbelt, New York City..you name it and poverty was well represented. We spent a few hours and at one point we were leaving and we walked out of the compound...right into the arms of waiting FBI agents who handcuffed us and took us aside to question us about the tent city!
Were there any guns in there? No, sir, didn't see any. How about dope and drug use? No sir, didn't see any...it went on like this and finally as we were military, we were taken to the naval jail in Annapolis sitting in a Naval jail cell until the MP's came for us to escort us in handcuffs back to Ft. Lee where we would have to face our CO to answer a lot of questions including an FBI report, a shore patrol report, and god knows what else. Thankfully I didn't own an Italian hunting rifle or would have been accused of assassinating JFK years earlier.
We arrived on base late at night and were taken to the CO's office, Captain Benjamin...a Black Officer! He got up from behind his desk after the MP's left and walked over to us and said in a loud voice.."What the fuck were you two thinking of?"
Graduation time came at AIT, the Poor People's March was behind us and we stood at attention while Captain Benjamin handed us our diplomas and orders for our next duty station. Captain Benjamin leaned into me to talk quietly in my ear..."God help your next commanding officer!”
Army Diaries Segment by Mike Marino
Ft. Lewis, Washington April 13, 1970
Left Friday night for Seattle for two and half drug saturated days in the U District. Along for the ride, were Red, Morgan, Ed, Kelly, McCarthy (the crazy one) and myself. We each had a hit of Sandoz red at noon when we arrived (that evening around sunset we had another hit of Sandoz red, one cap of mescaline and throughout the evening with the ladies we met at the crash pad we all enjoyed smoking 2 dime bags.
Dot was around 40, attractive lesbian who played guitar for hours her playing very bluesy,
Cris from the UDC who is taking Mike D.’s place at the University dropped by for some smoke and brought donuts and two friends along. Nice cats.
Seattle, Washington April 14, 1970
Picked up a copy of Che’s “Cuban Revolution” from a bookstore.
We scored mescaline on campus, dropped same.
Sue E. my WAC girlfriend showed up at noon at the bus depot we all met her and got her stoned, She’s talking marriage but Frank and the boys in the band said they worry about what domestication would do to me. I told them she was bi-sexual (no secret) so it would be different kind of marriage.
I also have to break off relation with Kath G. Married women get their lovers black eyes.
McCarthy and I got into discussion at dinner about new guy in the company, Will Rogers.Pretty heavy on the politics. I like him, McCarthy doesn’t understand him. He’s a member of the Progressive Labor Party and joined when at SF state.
We all had more acid and went to see the premier of a movie called “Woodstock” first going to the Ave to score more acid. Six hits of purple double domes at $3 bucks each.
McCarthy was so stoned he stood on his seat doing the Joe Cocker song singing along. We got him to sit down and shut up but I wanted to do the Who impersonation!
Afterwards we went to my ex’s place. Paula, she and I still friends and I think she also likes Sue. Could be interesting if all came together. Smoked more dope and she whipped up a batch a leftover stew.
Seattle April 15, 1970
We scored more acid in the morning on the Ave. Blue flats for $2.50 each for band of outlaws. We went to the Spacearium and Planetarium spacing out on space then to the Space Needle. I was rushing fast on the elevator and when we got to the top I thoughtwe were in a flying saucer. I told Kelly that and he believed me.
We had to head back to Ft. Lewis so scored some green flats $3.00 a hit smoked a joint and took the bus back.
Sue and I made out in the back seat with McCarthy laughing like a maniac looking out the window at traffic. Will take Sue to dinner in Seattle next week and rent a motel room for the weekend and catch a movie, either Easy Rider or M.A.S.H.
Bad Trip
Not all drug trips are real Timothy Leary Sgt. Pepper gonzo ganja extravaganzas and it depends what you happen to fuel yourself at the time. In Okinawa there was a veritable all you can eat salad bar of chemistry to feed an army...which in fact it was doing ...feeding the US Army so we could be all that we could be! Hell, I was an Army of One...One who rather use a bong than a bayonet.
One week I went on a five day speed binge mixed with acid and weed. I unfortunately broke my own personal speed sound barrier with a sonic psycho ka- boom. Speed is the great communicator...especially when you have nothing of importance to say. I loaded up on dexies, bennies and any pill I could find that would fill my tank with high octane. I was now the chemical, version of TV Tommy Ivo ready for the quarter mile track.
That was in Okinawa..but while in the Haight many of the white rabbits, (Yes they were everywhere along with fire breathing dragons!) wore flowing Marlon Brando when he got fat kaftans, fading flowers in their hair, face paintings and sitting yoga style inanely blowing bubbles in the park and saying things like Far Out and a whole lot of Wows in order the change the world. Nothing like a good bubble blower to bring about integration and of course, if you wanted to,end the war in Vietnam all you had to do was paint your face and recite “Howl” backwards standing on your head while fondling the person next to you.
In Asia on my speed run I was involved in a five hour conversation with a guy also on speed who described how to make a guitar….not too bad you say? He started with chopping down the tree and the entire fucking process. As if I cared. Look, I am Jimmy Page when it comes to air guitar...but a real one? A Gibson or a Martin are to me a drink and bird.
I kept talking for five days and forgot my own name at one point. By the fifth day I was on hands and knees weak crawling to the toilet, not a great image I know but could barely walk. After a few hours I was back in shape and a bunch of us took more speed and acid..hopped a bus and headed for the beach on the northeast of the island and one of us brought along a football. Believe me I’m not Joe Montana and when I tried to catch a bullet pass it hit my chest with the force of John Henry’s hammer and knocked me flat.
Another time in Seattle when in the Army, me and a friend, Jim McCarthy went to the U District to score some acid on the street...we did...except it was some kind on animal tranquilizer that within minutes had the street undulating like a stripper on stage, the Space Needle became a lava lamp and I started sinking into the concrete sidewalk as I was sure it was quicksand!
We had a little money between us and got a room a dive transient hotel downtown and spent the night watching old black and white Dracula movies...the only thing on at the time late at night...remember..pre-cable days?
For the most part chemically altered states had been berry berry good go me, but it depends on another thing we had plenty of...Vibes...Good Vibes, Bad Vibes and No Vibes….and more importantly...not a vibraphonist for miles around….
So to Vibe or not to Vibe…..that is the question...right now I have to go blow some bubbles to see if I can neutralize North Korea...I may have bad vibes...but more worried about his bad hair!
With a Little Help From My Friends
Photo: Me center, Hank on right and Asher on left looking stern in the barracks in Okinawa, Machinato Barracks.)
Whenever you watch a film that deals with the military way of life, from Band of Brothers to Biloxi Blues to Platoon, it matters not where the action takes place. It’s mainly about friendships formed, that specific junction in the road where people of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and race come together as one...a member of the Green Machine. You watch each others back, you’re there when they need you and vice versa. I had many friends while in the Army and have written about some of them but one I neglected to paint a literary portrait of is Hank Balderrama.
We were assigned to the same unit in Okinawa and two people couldn’t have been at opposite ends of the cultural pool. He, a 28 year old Latino draftee from New Mexico, non drinker except for a beer or two, no drugs, college degree and the most intelligent man I had ever met.
Me...a mere 20 years old, high school drop-out, unmarried, alcohol and drug abuser and not the brightest bulb in the marquee.
All I could ever think about even in the military, especially after I got my own apartment in Naha with two other dope fiends was getting high and getting laid. Hank taught me to play chess...CHESS? Also I was terrible at keeping in touch back home with family, especially my mom and grandma. So enter Hank Balderrama.
He would write letters home to family for me, introducing himself and of course the family knew I was too stoned to keep open lines of communication so they appreciated Hanks efforts tremendously...as I do now and have for decades.
I did manage to get him to take acid one time. He was living in the barracks and I was a townie now so went to visit him and he agreed to try it. We went out back of the barracks on the hill overlooking the South China Sea and let the magic begin….I’ve been as you have been too I’m sure, asked by those who never took acid…”What’s it like?” I never have a valid answer...Hank hover did...I asked how he felt after an hour or so….his response? “This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done!”
He and I would go downtown in Naha and browse the shops and bookstores, he read Japanese and spoke it fluently. I could order a beer and a hooker….kind of limited in retrospect, eh?
Politically we were on the same page...except...except...he was more academic in his approach and not one to take to the streets so he would run interference for me when I did march against the war in uniform in Okinawa..a definite no no.
When it came time to leave the island for stateside I talked with the sergeant who would be on duty the next early morning and Hank of course was to sleep deep except for the fact I had asked Sgt. Frakes as a joke to wake Hank up early and tell him he had KP.
That afternoon as I boarded the plane for the states Hank handed me an envelope and said, “Gonna miss ya and here are a few words of our friendship, please don’t open it now, wait until you’re in the air” I began getting sad leaving this wonderful human being behind who had been a sort of mentor to me as well as friend.
I got on board and as we eventually taxied down the runway and lifted off...memories came rushing back and now I felt guilty playing my last joke on Hank with a fake wake up call. So I felt bad but wanted to rad his note now and probably feel like more of an asshole….I pulled the paper out and unfolded it...and there it was…”Mikey, will miss you and want to tell you Sgt. Frakes told me about your wake up call, my last joke on you is to let you know you didn’t get away with it!”
