Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (23 page)

The sergeant paused, and I saw the corners of his mouth rise ever so slightly as he appraised Andy. I couldn't tell if he was pleased or disgusted by Andy's answer. A moment later, the smirk was gone and he was nose to nose with me.

His breath was hot on my face. It melted the snowflakes that had come to rest on my eyelashes, and I felt water trickle into my eyes. Resisting the urge to blink, I blurted out, "I'm here to find out who I am, sir."

I regretted it instantly. I sensed the sergeant pause. His eyes bored into mine. He looked at me for a long moment before speaking. "I can answer that question for you right now, private. I can answer that question for every man standing here. Who you are—what you are—is a soldier in the United States Army. Nothing more and nothing less. So now that we've answered your question, maybe you can give me a good reason for taking up space in my camp."

I felt the tension as every man in line waited for me to deliver a satisfactory response. Already I'd made the mistake of standing out, and unless I corrected my error as quickly as possible, I ran the risk of becoming known as a liability, even before doing my first push-up. In a matter of seconds, I foresaw my failure and wished I could get back on the bus and go home.
"I'm here to protect freedom, sir," I said hastily.

The sergeant nodded, apparently satisfied, and moved on. I waited until he was five or six men beyond me before allowing myself the deep breath I needed. It was my first lesson in the art of camouflage, and one I would find useful in the coming years.

Introductions over, the process of rendering us into our most basic forms continued as we were sent to the base's processing center for physicals and testing. Hours later, our heads shaved, teeth checked, and arms smarting from a series of inoculations, our initial reduction was complete. In our freshly-issued uniforms, we were virtually indistinguishable from one another, a group of strangers whose first order of business was to bond based solely on the shared fact of our being thrown together. Processing continued for several days, during which we discovered that we were now the men of Company D, one of three groups that would begin basic training the following week. We were further divided into four squads of twelve men each, using some unknown criteria assumably gleaned from the mental and physical tests we underwent throughout the days. I fell into A Squad. Andy was in C Squad, although it hardly mattered, as all four of our platoon's units would share a common barracks. Training began in earnest the next week, when we were symbolically "shipped out" from our processing quarters to our home for the next nine weeks, a drafty barracks whose heat came from a smoky coal stove and whose wood plank walls—cheaply and hurriedly constructed sometime after World War II and little improved since then—had chinks large enough to permit snow to come in. There we were stacked in bunks and our gear stored in footlockers, everything ordered with the precision for which the army is famed.

The details of Army Basic Combat Training are only barely of interest to the soldiers themselves, and to those unfamiliar with military life, a recitation of the drills and classes is almost certain to result in a loss of attention. Anyway, the depiction of this initial period of combat training in films and television programs has more than adequately provided all but the most unimaginative with a rudimentary understanding of the specifics and a more thorough appreciation for the overall effect it has on the young men who experience it firsthand. In short, it is difficult, sometimes brutal, and generally demoralizing. It is meant to be. BCT

was designed based on the notion that failure—at least in the early stages of training—forces a soldier to realize that he requires the assistance of his comrades in order to survive. By giving him tasks he can neither complete singlehandedly nor even in tandem with his unit perform to the demanded level of proficiency, he learns quickly that much more is required of him. The expectation is that in his desire to please he will rise to the occasion rather than let down his unit, his army, and his country. In general, it works. Eager to be seen as worthy of wearing the uniform, most soldiers discover they can indeed give their all when called upon. And it is a self-correcting system. Although popular depictions of basic training generally portray the drill sergeant as the primary motivating force for underperforming recruits, this is not altogether accurate. Of more importance is the internal pressure. Those who cannot meet the standards are seldom released from duty. Instead, they are recycled into another company and forced to begin the process anew. Faced with the prospect of having to endure humiliation all over again, and in front of classmates who will be aware of their initial failure, most men will do anything to redeem themselves.

Objectively, the process is easily viewed as being cruel, and to some degree it is. But a military exists, ideally, for one reason only—to defend a country and its allies. Accordingly, it requires members who are equipped for that purpose, and with limited time available to prepare combatants for service, it is not surprising that a force whose very existence depends on the efficient utilization of resources would look for the quickest route to supplying itself with soldiers.

