Dead in Panama

Jungle Ops Training Center (JOTC) at Ft Sherman, Canal Zone

JOTC barracks reflected in crew chief's visor

Bravo Company, 1/325, 82nd Abn Div, on the Rio Chagres

Unloading LST

Rising Sun over Limon Bay

One of the strangest conversations I ever had with Dad, and there were some strange ones, concerned my being killed in Panama.  Dad was informed by my mother, who,  according to Dad, seemed to be on another planet.  She approached him in our backyard where he had set up a radial arm saw and spent as much time as he possibly could cutting wood and avoiding people.

"John's dead." she said.  "What?" he said, turning off the saw.  "John's dead.  It happened early this morning." He was stunned.  How could it have happened? And then he remembered I was in Panama.  He knew it could have happened any number of ways and plenty ran through his head.

He looked at her and said, "Our son's not supposed to die before us."  She cocked her head, "What are you talking about?"  "John," he said.  "You said he was dead."  "No," she said. "My uncle -- John -- he died this morning." "Oh," he said. She turned and walked back into the house.  He switched the saw on and grabbed another piece of plywood.

Beautiful Bullshit

The French Foreign Legion, 1984, photographed by John Robert Young

I heard the platoon from my back yard.  40 men in white t-shirts, green fatigue pants and bloused black boots.  It was 1965 and I was eight years old.  I raced from my yard and caught up just as they turned left onto Sunchon Street in the Ft Bragg housing area called Hammond Hills.  I ran behind the platoon for a block or so before there was a sudden down pour.  The platoon sergeant lead the men under an empty carport, barked an order I didn't understand and everyone relaxed and lit up cigarettes.

I was mostly ignored as Zippos snapped around me.   One young black soldier smiled and I smiled back.  He lit a cigarette and stuffed the bright green pack of Salems back in his trouser pocket.  I don't remember talking.  Him or me.  But I see him clearly in my memory.  Tall, he was built like a "V" with broad shoulders and a narrow waist.

The rain let up and the run continued.  I ran behind my friend for a while but saw the border of Hammond Hills, shouted goodbye and veered off towards home.   I'll never forget that day or that soldier or the feeling I belonged… safe in the platoon.  I see it in my mind as a black and white photo on high contrast paper.  The black of the boots and bright white t-shirts…all in four straight lines.  My home... running away from me.  Ten years later I'd enlist.

Car Sales in the Army

Rightly or wrong, whenever I hear "…the VA," I cringe.  I entered the Army in 1976 for a four year stint as an airborne infantryman but I was an Army Brat and familiar with war stories of servicemen I knew at the Ft Carson Sport Parachute Club.  Gordie, a jump master, had 1st degree burns from napalm and I still remember him telling me how they rebuilt his ears.  And there were already issues with Agent Orange.

My father told me early in my enlistment that, "…you don't waste lives like they were office supplies."  That makes a lot of sense to me and pretty much anyone who has ever heard it.  But….

The Army is a big place.  In big places, people do things they wouldn't normally do for the sake of the institution.  I have no doubt working at any VA hospital is a stressful and an altogether sad job.  But they're not getting shot at.   Neither was I.  Getting out in 1980, I just missed Panama and was happy I did.  I had no desire to take anyone's life.

I did jump from airplanes, flip over jeeps, fall off a tank twice and came very close to shooting my squad leader who zagged when he should have zigged into my firing lane.  Twenty years ago I had a problem with my lower back.  I was x-rayed and the doc asked if I was a gymnast in high school or college due to repeated impact at L4/L5.  "I'm not gay,"I said.  The Doc laughed and I added, "I jumped out of planes for four years.  Could that have something to do with it?"

That doesn't bother me.  Mostly because I'm lucky and have decent health insurance.  I could afford to avoid the VA.  What has bothered me was the "Used Car Salesmanship" the Army and a doctor displayed during my ETS (termination of service) physical.  During a hearing test, "raise your finger when you hear the ping" the administrator looked at me and frowned, jotting down the numbers you see that were later crossed out by the doctor.  Oddly, a civilian.