I had to laugh and damn that Hank. He had the last word after all….We still keep in touch and when it comes to explaining what a friend is...I tell people….”It’s the most exciting thing a person can have…” Stole that from Hank…..
Army Dazed: The 412 Disciplinary Barracks
In Okinawa, my sojourn of off base living was eventually interrupted for a few months. My new home would be the 412 Disciplinary Barracks where we who had shown no regard for the military way of life were sent in effort for us to see the light. Insert “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” here.
I was sent there for a myriad of “crimes” such as disobeying a direct order and forming and marching in a Moratorium March on “foreign” soil and in uniform. We about 20 of us marched and wore black armbands. There were no actual armbands available so we got pretty creative with scissors and a few of the guys civilian pants that seem to be made to order. We were warned on a company formation that anyone one who participated, (as word had leaked out, damned snitches!) would be prosecuted. We all were except I was singled out for harsher treatment.
I was also on the CID watch list for drug use, dealing and hanging around certain elements such as Casey, the black market honcho. When I met him he introduced himself simply….”I’m not a cop, I’m not a crook, I’m an Okinawan business man.” Other than a few boxes of cartons of cigarettes sold to him by us, I mainly made purchases. Hell, could have bought my own jeep for a few hundred dollars.
Another burr under the military saddle was that I was writing for the Ally underground GI newspaper back home in California and distributing the paper on the island. Not good. The final straw was a few of us painting a huge Peace Symbol in black paint on the outside wall of the headquarters barracks I was attached to the night before the IG inspection and was visible from the road below the barracks so the General would see it on his way in...Not a good move.
Retribution after the March was swift and was threatened to be sent to Vietnam as a tunnel rat. No thanks. Next they banned me from the company grounds without orders which meant after 30 days I would be classified as a deserter. Tried and jailed.
Naturally I called in the troops and my friend Hank started writing letters to Sen. Phillip Hart of Detroit’s Hart Plaza fame who got involved and through him we also got the ACLU to represent me and run interference. Correspondence between Sen Hart and the commandant of the islands office were sent to me from my ACLU attorney in San Francisco and still have all the copies in a box my daughter has, including copies of my correspondence which was done in duplicate on a typewriter as well as the ACLU letters to the military.
My commanding officer, Captain Talpas called me in frustrated and offered me OCS...Officer Candidate School, ha, leadership abilities,and I could be off the island and out of his hair...not his problem anymore...I refused by reminded him NO High School diploma! With no other option, I was charged with the Moratorium March thing (which I did not dispute) and the Peace Symbol that defaced govt. property, which I gladly admitted but as usual said I did it alone so my other two buddies who helped were covered. so as a result I was sent to the 412 Disciplinary Barracks. A few of us there were in for political types for crimes ranging from irritation to the powers that be while others were two gi’s who raped a 14 year old local, a couple guys who loved bar fights, and others for assorted mischief.
I spent two months there buffing floors and cleaning latrines, smoking cigarettes and writing in my journal. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant. The guys were of one mind...we’re in this together no matter our differences….we had a common enemy now….besides my buddy John Thomas from Kansas would drive by in a jeep once a week and toss a few lids of weed over the barbed wire and I made sure to share with what could aptly be called a real live Group W bench.
Soon it was time to leave the island and head for my next duty station, Ft. Lewis, Washington. Picking me up at the 412 was Master Sgt. Starr, who was a lifer and the man who got me busted for the March. He was doing his job and I was doing mine. He and I wrote after I was back in the states and we remained friends until his death. He taught me many things but mainly. Stick to your convictions, there may be consequences but be true to yourself...I always have and sometime paid the price, but I can look myself in the mirrow everyday.
I got ready and packed at the barracks and my friends and I had one last smoke out before nightfall. I was to leave the next afternoon on a flight back home. Hank would drive me in a jeep to the airport.
I think I mentioned this in a previous piece, but if not...When it came time to leave the island for stateside I talked with the sergeant who would be on duty the next early morning and Hank of course was to sleep deep except for the fact I had asked Sgt. Frakes as a joke to wake Hank up early and tell him he had KP.
That afternoon as I boarded the plane for the states Hank handed me an envelope and said, “Gonna miss ya and here are a few words of our friendship, please don’t open it now, wait until you’re in the air” I began getting sad leaving this wonderful human being behind who had been a sort of mentor to me as well as friend.
I got on board and as we eventually taxied down the runway and lifted off...memories came rushing back and now I felt guilty playing my last joke on Hank with a fake wake up call. So I felt bad but wanted to rad his note now and probably feel like more of an asshole….I pulled the paper out and unfolded it...and there it was…”Mikey, will miss you and want to tell you Sgt. Frakes told me about your wake up call, my last joke on you is to let you know you didn’t get away with it!”
I had to laugh and damn that Hank. He had the last word after all….We still keep in touch and when it comes to explaining what a friend is...I tell people….”It’s the most exciting thing a person can have…” Stole that from Hank…..
Asian Days and Nights
Unlike a lot of guys who got stationed in states while enjoying Uncle Sam’s hostile hospitality I was fortunate to enjoy Asia for two years. Okinawa, Bangkok, Tokyo and Seoul. My base was Okinawa but on my leaves and time off passes would travel carefully avoiding anywhere with bullets and grenades. I preferred the massage parlors and bars.
...but….Okinawa...here was a spot on the planet where exploring coastal caves and meeting it’s people was a little bit of heaven on Earth. Example of the people. They have what are called Skoshi cabs, small compact cabs to whisk you from here to there. In time you get to know the driver as you tended to get him all the time and nn fact looked forward to it. He becomes a friend.
My cabbie, Hideo was the Skoshi cab wizard of Oz. He was full of island lore and history, and a smile and laugh. His biggest laugh was trying to teach me Japanese which I eventually did..well..enough to get by.
One time he picked my and Kimiko, my Japanese girlfriend, up and asked if before we hit the downtown area he would like us to come to dinner to meet his family the next night. We agreed immediately and never had such a pleasant evening with such wonderful people. We reciprocated and took he and his wife and two kids out to dinner with us. At Christmas we all exchanged gifts. We were now family.
Kimiko would take me on tours of various shrines and my favorite one for peace and beauty was the Naminoue Shrine a Shinto shrine in Naha, sitting perched on a high bluff, overlooking Naminoue Beach and the ocean. A sacred space to the Ryukyuan religion.
A sad trip was a series of cliffs where young Okinawan women would jump and commit suicide rather than be captured by the American soldiers. They were told by the Japanese forces that the Americans would do horrible things to them...these were young school girls who never got to bloom as beautiful as the abundant hibiscus that permeate the island.
We would also explore the coastal caves towards the northeast end of the island. We found one that you had to enter from the top of the cliff and climb down a thin shaft split in the earth. When we finally made it to the bottom it wa surreal scene straight out of a bowl of opium. Giant ferns, boulders and stalagmites and tites. We also found old Japanese army boots, rotted and old left by the Imperial army when captured or escaped. They had used the vast cave network of the island for bases of operations. We had emerged into history!
We would also take the bus ride to the northern farm communities to meet the villagers and talk as best we could. Our Japanese not so good, except once when Kimko came with us. They were a giving people. Inviting us to eat with them listen to them play delightful music on the few spare guitar like instruments called a “sanshin”.
I enjoyed shopping over there too...I am short in stature but could purchase clothing in the men’s department there as opposed to the teen department in the States.
We had our share of typhoons hit the island and the rule was for GI’s wherever you are when it hits “orange” stage on the waning to stay where you were. Had my own apartment and plenty of dope so we could get crazy as a loon during a typhoon. One time however I did get stuck at a whorhouse in Koza fpr two days playing poker and drinking with mamasan and the girls. After I gave mamsan a hundred bucks for the food and shelter she gave me. Not to mention a few forays in the back room….but it was the friendliness and kindness that stand out….
I would spend time also at Okinawa movie houses watching Japanese films and learned the legend of Godzilla was that he was born in one of the large caves on the island. That made my day! My hero!
I found this friendliness throughout my travels in Asia. Even Kimiko’s parents liked me which made everything perfecto.
When I got back to the States after almost two years...it was a culture shock. The pace was Indy 500 again, cab drivers rude, traffic a mess, everyone in hurry to get here and there grabbing a brass ring to the future that may or may not lie ahead for them…
I missed living in the present. I missed the honesty of the people, the simple outlook on life, the calm and yes, I also began my Zen studies and practices over there.
Those times have faded but disappeared as they are etched deep into my psyche. They live daily in me, and will until the day I die...but Okinawa taught me how to live….and live in the present and to make the most of life every minute of existence.
Asian days and Asian nights….thank you Okinawa... and when I die I’ll wait for my skoshi cab to take me where it will. Maybe a hilltop shrine or perhaps just a simple dinner with family…..
Army Dazed: Fort Louie. Louie
OK. so it was Fort Lewis in Washington State but couldn’t resist the Louie Louie. Hey, could have been worse, I could have called it Ft. Martin and Lewis. This installment of The Army Diaries, Army Dazed will take a look behind the game show curtain at some truly prize winning American warriors as they refer to them today..whereas we preferred “reefer” to refer back then. Hell, we had a war to end and and an ETS looming on the lost horizon where the Shangri La of civilian life awaited us with valet parking.
