Playing Army: Bullet Pointing a Boomer Experience

During the Vietnam War, an M16 clip held 20 rounds. Basic Training drill instructors nagged recruits to call the weapon a rifle rather than a gun (“You use your gun for something else”). The M16, on semi-automatic, fired one bullet at a time. On automatic, rounds fired in bursts. The enemy’s AK47, less accurate but lighter, proved less likely to malfunction in the field. One drill sergeant advised loading only 18 rounds to avoid jamming. This story, with time, is fully loaded:

• #1

1968: In the middle of this night, adrenaline’s rushing. With Frank and Gil, I low crawl from our mountain perch overlooking our objective. Blackness shrouds the night; ground fog curls through trees; muffled shuffling signals others descending; dim light below beckons.

I’m 19. Action. Downhill. We separate from other tasked squads. The light show, to shock and awe, explodes above—too soon. Spotting awakened enemy, cut off, we flee. Lacking communication, rebuking ourselves, we reconnoiter to return near dawn.

Emboldened by earlier failure, we spread the chemical we carry and block our target’s exit before returning, with a story to share back at home base.

Operation Rolling Thunder? Battle of Khe Sanh? Battle of Hue?

Hardly!

A St. Mary’s College raid on the University of San Francisco campus before a football game. Big boys playing soldier. Fireworks, orchestrated by our senior “munitions expert,” provide shock and awe. The chemical? Smelly stuff concocted by a junior chem major. Reconnoitering site? Gil’s family house in the city’s Sunset District. Our target? A U.S.F. dorm.

The foul smells in dorms, classrooms, and fountains supposedly rescued U.S.F. students from Friday morning tests. The next week we “capture” a revenge-minded U.S.F. student, lurking on our suburban campus. Held POW-like in our student lounge, he gets his head shaved before being released, sans clothes, in a Moraga Shopping Center.

College students, derisive of the war, playing army while less fortunate peers fight in Vietnam.

• #2

Racial reckoning and the unpopular war fragments generations. The campus atmosphere on the first day of December, 1969, is tense: Draft lottery.

The random choice of ping pong balls from a Bingo machine promises fairness in the cannon fodder draft. I, like many, have marched against the war in Berkeley and San Francisco. The powers-that-be don’t stir the ping pong balls. December birthdays, last ping pongs in, overwhelmingly get chosen first. My December 6^th birthday draws number ten. A classmate draws a black cross next to my name.

• #3

The Oakland Induction Center mid-March. Crowds demonstrate loudly on Webster Street: My physical to join an Army Reserve unit, the 91^st Committee Group, its mission, if activated, to step in to conduct Basic Training if Fort Ord personnel get rotated out.

I peer out the opened second-story foot-level transom at demonstrators below, demonstrators like me. My backside stands at attention as I bend, face away, from the middle of two-hundred other bottoms-up unfortunates. A circulating doctor conducts perfunctory hernia checks, quick time. He has a cockeyed gaze when, violated, I glance back. My first non-playful army experience sets the tone: The Army has me by the balls.

• #4

College students, most Caucasian, join Reserve and National Guard units to avoid Vietnam. LBJ and Nixon, fearful of blowback, didn’t want to send fortunate sons to ’Nam. Larry and Ned, both of whom joined the same Reserve unit after graduating earlier (Larry’s lottery number: In the 300s), reassure me the 91^st wasn’t sent overseas during either World War or Korea.

I take my oath two days before my May graduation. Campuses explode after Kent State. I realize what I’m getting into, being estranged from my true self, when I sign a document indicating I hadn’t been a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, among other so-called subversive organizations listed.

Two days after graduation, I receive what would have been my draft notice. I will go to Basic Training at Fort Ord in August with unfortunate sons—disproportionately poor men of color.

• #5

A Labor Day fire’s burning near the Monterey Peninsula I loved exploring with college sweethearts. The rumor—they proliferate among inductees—is that enlistees, distinguished by our “maggot tags” —white strips on fatigue shirts—will fight the fires. Cannon fodder practice? We do spend one weekend literally cleaning out our barracks with toothbrushes to protect us from the meningitis that hit Fort Ord.

