Tape 10, Side B

[Begin Tape 10, Side B]

Your left!
Your left!
Your left, right, left!
You had a good home but you left, right?! [laughs]
You had a good home but you left, right?!
Sound off!

That was one. I liked that, ‘cause it had left-right in it and there was a little play on words: pretty sophisticated for the armed forces. And there were things casting aspersions on other branches of the service: the Navy, the Air Corps, the Marines.

Did you ever feel identified with the Navy since your father had been Navy?

No, never did, ‘cause he was kind of a…

You didn’t care?

Yeah, no… no, it wasn’t the real Navy, this was Navy-Air Force, it was always near naval Air Force bases. He took me a couple times onto the base where the jets were revving up, you know: extremely loud noise; so that was all airplane stuff. I liked the airplanes, but no, I didn’t have any of those corps affiliations. The other thing marching you had to know all the little turning around tricks, how to do left-faces and right-faces and about-faces—that’s very tricky because you have to do it just on the right foot. And what’s the other thing…?

What were the consequences if you messed up?

Well you might get called out or just embarrassed or… [laughs] my favorite was: Your other left foot! if you had mistakenly gone right when you should have gone left or vice versa: Your other left foot! Or the real bad ones, and there were a few bad ones, they’d have to be taken out for remedial marching all alone. Sometimes you’d look out and see some poor hapless recruit just marching up and down by himself and maybe a swaggering drill sergeant strolling up and down saying: left, right, left, right; about-face! ten hut! parade rest! And you had to know, well you had to know how to count, count off, that was important. Yeah, eyes right!

Was it a challenge for some of the guys?

Maybe, maybe it was, yeah, ‘cause you had to keep track of what was coming down the line, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine. When it came to eight and you were nine you had to snap it out and turn your head right, and you had to know how to distance… everything had to be squared up so you had to know how to distance yourself from your compatriots on either side, and there was double-time.

Was that where you learned…?

Cornhole interval? That happened once; it was kind of a joke because we had like a substitute drill sergeant one time [laughter], like a substitute teacher, ‘cause the regular one wasn’t there, so he came in and he must be… The behavior of short-timers is different; you know when people get pretty short, when they’re ready to get out, they drop a lot of the mask of discipline and…

So you just mean toward the end of your…?

Toward the end of their career; when they’re getting out; when they’re short. So he was [laughs]: “Gentlemen!” [laughs] (you know we’re marching) “we’re going to march in cornhole interval. Those of you who don’t know what that means, you’re gonna find out.” So you have to slow down a little bit, and we thought it was just funny; we were laughing too. You have to slow down a little and approach the guy in front of you, get real close, so you have to kind of shuffle along there; so you know here’s this huge column of guys just kind of shuffling along there, real close to one another. That was funny for a while: cornhole interval: where do you get that stuff?

So he wanted you to close the gap and then he was going to tell you what the limits were, what the interval was?

You had to do it, you had to get close enough so that you were packed in, but you still had to be able to progress forward, this whole shuffling line of five or six deep guys shuffling down the road. And you know the other people are running by double-time, running past us and looking and laughing. So it was just a show, and there really wasn’t any, you know, in the official army drill lexicon there was no cornhole interval [laughter]. You couldn’t find that; look that thing up. I ain’t gonna do that no more.

So the short-timers would just sort of throw that stuff on you?

Yeah sometimes, sometimes you’d see that, even officers sometimes. When I was, later on in Fort Lewis, Washington, I mean you never see officers break down. This was one time where I did. Our company captain, he was, you know he got down to a week; we knew he was out, but he got down to a week and he started going around, in that week he started—what was he doing? Oh, his jacket, his army jacket, he’d take it and shove it down around his shoulders, which was a major violation of the dress code, and loosen his tie, and he’d start skipping around the office singing: I really give a shit; I really give a shit. [laughter] And then he’d pull himself together. He had this big smile on his face. So yeah, I mean… There was another division you could see right away among the lifers, and the lifers were career army, whether noncommissioned officers or warrant officers or professional officers: there were those who took it all very sincerely and seriously and then there were those to whom it was just a job, you know, and all they wanted to make sure was they didn’t get killed and they didn’t get assigned to an active combat area before their time ran out, and those you could, I mean you could spot—it’s probably like inmates in the asylum—you can spot them immediately, you can spot which kind of guards are gonna be more or less on your side and which aren’t, you know, and you could spot the lifers immediately who really believe in duty, honor, country and discipline and all these things and…

So you try and look out for them.