I have to admit candidly that prior to my arrival at Ft. Louie, Louie I had been two years in Asia on a 5 and dime of chemicals from LSD to Opium and all things in between on a daily basis. Before that two years in Haight Ashbury again in an altered state every damned day, so many of the Ft. Louie Louie recollects are purple hazy to be sure. My daughter has in her possession my Army Diaries so not handy but will go for broke from memory.
One that clearly stands out is a plaid shirt wearing Oregon logger type who today writes. I write too. Must have been the chemicals we both fortified ourselves with. Frank Gutch Jr. you may have heard of him as he has not been mentioned all year in a sexual assault case in Hollywood by Reese Witherspoon, although she has a restraining order on him.
He was and is Numero Uno buddy and quite “Frankly” got me through those days by covering my ass from the brass. Sort of like the Smothers Brothers…’Mom always did like you best!” He kept my ass from the stockade during a major barracks inspection where I spent time in a utility closet with a medic taking my vitals. and another time he rolled by sorry ass from a campfire on Pugent sound when a stoned Mikey rolled into it. Both events hazy in my mind but clear in his.
Both of us were quite friends with..ready? Will Rogers! Yep a young serious Socialist who talked the talk and walked the walk. Clean of drug and alcohol abuse if I remember, and would have had a nude poster of Eugene Debs in his locker if such a thing existed. Let’s face it Will was Hot to Trotsky. The other Will Rogers said once ‘I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.’ Our Army Will Rogers always said, “FTA!”
We also had a rather large character called MacDuff...never did know his first name. Duffer was as large as a Jeep and could eat one for breakfast, but when he dropped acid he would sit on the floor of the latrine and count floor tiles. Sounds funny now, but in the army you never know when the Commanding Officer will need that information for for a report to the Pentagon in case of war. A Clean Latrine is next the Godliness!
Jim McCarthy. Probably the one guy who I got into trouble with in Seattle more than anyone else. He an I thought we scored some acid on the Ave one night..turns out were some sort of horse trangs and with little cash now between us took a room in a downtown hotel, the kind you find in B-Movies. It had a black and white TV in the room so watched a Dracula movie marathon until we passed out.
We also took a 15 eay leave together and went down to Haight Ashbury and partied with my old friends there and in Berkeley, going out to Mandrakes bar in Berserkley at nights stoned to enjoy the Flamin Groovies who were the house band and the stage the size of a postage stamp but got to get stoned with them and enjoy the music. When It came time to go back we had a few days left on our leave and Jim wanted to hurry back. I wanted to hitchhike...I said look we may e late a few days...so what..if your late getting back it’s AWOL minor punishment as long as it’s not 30 days or more..that’s desertion..we made it hitching to Portland and fromm there took a bus and made it under the wire anyway….
Also I was dating a college girl I met on campus on one trip and she lived with a blind roommate. Wendy, her name, not mine, and I went out for Chinese one night, food that is and not a Chinese hooker for a threesome. When we came back he and the roommate were trying to play a Moody Blues album on a Braille record player. Helen Keller meets the Counter Culture.
I had a girlfriend on base at Ft. Louie as well. She was a Sgt, E-5, and nI was a Spec. 4 so she outranked me my a few dollars and power. Sue E. was a WAC and never thought I’d date a ‘soldier’ but she was one and I did. She was as god on the rifle range as I was but not a doper by any means so kept it straight around her although she knew about me and my chemical habits.
She wanted to get married and stay in the Army. That was not in my plans...the army part that is and besides I knew in time I couldn’t keep off my Yellow Submarine for long. We dated and that was it..she understood and damned if I don’t still have her letters and we kept in touch for years after I got out. She eventually married a Captain and set up army housekeeping in Germany.
There were other characters too...Gartrell etc. but hazy foggy remembrances at best.
It’s also where I met Jane Fonda to storm the fort but will save that for another time. Including the acid ride on the Space Needle Elevator and the Lucy in the Sky public bathroom there with yellows and oranges that melted when you looked at them and you melted with them...OK, so it was probably the acid….who knows?
All those people have faded in the rearview..except Frank and I we maintained our friendship since 1970 and the son of a bitch friended me or I friended him here on FB. He proably wants his money for the dope he gave me….goddamned prick!
Wonderland in Okinawa
Army House Party
I’ve talked about the bond a person forms with others while in the military, which upon reflection is probably similar to those that federal prisoners make after a few years of incarceration...OK...bad example, but it is group living, barracks bound, by the numbers living, fall in for formation living, field strip that cigarette and left, right, left living. However, if you’re lucky you can, once you are out of basic and AIT and land at a regular duty station apply for permission from the green machine to live off base. I got lucky in Okinawa and managed to live in my own rented apartment in Naha near all the strip clubs and bars along with my girlfriend, Kimiko, who was a dancer at a club. We also had a revolving door at the apartment of an assortment of characters that certainly added color to the place. The Dope Fiends from Outer Space, my friends from the khaki world of FTA or Fuck the Army for those of you not familiar with the initials.
I’ll attempt to touch on some of the quirkier happenings on the island and offer a glimpse of some of the people who shared those odd moments in space and time spaced out most of the time with me.
Ray Weems was one of those Buddy Holly, Lubbock, Texas looking kind of Texans except he lived on his parents ranch in the Panhandle. Tall as a redwood it seemed he had never taken acid before or smoked weed but he wanted to fly to earn his wins so he came to one of our apartment parties that was usually attended by a dozen or so guys and their local girlfriends with one purpose in mind..to get fucked up and listening to reel to reel tapes on my Akai monster recorder. The tapes were recorded of shows on KSAN underground radio in San Francisco and sent over by my friend John in Berkeley.
Tape was rolling and Weems had received holy chemical communion 20 or so minutes prior to lift off...by an hour into flight he was a space oddity. The apartment was strictly Japanese...futons and straw mats on floor. I had a wind up clock and turned it upside down and asked Weems what time it was, and no t was not Howdy Doody time.
He puzzled for almost a half hour trying to figure out the upside down numbers and clock hands moving in the wrong direction. He was laughing uncontrollably soon enough and we gave him his wings. A Texas cowboy on acid is something to experience.
Let me introduce you to Mssrs. Benevides and Marquez, two street hipster from the mean streets of Philthydelphia. Put it this way, they were the Special Forces of our social circle. Someone tried to steal your stash, or want to fight in a bar...these two were the Green Berets of crime. They knew every criminal element in Naha’s black market so you were able to purchase anything from a gun to a Pez Dispenser in the shape of Buddha! I had to make use of their friendship in a few bars not to mention on weed thief and as a result I never charged them for weed or acid I was selling. They were the Navy Seals of the military underworld.
Enter now Artie Asher. He was our company Mail Clerk and every Christmas he would hand out envelopes disguised as incoming mail to his friends. Let me explain...Artie had been in the army for 8 years and was a PFC! He claims he kept getting busted down...I say he was CID or the Army equiv of serpico Undercover. Never let him too close close enough to keep an eye on him. He did steal some weed from my apartment once..and admitted it after Benevides and Marquez questioned him down by the Shuri Temple. He paid up and we got along fine after that, but still my suspicions remained. What do they say..Keep your friends close and your enemies closer…
We had a multi stemmed water pipe I had bought in Koza and at one point the main characters of my tribe were given one with the promise we’d al met later in civilian life, bring our stems and smoke a monster grass bowl of whatever we managed to smuggle back home...we never did do that ..and somewhere out there 4 other stems are sitting on a shelf or in the trash
Leroy Basham was another story. He was pure stoner and a poet and fell in love with a local as did I and we both wanted to get married to these fantastic women. We were sent to counseling!!! Counseling? Geez. The chaplain said it is difficult getting permission to marry a foreign national. I said,”But they live here, we are the foreign nationals!” We were both denied probably because we were on the CID watch list. Leroy took it hard and tried suicide after which he went AWOL..where the hell do you go AWOL on an island...I still have letter he wrote to me from the stockade after I was stateside. He never did marry Asako I believe was her name.
In addition to providing green leafy matter and better living to chemistry that I was used to my other concern was getting this shit back home as well as my Akai reel to reel. The Akai was easy...
As for getting weed back to the states with little risk as nothing screams stockaged like a duffle bag with a pungent green aroma. You could get away with it in Asia as I did o trips from Thailand to Okinawa..but going stateside? Suicide Mission.
What I would was to purchase a half dozen Japanese decorative dolls in plastic display cases, remove the heads and fill the body with high grade marijuana and a few opium balls I got from guys in Vietnam, then ship them home to family where they stayed displayed proudly on mantels and shelves so when I returned to the states I would make forays to retrieve quietly and without notice my smuggled goodies.
To be honest...there was ten times the drug use in the army for me at least in Okinawa in one day then there was for a week in the Haight. I had access to Bangkok and Tokyo not to mention guys we knew in Vietnam who would send over Vietnamese opium in exchange for good California acid which I got from my friends in San Francisco in exchange for opium and hash from Asia. It was Chemical Capitalism and Doper Democracy...God Bless America!!!
With a Little Help From My Friends
By Mike Marino
Photo: Me center, Hank on right and Asher on left looking stern in the barracks in Okinawa, Machinato Barracks.)
Whenever you watch a film that deals with the military way of life, from Band of Brothers to Biloxi Blues to Platoon, it matters not where the action takes place. It’s mainly about friendships formed, that specific junction in the road where people of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and race come together as one...a member of the Green Machine. You watch each others back, you’re there when they need you and vice versa. I had many friends while in the Army and have written about some of them but one I neglected to paint a literary portrait of is Hank Balderrama.
