Tape 11, Side A
[Begin Tape 11, Side A]
I’m still in basic training here. The other thing besides hand-to-hand combat that was funny was the bayonet training. Bayonet training: basically there were dummies hanging from ropes and you had to fix your bayonet on your weapon, your bayonet was always with you but you had to affix it to your weapon and approach these dummies; some of them were free-hanging from ropes and some of them were more solid; and using the approved thrust method you had to drive your bayonet into these dummies and then go on to the next dummy. It was all done in the drill-like fashion, but you were supposed to shout out [laughs], as you thrust your bayonet into one of these dummies you were supposed to shout out some sort of a thing, and basically what you were supposed to shout out more often than anything else was: Kill. You were supposed to shout out Kill because that was the spirit of the bayonet [laughs], because they would drill you in that before: What is the spirit of the bayonet? and everybody had to say: Kill! What is the spirit of the bayonet? Kill! So when you approached these targets you were supposed to say: Kill! And you know they would get on you if you weren’t saying something Kill or…loud enough: Louder!
Could you add other things to it?
Yeah. I’m going to kill you now! Now! Take that! Take that you enemy!
Silly savage.
So I didn’t say anything, you know, I just… I wasn’t gonna… ‘cause everybody was yelling all around, I was just... But I liked to stick ‘em, yeah, that was fun. And the thing I didn’t like though was climbing over the huge barrier, yeah, climbing over the huge barrier, climbing up the ropes over the very tall mountainside, and not rappelling down the other side but just scooting down the other side, you know, you’d get rope burns all over your hands and… No, I never liked that, ‘cause you had to do it real fast too and I couldn’t do it that fast, so they’d start yellin’ at ya. They’d yell at ya.
So you’d catch some flack…. What were you built like in those days?
About the same, you know, sort of…
So, for the benefit of the listeners…
… cockroach; built like a cockroach.
No, but you’re pretty big—what do they say?: big boned.
Yeah, I’m a big hefty guy, but I’ve got long legs, they’re good for running.
So you were fairly stocky…
…stocky but no upper body strength, the typical American frailty at that time, yeah. Not a lot of arm strength, so chin-ups and push-ups and this kind of climbing: couldn’t do that so well.
So when you had to do twenty push-ups, that was pretty hard.
Yeah, yeah, had to fake ‘em: one, two… fifteen! Sometimes they’d walk away, they’d just tell you the thing and then they wouldn’t stand over to watch you.
But then all the karate you had done for yourself was more… ‘cause it sounds like you were probably, well you had calluses for one.
Yeah, it’s like that Bill Cosby routine about karate where he said: So I practiced karate and what you’re supposed to do is build up the big slabs of calluses on your hand and you keep your hand in your pocket for a couple of weeks; your hand starts to smell like a foot; so even if you miss the guy the smell’ll kill ‘im. [laughs] (That was a good one.) I got so good I would walk down nothing but dark streets with twenty-dollar bills hanging out of my pockets. But that was just… I didn’t really take it very far, that stuff; I could punch a hole through a door, that’s all. I could break a brick or a two-by-four or something like that. I used to do that a lot.
So you didn’t have a lot of stamina but hand-to-hand combat you would have probably done pretty well.
Well, you know, yeah, better than that.
You weren’t shagged out.
Yes, better than that, and I could march a long way and I could move quick, but some of that other stuff… and I could shoot my gun, my rifle.
[Laughs] You’re never supposed to say…
… never say--it’s not a gun, it’s a rifle.
That rhyme about ‘This is your rifle, this is your gun’*, we must have seen that in some World War II movies.
Possibly, yeah, I don’t remember that one. Once you found that out, it was one of the rules, nobody ever really called it a gun anymore.
It’s like calling a ship a boat.
Exactly, you know, there was that nomenclature; that’s the other thing: you started to discover army nomenclature: one uniform… let’s see… one helmet liner… one liner comma helmet comma olive green. Sometimes you had to give lists of what you had or what you were wearing—there were checklists—and you had to do it like that.