You’d better watch out for them, yeah, they’re no fun at all. Right, skate out from under those guys. Of course I liked the rifle practice the best, you know, they just troop you in; and at Fort Bliss, Texas they had a great big firing range, so fifty people could be firing all at once, targets would pop up.

Did you have your own rifle?

Sure, got your own rifle; gotta take it apart, gotta keep it clean.

What kind of rifle?

M16, well actually in basic training it was M14s for most of the time; they were implementing M16s in the army generally but we didn’t get M16s until sort of half way through.

Were they very different?

M1s…very heavy; very heavy [groans]; I mean significantly heavier than M16s, they were big wooden logs and pipes you have to pick up; they’re hard to hold on to.

So they used those in training?

They used those in training, yeah, and for firing too. In Fort Lewis for a while they weren’t actually firing, but everybody had M16s with no rounds in them so you could get the idea of how heavy they were and what you had to do and carry: I mean you could clean them, carry them around; you couldn’t shoot them though [laughs]; they didn’t have any ammo at that time.

But it was M14s? or you were saying…? ‘cause you mentioned M1s.

I’m sorry, M14s; we never got M16s. We never got M16s and we… yeah, I got confused. M1s, those old World War II M1s, so we started with those and then we got M14s, and I don’t think we ever got M16s. They were using those in Vietnam, that’s what they were using, but whatever they had they were shipping over there, so we were training with M14s, which are still heavier than M16s.

And in basic training it was the M1?

Started off with the M1s, which had been around for a long time.

Heavy.

Heavy suckers, yeah.

So that’s what the guys in World War II carried around?

I think that’s a World War II weapon, M1; I’m not sure. I’m not sure. Maybe not, maybe it’s a Korean War weapon.

So your camp training in shooting helped you out?

Yeah, that was fun, because I already knew the proper way to hold and aim a rifle to get the best results, and I got better and better there. You know at the end they give you a little badge or a little medal of some kind that indicates you’ve completed basic training and you can hang from it little bars that indicate what sort of areas you excelled in, and for riflery they had this whole hierarchy of things from bolo [laughs]—not really—from marksman to sharpshooter to… I forget… marksman, sharpshooter, expert and I don’t know what the… sniper [laughs], I don’t know what the other one was….

And you got?

I got an expert badge; I got an expert badge out of shooting. You could also go to the PX and buy these funny things like ‘fork’, ‘knife’, ‘mess kit’, you know….

And that was all right? You could do that?

Well you could do it; you shouldn’t really put them on there when you were walking around; it was just joke stuff. And you shouldn’t put them on there when you’re there on base. Knife, fork, entrenching tool, condom; they had all sorts of ‘em. So yeah, I liked the firing part, and there was a point where everybody got to throw a grenade, so I threw a grenade.

Was that fun?

That was fun, sure. Great big explosion.

Was it scary?

No because you know the army, especially a basic training operation that’s been in business as long as they had in Fort Bliss—later on I saw some bad stuff, like in Fort Lewis, where it wasn’t historically a basic training operation, when I got there they were just putting it together, so there was some bad stuff there.

So they didn’t quite have it together?

They didn’t quite have it together, but in the army everything is done by the numbers and if you can count, you know, one, two, three, they make it so easy to do everything, one, two, three, and they’re not gonna let you do the grenade, live grenade, until you can do one, two, three, four, five, whatever: Take the grenade; pull the pin… Take the grenade in your right hand; pull the pin—put your hand over the mechanism there so it’s still not alive—and cock your hand back on three and then release on four.

Oops!

Yeah, well, talk about your brown-nosers…

You couldn’t hand it to the officer?

Yeah, here, you do it I… [prissy voice] you do it so much better [laughing], I like your style. But before that they would have…

Want to tell me about the brown-nosers?