We were assigned to the same unit in Okinawa and two people couldn’t have been at opposite ends of the cultural pool. He, a 28 year old Latino draftee from New Mexico, non drinker except for a beer or two, no drugs, college degree and the most intelligent man I had ever met.
Me...a mere 20 years old, high school drop-out, unmarried, alcohol and drug abuser and not the brightest bulb in the marquee.
All I could ever think about even in the military, especially after I got my own apartment in Naha with two other dope fiends was getting high and getting laid. Hank taught me to play chess...CHESS? Also I was terrible at keeping in touch back home with family, especially my mom and grandma. So enter Hank Balderrama.
He would write letters home to family for me, introducing himself and of course the family knew I was too stoned to keep open lines of communication so they appreciated Hanks efforts tremendously...as I do now and have for decades.
I did manage to get him to take acid one time. He was living in the barracks and I was a townie now so went to visit him and he agreed to try it. We went out back of the barracks on the hill overlooking the South China Sea and let the magic begin….I’ve been as you have been too I’m sure, asked by those who never took acid…”What’s it like?” I never have a valid answer...Hank hover did...I asked how he felt after an hour or so….his response? “This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done!”
He and I would go downtown in Naha and browse the shops and bookstores, he read Japanese and spoke it fluently. I could order a beer and a hooker….kind of limited in retrospect, eh?
Politically we were on the same page...except...except...he was more academic in his approach and not one to take to the streets so he would run interference for me when I did march against the war in uniform in Okinawa..a definite no no.
When it came time to leave the island for stateside I talked with the sergeant who would be on duty the next early morning and Hank of course was to sleep deep except for the fact I had asked Sgt. Frakes as a joke to wake Hank up early and tell him he had KP.
That afternoon as I boarded the plane for the states Hank handed me an envelope and said, “Gonna miss ya and here are a few words of our friendship, please don’t open it now, wait until you’re in the air” I began getting sad leaving this wonderful human being behind who had been a sort of mentor to me as well as friend.
I got on board and as we eventually taxied down the runway and lifted off...memories came rushing back and now I felt guilty playing my last joke on Hank with a fake wake up call. So I felt bad but wanted to rad his note now and probably feel like more of an asshole….I pulled the paper out and unfolded it...and there it was…”Mikey, will miss you and want to tell you Sgt. Frakes told me about your wake up call, my last joke on you is to let you know you didn’t get away with it!”
I had to laugh and damn that Hank. He had the last word after all….We still keep in touch and when it comes to explaining what a friend is...I tell people….”It’s the most exciting thing a person can have…” Stole that from Hank…..
The Army Diaries - Prelude to a Prey Lewd
By Mike Marino
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, and hustling jailbait kids. Hookers and hustlers, under the big top in a sexual three ring circus to keep the customers satisfied and paying.
In Hawaiian Hallelulia Honolulu, Mike was marooned, beached, bummed and burnt by the sun, later he was 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 and the ways of the world of back alley Tangier with hipsters and hookers, posing as poets in heat, 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 large teeming 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 path to protest had been recently blazed, and it was heading straight to the political crossroads of the campus. Mike was now about to enter this political forest, and would become, in time, a pathfinder. But...just where would this path lead? To Oz? The Pentagon? The calm god's eye center of the mandala, or the whirling vortex of the ninth circle of Sixties hell. It would take another pathfinder to point to the proper direction to clear the confusion of the spinning compass needle, magnetic north was non magnetic south now, and east meets west was a Paul Butterfield Album!
Mike's old friend, and manic mentor, a terrific beatific hornblowing Honolulu cabbie who took the young runaway under his wing and tutelage, Doc Yucatan, had burst forth into Mikes life with the force and impact of a white-hot light-blinding hydrogen detonation.. As age caught up with him, as age will do without warning, Doc morphed into a feathered dream catcher. Migrating from the palm frond frontier of an island paradiso, he found comfort in settling into the azure, silver and turquoise chanting mantra lifestyle 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 personal 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, scoured the desert together looking to mentally, if not physically, if it were possible, to sex it up with one or two of the deserts psychedelically delightful cacti muses. The desert now, before, the islands...Hawaii. Mike never thought Doc would ever leave that tropical fruit basket he had called home....but then....
Doc's wife died in early '67, 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!!!"
The Army Diaries - Chapter One
...and it's one, two, three...what are we fighting for?
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.
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 song still applies....and it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for? ...
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. The Magic Army Bus
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.
The Firing Range
Vietnam, Mike thought while training. Where the fuck is that and who the fuck are they and what, yes, 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.
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 Woodstock. An ocean away, sat 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, and a plethora of psychedelics in the chemical rainbow of a multi-colored psychotropic of cancer ablaze with a hallucinagenic 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 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.
..and..it's one, two, three, what the fuck were we fighting for?
Basic training is, well...pretty basic...for mass murderers with a taste for blood. Mix anger with angst, add a dash of red, white and blue patriotism, and you have the makings for one killer cocktail of a psychosis for the creation of the American killing machine who will go out waste a village of women and children, and all in the name of Old Glory, God and Country. The American soldier has been pretty much a wimp puppet on a string for it's capitalist puppetmasters in Washington. Go ye forth, and forget about multiplying, instead subtract, take the life of the enemy, who is whoever we say it is and for whatever reasoning we can drum up or make up or think up and kill them dead. Better dead than red! Kill a commie, kill a slant, kill a kraut, kill Cong, kill raghead, kill, kill, kill, kill Bill!!
Today, returning vets from Afghanistan and Iraq have racked up more car wrecks on America's highways then those from any other invasion in American history. WWI and II it was shell shock, Vietnam it was Post Traumatic Syndrome and Agent Orange, today, it's a dire need for driver's ed. Every war has it's own special "fallout" whether it be suicide or mass murder or cancer. I guess today's vets are trying to outrun an invisible roadside IUD in a Walmart parking lot. Try yelling "INCOMING" just for fun and see what happens. Talk about a real slapstick moment...The Three Stooges couldn't top this nyuk, nyuk Kodak moment frozen in time like a deer in the headlights.
The highlight of basic training, if you happen to be from the deep south where dinner is shot on the front porch everyday and fetched by a three legged dog named Tripod is the rifle range. Used to be M-1, then M-14's and of course the all around rapid fire M-16. Those old southern boys, hot damn, could shoot the spots off a leopard at 300 yards. They could dot an "i" at half that distance. They were good, so good in fact, most of the hot shots ended up in Vietnam in an infantry unit. I managed to do well enough to barely pass. C'mon how can you not make Marksmen with the damn rifle has a sight on it..duh! Like it's a major accomplishment..the southerner obviously had a death wish or zero mentality as they didn't figure this out...Sharpshooter? Vietnam!! Makes up for slavery down on the old plantation. "Heah, .get back in that field.." now it was, "Heah, you sharpshootng white trash, hop into that body bag!"
The rifle was mystical in itself. It was a weapon, not a gun. Lord help the hapless private who called it a gun...punishment was swift, and quite frankly, entertaining. One young fellow called it a "gun" and had the wrath of Khan come down on him like a ton of drill sergeant bricks. He had to run in cirlces, rifle raised over his head with one hand, the other grabbing his crotch and had to repeat the refrain.."This is my weapon, it is not a gun, this is cock and this is for fun!" He was one of those who constantly gave the DI grief, and ended up in some sort of comic punishment pageant..we would all laugh quietly to ourselves at the comedy unfolding before us. One day on march, the "gun" kid was sick and the dispensary issued him a pass to stay in the barracks that day. We marched, chanted, fired at the range and then marched back to the barracks. When we walked in, the kid had hung himself in the barracks. We saw that..and nobody laughed this time. For most of us, this was our first look at death in the face. For most in our unit, it would not be the last time they would see or face death on it's terms in Vietnam.
Pugile sticks were another "gladiatorial" training exercise we engaged in, that was in case the enemy came up us with cushioned sticks instead of AK-47's, you never know could happen. It was a scene out of Robin Hood where he dukes it out with Little John, and unfortunately, being the smallest of the lot, I only had larger opponents to bash away at, and vice versa. In Detroit in my younger days, we had fights, but with fists and not sticks or the gangbanger zip gun affairs, and that was usually over some girl, Kathy Brenneman mostly whose sexuality infected the male populous of junior highschool to the point that black eyes replaced hard on's. I'm sure she took perverse joy in the whole situation much as the drill instructor liked seeing a bunch of new recruits beat each other bloody. In another life he was surely the Marquis de Sade, sad as it sounds.
Bayonet practice was a sticky affair too. Stuffed dummies hanging on ropes, an old Negro hung by the KKK in the old deep ass south before integration and before reason and common sense prevailed. There is no common sense however to the reasons to go to war. Ok, WWII was a bit different. World domination by the Germans and Japanese, that is history, and today it's world domination by the United States. It was time to train and man up as we had taken the place of the French in old Indo-China, and these body bags were American Made! None of this made in Japan crap! American boys in American bags for America! Usually we charged the dummies, and the drill instructor would yell out "If your grandmother attacks you with a grenade, what do you do?" The group refrain was "Kill Her!" My grandmother only used a yard stick for discipline and had never seen a rice paddy in her life. The group acted in unison, a tent revival in heat. Kill or be killed was the mantra.
