New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
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by Larry L. Dill
Chapter 4: Geronimo Tears
My 1-A status with my Texas draft board hung like a cloud over my head from the day I left the seminary in Austin through the entire time I lived in New York from October until the end of December of 1968. My failure to obtain conscientious objector status coupled with my failed attempt to recover my lost religious piety had left me as battle scarred as war veteran. The idea of going to Canada seemed as remote as ever and I guess I had simply resigned myself to going into the service. Though it seemed likely that if drafted I would go to Vietnam and quite possibly die there, I felt a strange relief once I had accepted my fate. I knew my parents would be proud of me and I felt somehow that anything else was suspiciously cowardly no matter what one’s profession of faith or political belief. Most men, I believed, and still believe, feel an instinctive need to prove themselves courageous. I had flirted with the idea of proving my courage by going to jail to protest the war, and if that would have been the true test of my courage, I suppose I proved a coward. I had crossed some line, over some invisible border of belief and conviction and was living in another country, but I no longer felt at home in the skin of protestor. I was not in any way slipping back into the beliefs of my youth, into some kind of patriotic gore. No there was a third way. The way of existential authenticity. Big words, yes. But you look at what I’m trying to tell you that I was feeling and give it another label. I decided to see as much of the world, starting with my own country, as I could. 3 days after Christmas, four months after arriving in New York I sent my duffle bag on a greyhound bus to Miami and with a foot of snow on the ground in Manhattan hitched a ride through the Holland Tunnel right out on to the New Jersey Turnpike and headed on down to Florida myself with just a backpack and my first guitar, a cheap pawn shop guitar with rusty strings, given to me by the only woman I had ever had a date with in New York. I barely knew how to play it. In Florida I spent my first night on an Indian reservation, soon found a room in a flop house behind a truck stop and began an odd adventure with a 19 year old girl, who picked me up on the side of the road in Ft Lauderdale on New years eve. We hit it off immediately. She went to Broward County Community College, worked part-time at Sears and still lived at home with her parents. I stayed in touch with my parents by mail and about a month after arriving in Florida I received the only telegram I have ever received in my life. My father had written, “Draft notice arrived. Call home. Dad.” Diane and I discussed it and since she had a car and wanted to escape South Florida suburban mediocrity for the revolutionary world of San Francisco, we agreed to take off together the next day. I swear I can’t remember if I told her that I had a draft notice waiting for me in Texas or not. For that matter I can’t remember ever promising to go with her to California, either. She was ready ride and so was I. She showed up the next morning at the appointed time but instead of being in her car she was dropped off by a girl friend. She figured her parents would initiate an APB for the car and we’d be picked up before we got out of Florida. So we hitchhiked to Texas. That trip is another story, too but we’re trying to stay focused on the question, “What did you do in the war, daddy.” The last time I saw Diane was when I took her to the Greyhound Station in downtown Austin and put her on a bus for San Francisco. The last time I heard from her was a post card I received during basic training at Fort Bliss in El Paso when she had passed through on her way back to Florida, her hippie adventure evidently over.
Once in boot camp at Ft Bliss (now February, 1969) it was the legendary hurry up and wait. I had started smoking in New York. And drinking beer. I’d never been much of an athlete in school but boot camp on 2 packs of Camels a day was hell. The running got to me. My lungs were always on fire. But I kept up. My favorite thing about the Army was the food. Just what everybody else complained about. Lots of meat and potatoes, lots of cobbler, and all the ice cold milk you could drink. I was intimidated at first by the black guys. Like every other red blooded American boy I’d been through the gauntlet of locker room teasing in high school in south San Antonio, but the truth was there were no black kids in our school and though I was 24 now, considerably older than my peers whose average age was about 20, I’m not sure I can remember ever having met more than one or two black people in my life, even in college. I once heard the Pulitzer prize winning black playwright, August Wilson, describe the difference between the way a group of black men and a group of Asian men (for example) behaved in a restaurant. He said the black men would be shouting and taunting each other in an otherwise quiet restaurant as if they were, well, in a locker room. The Asian men would be quiet and dignified. These black guys in boot camp were constantly putting me through the ringer. Besides continually bumming cigarettes off of me, “Do you eat pussy?” was one of their favorite taunts. “Hey, Dill,” they would say, “Come over here man. Lemme axe you a question. Do you eat pussy?” If you said “No” you were lying (or inexperienced, it was hard to tell with these guys). If you said “yes” you were disgusting. I came out of the 60’s and out of my service in the US Army with one of my most vivid memories being of my perplexity over whether or not black men thought cunnilingus was good or bad or unmanly or whether they were just putting me on, basing their own misperceptions of white men as not being romantic enough to really know how to please a woman.