Well, when they first introduced the topic of grenade throwing they’d get us out there in the bleachers outside and a demonstrator would come, I mean an expert would come up, another drill sergeant: Men, today we’re going to show you the proper technique for releasing a hand grenade. And so this guy, what he did was said: This is a hand grenade; now if I pull the pin here—and he bobbled it and he dropped it and it rolled away from him and one of these brown-nosers from the bleachers ran out and threw himself on it! [laughter]

‘Cause he’d seen too many Audie Murphy movies or something?

I don’t know. It was a dud of course, you know, he did this on purpose.

Was he happy with the guy?

No, no, no, no [laughing]. He just looked at him and shook his head: You dumb son of a bitch.

So what’s the proper thing to do, run like hell?

No, the proper thing, in combat situations of course the proper thing is to cover it. But he just thought: Oh you idiot. And you know the rest of us for a split second there we thought: Whoa, we're all going to be blown to bits! but then you know in the next split second: No, they wouldn’t do that, they probably always do this to see what happens.

So it was kind of theatrical.

Yes, it was always theatrical but also by then we’d seen enough of this kind of army lifer humour to know that it’s just a perfect thing for them to do; for example: gas. You know one of the things you’re issued is a gas mask and you go through gas exposure training, you know, when the command ‘gas’ comes down the line you’ve got three seconds to open your gas mask case, grab the mask out, put it on your head and clear it and then you can breathe with the gas mask: you’ve got three seconds. And so we’d had a couple of gas drills already, without gas, and so we knew that sooner or later down the line there was going to be a gas drill with real gas. You know one of the things you pick up, like from holdovers—people who have to go through basic again! [laughs]

Were they…?

They were bolos.

Guys who were one short of a six-pack?

Yeah, something like that, or they were sick for a week or something like that, or they didn’t quite… You’d hear stuff; you’d hear about what was coming, ‘cause they wouldn’t tell you necessarily, officially. So you know you have to learn how to… We knew also at the end of it there was going to be a big obstacle course maneuver, a big night obstacle course thing as part of our final testing, so you have to know how to go through obstacle courses, and one of the things that you have to do is crawl under barbed wire. So what you’re supposed to do is… so they get waves of people through these barbed wire fields. You’re supposed to hit the ground, roll over on your back, take your weapon out and put your weapon in front of your face and use it to lift up the barbed wire as you scramble backwards on your back crab-like through the barbed wire field.

Sliding on your back?

Sliding on your back using your elbows as best you could—you’ve got your weapon up here to keep the barbed wire off your nose, ‘cause it’s right there--and you’re scooting under there; and we’re all doing this, while we’re all doing this these wise guys, these wise guy drill sergeants come by with tear gas canisters and they’re popping these things and they’re saying—you know you’re supposed to say: Gas! Gas!—they’re popping these things they’re going [indifferently]: ‘Gas’… (and then they put their masks on)…’gas’… And these tear gas canisters are spewing this stuff out so you’re under this barbed wire with your rifle stuck up there, you’ve got three seconds to drop--however you’re gonna do it, it’s kind of hard to do it.

You’ve got barbed wire in your face…

You’ve got barbed wire in your face and you’ve gotta let go--you’re never supposed to let go of your weapon but you’ve got to let go of it at least with one hand and reach down there and get your…

You’ve got your three seconds…

You’ve got your three seconds and you’ve got your tin—you’ve got a full pack on your back and your tin helmet, you know, your big heavy metal helmet, so you have to get that off, get your gas mask on, get your helmet back on, get your rifle back up and then keep a movin’, ‘cause you gotta keep movin’. So some of the guys didn’t make it and so you could hear gasping and coughing; I did it—I don’t know how I did it—but you could hear gasping and coughing and that sort of stuff and the air was kind of…

So you got some, you got the tear gas?

No, I didn’t get any, I made it there, but later that same day [laughs] was the tear gas exposure test. And they lined us all up, and there’s a cabin out there, and they say: ‘Okay here’s what you do, you’re gonna go in there’…. That cabin was filled with gas—I don’t know if it was CS gas or tear gas or what, probably just tear gas—but it was very strange in that cabin [laughs]. The light was different, so maybe it was a tinted gas or something like that. ‘But you’re gonna go into this cabin and there’s a non-gas area, and you’re gonna wait there and when they tell you you’re gonna go into the gas room and take your gas mask off—you’re gonna go in there with your gas mask on—go in there, take it off and say your name, rank and serial number and then get out.’ Okay, we can do that in three seconds, we can do that. We figure oh maybe you’ll get a little in your eyes but you’re not gonna have to breathe it.