The doctor tells me the hearing test results are wrong because, most likely,  the machine is screwed up.  I ask what that means.  The doctor, who looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy in a lab coat, creaks back in his chair and tells me my only option is to extend my service a week until the machine is fixed. I tell him I'm getting out the next day.  He tells me it's up to me.  So, numbers are changed and my only exception to my health, "My hearing" is scratched out.

Looking back, I was a kid hot to leave Army. I was not hanging around Bragg for another hearing test.    How's my hearing?  Ask anyone who knows me.  It's not Agent Orange but this Memorial Day Weekend, I often reflect on the history of using men, and today women,  like they were office supplies.  I've talked more than one kid outta joining.  In the end, I usually sum it up, "No matter what the Army says, they don't give a shit about you. If you're okay with that -- You're good to go."

Is Smoke Bomb Hill Kosher?

From Left: A couple A team sergeants and Dad on far right

Smoke Bomb Hill and Hammond Hills (click image to enlarge)

I remember him walking home. At eight, I was in my Hammond Hills bedroom researching an MG-TC. The Old Man was racing in the local SCCA club and I desperately wanted him to dump the Berkley with the chain driven motorcycle engine for a British Racing Green TC. For some reason, I look out my window and I see the swagger. More shoulder than hip - he had cocky written across his forehead.

The captain bars on his green beret glint from the sinking September sun. Starched jungle fatigues are cut at the waist with a web pistol belt. My Old Man is walking home from Smoke Bomb Hill with his XO who has less than seven months to live before drowning in the Son Toy River. Later that night, I'll fill an empty Budweiser bottle with water and wander out to the patio and stumble and weave in front of these two men who'll laugh their asses off.

10 years later I drank draft beers at the main post bowling alley with three of Dad's team sergeants from his tour in Vietnam. Two were still in Special Forces. The third had retired and spent most days sitting outside his trailer in Spring Lake, playing gospel music over a surplus PA system. The two sergeants told me how Dad used a Boy Scout wire saw to garrote VC. They laughed while the gospel lover just stared at me.

I was in the middle of zero month for the SF Qualification Course. Phase I at Camp McCall wouldn't start for another two weeks but I was happy fucking off on Smoke Bomb Hill. SF was a fairly loose group and I watched senior NCOs dry hump each other out in front of morning formations. There was so much dry humping in the Army that when I went back to college, still shitting army chow, I dry humped Roland Schumann who was bending over an ice box looking for a pint of chocolate milk. He turned and looked at me with this unmitigated terror in his eyes... and I realized he didn't get it. Neither did the 300 or so other students watching from the dining room.

Back in the Army, I knew I wasn't going to make it through Special Forces training. One of the few times I've accurately predicted anything. Of my class of 88, only three would get a green beret and they were all second term NCOs. The washout was so great, I was told my class was the last to allow anyone under E-5. But knowing I didn't have a prayer took a whole lot of pressure off and I Ghosted, disappearing to avoid details, whenever I could.

Another formation, more dry humping and names of the 85 "No-Go" are read. The 1st Sergeant repeats, "82nd Repo" over and over and over…until XVIII Airborne Corps goes to an PFC infantryman. Everyone looks at this bastard and wonders whose dick he's sucking. I'm wondering what the fuck an infantryman does at a corps headquarters and as I ponder the thought, my name gets closer and closer and the first sergeant, who's fond of saying to the formation, "You, in the green pants and black boots, come here," says my name and XVIII Airborne Corps. And everyone looks at me and wonders…

To this day, I still do. Before my father died a couple years ago I asked him for the umpteenth time, "Was it you? It had to have been you." He sucks on a cupped cigarette, inhales and blows out a pin stream of smoke and tightly wrapped words, "That wouldn't have been kosher."