There were times during those nine weeks—many of them—when I wished wholeheartedly that I had never made the decision to enlist. There were times when I wanted to give up, or cry, or even turn a weapon on the shouting, finger-pointing source of my unhappiness. But I cannot deny that there was also something magical about going through it with a group of men who, like I did, simply wanted to see it through to the end. This, not the ability to handle a gun, scale a wall, or dig a trench, is the real reward of BCT. During those hours marching through the snow and mud, shivering and miserable, my body broken and my psyche bruised, I became part of something.

Perhaps I was more vulnerable to the experience, never having been on a sporting team, nor, with the exception of the Boy Scouts, belonging to a tribe of any kind. Whatever the reason, I came to love the camaraderie of my squad, and the platoon at large. The men with whom I shared these daily travails became my friends. I came to know who they were, and I came to love them. It was like having brothers for the first time in my life, and although I think somewhere in our minds we never stopped thinking about what might happen to us at the end of our training, for those two months we were strangely happy.

People often ask about sex between soldiers, particularly in a time when women were a rare sight on military bases. They are often strangely disappointed when I tell them that, based on my experiences, such encounters are more the stuff of fantasy than of daily life. For one thing, we were too tired. For another, the effect of intimate companionship is not generally arousal but desensitization. After seeing another man's morning erection on a repeated basis, it becomes more a point of good-natured ribbing than of erotic fixation. Which is not to say that I didn't find some of my platoon mates attractive. I did. But these thoughts were fleeting, at the most resulting in masturbatory fantasies acted out at night, when the snoring of my neighbors would cover any squeaking of my indiscrete bedsprings. It would be some time before I would have a physical relationship with another soldier. For the moment, I was more concerned with learning what I needed to know to stay alive in Vietnam. Although there was no guarantee that we would end up there (and ultimately only about one third of all soldiers serving during the Vietnam era did, and only a small percentage of those in combat), we all assumed that we would. After all, wasn't that why we had enlisted or been drafted, to continue the fight against the Communist followers of Ho Chi Minh? Although many of us feared what setting foot in Vietnam would mean, I think the majority of us would have been disappointed not to get there, especially after spending much of the winter on our bellies in the frozen mud.

I suppose this is difficult for those who weren't there to understand. The popular image today is of the Vietnam draft dodger running north to Canada or south to Mexico, burning his draft card, and moving from place to place, avoiding conscription at all costs. Largely, though, this is a figure whose mythology has been magnified well beyond his reality. Perhaps a hundred thousand young men out of the 2.2 million drafted (and an estimated five hundred thousand of the 24 million eligible but never called) avoided serving in this manner. Although often overlooked, the fact is that only about one third of the fighting force in Vietnam was comprised of men who were drafted, compared to two thirds in World War II and nearly one half in Korea. We were, by and large, a volunteer army, even if we had some reservations, and we did.

In discussions with my students about recent events in the Middle East, in particular the war in Iraq, I like to remind them that the Congress that voted to empower the president of the United States to use force against Saddam Hussein was comprised, by a vast majority, of lawmakers who never served in the armed forces, and who in many cases actively avoided serving. The president himself has a service record of questionable merit. In contrast, Vietnam was a war supported, at least initially, by men who had seen battle in Korea, just as Korea had been supported by men who had served in World War II. They understood, most of these men, what war was about. They understood what they were asking the young men of the country to do because they had been asked to do it before them. For this reason, I believe the actions of those who opposed Vietnam—either by refusing conscription or by actively protesting against the war in other ways—were deeply wounding to a great many people of previous generations. Since the army was the only branch of the armed forces utilizing draftees in significant numbers, those fearing death in combat could greatly reduce their chances of bodily injury by voluntarily joining any of the other three. Although dodging the draft is often suggested as the only option for avoiding an early death, the fact is that there were alternatives beyond simple refusal. Given these other possibilities, the question I ask my students to ponder is why someone would instead choose an action almost certain to result in stigmatization, if not prosecution and imprisonment? There are many perfectly acceptable answers to that, but chief among them is the argument that the majority of protesters nurtured the deep-seated conviction that war, for any reason, is wrong. This was a position the men of Company D found ourselves debating during basic training, not because our cadre asked it of us, but because it was at the heart of several incidents that changed, for some of us, our outlook on what we were doing.