They also made sure we didn't have magazines of "that type", you know tits and ass that could cause a creaking of the cot springs at night, giving away your position to the enemy. You weren't pumping led from the firing line now, you were hand pumping another weapon of choice, and it was locked and loaded and fully automatic. Showering in a herd was another experience that you may have first been exposed to in school after a sweaty gym class or sports event. Naked same gender bodies all packed in a three walled tomb of shower heads that you were positive were only a ruse and soon the Xyclon-B cannister would drop and it's asphyxiating gas would perform it's "final solution" now that you lost the state championship in front of god, coach and cheerleaders. You weren't even Jewish!
All in all, introduction to Basic Training was the Nightmare on Army Street. Unlucky 13 weeks of training to be an authorized serial killer. You can go with the flow or grab your crotch..this is my weapon, this is my gun...this if for killing, ah, yes, but this my friend, is for fun!!!
The Drill Instructor in Full Metal Jacket was not far off from the reality of insensitive derangement. Basically a man from La Mancha who favored firing machine guns at invisible windmills and perceived enemies his government has convinced him are real, in reality, not real, not a threat since 1939. The DI is an empty vessel filled with delusions of machismo, lacking in self esteem and makes up for it wearing uniforms, and accoutrements and accessories of war and authority. In civilian life his counter part is the cop, the prison guard, the mall cop, the armored car guard. The uniform adds inches to the penis of the Oedipal devoured devotee' to flex muscle and prove he really doesn't want to bang mom, at least his own, but a few of his friends have a cougar or two at home and those lucky bastards got to breast feed from her!
Our first day after getting settled into the barracks was spent in a circle on the floor in the wooden housing to introduce ourselves and tell a little about our background...I was in a particularly playful mood and having a mouth that would get me into trouble over and over while in the Army stated simply, "I was a Hippie in Haight Ashbury."
The sergeant went off like an unexploded German shell in London after the war. He went on a tirade about how "hippies" and their kind are influenced by Communists and their heathen ways and philosophies. You know, belief that African Americans deserve to go to the same schools and as Lilly's whites; belief that we should not make war on small countries who had done nothing to deserve an armed visit of intervention by the most powerful, brain dead, bully nation on the planet who would in time decimate their country, but not their resolve; a bully nation who would kill tens of thousands of their people; and at the same time would loose over 50,000 of it's own young in a war that later in retrospect was seen for what it was. A lie and a waste of time and lives. Of course, the old Viet Nam Vets ride their Harley's wear pins all over their hats and levi and leather jackets that proclaim to the world "Vietnam Vet" It's like John Wayne Gacy wearing a helicopter beanie that says.."I Kill Children" The draftee had no choice, and while the death toll mounted at least the Vietnamese were dying in defense of their country in the middle of their own civil war. In the end, they won the war, while Americans died for nothing and ended up as the bully in the school yard who finally gets what's coming to him.
After my ill-advised public "confession" I was taken aside by the sergeant who said, "I'm run you so hard, you'll want to go AWOL and when you do, I'll be standing behind you with my .45 and I swear I'll shoot you in the back" Yeah baby, you can't tell me a uniform doesn't make the man..ha! I always kept that statement in the forefront of my mind and that was the turning point in my life that pushed me over the political edge that in time to come as the realities settled in had me partial to the Weathermen as opposed to the SDS. In the words of Che Guevara.."no true revolution can be won without the spilling of blood on both sides" You know what they say..go for the headshots!
I was now officially on "the other side of the wall" and I was not going to let them put another brick into it. It was now war, and even though I was their "captive in khaki" for the next couple of years, it was a wonderful opportunity to go "underground" and undermine from within. The next years would result in the formation of illegal demonstrations, my first political writings for the military underground in the Ally newspaper, leading strikes and marches on foreign soil, smuggling and selling drugs, and my subsequent arrests and jailings, along with beating the system. each time..damn, victory is sweet. How Barbarella Cranked My Machine When I met Jane Fonda at the Shelter Half Coffee House near Ft. Lewis in 1970, it was for an anti-war speech along with Q and A with Hanoi Jane. My leftist politics were flowing like hot lava and how King Kong was much more dangerous than the Viet Cong. Look what he did to New York..whereas not one Viet Cong was shot down from the Empire State Building holding a blonde in his evil clutches.... I had been volunteering at the Shelter Half coffee house and participating in the anti-war movement within the military which is not a safe thing to do. The movement was growing and spilling over the barbed wire walls and merging with the civilian movements in the street and on the campus. I had been doing acid all day long while in Seattle waiting for Jane to arrive that evening in Tacoma. I rushed back to Tacoma at 5 to meet her, but you have to remember..although I was hard left in political thinking and action...damn it...I wanted to meet Barbarella!!!
I of course wanted to meet Hanoi Jane, but...but...I also wanted to meet Sci Fi Jane complete and replete with tasty thongs and lazer guns....and that damnable Pleasure Machine. For those of you too young..before Laura Croft, before Xena..there was Barbarella. I had seen the Vadim film a few times when it came out in '68 and my favorite scene is where Barbarella is captured by the enemy and placed inside the "excessive machine" where they crank it up for her to experience increasing pleasure, and her clothing is completely removed from the machine. When she reaches high climax she will die of pleasure writhing in ecstasy..but the machine burns out..it can't keep up with Barbarella!!! On that day heading back to Tacoma to meet her I pictured her as a flesh and blood excessive machine and I was ready to be placed inside of her to experience increasing pleasure...well...it was a visual brought on by too much acid that afternoon.. and fond masturbatory memories of the film..so yes, I was fonda Jane.
I hopped a Greyhound to Tacoma. The 'Hound is shaped like a giant silver dildo and it's cool to ride inside and feel you are penetrating someones asphalt vagina. Talk about "roadhead" ..it's a perfect preview of coming attractions and remember when it came to Barbarella...to come was indeed a verb. I got off the bus buzzing on acid and Dexedrine I took along with a joint smoked as soon as I was ejected or ejaculated from the giant silver diesel road ready steel belt dildo.
I raced to the Shelter Half as it was getting late and Jane was to talk around 7 and now it was close to 5:30 and I was in a chemical time warp without a clue as to minutes, seconds, nano-seconds, hours, quarter hours, half hours, or king biscuit flower power hours. I dashed in excited..panting...ready for the "excessive machine" to turn me into melted butter, but...but....Barbarella was not there...the machine was unplugged...and then..plugged back in again when I was told she was there to check in but she and her entourage were down the street at a dive of a Chinese Restaurant I knew well..with two you get egg roll..now with egg roll..I'd get Barbarella.
I walked in the dimly lit Chinese joint and just in front of me in a booth sat Jane, along with two of her entourage...one on one side of her and the other alone in the booth across from them. Eyes glimmering and glistening from an avalanche of acid I walked over to the table and just grinned that schoolboy deer in the headlights damn teacher you're hot look and would like to fuck you after class and detention if that is OK with you grin..Jane said simply enough.."Won't you join us" with a big grapes of wrath smile. and I a dumbstruck dumbfuck, at a loss for words nodded like some damned hunchback mute from a classic novel and sat down across from her. She extended her hand and said, "Hi, I'm Jane Fonda" with firm grasp and shake...I grabbed her hand and said..and I regret to this day these words....I looked her in the eye and said.."No SHIT!!!"
I didn't know how to pull out of this social nose dive and gaffe but the rest of the meal went fine...I had no money as usual in those days so she paid for my dinner of chow mein and also a pack of cigarettes as I was out...we all left the restaurant together and I mentioned that I happened to have a few joints to which they, the joints received a rousing reception..we took our time walking and by the time we got back to the Shelter Half we had inhaled and exhaled three bombers as big as B-52's only we were getting bombed..not some pathetic village in Vietnam...
We went in and I took my place with her entourage in the front row and Jane worked the room and gave her talk...about peace, the waste of war, the blood and the body bags and how we must end this bloodshed. This useless tragedy that was consuming our own nation by dividing it in half. Violence in the streets...violence and death to draftees and young GI's who didn't have a choice in this war...the war must end...the bloodshed must stop...stop filling body bags...make love..not war...as she spoke ...I was inspired...afterwards there was a Q and A session and of course everyone wanting to get close to Jane Fonda...afterwards...Jane and I and her two compatriots went to her hotel downtown and smoked more joints that they had, drank wine and talked for hours...
Everyone has memories of Jane Fonda...good or bad...opinions are like assholes as they say..everyone has one...but that is about Jane Fonda...Hanoi Jane or whatever you refer to her as...I don't know Jane Fonda, as I spent the night with Barbarella...locked in an excessive machine of my own desires...where I might die of extreme pleasure in the fertile Fonda in one brilliant orgasmic cosmic flash...war may be hell..but a writhing Barbarella is pure pleasure....besides...remember..Make LOVE...not WAR...with Barbarella it was more than mere love...it was pure LUST!
Culver Military School: Uniforms Piss Me Off! It was bad enough when I was in the actual military. Uncle Sams crazed cacophony of khaki with it's red, white and screwed assemblage of cannon fodder for useless war. Those of you that know me, understand the fact that I am not a team player and proud of it. How can I be, I'm a writer. By it's very definition writing is a solo pursuit...we drink a lot, we use drugs, we rant and rave about the world around us. We do it in absolute isolation, like lepers in a colony, cutoff from society. Painters and other artists are the same...we are solo acts. We don't conform..if we did we'd loose our creative direction. Individualism is a mantra...conformity is a disease we try to avoid. Then there are those times when non-conformity can bite you on the ass.
