But I didn’t mean it. I knew his type. He was, in my opinion, a mean, bigoted, ring-knocking son-of-a-bitch: the kind of officer who might lose us this war through his own ambition and cultural blindness.
I began to think about extending my time in Vietnam another six months to grab that easy promotion. I had acclimated, and even the mortar attacks no longer worried me. I was not worried about the shell with my name on it, just the ones labeled ‘to whom it may concern’. The residual fear kept you sharp and alert. Despite the problems with some of the senior NCOs, I was getting comfortable. I was doing five jobs, if we were going by stateside standards. I was good at all of them, and would be recommended for an Army Commendation Medal by my OIC. I scared my parents when I mention the possibility of extending my time there in letters home. My father was polite, but wrote back, several times: “I wish you wouldn’t.” We had an incident on the flight line. Our aircrafts’ engines were partially maintained by a civilian contractor, and one day one of their technicians spilled aviation gasoline on himself, caught fire, and, panicking, ran away endangering himself and the aircraft on the line. An ASA soldier ran after him, tackled him, and rolled him in the dirt, extinguishing the fire and saving his life, and possibly a couple of aircraft as well. The technician was burned over about half of his body, and our guy was a bit singed as well. The Army has a special medal for such events called the Soldier’s Medal. As the NCO in charge of Awards and decorations, I certainly thought he was deserving. So, just doing my job, I went out and got affidavits, which I typed up and had signed by witnesses. The new company commander refused to approve the award or to forward it to higher headquarters. When I protested, he said that too many awards were being given out. The unit had just gotten its second Meritorious Unit Citation, which he didn’t understand, because he was, like most of us, not allowed to see the traffic we collected. He drove an airplane and was not part of ASA proper. When it came to Operations, the Chain of Command was upside down, with the Operations Officer selecting the targets and planning the missions, and the E-5s with the radios in back of our aircraft giving direction in the field. He resented this. It was emasculating. But orders were orders. His final comment on that award showed his true colors. “Besides, he was only a Zip (Vietnamese),” he said about the victim. He was an exemplar of White privilege, and only commissioned officers were White. (Commissioned officers who were African-American were also White, magically transformed by their commissions. There were more and more such, and he couldn’t afford to piss anyone off. Everyone has friends.) The rest of us were of a lesser breed. That snobbery existed throughout the Army, and was one of the reasons my father retired. It was why my mother had disliked being ‘The Colonel’s Lady’ so much. They both came from rural poor families. The upper crust officers and their wives annoyed them. Some came from Money and were graceless enough to let that show. Had this Major not needed his ticket punched with time in a combat zone to make higher rank, I doubt if he would have been in Vietnam at all. Not that he was scared, just the opposite. We weren’t on the front lines. He had no bragging rights with his West Point classmates, since no one knew exactly what we did, and we were very careful not to tell them. He was a good soldier in most respects, but being relegated to ‘Support’ was something that he felt keenly, as a personal failure, I suspect. One thing was sure: awards for his troops would be kept to a minimum. He felt no pride in our accomplishments, which included saving thousands of American and Allied Forces lives by delivering timely intelligence. It lacked the essential glamour of front line combat. But we had our moments. We had no need to look for trouble. It found us often enough. My pal Bill, the young MP, was assigned to a supply convoy one day. This was part of our do-the-base-chores, fly-under-the-radar, don’t-make-waves, strategy. We contributed some big trucks, and some guys from the motor pool who wanted an adventure went along, as did a couple of others. I think Bill was the only MP, and he went in his usual full ‘battle-rattle’ of extra weapons and gear. He rode next to a tough, mean, short, and fat Italian-American kid from a big city , who was eager for action, too. This kid strutted around looking for trouble. I suspect he was a bully in high school, and simply didn’t comprehend his situation. There were plenty of fights available, and no one needed to pick one. The mortar attacks should have made that plain, but the base was so well protected, and we were so coddled, that some were insulated from reality. The trip up to Saigon took about three hours because the highway was torn up here and there from war damage. Nothing happened until the return trip, when the trucks were fully loaded with supplies. Then a local-force Viet Cong squad sprang a trap, firing