And if you just said one helmet…
Yeah: I got my green helmet liner. No, no. One liner comma helmet; one liner helmet color olive green, one… It’s like that Slim Pickins thing we were talking about*: forty dollars in gold…
[Laughter] Two pair nylon stockings; one prophylactic…
So you know it’s all part of the rules, and like I say, they weren’t trying to mess with your mind too much, they just wanted to fulfil their work quotas, although some of the drill sergeants were serious about preparing you for combat eventually, you know, they were always saying: How do you think you’re gonna survive over there if you can’t do this? So you gotta learn how to do this. And you know there were some emotional breakdowns and sometimes you had to go see the chaplain, I mean you could go see the chaplain any time: they had a chapel on base; they had everything there.
So was the chaplain sort of used therapeutically? I mean you say you could go see the chaplain, was it usually people did if they had some kind of problem or were feeling upset or whatever?
Yeah, that kind of thing.
Did they have psychiatric help?
Possibly they did, possibly in basic training if something like that came along they’d just wash you out, send you back home to mommy or whatever.
This guy can’t cut it….
Yeah, he’s not crazy enough [laughs]; some Catch 22 thing. You’re insane… So if you want to get out of the army you’re insane, but that’s just the kind of people we want in the army, people who want to get out. But oh the other thing was the Chaplain Corps, the officers and enlisted people in the Chaplain Corps wore these little black neckerchiefs and people in the combat arms wore these little camouflage neckerchiefs, so you could see all that. There were some sky blue ones: I don’t know who they were, maybe jumpers, maybe parachute rangers or something like that. I mean you had to know all this stuff too because there would be… this was all part of getting out; there were tests of various kinds. Other than all that stuff the big event was the obstacle course at the very end.
What was the buildup to that?
You knew it was going come because you were getting very close to the end and they would refer to it, but you didn’t know when it was happening, and so some night they just rousted everybody out of bed: it happened at night, they rousted everybody out of bed; everybody got all their gear on: gas mask, full pack, weapon, bayonet, helmet liner and steel pot; and you’d just go out there, go out there wherever they told you to go, and it was in some strange area we’d never been, so it was disorienting at first.
Oh really? Everything was unfamiliar.
Yeah, everything was unfamiliar. It took a while to get there, and it was disorienting, and you know we could hear the sounds in the distance as we approached ‘cause there was rifle fire and there were explosions, and every now and then: pssssst boom, a flair would go off and then: boom, a giant explosion. So, you know, and then it gets louder and louder; it’s like a simulacrum of approaching a battlefield or something like that.
Was there supposed to be any sort of live ammunition?
That was never clear. These were tracer bullets overhead so you could see them [makes sound of tracers], you know, red…
So those were for real.
Well not necessarily. They would never say whether they were real or not, you know, we all figured they couldn’t be real ‘cause somebody’s liable to get up, and, you know, how would that look?
…catch one.
How would that look back in the hometown newspaper? So we figured they had to be blanks, but no one knew for sure.
But if you could see ‘em flying over your head though…
They could be blank tracers; but still even a blank would kind of knock you silly [laughter].
I bet, and how would that look at home?
Powder burn… So nobody was really sure and they were pretty low over your head ‘cause what you were supposed to do was they’d get a wave of you, you know, thirty or forty guys in the trench, and then they’d send that wave over, and behind them another thirty guys would get into the trench, and then they’d send that wave over, and you had to—we knew what was going to happen—you had to crawl to the other side of this obstacle course and at some times you might have to go under barbed wire and when the tracer goes up you were supposed to lie stock still because spotted throughout this field were these huge pits, explosive pits, and that’s where the explosions were coming, you know, huge dynamiting bombs were going off, so when the tracers went up you froze and then you got a chance to look around, see what was going on, there might be a pit over there, big explosion, and then the lights go down, keep moving, and then they might throw a gas canister out there or two while you were moving across, so it was chaos, you know, it was very chaotic but it was being controlled and they were watching everything at every stage of the game, I mean they were watching the action, and spotted throughout there were drill sergeants urging you to move on, move on, move on; but I didn’t want to make it happen so fast [laughs], plus I didn’t want to be panicked or anything like that because everybody was getting real excited and they just wanted to zip through that as fast as possible and if you did that you could fall into one of these explosion pits [laughs]—they probably had ‘em sandbagged off so you really couldn’t—but you just didn’t know. So I was in one of the early waves and I made it across with one of the later waves: I just took my time, you know, I just went slowly and my wave went way ahead of me and there was another wave coming back and they just scrambled all around me and there was another wave and I was just creeping along slowly, creep, creep, creep: got to see lots of flares and hear lots of explosions but you know I was pretty calm, watched lots of tracers. So I made it across to the other side and that was that; that was the end of basic training basically.
