Joining the Army, going to Vietnam, joining the resistance

I served in the Army for four years from the beginning of 1966 to the end of 1969 and I spent one year in Vietnam from Oct. ’67 to Oct. ’68.  I enlisted for four years because I wanted to avoid being a foot soldier and avoid going to Vietnam and I believed the Army recruiter who talked me into joining the Army Security Agency, which does radio and electronic data gathering for the National Security Agency.

The recruiter said I would get my choice of foreign languages to study and that after one year of learning the language at a military language school, I would probably be sent to Germany where I would spend the last three years of my Army enlistment at a secure base translating transmission from Russian or Romanian or Bulgarian into English.  He painted a rosy picture of me taking leaves to travel around Europe sightseeing with the local girls I would meet there. 

It sounded good, so I chose 10 languages, all eastern European, and felt sure I’d be safe in Germany and wouldn’t have to go anywhere near Vietnam where our troops were starting to get killed in larger and larger numbers. 

It didn’t exactly work out the way the recruiter promised me.  Halfway through basic training, which was brutal in the winter at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, I received orders for my next assignment:  Vietnamese language school at Ft. Meade, Maryland.  I wasn’t a very good student and never learned to speak Vietnamese very well. 

After language school the Army sent me and my buddies first to a base in San Angelo, Texas, where we learned out to use a big radio backpack that we were told we would be using in Vietnam on patrol to intercept enemy voice radio transmissions and we were to interpret them and tell the company commander what the enemy was saying.   

After several weeks, we graduated from radio school and were sent to Ft. Hood, Texas, to play war games with an infantry brigade we were supporting.  Then, in Oct. 1967 they put the brigade on a train to Oakland where we got onto a troop ship and sailed to Vietnam. 

Luckily, the Army changed its mind and never made me carry that big radio pack into the boonies.  Instead, most of us were posted to a company on a hillside outside Pleiku in the Central Highlands where were helped to break codes and translate radio messages sent by the enemy in Morse code.  We could use a Vietnamese to English dictionary, so it wasn’t too difficult. 

When I completed my one year in Vietnam, I was allowed to come back to the U.S., but I still had more than a year left to serve on my 4-year enlistment.  They sent me to Goodfellow Base in San Angelo, Texas, and wanted me to teach new recruits how to use the radio packs that I never used while I was in VN. 

By then I was fed up with the Army and fed up with the war in Vietnam.  My wife had finally confessed that she was in love with another guy, who was off doing basic training with the U.S. Coast Guard.  She asked if she could stay with me until she could be with her Bill.  I agreed hoping maybe I could win her love back.

I decided that I could not teach the radio pack course, so I walked into my commanding officer's office and told him that I although I was not religious, I was a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam.  Having served there, I told him, I had seen first-hand how we mistreated the people and their land, and I would have no part in helping send another soldier over there.

My CO seemed shocked and didn't know what to say or do, so he dismissed me.  A day or two later he called me back to his office and told me that the Army was taking away my top secret clearance and that I would not have access to the portion of the base that was off-limits to anyone without a clearance.  For a few weeks I was in limbo there at Goodfellow.  I had to report to my unit and stand in formation and then hang out in the company HQ until the end of the work day at which time I could return to my home I rented by the Concho River near downtown San Angelo.

One weekend, my wife and I drove to Austin and partied with friends.  But I often had bad asthma attacks when exposed to cats or dogs in those days, and I had a doozy of an attack that weekend.  Finally, Molly loaded me in our car and drove us back to San Angelo and took me to the base hospital.  Now, typically, when one is taken to an ER for asthma, the docs shoot you full of adrenalin and other meds and revive you and once you are breathing fine, they counsel you on what meds to continue taking, what to avoid, etc., and send you on your way home, But not that night.

Instead, they put me in the hospital and to my surprise they didn't release me in the morning.  In fact, they kept me in a hospital room all to myself, which was unusual.  Finally, an unfamiliar doctor came to see me who turned out to be a psychiatrist.  He told me that they were going to run some tests on me.  These turned out to be an array of psychological tests.  After I completed those, I spent a couple more days and nights in the regular part of the hospital, and then they transferred me to the hospital's Psych Ward for mentally disturbed soldiers, sailors and airmen.

It turns out that my incarceration in the Psych Ward had nothing to do with my asthma or my mental condition, although the Air Force psychiatrist did come up with a diagnosis for my condition. He said I had schzoid tendencies.  Yes, for refusing duty and declaring myself opposed to the Vietnam War, I must be crazy.