So you’re exhaling the whole time ‘cause you’re saying…

Exhaling, right. You say da da da dut, take a deep breath, take your gas mask off, keep your eyes shut if you can, and say it and then put your gas mask on and get out of there. That’s cool. We can do that. No problem. Three seconds: Private Conkin, US56400570.

And you did?

Well, so I get in there, you know; as we’re going up there we can see from the exit there [laughs] there are guys, everybody’s gasping—not everybody, but a lot of people are gasping, some are on their knees; I remember one guy who was crying, he was just crying, he was crying to beat the band, you know, clutching at their... Okay, these guys, they’re not talkin’ fast enough [laughs]. So I go in there and it’s eerie in there, it’s all red or yellow or whatever and there are three guys sitting at a table and it’s filled with gas, filled with gas. Three guys sitting at a table with gas masks on.

So were they officers or were they…?

Probably not. Officers, you know, they’re all… Who knows what the officers are doing during basic training. You hardly ever see officers that much.

So the guys sitting at the table though are…?

They’re all drill sergeants. Bastards [laughs]. So you get the sign from them to do it: Take gas masks off; say it: Private Conkin, US56400570, and you start to put your gas mask back on and one of them, you can hear him through his gas mask: What?! I didn’t hear you! [laughter] So, completely unprepared for that, I have to do it again.

And you absolutely have to take a breath.

You have to take a breath. Yeah. That’s how they get you to get a little exposure. Everybody has to get a little exposure, right. That’s why everybody’s running out of there gasping and coughing and hacking and… so I did too, yeah. Gotta whoa! and then get out of there, you know, put it back on and then get out and then take it off and breathe in the air again. It was harmless really, except maybe some people had conditions, and like I say, it brought some of them to their knees. And then maybe also some of them had to repeat it a couple of times [laughs]. But that’s the kind of thing they would do, you know, so when this grenade incident happened it was only for a split second that we thought it might be live, and then ah, it’s another lifer trick.

Perfectly coordinated with the brown-noser.

Oh yeah, man, he’s the kind of guy, he called… yeah, he always would get in trouble for calling the sergeants sir and he would call the other recruits cadet. I mean it was bad enough…

He thought he was at West Point.

Yeah, exactly, or he had some high school military training or something like that. Cadet. If you called anybody anything you could call them private or something like that, but most people, I mean you had your name tag on, and your name tag did not say sorry, so if you said: I’m sorry, sergeant, he’d say: Your name tag doesn’t say sorry, Conkin. Drop and give me twenty! [laughter]

Were the sergeants tough on the brown-nosers?

Yeah, yeah they were, they were tough on them and they were tough on the bolos. One of the things they would do to punish you was make you be a road guard or a guidon carrier, you know, because when you were marching around in your unit you had to have two road guards up at the front of the phalanx and at the very front you’d have to have a guidon carrier, which was a big pole with a flag on it, your unit, whatever it was. So when you came to road crossings the command would be: Road guards! right and left, post! So the road guards had these big yellow reflective things on top of their full backpack, steel pot and weapon and big old heavy combat boots, and they had this big old yellow thing and they had to fall out and stand at parade rest to block any oncoming vehicles. So road guard, nobody wanted to be a road guard. But that didn’t bother the cadet guy, he was proud, proud to stand out there, proud to carry the guidon. See all along they were doing testing too. Part of the thing was to try to figure out where you would fit in the army, in the big scheme of things, where you would go next for advanced training.

Were these pencil and paper tests or…?

A lot of them were, yeah, pencil and paper tests, and I remember they concluded that I should go into cryptography as a result of my tests, which meant a National Security Agency clearance, which meant four years. I said no, thanks. I thought it was kind of interesting, I said: I can’t be a draftee and go into that? No, you have to go in for four years. They send you to Monterey, the Monterey Presidio, they had cryptography and language schools there; sounded good to me, much better than having to go to infantry training or something like that.

So did you consider it?

Not for a second [laughs].