That is why when I was sent to Culver Military Academy at th age of 14 I was aghast. It was a nightmare world of Hitler Youth and regulation, spit and polish, class systems of upper classmen and lower classmen..it was worse than college as I can only imagine not having attended any institution of higher education. Man and Superman in the flesh. It was not the world you see in films like "Reds"...it is bland, boring, regimented, a conformists Garden of Eden and a non-conformists Garden of Pure Evil. It's great for those who wish to be policemen, or firemen, or service station attendants who require uniforms to wear to feel whole..to give them standing and stature in their field..to make them feel a part of something. Hells Angels, punk street gangs, and sororities..all the same...identity crisis that requires a sameness..a brotherhood..a sisterhood...a hoodlum hood...General Hood...Robin Hood....So when I was thrust headlong into this nightmarish lava pit of conformity...I felt the priests were right all along..I had been cast into fire and brimstone as punishment for whatever Catholic laws of propriety I had dared to defile and defy. Which diety had I pissed off? Jesus himself might come down off that cross and sucker punch me then crawl back up to take his place in history or mythology, whichever you believe.
It's easy to blame the circumstances that landed me there on my parents, my environment, the company I kept. Anyone but myself. Ok so taht is bullshit and glad you agree. You do agree don't you? If not, then you are not very bright are you? You make your own bed, and hopefully someone will sleep in it with you, or so my philosophy says. I had a stepfather enter my world at the age of 12, and unlike some kids, couldn't handle the intrusion. It upset the apple cart of my existence. We moved from the eastside of Detroit, my home since birth...the old neighborhood...the Italian Disneyland of Dagoism, to the lilly white pansy westside where the Frats outnumbered the Greasers 5 to one, and leather jacketed girls were replaced by prim and proper Audrey Hepburns. Penny loafers replaced boots with cleats, and peg pants gave way to the fashion of chino pants. Dago denim was out. The wet head was dead and the beach boy look was coming into vogue and the suburban landscape replaced my beloved city alleys and avenues. Dagos and Poles and Blacks and Irish mixed it up on the Eastside..on the west it was very white...almost a Canadian white...diversity only went so far and I was a fish out of water....
I began getting into fights in my new school with the penny loafer crowd but found other kindred spirits who introduced me to drinking until the needle hits vomit, and borrowing cars on the weekend that didn't belong to us. Hotwiring is an art form and we were goddamned Michaelangelos hotwiring our Sistine Chapel and revving up the statue of the Virgin Mary and watching her redline and head for the finish line where Mary Magdeline waited with arms and legs wide open. The big Buicks and your granfathers Oldsmobile turned into teen tanks .
.We'd start the cars up and take them to an old dirt track near Rouge Park..run them around until out of gas..fishtailing, radio's cranked up and then let the car sit idle after scraping a few trees and ripping the paint job and leaving a few dings and dents. We also did that with our parents cars. Roll them down the driveway...extra set of keys we stole and then fire it up down the street at midnight when they were asleep...drinking, fighting and fucking was a way of life. I started early in the arena of sex at 14. The only time you can fuck an underage girl and get away with it in a socially acceptible fashion is when you too are underage, or living in the Haight in '66. Sweet Jesus, I can still feel that softness below and that firmness above in my hand...
One night I had an argument with my dad as I got kicked out of school for the third time that year for smoking on school property again and nailed by the shop teacher. I made the mistake of grabbing him by his tie and pulled him hard, so hard he fell forward and hit the ground...my adrenaline rushing...I was then rushed to the principals office..a familiar path led the way as I had been there before. I was kicked out for week...I said, "Make it Two" so he did..duh. I didn't tell my parents thinking my life in school was invisible. I would use my sabbatical from school to hang out at the pool hall on Ford Road near Telegraph where I always fled. Bought my Chesterfields from a machine and used my allowance to shoot pool until I won enought money or lost it all to that "faster gun"
I would also spend time with my girlfriend who would skip school to meet me so would head to the woods down by the old Henry Ford Mansion ont the Rouge River to enter the age of discovery...Mr. Lewis and Ms. Clark....forging ahead...her dad found out she was skipping class and of course I was to blame so ....my parents were called an the sky fell in...My dad and mom had enough and packed me off to Culver Military Academy in Indiana. Would give me an education, make a man of me, and in time I would make something of myself. It was a costly affair and they had to really scrape to get the funds to get me in..but in they did and there I went.
The first day I saw a sea of blue uniforms..riding pants with faggish flared sides, blue shirts (they were cool), black ties, black belts, and those black jack boots that made one look like a guard straight out of Shindlers List waiting for the next trainload of soap, gold teeth and lampshades. The kids were from all over..France, England, Germany, Canada and of course the United States. Rich kids mainly whom I had nothing in common with. Rich kids piss me off to this day. The snob and clique factor was in high gear and fortunately I got share a wooden tent with two others of my "status" and reputation. Malcontents and solo acts. Drill by morning, then school with a classroom of boys, and male teachers, not one set of tits in the crowd..how the hell can you score here? It was a crashing blow of reality.
We did have horses though as it was a cavalry school and we each had our own to care for, feed, groom and best of all..ride all afternoon. We learned western saddle, eastern saddle and bare back. We had races and I never felt so free as when riding bareback across those midwestern fields and along the streams and up the hills. My horse was small, as was I, and was named Peanut..insert corresponding short joke here if you must. The only time I felt happy there was when riding or spending time with Peanut. The human factor of rich kid blues? I managed to shut them out. Close the door and bolt it.
The classrooms were rigorous...regimented..one teacher Mr. Griffin had a hard on for me and tried everything to make life miserable as I questioned everything and my military bearing left a lot to be desired. One morning entering the class he called me to the front and was brandishing the dictionary from under my chair (We all had one) He showed the class on the page under G with a picture of the mythological beast..the Griffin that someone had written Mr. Griffin and of course he blamed me. One...why I? I had no idea what a Griffin was nor even interested. Second why would he go through my dictionary of hundreds of pages an miraculously land on the page with his name on it..unless..unless..he had done it himself. He was a prick and would have fragged his ass in a combat zone with no compunction.
He decided I needed punishment of extra duty. I asked to see the camp commander to voice a complaint and make an accusation. He was livid but had to by law allow it..my peronal appearance before the "tribunal" was all one sided. Griffinized and I lost and the punishment was sustained..I have never trusted authority and this is one example of many of why. I hate uniforms, police, the military, and this is the germination point where most of that stemmed.
Well to make a long story short...I decided then and there to "desert" ...I mean it wasn't a combat zone..but I forgot..my parents who had busted their ass to get me this "education" at great cost would not get their money back...so in the dead of night after lights out I packed up and split across the fields to the dark night of Indiana highways and began hitching...got a few rides for a few miles and ended up around 2 am in farm country..deep farm country..where second cousins fuck second cousins for fun and have little inbred babies...I ended up sleeping in the barn that I snuck into..like John Wilkes Booth hiding from Federal soldiers after assassinating Lincoln..the man who gave us the draft and the income tax! As a side note..did you realize Lincoln died on April 15? The same day your taxes are due? Just an observation. So the next time you complain about your taxes..blame Lincoln..if the draft comes back..blame Lincoln. If you wasted money at the theater on the film "Lincoln"..blame Spielberg!
I left the next day and managed to get rides into Michigan and just north of the state line hit US 12, or Michigan Ave. ..that effectively runs from downtown Detroit across the state to downtown Chicago. It was the old military road and linked the regions two arsenals in the glory days of the territory, when Chicago was named Fort Miami after the Misamiami indian tribe in the area, and not Little Havana in Florida!
My parents had already gotten the call that I was missing. I didn't know that but felt a heroes welcome would be mine. I did learn to ride horses, I stood up for my rights and made it home alone hitch hiking. Damn, there would be ticker tape parades, my moms outstretched arms to take her loving son to her bosom. Dad so proud of his boy...the neighbors cheering...flags waving... a ticker tape parade...an appointment as Ambassdor to some third world country with barechested natives, and a statue erected in my honor.
Nothing was further from the truth...it was a living hell...my parents it seemed had their personalities taken over by aliens from space..they weren't the same..they were as angry as a hive of pissed off bees....I was immediately laid into...grounded for life it seemed and I wasn't greeted as the hero home from battle...I was the bad guy! Me...the bad guy! My white hat had fallen off somewhere on the dusty trail.
I had to go back to school...and of course everyone knew the story by now...and the crowd I hung with before was proud...what more can I ask for...I started right back up where I had left off..fights, girls, borrowing cars for joy rides...but it wasnt the same...something had changed...in time I decided on another journey and by the next summer had made plans to leave again..but on my own ....my choice and took what money I had earned working at the car wash and as a dishwasher at the pancake house and ended up in LA...three days later I was in Honolulu...Now I thought..this is paradise and I can live like a king forever!!! Military school was well in the past..but I never lost my love for horses and riding and always will..but another thing remains constant as well...I still hate uniforms..but have a penchant for grass skirts and coconut bras! Americans....screw this....it's time to Kick out the Jams, Motherfuckers!!" A Three Day Pass to The Poor Peoples March - 1968 It was a grand experiment that sprang from the passionate flowing fountain of the Sixties Civil Rights movement. It was a throwback to the days of Civil Disobidience and the Bonus Marchers on Washington in an earlier era. This was not a veterans march, a union protest or a ghetto-ized singular racial issue. It was poor people...pure and simple..a march on Washington. Not that wimpy Occupy Movement that had no teeth or balls at all and is still an embarrasment by protest standards.