on the trucks from the side of the road. (Since I was not there, I am going on what I can recall of what I was told at the time.) The convoy stopped. Bill was riding next to the tough little Italian-American kid, who was frozen stiff – just sitting there, unable to move. Bill had to pry his hands off the steering wheel and drag him under the truck, telling him to start firing his weapon at the enemy positions ahead of him. (He never did.) Then Bill ran up and down the road, organizing a defense. Rocket-propelled grenades began to land among the trucks. If one actually hit a truck, then it and the supplies it carried would be lost. Bill took action. Standing out in the center of the highway, he held his M16 in one hand and his .45 caliber pistol in the other, and directed fire on the enemy, yelling encouragement to the others. As one of the men who saw this said, “He looked like one crazy motherfucker out there.” Everyone else fired their weapons, some of them standing and yelling as they did so. The Viet Cong lost heart, and broke off their attack. No one messes with a crazy man. They ran away, and suddenly it was over. No one badly injured and all of the vehicles intact and undamaged. By the time they got back to the airfield, the rest of our guys were pumped up. Very excited. “Don’t let anyone tell you that combat isn’t a gas!” one of them shouted as they poured into the Flight Operations building to report. The CO listened, and then told them to calm down and go unload the trucks. The little Italian-American kid was very quiet, but no one teased him about his panic attack. Some of the guys had them during mortar attacks. Some were the career soldiers who were also in a combat zone for the first time. One of them was so spooked by the mortar attacks that he moved his bunk into one of the bunkers where he caught pneumonia, and damn near died of that, instead. Panic was something that was quietly noted, but not discussed. You just hoped that it wouldn’t happen again. Everybody got a pass for it – the first time. And most of us never gave in to it. We expected that we would experience some kind of combat at some point, and some, like Bill, looked forward to the day when they could prove their manhood by doing brave deeds. As the younger men were shouting and slapping each other on the back as if they had just won an important football game, I remember shaking my head. None of them particularly liked Bill, but they were all talking enthusiastically about how he’d led them to victory. They had no idea how lucky they had been. The Viet Cong had not even used a classic ‘L’ shaped ambush to catch them in a crossfire. Most of the RPGs fell well short of the trucks. And they’d had a good leader, a skinny 19-year-old kid they usually teased for his ‘John Wayne’ habits. Bill wasn’t with them, and when I inquired, I was told he’d had to go to the dispensary for some sort of minor injury. The next day he came to me at my office. “You do Awards and Decorations, right?” I nodded. “The Medical Officer gave me this, and said I had to turn it in to you.” He handed me a form that I had never seen before. I had to go to our shelf of Army Regulations and look it up. I said, “Bill, this means you get a Purple Heart.” He was very surprised. “You’re kidding! For this? It’s a scratch! He took it out with a pair of tweezers. They covered it with a Band-Aid.” He unbuttoned his fatigue shirt and showed me the Band-Aid which was near his sternum above his diaphragm. He’d been wounded, but in a very minor way. I asked, “What was it?” “A piece of shrapnel.” “Do you have it?” “Sure.” He dug into his pocket and came out with a tiny glass sample bottle. Inside of it was a wicked-looking, blackened, jagged piece of steel about three-fourths of an inch long. “Hey, no big deal, right?” I felt very solemn. “Bill,” I said, “I think you should take it. Reading the reg, you have earned it. And if we don’t forward this up the chain of command, we’ll look like assholes for trying to deny you something you have earned. It will help you with the V.A. after you get out, and give you extra points for a government job. But there’s another, more important, reason.” “Yeah?” He looked at me, now very concerned, because I was talking to him like some sort of Dutch uncle. I had never done that before. “That scratch is right over your aorta. That’s the big vessel that carries blood to your heart. If it had gone three inches deeper you would have bled out, and died in about five minutes.” He stared at me for a long time, and turned really pale, as what I said sank in. He sat down hard in the chair next to my desk, suddenly short of breath, his eyes wide. Until that moment, it was all a glorious game. The hard fact that he might actually die in Vietnam hadn’t made much of an impression. He got up and bolted out of the room, and that night, for the first time in his life, got very drunk. He recovered quickly, and appeared for the next guard mount still hauling his extra gear. He was a more sober, less enthusiastic, warrior from that day forward. I went around trying to get affidavits