And no one said: Conkin you started out first and you came in last, what kind of a bolo are you?!
[Laughs] You’re gonna be a holdover; you have to surrender your entrenching tool.
So the main thing was you made it across. Were there any that didn’t survive? They didn’t find any body parts?
Bobbing in the Pedernales; no; in the Rio Grande, nope; I think everybody made it, and it was just a big horde on the other side because nobody was separating themselves out by unit or anything like that, so they were just milling around, because there was no control on the other side, all the monitors were paying attention to what was going on in the combat zone. I remember it was just a big milling scene; I don’t even know how we got back, somehow we did and there was the last parade, up and down the field, with dignitaries, like the Fort Bliss commander was there: Eyes right! as you passed by the central procession stand: Eyes right!
So had you guys been pretty much whacked into shape by that time?
Well you know everybody could do all the… yeah, you’d been through it, and you could go to the PX and get one of those things for the back of your jacket that says: When I die I’m going to hell because I’ve already been to Fort Bliss, Texas [laughter]. No, no, I got that wrong: When I die I’m going to heaven because I’ve already been to Fort Bliss, Texas. That’s what it is; that’s the way it…
One of those shiny coats?
Yeah, you know, like a high school jacket sort of. Then there was the whole… I got into a big hang-up about… you were done; you had your orders; you knew where you were going next. I was going to Fort Knox, Kentucky, but there was a two or three weeks gap in there, maybe a month gap in there before you had to report to your AIT Center, they called it Advanced Infantry Training but I was going to—this was when they had already started to assigned people their MOSs, it’s a little code number that indicates your military occupational specialty, and I saw that I was going to be a 71H20 I think, which was like a company clerk.
Did you know that already?
Yeah, I think it was part of the show, and I was going to Fort Knox to study all the things that they want you to know to be a company clerk.
So do you think if they look at you and they say: oh, this guy should be a cryptographer and you say: I’m not going for the four years, they say: company clerk?
No, no, the two things didn’t have any connection, it was just you weren’t going to do that so you had to do something else. I could read and write, so… some of them good old boys I don’t know if they could, they could shoot, or they could be in the motor pool; so these were all distinct occupational specialties within the army; it’s all done by the numbers too.
And they were being sent off all over the place.
Yeah, everybody was going to their next phase of training: real infantry training, or motor pool training, or communications specialist training, that sort of thing.
Had you made friends with anybody particularly?
No, not in that space of time, not in that era: I can’t remember anybody’s name or anything about that time. I was just gonna go back to Southern California for that time, for that break time in between.
How much time?
A couple weeks maybe, maybe a little longer than that. It was like a little leave sort of a thing.
Then would you be given transportation, you’d be flown…?
Yes, after, from there to Fort Knox, wherever you wanted to go, from there to your next stage that transportation would be covered. You had to arrange for your own transportation from Fort Bliss to wherever you were going. So there was this guy there, one of these guys, he’d collected a hundred bucks from everybody, you know, from four or five guys, ‘cause he had a vehicle and he was gonna drive to L.A., so I gave him a hundred bucks or a hundred twenty bucks or something like that, but then I was late. I don’t know what happened but I went back, I had my duffel bag all ready, I went back to the barracks and there was nobody there. So he had taken off: I lost my hundred bucks.
That’s quite a bit of money too in 1966.
Yes that was because I mean… they were paying you some amount of money during the basic training, I mean you got some money for that because you were at a rank—oh that was the other thing: you got promoted to private first class and you got a stripe, before then you didn’t have anything, so you got a stripe. So you’d put a stripe on your class As, which is your dress uniform, you get on the airplane with your little medal that says Fort Mac and mess kit and your little hat for traveling…
Did you have to sew your own stripe on?