During the early weeks of boot camp, which I believe was about 6 weeks long, I was called one day into the office of a Colonel in the CID, the Central Intelligence Division, the internal military equivalent of the FBI. The reason for the meeting was two-fold. First of all he wanted to know why I had refused to sign the loyalty oath during the induction procedures. The loyalty oath as I recall it, having seen it for only a few moments 35 years ago and without having seen it since, said something like, “there are no circumstances under which I will refuse to obey the orders of my superiors in defense of my country.” I had accepted my draft notice and had shown up for duty as ordered out of the natural flow of fate that seemed to control my life. But once having committed myself when asked direct philosophical questions like those proposed by the loyalty oath, I became stubborn and argumentative, what we now call passive aggressive. Now that I had committed what I considered to be the heroic act of accepting the draft without running away to another country or faking my way into some loophole draft deferment available only to the educated or the well informed, I felt I had the right to question authority like any good graduate student would do in a seminar on English literature. “How do I know that I will not be ordered at some point to commit acts that go against my conscience?” I said to the Colonel. He smiled.
“You’re not a communist, are you?” “Of course not,” I said. And then as if to dismiss the whole loyalty issue as irrelevant, he said, “Well the real reason we’ve called you here is to inform you that on the basis of your test scores during your induction procedures, I am prepared to offer you a position in Officer Candidate School.” My first thought was about how proud my father would have been of me if I had become an officer in the US military. I almost said yes. But I stood up and thanked the Colonel for his understanding and said that I was sorry but that to accept such a path would be to betray my conviction that this war and all wars were generally unnecessary and tragic and that to become an officer would be to collaborate with values and ideas that were abhorrent to me. I saluted the Colonel and again he smiled and told me matter-of-factly that I still had a few days to make up my mind. I went back to the barracks and the black draftees who were still waiting for a definitive answer about whether or not I ate pussy.
Besides the food (which as I said before, was amazingly good), the one thing that made Boot Camp tolerable was Bill Buckner. Buckner, like me, was a college graduate, an English major and about my age. His father, the head chaplain at NASA was an Episcopalian Priest and the author of one of the first public prayers used by astronauts in outer space. Knowing that about Buckner was strangely comforting. And it must have made him feel somehow invincible. He was fearless. We immediately became subversive comrades in arms and did everything our analytical minds could devise to get out of work. We fed off of each other’s rebellious spirits and nascent creativity. I was a poet. Buckner, whose hero was Nabokov, was an aspiring writer as well. The first thing we successfully pulled off was to take advantage of a situation in which there were not enough beds on the first floor where our platoon was bunked and Buckner and I had to sleep upstairs with another platoon. We hatched a plan that when it came time to mop the floors, wash the windows and clean the latrine we would tell the leaders of our platoon that we had to work upstairs with the platoon where we were actually sleeping. When asked upstairs about our lack of participation in cleaning chores we would say that we had to do all that stuff with our actual platoon which was bunked downstairs. I don’t know who had the idea originally, but we were always on the exact same page even when we had to split up to gather intelligence or create PR smokescreens on one or the other floors. Day after day when we thought the coast was clear we would high tail it out a side door and head for the on base Dairy Queen just 2 blocks away where we would eat banana splits or chocolate sundaes and talk about literature and women (and yes, about the pros and cons of eating pussy). It is a miracle we never got caught. But reveille was 4 o’clock in the morning. Once the routine of basic training got under way, we rarely saw any officers other than drill sergeants. These guys were legendary hard asses but since they were getting us out of bed at 4 am, and since they did not stay in the barracks with us but most were married, had families and lived off base, their day began around 2 am. By 4 in the afternoon the drill sergeants (hard ass as they were) had already been up for 14 hours and screaming at us for 12. They went home to their wives. “Natural leaders” among the trainees were put in charge of each platoon. The drill sergeants would conduct white glove inspections throughout the barracks every morning at 5. Infractions would cost the entire platoon extra duty during the day, which could be anything from extra push-ups to running extra miles. We ate supper at 5 pm, had three hours to clean the barracks and lights were out at 8. They were killing us with exercise during the day, and had us in a no win situation with the barracks maintenance at night even when they weren’t there. When I say “we” I mean all of us except for Buckner and me. Neither one of us ever touched a mop to water, never ran a waxing machine or cleaned a toilet. We spent our evenings at the Dairy Queen talking about art…and stuff.