No, this march had a Genesis...a prophet..a visionary with a dream. Martin Luther King was already in the government crosshairs but undeterred he platned the seed for a Poor Peoples March on Washington, DC. They would come from across the nation, poor Blacks, poor Latino's, poor Whites, poor Native Americans. Anyone who was at the bottom of the American societal food chain would be represented.
The idea non-violent and pure Martin Luther King, who unfortunately was cut down before he could see it to fruition. An assassins bullet brought King down..but did not kill the idea of a Poor Peoples March. It was now fuel injected with a life and power of it's own at this point and there was no stopping the juggernaut.
The project was now under the care and guidance of Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson and of course, Correta King. The plan was to march en masse on Washington DC in an effort to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States.
It was a frightening prospect for the politicians in DC to gaze out of their plush tax payer paid for office windows to witness thousands of marchers, angry, poor, broke on the Washington Mall erecting a tent city...squatters claiming turf...after all it is “the governemnt of the people” They would stay for six weeks, camped out. The Justice Department felt this was the Bolshevik Army on the move to torch Washington and take over the government, so the FBI instituted POCAM to disrupt the campaign with provocateurs and to monitor the marchers, photograph them and to discredit the project and it's goals. Land of the Free eh? Can you say "Freedom of Speech" or spell "Democracy?"
At the same time I was in AIT training at Ft. Lee, Virginia, just prior to graduation and shipment to Okinawa. I was becoming more of an activist on a daily basis, and the Poor Peoples March was something I had to be a part of, along with my friend and comrade, (yes, I love that word and the effect it has on Right Wingers!) Dave. We were both mere privates but even a private gets a weekend pass and most head to Virginia Beach or Norfolk for the nightlife and sexual encounters. Dave and I however decided, lets go to DC..lets see what is really going on..and lets lend a hand and do our part. Many we knew talked a good game, but we felt action is activism, as I still do, and talk is cheap.
We hopped a bus on base and headed to the capital. Once we got to town and got off the bus we immediately headed for the Washington Mall and Tent City, also called Resurrection City. Cops were everywhere, the military was there with rifles and bayonets, it looked like an occupied city and indeed it was. Jefferson was right...the people should not be afraid of it's government...their government should be afraid of it's people! The Capital was on high alert...the White House was in a panic...Vietnam was another issue raging and Civil Rights and Human Rights were now taking center stage by storm.
Dave and I went wading in the Reflecting Pool with hundreds of others.....it was small act of Civil Disobidience that would not leave a lasting mark in Thoreau's mind were he alive but the mugginess of the capital warranted a dip in the pool..besides Lincoln would have loved it even if LBJ didn't. And who cared what the politicians felt anyway...after our "outrageous act of treason" we decided to go to Tent City, go in and be a part of what we felt was one solution to the problem, so brazenly we walked to the "gate" of snowfencing, past the FBI sentinels with binoculars and got a three day pass to enter (I still have this pass today, actually my daughter who is keeper of the Marino flame has it in a collection)
We went in and blended in with the cacophony of society...it was a smorgasbord of racial diversity, the poor from all corners of the country. The deep south, the west coast, the rustbelt, New York City..you name it and poverty was well represented. As we were walking the grounds and talking to people we were approached by what we found out later was a contingent of the Black Stone Rangers, a notorious street gang of the time in Chicago. It must have been our white faces and short military hair that prompted their inquiry as to why we were there..and then...arrested by them and placed into chicken wire "jail cell" for questioning..We had come to see the dream of Martin Luther King and discovered it had been highjacked by a more violent element, which in any revolution is natural evolution and inevitable.
We were questioned for over two hours and eventually they let us go, with apologies but with guns on the table while your being questioned is a nerve wracking affair to say the least. They took us to the food area so we could grab a lunch of beans and rice and left us on our own and in fact were quite polite to us. I guess we passed the poverty test. Or the stupidity test..I guess with all the FBI and Military surveilance out and about and along come two military haircutted good intentioned individuals who look the part...you just had to go with the flow. We spent a few more hours and at one point another group of Rangers came up to check our papers, gave us the ok and they led us to gate when we said we were leaving..they were polite we all waved and we walked out of the compound...right into the arms of waiting FBI agents who handcuffed us and took us aside to question us about the tent city!
Were there any guns in there? No, sir, didn't see any. How about dope and drug use? No sir, didn't see any...it went on like this and finally as we were military, we were taken to the naval jail in Annapolis sitting in a cell until the MP's came for us to escort us in handcuffs back to Ft. Lee where we would have to face our CO to answer a lot of questions including an FBI report, a shore patrol report, and god knows what else. Thankfully I didn't own an Italian hunting rifle or would have been accused of assasinating JFK years earlier.
We arrived on base late at night and were taken to the CO's office, Captain Benjamin...a Black Officer! He got up from behind his desk after the MP's left and walked over to us and said in a loud voice.."What the fuck were you too thinking of?" Dave who was from Jamaica Queens in NYC said, "Sir, we were just visiting my family!" At that..we all started laughing, but not for long. Captain Benjamin said, "You do have to be punished for this. I have to set an example as this will be all over the post by tomorrow...ok, for the next three night, you two are on guard duty." So for the next few nights we marched for hours guarding an empty coal bin outside the barracks...who the hell will steal coal dust anyway...but as he said..he had to make an example and lets face it..we could have done time in the stockade for the stunt we pulled..singing "as simple song of freedom"
Graduation time came at AIT, the Poor People's March was behind us and we stood at attention while Captain Benjamin handed us our diplomas and orders for our next duty station. Captain Benjamin leaned into me to talk quietly in my ear..."God help your next commanding officer, but you made life interesting for me and by the way, you have conviction and that is why you weren't sent to the stockade" or something to that effect.
I will always remember Tent City, and when I look at that old three days pass now faded and yellowed, I get a rush of a memory of a fantastic experiment in Civil Rights that even the FBI and the Military could not bring down the way a bullet brought down MLK. The dream was still alive...and more to the point so was civil disobideince and activism along with healthy dose of Freedom of Speech...even getting jailed was a pleasant fullfilling experience..what did Thoreau say.."If laws are unjust, the only place for a just man to be is in jail..." The Lifer and the Kid Going into the army in the Sixties was a frightening experience...your mind raced like a mo-sheen at Talladega..would I end up dead in some shit hole rice paddy outside the village of Suc Muc Dic in Vietnam, or held captive as POW playing Russian Roulette in downtown bars as the Christopher Walken character in "The Deer Hunter"? Better that than Ned Beatty in "Deliverance" squealing like a pig for two guys who had more banjos than teeth. So color me surprised, and khaki when I got orders to go to Okinawa. The Rock as it is affectionately called is a small sliver of volcanic land in the South China Sea south of Japan and just east of Mao's Red Star Cafe and Casino where even topless dancers in a Chinese workman’s cap can't elicit a decent erection from GI Joe.
I landed in Okinawa, already writing part time for the ALLY underground newspaper which was the military equal of the Digger Papers in San Francisco. I was also a distributor for the paper that I passed out and around in a round about way to "convert" the masses to revolution. Not a Trotsky by an means, I did my best and managed to rally support. Led protest marches on foreign soil..actually it was Okinawa and the military was the intruder "foreigner" but lead a peace march in full uniform in the Sixties and the shit truly does hit the fan.
One man who I distrusted as "the enemy" was a first sergeant named, Starr. No relation to Ringo at all. This Starr marched to a different drummer..a military drummer. He had served at the tail end of WWII..you know..the BIG ONE..as those guys with all the pins on their ball caps that reminds us to remember the Arizona while dousing ourselves in booze at the VFW reliving the war one bullet or bomb at a time while getting bombed by an invading army led by Rear Admiral Jim Beam.
Sgt. Starr ran a tight ship at Machinato Base where I was stationed. His favorite phrase when he didn't believe you was "Aw, Horseshit!" Those two words were like a wall of words...those two words..said it all...it said.."your in my rifle sight and I'm ready to fire so don't fuck up!" I did..many times. I was bringing marijuana by the kilo into Okinawa from Thailand, acid from San Francisco from old friends and making quite a living while residing off-post in Naha living amongst the locals. I was Colonel Kurtz living up river, severed from the military command.
Sgt. Starr would call me into the office and lock my heels..you ex-military types will understand that...the rest of you can use your imaginations and have a field day with it's meaning. We had a new CO ...90 day wonder second louie louie, fresh out of college and without a clue as to what the realities were in Okinawa. He was starched and salute happy and threatened to rid the company of it's dope smokers...drunks were fine..you could send them to Vietnam and they'd be all ten foot tall and bullet proof until the they were deep in the shit up country.
