Tag Archives: Army

Veterans

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I am a veteran.  I served in the U.S. Army from 1962 to 1965.  I am from a hick town in Western Colorado.  I hadn’t done well in my first attempt at college and needed to get out of Dodge.  Other than oil and gas and the uranium mines, there weren’t many job opportunities.  I worked for the Park Service for a while, but the job was seasonal, 180 days per year.  It takes years to get a full time job.

So, it was time to bug out.  The two courses most guys took were going to Los Angeles or the military.  My friends who went to L.A. All starved out and had to get money from parents to come home.  My choice was the military.  My preference was the Navy, but the enlistment was for four years.  The Army was three years.  I enlisted for a European tour.  I did pretty well on all the aptitude tests so the guy offered electronics.

I didn’t think I was interested in electronics, so what else did they have?  How about missiles?  Fort Bliss in El Paso is a big missile post so I said OK.  I was put in missile electronics.  It turned out to be good.  After basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri I went to electronics schools at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey and Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.

I was trained as a radar repairman on an obsolete missile system.  I was sent to duty in another missile system outfit.  We played a lot of volleyball.  When that unit deactivated I was sent to a  Hawk surface to air missile outfit.  A radar is a radar, so I went right to work.  It turned out to be two fairly good years in a decent outfit.  The other guys were a lot like me; college hadn’t worked out, so the Army.  I liked Germany, the Army not so much.  I did some traveling, drank some beer, and came home.

A good thing about military service is the benefits.  I went back to college and the GI Bill paid for a lot of it.  Now I have the VA if I need it.  I have hearing aids from the VA for the hearing loss from shooting a fifty caliber machine gun.  I also get a small pension.  Overall, not so bad.

I also get to give Marine veterans a hard time for being marines.  They seem to think they are hot shit.  Well, I’m glad they are on our side, (mostly).  Navy and Air Force vets are OK.  As for Army vets, you need us, we are all trained killers.  Huh, not so much.

The Vietnam war heated up after I got back in college.  I am a social sciences major, learning history and war literature.  That war made no sense at all, so I was fairly active in my opposition.  The difference being I was a Veteran, with the sense of commonality with those poor saps in Vietnam.  I spoke out in support of those serving.  I respected servicemen then and to this day.

Go to a VA hospital sometime.  Most of those vets really need the help.  The VA tries, but overload and bureaucracy makes it a scary place.  The providers themselves are, in my experience, great if you can get in to see them.  The military is smaller these days, but the damage inflicted on those deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan is awful.  That is a lesson we didn’t learn in Vietnam.  A war without clear goals takes a toll on those who fight in it.

I am against war.  I am a pacifist.  I oppose the U.S entering into foreign adventures where people shoot at one another.  I am a veteran and proud of having served.

Posted in Army, Stories, The Army, Veterans

The Buckner Banner

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USNS Buckner

USNS Buckner

One of my first literary adventures was as editor of The Buckner Banner, the ship’s newspaper on the USNS Simon Bolivar Buckner,  a troopship sailing from New York to Bremerhaven, Germany.  It was 1963, and the U.S. Army was shipping me to Europe.  Just out of technical school, I had one skinny little stripe on my sleeve. I must have been chosen as editor by some random process, as I had no experience.  I guess that has always been the Army way.  The Banner ran a news digest from the radio room every day, and had a lot of canned content used on every nine day voyage.  My job was to come up with some original content. I had a crew of clerk typists who made mimeograph masters we ran off every morning.  The most valuable thing I learned as editor is to listen to your people.  One of the guys suggested we serialize a Sherlock Holmes novel. The passengers on the ship were a lot of GI’s headed to their first real duty station in Germany, stacked four deep in bunks in the cargo holds, and a large number of dependents, family members of career Army personnel.  There were daily movies and a library, but little else for people to do.  The Banner was a major defense against boredom. That Sherlock Holmes novel was a big hit.  The mimeographed paper was hard to read.  The machine was worn out, and the reproduction quality was terrible.  We made no effort to make each paper entirely readable, so the passengers were forced to share their copies in order to be able to read every page.  A detective novel became a shipboard community building event. People loved it, and I got a lot of compliments for someone else’s idea.  I also had the run of the ship as the editor and got to explore the entire vessel, from the heads in the bow to the fantail.  I was also exempt from all the nasty little jobs the Army gives troops to keep them busy.  I was on the same ship on the way home, and knew all the places to hide. Mostly, the voyage was routine.  There were stories about previous trips with bad weather.  Those cargo holds full of troops had waves of vomit sloshing back and forth as the ship rolled and pitched.  Then it had to be cleaned up.  The most excitement we had was the lifeboat drill the first day out.  The dependents lined up behind the lifeboats.  All the GI’s in their life jackets lined up facing the water.  We used to joke that part of the Army nomenclature for us was “expendable, non-returnable, with cover”. There have been some interruptions in my literary career, such as as the need to make a living, but the Army gave me a start.

Posted in Memoirs, My Story, Stories, The Army, Troop Ships