When Basic Training was over, Buckner and I said our goodbyes. He went directly to Chicago to become an information specialist for the 4th Army. Whether or not his father’s connections at NASA had anything to do with such a plum job, I have no idea. Maybe his father really was good at the prayer thing. Maybe Buckner, who claimed to be an avowed atheist, had been pulling my leg the way he and I had pulled the Army’s during Basic Training. After a few letters to each other, we lost contact. I went to Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, just south of Tucson, right on the Mexican border, to train to become a company clerk. I never had another soul mate in the Army like Buckner, but in the month or so I spent at Ft Huachuca, I managed to make some friends. One, whose name I can neither remember nor would I reveal if I could, we’ll just call him, Dude, was a classic “dope head” who always had marijuana on him and was a regular heroin addict throughout his military career. He had been busted for possession and sale of marijuana in Los Angeles—busted for a quantity that could have drawn him a 20 year sentence—but had been given a reprieve by a judge who offered him the alternative of military service. It was a no-brainer for the Dude. It was like throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. On a weekend furlough trip with him from Clerk School at Ft Huachuca to Phoenix to see his old friend who owned the club where the British rocker, John Mayall, was playing that weekend, I spent one of the haziest, most out of control weekends of my lifetime. Like a dog or a small child who has ventured a little too far from familiar surroundings I was actually ecstatic to get back to the security and order of a military base. The last time I heard from the Dude was after I got out of the Army. He’d gotten an early discharge as I had. His discharge was of course for drug abuse. With his 212 discharge in hand Dude left all of his military clothing behind in Korea, filled his duffle bag with cheap but quality Asian marijuana (US street value at the time about $15,000) flew back to the US on a military aircraft (this was all before drug sniffing dogs or urine tests) and walked off the base in Seattle, Washington with his drugs and an honorable discharge. It still makes me nervous just to think about him.
Clerk school at Ft Huachuca was nothing like Boot Camp. It was like being back in school. A boarding school. Or away at college or a corporate training camp. The camp itself was beautiful, like Camp David set in the desert southwest. The weather was perfect. It was April. There was no harassment by drill sergeants. We were up at 6. Breakfast at 7. School at 8. Classes in typing, military regulations and administrative procedures were conducted about the same way they would have been in a well disciplined business school. We had an hour break for lunch and classes ended at 5. Dinner was at 6 and the evenings were free. There was an Olympic sized swimming pool, a library, a bowling alley, a day room with table tennis, darts and television, and religious services almost every night for those who were interested. Many of the guys found ways of running off or hiding out in the evenings in order to do drugs as I’ve already mentioned. But I usually avoided both the authorized and the unauthorized recreational activities, keeping to myself, reading, writing or taking long walks out into the desert to watch the sunset.
On one such walk I suddenly realized that I had walked so far south out into the desert without having come to any fence that I might actually be off the base. Not only off the base but out of the country. I might be in Mexico. Beyond me in the blue haze of the desert evening I could see the western crests of the Sierra Madre Mountains. I thought long and hard about turning back. I was after all an Eagle Scout. I had had wilderness survival training. In fact I had taught wilderness survival training at scout camp. Thanks to US Army boot camp I was in the best physical condition I had ever been in my life. Within a few weeks I would find out whether or not I would be sent to Vietnam. I had already dodged one bullet by being sent to clerk school rather than to advanced combat training. But whatever your MOS (military occupation specialty) be it office or supply clerk, mechanic or cook, if you were sent to a combat zone you were being sent into harm’s way.
I looked out at those beautiful Mexican mountains, perhaps no more than 10 miles away. I sat down in the sand and cried. The endless expanse of sunset cast 100 foot shadows behind the cactus plants that surrounded me. Four months earlier I had been within a day’s drive of the Canadian border and I had turned away. Now I was at the other end of the country, standing on the Mexican border, (maybe I was actually in Mexico) and I couldn’t do it. It was one of the defining moments of my life. I was against the war. Leaving the country would have been a profound and courageous act of protest. Leaving the country here and now by escaping into the mountains of Northern Mexico as Geronimo had once done would have been as physically and intellectually challenging and as morally ennobling as any thing I might ever again expect to have the opportunity to do in my life, even in Vietnam.
Still sitting cross legged in the sand with the tears still streaming down my face and a baby tarantula rocking back on its hind legs looking up at me, I turned to look back at Ft. Huachuca, which looked every bit like one of the Hollywood cavalry outpost movie sets that had been fashioned after it. To the west, to the south and to the south east as far as I could see the desert stretched away to the mountains of Mexico. The tarantula never took another step toward me. It turned slowly as if having finished conveying its mysterious message to me and crawled back into the desert night. I stood up, wiped the tears from my eyes, dusted the sand off my fatigues and walked back to the barracks. I spoke to no one that night and no one spoke to me. Within a few days I learned I would be bound for Korea instead of Vietnam, there most likely to spend the rest of my military service obligation in relative peace and personal security.
Go to Chapter 5, The Crossing: Part 1, The Letter
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