Starr it turns out liked me..why? I don't know we were planets apart..he a flag waving John Wayne Patriot ..me a not so flag waving but gimme an F kind of kid out to change the world and end wars and poverty and hunger...obviously I failed..those are all still with us...my apologies..the next guy will try harder. Well..the story continues..Starr called me in the office and warned me about it. We would be smoking in the paint shed out back at night, but the new guy found out and had it padlocked. Starr at that point gave me, and I couldn't believe it...permission to move off base and get an apartment! He also warned me about CID (cops) that were looking into the "dope problem" although didn't identify them. The rest of us had a feeling who they were..new guys, bad acting, overly curious...cover blown, but it was Starr's intentions to cover my ass that made me look at him in a different light..like Mafia guys respect Cops...they are only doing their jobs...and it dawned on me...Starr and I both respected each other..we were only doing our jobs..mine to push the envelope..his job to keep the envelope from exploding like an over filled balloon full of paint that would ruin Carries prom night.
One night before the major IG inspection..where the god like general arrives to inspect barracks, billets and bullets...a few of us were on acid and smoke that night...went to the second floor roof of the barracks and spray painted a monster peace symbol on the side of the yellow building..the peace symbol was black so highly visible..and I knew would be irritating...we however were seen by some guys and they sang like canary's...we were busted and the CO had me sent to a disciplinary barracks on the island, one step below the stockade. There were others there just like me. Political activists, dopers, hell it was the Briar Patch and I was Brer Rabbit..they were going to court martial me and my communications were cut off, but Sgt. Starr in his way made sure letters got out to my parents through a third party friend of mine. Soon there was a Supreme Court Judge from San Fran involved in the case and Senator Hart in Washington. My folks were also ardent liberals and besides..I was their only child, yes spoiled rotten, but lovable and cuddly at the same time..ha!
They were going to ship me to Vietnam as a tunnel rat but all the interceding stopped that process. Next they offered me Officer Candidate school which meant they could have me off the island and my influence as well within two days. I said yes I would go but only if I could command the disciplinary barracks of malcontents. I think they saw my plan that I was formulating..At last..hot to Trotsky I was ready to lead the revolt..well..they found that revolting so instead..just made plans to send me stateside..to be done with me like a spent cartridge on the rifle range.
I eventually left Okinawa for Fort Lewis, Washington..but strangely, and I still have them, and treasure them, are the letters from Sgt. Starr as we wrote each other for years after my Okinawan stint. He kept me informed of how the new guys were adjusting, who got busted that I may know, who was leaving the island, etc. I asked him once as he had been in the army for so many years.."Where's home?" his reply was simply.."Here on any base." His family lived with him and like true army families went from base to base except to the front lines in Korea and Vietnam. I got to know him and his family in last months on the island.
Later in the late 70's I got a letter from his widow..Sgt. Starr had retired and moved the family to Lincoln, Nebraska where he was originally from...and died within the year. I did something I never did voluntarily up until that time...I saluted in memory of Sgt. Starr, and felt I could hear him laughing, winning finally, and bellowing from khaki heaven or hell or wherever he was commanding the troops. The strangest thing is that to this day if I disagree with someone..I let out a heart "Aw Horseshit" and somehow the planets are perfectly aligned after that and I feel like Zeus commanding mythological armies of peace. Starr did teach me something valuable..even if the odds are against you as they were for me...fight the battle anyway...raise your sword and yell out HORSESHIT and the lead the charge. You may not win..but at least you can look yourself in the mirror everyday with pride. When I do die, I hope I get assigned to Sgt. Starr’s company and I'll know it's him if I hear a cranky old lifer who was full of life locking my heels and yelling at me on the one hand..and winking silently at the same time and giving me lots of room to be human. It's yin yang at it's best...war and peace ... Bang a Buddhist Gong, Hit an American Bong, and Get it On...in Bangkok!
Bangkok! Land of Asian delights, diverse and perverse. A smorgasbord of sexual activities unmatched in this or any other universe. The city at night is the definitive John Rechy poster child for Mailers naked and the dead..or actually the naked and the very alive..gyrating and dancing..the B-Girls, the B-Boys even if your menu calls for that, or a second helping or one from colmn A and from column B. Strip club hawkers and black marketeers not to be confused with Mouseketeers or Rocketeers or first or second or third level tiers or even tears for fears. The whole scene makes North Beach at night look like a bad wet dream. Bangkok is the real thing. No rules...and it takes no prisoners. Besides..where in hell else could you go in 1969 and score a kilo of pure mountain grown grass for a mere $100 and repackage it into one ounce lids and clear maasive amounts of moola? Do the math... Now... that is American capitalism and enterprise at it's finest teaming up with a we are the world busines arrangement with our Asian partners in a true expression of international cooperation, especially as the war in Vietnam was raging away in the former Indo-China not too far away. I didn't really care for the army but at least they sent me overseas to experience other cultures...god help me if I was stuck stateside for my tours. FTA you know...especially the fun and the travel...besides I'd already seen America from stem to stern..
While stationed in Okinawa for close to two years I was buying LSD from my friends back in the Haight for $3 bucks a tab and reselling for $7.50 on the island. It was also an item of exchange and barter in Thailand for some of the finest weed around. So we (my two partners and I) would hop aboard the khaki magical mystery tour on the magic bus of military transport to Tranny Land and the land of herbal milk and honey. We weren't the only one who got involved in this process..many had gone before and many had gone after we were long gone. So many in fact it became known as the Santa Fe Trail of Marijuana. Pioneers in wagons ho mode for the mother lode.
We'd fly from Kadena on Okinawa to Bangkok and there "Peter" would meet and greet us. Hell, this guy could work the room and was more in tune with marketing than most Chamber of Commerce toadies today. He'd have a car waiting and would take us to dinner or lunch as the case may be, put us up at his city home and at night...it was a plunge into the nightlife of nightclubs, cabarets, massage parlors and whore houses. An evening of delightful debauchery, followed by a couple hours sleep and then hit the road early after a quick breakfast and a joint, the breakfast of champions! and headed north to get swallowed whole into the depths of Thailand’s north country where law and order was merely a couple of body guards with automatic weapons and must admit not one smile ..they would have been great Secret Service and I have no doubt if they were in Dallas in '63, Kennedy would be a doddering old fool today wandering aimlessly about the studio looking for Larry King..the living cadaver of CNN.
This was an exploratory trip as we had 10 days in Bangkok and had much yet to taste and sample but in a nutshell...we showed Peter the cash for the kilo along with 10 hits of LSD with market value in Thailand of $15 bucks a tab. Inflation you know to get elation, or pontification, or the Buddha's own illumination.
After driving for almost three hours on some of the worst roads imaginable we made it to "the farm" ...a real rustic affair cut into the forest as tough it were a giant crop circle carved from outer space by some spaced outers. It was a veritable hive of activity..with workers harvesting the crop and taking it to an already overflowing enclosure simply called a shed and that is all it was. Corrugated roof with open sides and tables and tables full of magnificent manna in the form of natures own. The sweet smell of cleaned weed, cleaned by hand and baskets to catch the seeds and stems yet porous enough to let the sweet drippings of weed sex fall through onto the plastic sheets below for packaging. A real Grant Wood moment..or in this case...Gra nt Weed moment.
We got the nickle kilo tour and joined in the cleaning process with the workers. They understood English as they had much contact with the US military in the past. Lets face it..we were not an army of one..we were a stoned out army of none..we didn't want this war, but what the hell..lets knock on the neighbors door and borrow cup of cannibus?
We slept in the house at the farm that night, dropped one of the extra hits of acid each that I had kept for personal use not commerce and smoked a lot of Peters product. It was the strongest I had experienced in a long time. There was some laced with opium bits and that was a real Alice in Wonderland experience...in the north of Thailand...a strange stranger in a stranger land..but somehow it was all familiar. We slept until noon the next day and told Peter we had a deal. We paid half with Peter to bring the actual product to Bangkok in a few days just before we left. (He had done this before and had a reputation most politicians would be proud to have when it came to honesty..PS..he didn't let us down) Lets face it two GI"s on leave for 6 more days or so in Bangkok with a kilo of weed would have drawn attention and we'd end up in some "Deer Hunter" underwater cage with taunting guards dropping snakes in on us. Not thanks to tanks..
The next days and nights were spent in a sexual whirl wind ...the tranny clubs referred to in the states at the time and in Asia as "chicks with dicks" were the busiest venues on the planet...the clubs were stacked side by side like a sexual traffic jam on the LA freeway. The massage parlors and whore houses were also cheap and plentiful..and I must say creative....these girls were artists in the truest sense. Our canvas was stretched and pulled taut and tight while they worked on creating masterpieces in the gallery of carnal arts.
One day to go and Peter showed up as promised with the product an we paid the other half and bid each other one of those Casablanca ending speeches...you know.."Well Louie this looks to be the start of a beautiful friendship and for the next year it was indeed..and highly profitable too. Security on Okinawa for military was exceptionally lax at the time..but in Bangkok the authorities were corrupt so they were paid off by Peters groups and everybody was happy..thank Gawd for corrupt government officials everywhere...I salute you on the one hand and salute you with one finger on the other...
We made other shorter trips to Bangkok ...as well as Tokyo and Seoul. One thing about being stationed on Okinawa in the army...I got to see some wonderful cities and have some wonderful experiences that can be found only behind closed doors in places like Bangkok. The guilty part is that most guys when the got their "leave" they flew to the states to visit family...I opted for bordellos and bongs. So if you ever plan to go to Thailand..bang a Buddhist gong, smoke from a bong and get it on...in Bangkok