so we could put him up for a Bronze Star with V device for valor, but our new, mean-spirited Commanding Officer had put out the word, and no one would give me one. Bill didn’t think he’d done anything special, so he didn’t care. I did the paperwork for his Purple Heart, and walked it into the CO’s office myself. He wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something bad, and I said, very quietly, “The other copy of the Medical Officer’s form is out there somewhere, and if this is not signed and forwarded, it will make us look bad.” He stared at me, a bit surprised at my temerity. Perhaps he’d heard the story about how I’d kept us all from being shamed by killing the phony awards eight months before. Perhaps not, but he could tell I wasn’t going to let it go, just because he made an ugly face at me. He reached over and signed it. I took it away rather than leave it there. I didn’t want it getting ‘lost’. As I was headed for the office door, he said, “I understand your father is an officer?” “Yes, sir. Medical Corps, but he retired in May.” My way of telling him that he had nothing to fear from that direction, and that it didn’t matter. That I wasn’t afraid of him. “So he won’t be assigned here?” I could hear the implied sneer in his voice. “He was here about a year ago, sir. As the Medical Corps IG.” That took him aback. To recover, he said, “That’s a really sloppy uniform, Hamit.” His was tight, almost bespoke, because he’d had it tailored. I shrugged. “This is the way the regs say they are to be worn, sir.” Not to mention I’d lost at least ten pounds. “Excuse me, sir. I have to get this in the bag for tomorrow.” One of the other officers later told me that he’d called me a ‘barracks lawyer’ in their mess. I replied that I took that to mean he thought I was doing my job. But I didn’t mean it. I knew his type. He was, in my opinion, a mean, bigoted, ring-knocking son-of-a-bitch: the kind of officer who might lose us this war through his own ambition and cultural blindness. Bill’s Purple Heart arrived about a month later. I watched the ceremony from a distance, and don’t know what the new CO said to him, but a week later he was transferred out to a new Radio Research base up North that needed MPs. So I lost the best friend I had there. Nice kid. I missed him. His was the only Purple Heart awarded to a member of the 156th the entire year I was there. ASA wasn’t supposed to bleed. Perhaps that’s why he was transferred; for setting a bad example. We had ASA soldiers in other units who received not just Purple Hearts, but awards for valor, up to and including the Silver Star. They didn’t plan on that, but sometimes it just turns out that way. The false pride that made this CO deny awards to his subordinates was very inappropriate, and a detriment to morale.
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Reading Out of Step in the '90s probably would have resulted in what a routine review might provide--such as I do for the majority of books. However, when I was forced to be placed under two military officers after having worked along a participatory-type superior was stark in many ways. Thus as I write, I had already connected with Francis Hamit as he begun his deployment in the military... At the same time, I have spent more than a decade watching the actions of a president who has just acted without authorization to bomb Iran--and its subsequent results. It is clear from the above videos for Johnson and then Richard Nixon that it is normal to have constitutionally required congressional authorization or at a minimum to confirm it immediately... As of now, that has not occurred for what is now happening in multiple countries as Iran responds to the surprise assassination of Iranian leaders. War is not a game and, normally, all due diligence was been taken to enter into war with another country. This is the only president that has acted without regard to required protocol.
When Hamit began to consider his future career, he, of course, given his father's position, went through the routine type of testing for entering the military. I imagine it was similar to position testing conducted by the Office of Human Resources for working at West Virginia University, a land-grant multi-campus university who reported to a state-wide Board of Regents. Hamit's scores were above average--my testing scores were also above average. I was immediately hired by the Office of Human Resources. Hamit was recognized immediately as somebody who could be better utilized by not being sent into a war area...
Hamit had asked for Intelligence work and ultimately received further training to perform the best way possible to use his intellect. I laughed when he had to learn how to type--I had been typing around 80 wpm when I started working in Personnel.
Soon Hamit was in a position by which he could see what was happening both in the trenches as well as in the officers quarters... He soon formed some specific opinions...
Just as I had when I was placed to report to two military officers...
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