Good question. No, I think they had some way of doing that at that stage, later on I think you could do that or have it done for you somewhere—you had to pay for it. So I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know if I had any money. That was probably almost all my money. So I forgot what I did, maybe I flew back or took a bus back, but I got back there. No, it wasn’t all my money. I had plenty of money. Actually somehow I had a lot of money [laughs], come to think of it, ‘cause I stayed in this fairly expensive little apartment for that two weeks, in fact it was in the very same building where my brother Gene had lived in Hermosa Beach when he was there: right down by the beach and…
Do you think it was your military pay or from the restaurant?
I don’t know, must have been my mil… I don’t know.
‘Cause you said you borrowed a hundred bucks from Gene before so you must have...
Yeah, just right before, so I had some dough, I don’t know, I don’t know how much or… It all had run out though, I know that, it all had run out by the time my leave was up, so I had nothing.
Had you been in touch with people? Did Gene and Bob know you were in basic training in Fort Bliss?
I think somehow, despite my plan of just disappearing, somehow in some way Gene and I had been in contact, ‘cause I remember a telephone conversation or something, maybe it was from there, he’s saying something: I wondered where you went, I wondered what happened to you; and I said: Well I got drafted. The only thing I remember from that conversation was him telling me that I should really make sure I always had a compass, ‘cause he had some experience with this, you know, being in a combat situation and… always have a compass, that was the important thing, so you knew where you were, you knew roughly, that sort of thing.
Had he not had a compass when he got captured?
I do not know [laughs]. I don’t know, probably that was just something he learned in his training: if you had a compass at least you knew which direction was which.
It sounds like he didn’t particularly disapprove of your going into the military.
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I believe he was patriotic to that extent.
And at that point the consciousness about… was there any sort of anti-Vietnam War sentiment floating around in the…?
Possibly a little bit, but nothing like it became, nothing like it became; in fact I was out of the Army when it really had reached its peak, you know, the huge demos and that sort of stuff; but you know again there was that division in the military between people who were serious and people who were just playing along. All the protests and from what I saw all the anti-war sentiment, that was welcomed by people in the military.
Really?
Absolutely.
Really? Now why?
Because they didn’t want to go, most of them didn’t want to go out to...
So you mean people at your level.
People at my level and also, you know, I had some conversations with officers and some serious extended conversations with officers later when I was in Germany about this very subject, and you know they didn’t want to go, they weren’t happy with this kind of war, and even some of the real fighters, people who’d go anywhere just to get that fighting experience, ‘cause officers, you know, they’re not gonna get promoted unless they have some battlefield experience in their records, they’re not gonna get promoted very far, so you can’t be a major or a lieutenant colonel or a colonel, not to mention a general, unless you have combat time.
So they needed combat time but they thought this was the wrong war.
Yeah, by that time it had become pretty clear that this was the wrong deal; we weren’t being attacked—the whole thing—because it was a civil war, you know, even on the most superficial level, but you know a lot of them were serious about it. But none of it, in training, in official presentations and even in unofficial ways, none of it came through that this is our glorious mission, there was none of that talk, none of it. So it was always, I mean it was definitely something to be avoided, having to go to Vietnam, but if you went, you know, if you were a lifer and you got the orders, you went.
But they weren’t happy.
No, they weren’t happy about it. So I spent my two weeks in… Gene sort of remembers a situation, now I don’t know… I think I talked to you about this before, he has different memories depending on when I speak to him about the last time he saw me and it always has something to do with an airport and I’m walking around, I have every piece of clothing I own on, I have several different layers of clothing and I’m stoned out of my mind and I’m going into the army or something like that now. So I have no recollection of any such meeting, but you never know [laughs].
He makes that out to be when you were going to basic training or at this point between?
No, when I was going apparently, that’s what… or maybe it was this point in between. Yeah, I don’t know, it’s all confused.
Do you remember this or were you too stoned? [laughs]
There you go, how can I answer? How can I answer? Yes and no and yes. It could be. It could possibly be but I don’t recall that because, I mean I recall the telephone conversation, and possibly when I was back in Hermosa Beach during this little period between, after basic training, I rang up some of, one or two of my buddies that were in, in fact I probably did ring somebody up because I remember some sort of deal where we went out and got some Chivas Regal and downed a couple of pints of that and we were walking around Hermosa Beach in a drunken happy daze.
Do you remember who it was?
It was probably Richard Solario, the Chicano artist, and I think he went into the Army shortly thereafter too, I’m not sure.