It began only a week or so after our arrival, on the evening of Valentine's Day, when shortly before nine o'clock an explosion rocked the nearby Fort Dix Coffee House. A small brick building located not far from the camp, the coffeehouse was one of many organized near military installations around the country by antiwar activists. Its purpose was to provide not only a place for soldiers and their friends to congregate, but an opportunity to spread the truth about what was happening in Vietnam. Many of the coffeehouses were staffed by former military men, who were anxious to share their stories. The Fort Dix Coffee House had been the target of violence for some time. Its large glass windows had been smashed only a few weeks before, and soldiers were unofficially discouraged by base command from frequenting it. Being in the early stages of our training, we were ineligible for off-base activity anyway, so for myself, Andy, and the others, staying away from the establishment was not an issue, regardless of our opinions of its mission, which were varied and largely undiscussed. On the night of the explosion, we were recovering from a long day of training. Sleep, not Valentine's Day or the Fort Dix Coffee House, was foremost on our minds.

We did, however, hear the explosion, which blew out the plywood that covered the coffeehouse's shattered windows. We heard, too, the sirens of the fire trucks that arrived minutes later. But it wasn't until the next day that we learned what had happened, that someone had tossed what appeared to be a

"power bomb"—an army-issue training grenade—through the door of the coffee house. Packed as the place was with GIs and their dates, it was only sheer luck that no one was killed and only a few wounded.

New as we were to the army, many of us were still in the throes of first love. Andy, in particular, denounced the organizers of the coffeehouse as cowards and traitors. "I hope those fucking Commies learned a lesson," he said that night at mess, earning nods of agreement from many in both our and surrounding squads.

I feel the need to point out that we were not stupid. Yes, many of the draftees were there because they had been unable to attend college, either for financial or academic reasons. And we were young. But many of us—I would argue most—were capable of independent and at least somewhat nuanced thought, and for us the bombing raised questions, some of which we'd already considered and some which were new. This questioning was intensified a few weeks later, in early March, when there appeared around Fort Dix copies of Shakedown , an underground antiwar newspaper allegedly written and produced by soldiers from the base and nearby McGuire Air Force Base with the help of civilian sympathizers. The cover of the March 6 issue, a typed-up and mimeographed affair, featured a photograph of the bombed-out coffeehouse with the headline FT .DIX COFFEE -HOUSE BOMBED…CLOSED BUT

THE MOVEMENT GOES ON. The accompanying article decried the attack and provided additional details, including the charge that two men had been seen running from the scene and that rifle shots had been fired at patrons fleeing the explosion. Additional articles criticized the war in general, urging those of us still in training to recognize the barbarousness of what was happening in Vietnam and to protest our own treatment at the hands of the military establishment. Afraid to be seen reading the paper, I took a copy and hid it beneath my shirt. I read it later in the latrine, the only place I could get even a few minutes alone, then flushed it, page by page, down the toilet, lest I be discovered and accused of insubordination. Years later, I came across that issue of Shakedown at a flea market in San Francisco, for sale by an old hippie who had collected all kinds of antiwar propaganda and now was making a living selling it off piece by piece. Today it hangs over the desk in my office at the college, where I frequently look at it and remember what it was like to sit in that freezing cold bathroom, wrestling with the philosophy of war while outside the stall door my platoon mates celebrated a successful run through the camp's obstacle course. If you had asked me then if I was prowar, I would have answered yes. Now, having had a few years during which to think about it, I might clarify and say that I was antiwar but pro-Vietnam, by which I mean that although I found the idea of warfare itself distasteful and inherently repellent, I believed that what we were doing in Vietnam was right inasmuch as we were trying to keep a hostile force from overcoming our allies. In addition to seeing my involvement in the war as an adventure and a quest, I quickly came to see it also as a mission of honor. Perhaps instinctively I needed to do so in order to spare myself some of the mental anguish I suspected was due to befall me. Or perhaps I was merely impressionable.