Gil, my college roommate, assigned a different platoon, goes home a month after we get there, thanks to the separated shoulder that cost him two years of high school football. A good trade.

• #6

Privacy dies as surely as sleep, which retreats with middle of the night guard duties and cacophonous snoring. No latrine stalls. Sitting on the toilet after marching and running all day, I read a hard-bound copy of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.

The Ozarks platoonmate, who, when clothes were issued, literally didn’t know which way to put on boxers (“Do you shit through the hole?”), gives me pause with his slack-jawed question: “What’s that?” He points, I’m dreading, toward my genitals. Subsequent banter convinces me he has never seen a hard-bound book.

• #7

The beach in Carmel, bars and restaurants at Cannery Row, and music at the Monterey Jazz Festival evaporate from consciousness. Fort Ord, in which 1.5 million men (including Clint Eastwood, Leonard Nimoy, Joe DiMaggio, Jerry Garcia, and Jimi Hendrix) receive Army basic training from 1940 to 1975, obliterates other area touchstones. From Marina to Seaside, the world is olive drab, with drifting sand dunes, ice plant, and chapparal to traverse at double time.

• #8

On payday, we file through stations to receive our $89. We “volunteer” to give blood after reassembling an M-16, making a rack (bed) a quarter can bounce off, spit-polishing shoes. My turn in a small room. A Spec-4 (Corporal) will draw my blood. He misses my vein. Twice. Panicked, he darts from the room. The needle dangles. A doctor, his degree from a Puerto Rican University displayed on the wall, emerges to ensure I’m still “volunteering.”

• #9

One drill instructor uses the F-word as all eight parts of speech, often in the same sentence. When diagramming sentences with students in classes a few years later, I laud his command of language.

Another near-silent drill instructor never calls marching cadence (“Ain’t no use in goin’ home / Jody’s got your girl and gone / sound off . . . “). His tomb-stoned eyes provide the image that encapsulates Vietnam at Fort Ord for me. Remembering some Mai Lai? Obliteration of “brothers”? His face tells me the U.S. has no chance on the ground in ‘Nam.

• #10

After our second payday, Wayne and his fellow Reservist buddy pile into a cab with me headed to the Commissary. Wayne, a competitive runner as everybody from Oregon seemed to be then, is one of the few in our platoon who doesn’t go to buy cigarettes (“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”), footlocker treasure for most.

Shared Fort Ord cabs have two jump seats facing the back seat, holding three. Wayne’s pal and I jump in to enjoy the novelty of jump seats. Wayne crouches in the far corner from me as two older soldiers, stoned out of their minds, pile in.

The one settling across from me points a Smith & Wesson in my face: “You laughed at me, motherfucker!” Truly, the weapon doesn’t point; rather; it hypnotically waves back and forth as the cab inches off. The two Black men are headed to the Bowling Alley. Wayne, thinking we’re being robbed, wriggles his wallet behind his seat.

The two-minute ride takes hours. I can still follow the barrel, moving like a guillotine blade in front of my eyes. Later, firing that caliber pistol in training, I feel its recoil. My insides coil. Hit the doorhandle to jump out? Besides twitching nerves, I’d have to wrangle with the handle, backwards from my jump seat.

We stop.

Sliding in front of me, the two vets slither out as if nothing’s happened. I try to get a grip. “How do we report this?” Wayne pleads. The cabbie babbles that race relations are worse on base than off: “Shit happens every night. Go to your barracks, keep your heads down and mouths closed, and say your prayers.”

A week later, while in formation, I see my triggerman, a Staff Sergeant, acting like the king of his supply unit.

• #11

We need to finish a 1¾ mile course in our combat boots in a mandated time as a final hoop in Basic Training. To fail, to be recycled, is a Reservist or Guardsman’s nightmare.

Wayne paces me. In good shape, I’m nevertheless not a confident runner. We run the first four laps together before he takes off. I’m unaware a General has watched us from a podium.

Wayne finishes his next three laps in the time it takes me to go two. The General, thinking we’ve run the seven laps together, greets us at the finish line. It’s all I can do convincing him I shouldn’t run with Wayne in the personal match race he’s arranging. Meekly, I finish my last lap alone.