Would you say that he was the person that you were closest to?
No, there wasn’t anybody I was close to. I mean it was all very casual, superficial, and we never talked about our feelings, but then I didn’t really talk to myself about my feelings or any of that stuff; I was just moving from moment to moment; so there wasn’t anybody; I had no friends. I was like…
…Deputy Dan [laughs].
Deputy Dan*. So that time was over and that was an interesting little break of freedom in between those two periods, but I knew I was… I was ready to go to Fort Knox too. So I wound up on some prop plane from L.A. to Dallas, Texas and then a regular plane from Dallas to Kentucky, and then I was in… you know I spent, I don’t know how long that was, another couple months maybe in advanced training for my military occupational specialty, which was company clerk. And what they showed you was how to deal with all the forms, the most important of which was the morning report. The morning report form you had to fill out every single morning, and if somebody was on leave you had to note that, and if somebody was sick you noted that, and if somebody was in jail you noted that, whatever it was, and there were particular little requirements for doing that, and there were a couple of other forms, and aside from that the only other class was typing: that’s where I learned to type! [laughs]
Really? You didn’t know how before?
No, I’d never, didn’t have a typewriter, didn’t have any occasion to type.
So did you get good?
Nah [laughter]. It’s school! It was a classroom. I never did well in school. I was always just joking around, and I never practiced so I never got that good, but I could whip out a morning report, you know, and that typing class was taught by a WAC, so that was real fun for all of us, oh yeah, a little exposure to the… I love a woman in a uniform. But there was a lot of free time in Fort Knox, Kentucky; I was walking around a lot, you know, and let’s see this is, what was on the radio was, oh, ‘Monday Monday’, you know, doesn’t it have a [sings]: If I was in L.A.…
Oh yeah: I’d be safe and warm…
I’d be safe and warm, ‘cause it was cold there in Kentucky, and even though it was, gosh I guess it’s April-May, something like that; even then it’s kind of cold. It was a pretty good walking place. It was real nice. Walked by the depository where all the gold is. Got into trouble; that’s one of the times when I first got into trouble.
I’m gonna have to turn this over and I don’t want to miss this.
So we’ll stop here. Okay.
[End Tape 11, Side A]
I’m still in basic training here. The other thing besides hand-to-hand combat that was funny was the bayonet training. Bayonet training: basically there were dummies hanging from ropes and you had to fix your bayonet on your weapon, your bayonet was always with you but you had to affix it to your weapon and approach these dummies; some of them were free-hanging from ropes and some of them were more solid; and using the approved thrust method you had to drive your bayonet into these dummies and then go on to the next dummy. It was all done in the drill-like fashion, but you were supposed to shout out [laughs], as you thrust your bayonet into one of these dummies you were supposed to shout out some sort of a thing, and basically what you were supposed to shout out more often than anything else was: Kill. You were supposed to shout out Kill because that was the spirit of the bayonet [laughs], because they would drill you in that before: What is the spirit of the bayonet? and everybody had to say: Kill! What is the spirit of the bayonet? Kill! So when you approached these targets you were supposed to say: Kill! And you know they would get on you if you weren’t saying something Kill or…loud enough: Louder!
Could you add other things to it?
Yeah. I’m going to kill you now! Now! Take that! Take that you enemy!
Silly savage.
So I didn’t say anything, you know, I just… I wasn’t gonna… ‘cause everybody was yelling all around, I was just... But I liked to stick ‘em, yeah, that was fun. And the thing I didn’t like though was climbing over the huge barrier, yeah, climbing over the huge barrier, climbing up the ropes over the very tall mountainside, and not rappelling down the other side but just scooting down the other side, you know, you’d get rope burns all over your hands and… No, I never liked that, ‘cause you had to do it real fast too and I couldn’t do it that fast, so they’d start yellin’ at ya. They’d yell at ya.
So you’d catch some flack…. What were you built like in those days?
About the same, you know, sort of…
So, for the benefit of the listeners…
… cockroach; built like a cockroach.
No, but you’re pretty big—what do they say?: big boned.
Yeah, I’m a big hefty guy, but I’ve got long legs, they’re good for running.
