Where to begin? Can't say rehashing all the training days interests me much. So I'll start where I start. Let my fingers to the talking. The order will be set by the way it comes into my head and that head ain't as good as it once was and keep in mind it's the head of a drug crazed Vietnam Vet (maniacal laughter) whose suffering soul sees life through the flames of hell (more maniacal laughter).
Once we reached Fort Lewis for AIT the handwriting was already on the wall. January '69 was near the peak of the peak of troop commitment in the Nam. Gettin' a draft notice was a one way ticket to play with the big boys while carryin' a combat MOS. And the odds pretty much dictated that specialty would be 11b (light arms infantry, grunt, paddy pounder, leg, dog soldier). Didn't matter what we were called or what we called ourselves, we were goin' and had a one in ten chance of not comin' back. Happy crew? What do you think?
The order of mental drill, at least for me, was to not dwell on where we were going. Stuff it down, think about life as it was before the wearin' of the green. Lost love and family back home. S'pose it might well have been those repressed feelings of forebode, bubbling away down below and rotting my mental innards, that eventually found their way into the light as gallows humor. We had a saying that went kinda like this, "To hell with 'em. What're they gonna do? Stick us in the infantry and ship us off to Vietnam? Oh yeah, that's right. They're already doin' that."
None said it better than our mortar platoon on one lazy, overcast as usual, in the foothills of Mount Rainier, where the sun didn't shine but three days the whole winter we were there, late afternoon.
First off you've gotta have some background. Maybe a lot of background. The late '60s was a whole 'nuther world from the one we live in today. Attitudes were more raw, baby boomers were younger and not at all afraid to speak their minds. Our right wingers weren't as right wing or short minded as the one's today and there was a rainbow's end somewhere just up ahead with a pot of world peace and brotherhood/sisterhood/racial integrationhood/love and happinesshood for every boy and girl I might have missed in the hoods.
Even in the Army. Standin' face to face with the hopes we might have had before we were accepted and inducted, was the reality of where we were at the moment, and gonna be for the next twenty-one months. That the Army had us by the short hairs didn't help our attitudes one bit. 'Specially in the mortar platoon. Maybe it was 'cause they had to hump around with big pieces of steel and ammunition on their backs that led to their special way of lookin' at things. Whatever the reason, mortar boys had a reputation as loose cannons, a heavy left side to their brains, crazy as bed bugs one and all. And they took serious pride in it. They might not have known their real role in the Army before they hit Fort Lewis but once they were clued in by who knows who, they accepted it, lock, stock and barrel.
Our true role in the Army wasn't something the boys with the stripes or the bars on their shoulders taught us. No sir. One day a PFC sleeping in the barracks waitin' on his orders to come down, let us know what the previous cycle yelled when they took seats in a class. And it sure wasn't anything our Philippino drill sergeant taught us. But we liked it and stored the words away till the time we were gutsy, or desperate, enough to yell them out. When that time came, we sure did. Loud and clear. I'll get back to that sometime later. For now I'll simply say time spent in the Army was the same as in the outside world, all contingent on attitude.
As to the mortar platoon, they'd no doubt picked up their swagger from the unofficial, whispered voices just like us grunts. Their moment of glory came late in the cycle and amplified three letters most every trainee knew as well as their serial number, FTA.
Around that same time a pack of Hollywood yahoos organized a '60s style, anti-establishment, get to the heart of things and maybe change the world in the process, called something like the FTA tour. They said those letters meant Free The Army. And they sure as hell didn't. Now I didn't, and don't, have anything against the misplaced intentions of those Tinseltown types. Just that, as I recall, the closest any of them came to actual combat was seein' it on the news. No offense to them, bein' anti-war if you ain't goin', or ain't been, just doesn't carry the same weight as it does if you are or were.
One more aside. We had this march chant call the Delayed Cadence March. It was real snappy, kept us in step, and helped pass the time as we went from here to there. By and large we liked it. Beat the pants off spoutin' to the world how we wanted to go to Vietnam to kill Vietcong in the middle of blood and danger. I won't go into details as to how it went but you'll get the idea when I write the spin our mortar boys put on it.
Also, it's a different world now than it was back then and I want daddies to be able to read this chant out loud to their babes in arms. But they can't if I write it as it actually was 'cause it's got a seriously nasty word in it, many times in it, that nambie-pambies would claim is beyond potty mouth. Back in my Army days it was The Word, probably not on a par with The Word as it appears in the gospel of St. John, but our The Word covered a lot of ground for us killers in green.
The word I'm referrin' to is the F one at the beginning of the FTA. And since I don't want to offend anyone, I won't use it. Instead, I'll replace it with another that might have something to do with an American hero who avoided gettin' drafted by pullin' strings in high places so as to jump to the top of the waitin' list and end up in the Air Force Reserve where he was safe from most everything but a hangover. I'll call him George.
Don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against men who didn't go or didn't serve in the military. A good buddy of mine was a CO and did alternate service in the Peace Corps. Some were against the war and left the country or went to jail. Each of them made a difficult, moral, life commitment choice. All honorable in my book. The man I'm talkin' about doesn't seem to be anti-war to me. Even started a couple later in life. The way I see it, he cheated. Someone went in the place he would have occupied in the Army and, like I said, there's a one in ten chance that man died. Such is life in an unfair world.
On that fateful end of the day, as us grunts were in the barracks cleanin' our gear and gettin' ready for chow, off in the distance, comin' louder and louder by the second, was the Mortar Platoon. To a man, we walked to the windows kinda like the scene in From Here To Eternity where Prewitt is playing taps for the dead Maggio, and we heard the following (each word represents a single boot strike, left stride first):
Count cadence, delayed cadence, count cadence, count,
One, George the Army.
Two, George the Army.
Three, George the Army.
Four, George the Army.
One, George-it,
Two, George-it,
Three, George-it,
Four, George-it.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four,
F, T, A.
How long they'd been chantin' was anybody's guess. How many heard it, the same. But for sure our Philippino Senior Drill Instructor had and he was there on the Company Street to greet them in his unique, marginal English manner,
"Nobody George the Army in two hundred years! You not be the first!"
As I recall that was about the end of it. What were they gonna do to them? Stick 'em in a mortar platoon and ship 'em off to Vietnam?
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