‘Cause of the four years?

Yeah, four years was a killer. Not for a second. But they also would test you to see if you were a candidate, if you might be a good officer, even though you were drafted or had enlisted for four years they would give periodical OCS, Officer’s Candidate School testing, and some people were taken out and sent to Officer’s Candidate School, like this cadet guy may have gone that way, I don’t know.

So if they really felt you had the right stuff then they would…?

Right, you had the right attitude, yeah.

Having them tell you that you would make a good cryptographer, did that make you think about anything to do with future studying languages or…?

No, no, not really, but I thought it was kind of interesting that they would pull that out of the hat but I was suspicious of everything; I thought they just did it because they wanted people to go in for four years and then they’d send you to Vietnam [laughs], because they could do anything with you. You have a little protection as a draftee: once you’re in the regular army they can do anything with you.

So they can just assign you wherever they…?

Yes they can; I’ve seen plenty of evidence of that.

So draftees they really couldn’t do that, or they weren’t allowed to do that?

They really couldn’t do that. They really couldn’t do that, and it didn’t pay off either because for two years… a lot of them were destined for the infantry and for Vietnam anyway, but if you went on a different track you were supposed to be, I mean it was covered by the Selective Service Act and so on, you know, if you were tested out and—and nobody was fucking with you, you know, because they can do anything with anybody if they want to, but if they didn’t have any reason to do that, you know, to get you or something like that, it was pretty much straightforward, it was by the numbers and everybody was certainly into that, but if for whatever reason they wanted to get ya, they could, they could put you in prison, they could do anything because, you know, it’s totally their show: they could plant evidence on you, they could… they could just do anything, but most of the time they were too busy, they were too occupied with their own games or trying to please their commanding officer to do anything, to do anything odd. –They shoot you, you know, they could just shoot you, get you into a combat situation and shoot you, and that happened the other way in Vietnam, ‘cause everybody had weapons [laughs].

Now did you hear about that, about fragging and…?

At this time, no, we hadn’t heard, still the buildup hadn’t really increased yet, I mean we were in it, so it really hadn’t... We knew it was over there and we knew it was hot.

Did you ever hear about sergeants and officers shooting soldiers?

Not at that time, not in basic; later on that year when I went to Fort Lewis, Washington, then you start to hear stuff, because a lot of the returning, I mean there were some people whose tour of duty in Vietnam had ended and they were being tapped on to start a new basic training and advanced infantry training operations in Fort Lewis, and these were some of the zombies you’d see walking around there [laughs].

Really? They looked really burned out?

A lot of them were, yeah, a lot of ‘em. That’s when you’d see: Oh, so that’s what’s happening. And in Germany too, later on when I was in Germany. You know lifers, they cycle through combat, they alternate combat and non-combat when there’s a hot war going on, but when it’s not that hot: they might spend a year in a combat zone and another year in a non-combat zone and then go back to the combat zone, you know, and if they survive, back to the non-combat zone.

So you started seeing this when you were at Fort Lewis.

Yeah, started paying attention to it; it was unmistakable, yeah. But then it was all, you know, the only thing that Vietnam came into it was drill sergeants would make sure that everybody understood that you might potentially have to use some of the stuff we’re telling you about, you know, hand-to-hand combat or the bayonet drills [laughs], but it was also phony and funny because it was the military but it was flaky, you know, like the hand-to-hand combat was just--because they had to cram so much in I think—the hand-to-hand combat was just perfunctory, I mean the things that they made you do, and then you know it was on to the next thing.

So you didn’t feel like it would exactly put you in good stead if you had to have hand-to-hand combat?

Absolutely not. If we had a camera I’d demonstrate it but [laughs] it was just really weak flailing [laughter].

[Laughing] Sissy stuff.

It really was, the way they put it across. No.

It wasn’t up to your jujitsu or your karate?

Absolutely not. I had enough, I had more than enough stuff under my belt already that this hand-to-hand combat training was nothing, it was just nothing. But we saw it that way and we just thought: well, you know, we’re not gonna do this if we ever get into a hand-to-hand combat situation, this is not what we’re going to be doing [laughs], you know, this slapping and flailing and…

We’re just at the end of the tape.

[End Tape 10, Side B]