So you were fairly stocky…
…stocky but no upper body strength, the typical American frailty at that time, yeah. Not a lot of arm strength, so chin-ups and push-ups and this kind of climbing: couldn’t do that so well.
So when you had to do twenty push-ups, that was pretty hard.
Yeah, yeah, had to fake ‘em: one, two… fifteen! Sometimes they’d walk away, they’d just tell you the thing and then they wouldn’t stand over to watch you.
But then all the karate you had done for yourself was more… ‘cause it sounds like you were probably, well you had calluses for one.
Yeah, it’s like that Bill Cosby routine about karate where he said: So I practiced karate and what you’re supposed to do is build up the big slabs of calluses on your hand and you keep your hand in your pocket for a couple of weeks; your hand starts to smell like a foot; so even if you miss the guy the smell’ll kill ‘im. [laughs] (That was a good one.) I got so good I would walk down nothing but dark streets with twenty-dollar bills hanging out of my pockets. But that was just… I didn’t really take it very far, that stuff; I could punch a hole through a door, that’s all. I could break a brick or a two-by-four or something like that. I used to do that a lot.
So you didn’t have a lot of stamina but hand-to-hand combat you would have probably done pretty well.
Well, you know, yeah, better than that.
You weren’t shagged out.
Yes, better than that, and I could march a long way and I could move quick, but some of that other stuff… and I could shoot my gun, my rifle.
[Laughs] You’re never supposed to say…
… never say--it’s not a gun, it’s a rifle.
That rhyme about ‘This is your rifle, this is your gun’*, we must have seen that in some World War II movies.
Possibly, yeah, I don’t remember that one. Once you found that out, it was one of the rules, nobody ever really called it a gun anymore.
It’s like calling a ship a boat.
Exactly, you know, there was that nomenclature; that’s the other thing: you started to discover army nomenclature: one uniform… let’s see… one helmet liner… one liner comma helmet comma olive green. Sometimes you had to give lists of what you had or what you were wearing—there were checklists—and you had to do it like that.
And if you just said one helmet…
Yeah: I got my green helmet liner. No, no. One liner comma helmet; one liner helmet color olive green, one… It’s like that Slim Pickins thing we were talking about*: forty dollars in gold…
[Laughter] Two pair nylon stockings; one prophylactic…
So you know it’s all part of the rules, and like I say, they weren’t trying to mess with your mind too much, they just wanted to fulfil their work quotas, although some of the drill sergeants were serious about preparing you for combat eventually, you know, they were always saying: How do you think you’re gonna survive over there if you can’t do this? So you gotta learn how to do this. And you know there were some emotional breakdowns and sometimes you had to go see the chaplain, I mean you could go see the chaplain any time: they had a chapel on base; they had everything there.
So was the chaplain sort of used therapeutically? I mean you say you could go see the chaplain, was it usually people did if they had some kind of problem or were feeling upset or whatever?
Yeah, that kind of thing.
Did they have psychiatric help?
Possibly they did, possibly in basic training if something like that came along they’d just wash you out, send you back home to mommy or whatever.
This guy can’t cut it….
Yeah, he’s not crazy enough [laughs]; some Catch 22 thing. You’re insane… So if you want to get out of the army you’re insane, but that’s just the kind of people we want in the army, people who want to get out. But oh the other thing was the Chaplain Corps, the officers and enlisted people in the Chaplain Corps wore these little black neckerchiefs and people in the combat arms wore these little camouflage neckerchiefs, so you could see all that. There were some sky blue ones: I don’t know who they were, maybe jumpers, maybe parachute rangers or something like that. I mean you had to know all this stuff too because there would be… this was all part of getting out; there were tests of various kinds. Other than all that stuff the big event was the obstacle course at the very end.
What was the buildup to that?
You knew it was going come because you were getting very close to the end and they would refer to it, but you didn’t know when it was happening, and so some night they just rousted everybody out of bed: it happened at night, they rousted everybody out of bed; everybody got all their gear on: gas mask, full pack, weapon, bayonet, helmet liner and steel pot; and you’d just go out there, go out there wherever they told you to go, and it was in some strange area we’d never been, so it was disorienting at first.
Oh really? Everything was unfamiliar.