• #12

A couple National Guardsman, Sal and Kap, almost stereotypical big-hearted Italian and Polish ethnics from Buffalo, are heading off to be pole climbers. The notion of climbing poles to string wires almost scares me more than going 11B, 11 Bush, Infantry, the cannon fodder specialty in ‘Nam.

I “graduate” from Basic. Infantry A.I.T. (Advanced Individual Training) promises eight weeks of ratcheted up misery, my new cohorts the truly hopeless, except for a few Reservists. Through Basic—the gas chamber, details, guard duty, the chow, the senseless orders, the “hurry up and wait” —with the lying marching chant, “I want to be an Airborne Ranger” echoing, an oft-repeated threat is, “If you fuck up, you’ll end up in 11B,” my Reserve unit’s specialty, and on my dance card the next two months.

• #13

Survival, Escape, and Evasion. I watch a gleeful sergeant break a chicken neck with his hands and pluck out intestines to fashion a goopy sausage. His parting words will never leave me: “Your buddy buys it, you’re desperate for food, eat his buttocks first.” An hour on our stomachs on wet dirt under strung wire in a tricked-out Vietnam Village. Told we should only give our name, rank, and serial number if captured, we’re allowed to escape.

Rumors fly a soldier got impaled on a manzanita branch on the SEE course the previous week. Confusion, noise, and popping explosions reign. Escapees run amok. I get separated from what my drill instructor would call a “cluster fuck,” alone with the Ozarks kid from Basic.

He runs in circles, crying. “Follow me,” I urge, but he flops to the ground. I never find out if he’s captured. I pray he doesn’t suffer a similar fate in Vietnam.

My escape takes me completely off base. An amused Jeep driver delivers me, wearing fatigues and my full pack and lugging my M16, to the main gate. The guard chuckles. I’m chastised, but a smiling non-com at the course says, “God damned, you DID evade and escape.”

The next week I’m assigned to assist the trainers running the exercise with a different platoon. I watch captured trainees, taken within the first minutes of the big scatter, get waterboarded. The trainers laugh while pouring ice water from field food containers down captive noses and throats. Platoon, officer, and drill instructor names get divulged immediately.

• #14

Though I loathe guns, in Basic I had qualified as an M16 marksman. I’m getting Kentucky-windage-proficient with my M79 Grenade Launcher, though shooting an M60 submachine gun practically knocks me on my ass. A cattle car to a December night, live-fire range. My fellow cattle inhale every drug imaginable on the ride, “getting ready for the light show.”

It’s the Fillmore Auditorium with a twist. Tracers shoot through the darkness. Unfortunates, though, destined for Asian combat before Easter, are so high errant bullets flash backwards over our heads. Shock and awe, indeed.

• #15

A holiday leave ushers in 1971. My dress uniform hangs off my sleeker body as I await a connection at the San Jose Greyhound Depot. War demonstrators give me grief. I try to dissuade them: “I’m just playing soldier.”

I remember taking a late 1967 bus from my house in San Francisco’s Mission District to Kezar Stadium to watch the 49ers play. When we turned down Haight Street, “Summer of Love” burn-outs rocked the bus, mocking onboard fans. Football fans, conversely, pointed derisively at the “dirty hippies.” I felt torn, equally divided. Similarly, dreading confrontation with the protestors, just wanting to get home, I’m estranged from myself.

• #16

17 degrees. January. A seven-day back country bivouac, simulating a combat mission. My poncho’s spread over the three steel roll bars ribbed across the top of my pre-dug foxhole, but with that and my sleeping bag, I’m still freezing.

Hell breaks loose. A simulated attack. Incendiaries explode. Like a rocket, I shoot upwards, sorry I ignored the admonition to wear my steel pot (helmet) while grabbing a few winks. My head’s gashed, but nobody running hastily into each other while failing to set an organized perimeter notices or cares.

Later, I convince a cook driven out to serve us once a day for a break from our C-rations to carry half of the innards from my 70-pound pack back before our 15-mile march back.