Yeah, everything was unfamiliar. It took a while to get there, and it was disorienting, and you know we could hear the sounds in the distance as we approached ‘cause there was rifle fire and there were explosions, and every now and then: pssssst boom, a flair would go off and then: boom, a giant explosion. So, you know, and then it gets louder and louder; it’s like a simulacrum of approaching a battlefield or something like that.
Was there supposed to be any sort of live ammunition?
That was never clear. These were tracer bullets overhead so you could see them [makes sound of tracers], you know, red…
So those were for real.
Well not necessarily. They would never say whether they were real or not, you know, we all figured they couldn’t be real ‘cause somebody’s liable to get up, and, you know, how would that look?
…catch one.
How would that look back in the hometown newspaper? So we figured they had to be blanks, but no one knew for sure.
But if you could see ‘em flying over your head though…
They could be blank tracers; but still even a blank would kind of knock you silly [laughter].
I bet, and how would that look at home?
Powder burn… So nobody was really sure and they were pretty low over your head ‘cause what you were supposed to do was they’d get a wave of you, you know, thirty or forty guys in the trench, and then they’d send that wave over, and behind them another thirty guys would get into the trench, and then they’d send that wave over, and you had to—we knew what was going to happen—you had to crawl to the other side of this obstacle course and at some times you might have to go under barbed wire and when the tracer goes up you were supposed to lie stock still because spotted throughout this field were these huge pits, explosive pits, and that’s where the explosions were coming, you know, huge dynamiting bombs were going off, so when the tracers went up you froze and then you got a chance to look around, see what was going on, there might be a pit over there, big explosion, and then the lights go down, keep moving, and then they might throw a gas canister out there or two while you were moving across, so it was chaos, you know, it was very chaotic but it was being controlled and they were watching everything at every stage of the game, I mean they were watching the action, and spotted throughout there were drill sergeants urging you to move on, move on, move on; but I didn’t want to make it happen so fast [laughs], plus I didn’t want to be panicked or anything like that because everybody was getting real excited and they just wanted to zip through that as fast as possible and if you did that you could fall into one of these explosion pits [laughs]—they probably had ‘em sandbagged off so you really couldn’t—but you just didn’t know. So I was in one of the early waves and I made it across with one of the later waves: I just took my time, you know, I just went slowly and my wave went way ahead of me and there was another wave coming back and they just scrambled all around me and there was another wave and I was just creeping along slowly, creep, creep, creep: got to see lots of flares and hear lots of explosions but you know I was pretty calm, watched lots of tracers. So I made it across to the other side and that was that; that was the end of basic training basically.
And no one said: Conkin you started out first and you came in last, what kind of a bolo are you?!
[Laughs] You’re gonna be a holdover; you have to surrender your entrenching tool.
So the main thing was you made it across. Were there any that didn’t survive? They didn’t find any body parts?
Bobbing in the Pedernales; no; in the Rio Grande, nope; I think everybody made it, and it was just a big horde on the other side because nobody was separating themselves out by unit or anything like that, so they were just milling around, because there was no control on the other side, all the monitors were paying attention to what was going on in the combat zone. I remember it was just a big milling scene; I don’t even know how we got back, somehow we did and there was the last parade, up and down the field, with dignitaries, like the Fort Bliss commander was there: Eyes right! as you passed by the central procession stand: Eyes right!
So had you guys been pretty much whacked into shape by that time?
Well you know everybody could do all the… yeah, you’d been through it, and you could go to the PX and get one of those things for the back of your jacket that says: When I die I’m going to hell because I’ve already been to Fort Bliss, Texas [laughter]. No, no, I got that wrong: When I die I’m going to heaven because I’ve already been to Fort Bliss, Texas. That’s what it is; that’s the way it…
One of those shiny coats?
Yeah, you know, like a high school jacket sort of. Then there was the whole… I got into a big hang-up about… you were done; you had your orders; you knew where you were going next. I was going to Fort Knox, Kentucky, but there was a two or three weeks gap in there, maybe a month gap in there before you had to report to your AIT Center, they called it Advanced Infantry Training but I was going to—this was when they had already started to assigned people their MOSs, it’s a little code number that indicates your military occupational specialty, and I saw that I was going to be a 71H20 I think, which was like a company clerk.
Did you know that already?
Yeah, I think it was part of the show, and I was going to Fort Knox to study all the things that they want you to know to be a company clerk.