Just before our troop movement, I partially blow up my air mattress to simulate a full pack. It only takes a mile and a half, two “double times,” and one ambush alert dive to realize I’ve miscalculated. The half full pack slides back and forth across my shoulders, decidedly less comfortable than a full, balanced pack.

I “graduate” January 16, 1971. I wish the ‘Nam-bound well. Fatalistic reactions don’t bode well.  

• #17

Mandated one weekend a month in Concord with my Reserve Unit and two summer weeks annually at Fort Ord for the rest of my six-year enlistment, I’m doing alternative service two years later.

Ned, Larry, and I finagle an alternative service program. In lieu of some weekend meetings, we spend one afternoon a week at a Berkeley after-school center. We wear fatigues to promote military goodwill (in Berkeley?). Celebrating May Day, the 5 to 8-year-olds encircle me. Though supremely confident with teenagers and soon to be a high school department chair, I become entwined, the May Pole, a captured POW from my generation.

Since, I’ve had the utmost respect for that age group’s teachers and parents. Analogous to teaching all-volunteer army troops to read maps?

Soon, our Committee Group will spend two weeks at Fort Ord providing Basic Training to inductees the system coughs up to feed the new all-volunteer army. Sure to get more challenging: Teaching at rifle ranges and the grenade wall.

I’m settled into my Company Clerk role but hear tales of woe. Even the good-natured Top Sergeant Horton is disconcerted. Sergeant Major Earp, supposedly a descendant of Wyatt, gets apoplectic when he sees recruits who can’t count after pulling grenade pins.

• #18

The 91st’s two-week “summer” stint comes during April in 1975. Typical Army. A young Christian Brother to-be from St. Mary’s College gets assigned to cover my classes for the week of school I’ll miss (the other week is Easter vacation). I “dummy-proof” my lesson plans for the novice. Years later I joke with Brother Chris Brady, football icon Tom Brady’s Uncle, about that when he precedes me as Principal of our alma mater.

I’ve played the system by this time (going home on Tuesday night and driving back by Thursday early both weeks). Still, I’m active as Saigon falls!

We watch with rapt attention as Americans get airlifted from the embassy. I contemplate how we might be first in line if, God forbid, something happens to trigger the need for retaliation for our stripped-down, defeated army.

• #19

Still estranged today, Boomers who returned from ‘Nam and those who protested the war mentally frag each other. Glomming onto the hypocritically bellicose President Bone Spurs during the end of the last decade seemed apt for Boomers who withheld their ‘60’s rebelliousness until old age. Or they played their anger forward to unfortunate sons, some to the extent that they stormed the Capitol when their leader fell.

• #20

Student, creative graphic animator, and granddaughter extraordinaire, Melissa—pronounced the Brazilian way, MEL rather than MUH the first syllable—graduated from diverse Cal State University, Monterey Bay, situated partially on decommissioned Fort Ord, in May 2021.

After a coaching change, she had transferred from the D-1 school where she had earned a soccer scholarship.

Named captain before her junior and senior seasons got curtailed by Covid-19 protocols, Melissa nevertheless thrived. Traveling to watch her Otter games gave me permission to enjoy the Peninsula anew. I also explored “the base.” Ramshackle barracks and buildings endured like tombstones on CSUMB’s footprint. Driving on Reservation Road, Inter-Garrison Road, and 2^nd Avenue, or past the pockmarked old Parade Grounds, allowed memories to march back into consciousness.

I wonder if any of my bullet casings are snuggled under the sand near the Pacific Ocean.

We proudly celebrate Melissa’s Afro- and Indigenous-Brazilian side of the family with her. During a tumultuous 2020, she stood proudly with demonstrators who demanded justice after the George Floyd shooting and other social justice aberrations.

I pray Americans won’t stay estranged from one another, from ourselves, POWs of the Vietnam War, slavery, prejudice, and other issues that have been woven through our history under the bullet points that tell what we believe is our real story.

My last shot: The reconciliation will be harder now with Commander-in-Chief Divisive again in power and sowing disharmony, his only military experience in his mercurial, unreliable imagination. As unheroic as my military experience was, it seems like a paragon of patriotism in comparison to somebody who called those who fought in Vietnam stupid.

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