So do you think if they look at you and they say: oh, this guy should be a cryptographer and you say: I’m not going for the four years, they say: company clerk?
No, no, the two things didn’t have any connection, it was just you weren’t going to do that so you had to do something else. I could read and write, so… some of them good old boys I don’t know if they could, they could shoot, or they could be in the motor pool; so these were all distinct occupational specialties within the army; it’s all done by the numbers too.
And they were being sent off all over the place.
Yeah, everybody was going to their next phase of training: real infantry training, or motor pool training, or communications specialist training, that sort of thing.
Had you made friends with anybody particularly?
No, not in that space of time, not in that era: I can’t remember anybody’s name or anything about that time. I was just gonna go back to Southern California for that time, for that break time in between.
How much time?
A couple weeks maybe, maybe a little longer than that. It was like a little leave sort of a thing.
Then would you be given transportation, you’d be flown…?
Yes, after, from there to Fort Knox, wherever you wanted to go, from there to your next stage that transportation would be covered. You had to arrange for your own transportation from Fort Bliss to wherever you were going. So there was this guy there, one of these guys, he’d collected a hundred bucks from everybody, you know, from four or five guys, ‘cause he had a vehicle and he was gonna drive to L.A., so I gave him a hundred bucks or a hundred twenty bucks or something like that, but then I was late. I don’t know what happened but I went back, I had my duffel bag all ready, I went back to the barracks and there was nobody there. So he had taken off: I lost my hundred bucks.
That’s quite a bit of money too in 1966.
Yes that was because I mean… they were paying you some amount of money during the basic training, I mean you got some money for that because you were at a rank—oh that was the other thing: you got promoted to private first class and you got a stripe, before then you didn’t have anything, so you got a stripe. So you’d put a stripe on your class As, which is your dress uniform, you get on the airplane with your little medal that says Fort Mac and mess kit and your little hat for traveling…
Did you have to sew your own stripe on?
Good question. No, I think they had some way of doing that at that stage, later on I think you could do that or have it done for you somewhere—you had to pay for it. So I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know if I had any money. That was probably almost all my money. So I forgot what I did, maybe I flew back or took a bus back, but I got back there. No, it wasn’t all my money. I had plenty of money. Actually somehow I had a lot of money [laughs], come to think of it, ‘cause I stayed in this fairly expensive little apartment for that two weeks, in fact it was in the very same building where my brother Gene had lived in Hermosa Beach when he was there: right down by the beach and…
Do you think it was your military pay or from the restaurant?
I don’t know, must have been my mil… I don’t know.
‘Cause you said you borrowed a hundred bucks from Gene before so you must have...
Yeah, just right before, so I had some dough, I don’t know, I don’t know how much or… It all had run out though, I know that, it all had run out by the time my leave was up, so I had nothing.
Had you been in touch with people? Did Gene and Bob know you were in basic training in Fort Bliss?
I think somehow, despite my plan of just disappearing, somehow in some way Gene and I had been in contact, ‘cause I remember a telephone conversation or something, maybe it was from there, he’s saying something: I wondered where you went, I wondered what happened to you; and I said: Well I got drafted. The only thing I remember from that conversation was him telling me that I should really make sure I always had a compass, ‘cause he had some experience with this, you know, being in a combat situation and… always have a compass, that was the important thing, so you knew where you were, you knew roughly, that sort of thing.
Had he not had a compass when he got captured?
I do not know [laughs]. I don’t know, probably that was just something he learned in his training: if you had a compass at least you knew which direction was which.
It sounds like he didn’t particularly disapprove of your going into the military.
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I believe he was patriotic to that extent.
And at that point the consciousness about… was there any sort of anti-Vietnam War sentiment floating around in the…?
Possibly a little bit, but nothing like it became, nothing like it became; in fact I was out of the Army when it really had reached its peak, you know, the huge demos and that sort of stuff; but you know again there was that division in the military between people who were serious and people who were just playing along. All the protests and from what I saw all the anti-war sentiment, that was welcomed by people in the military.
Really?
Absolutely.
Really? Now why?
Because they didn’t want to go, most of them didn’t want to go out to...
So you mean people at your level.
People at my level and also, you know, I had some conversations with officers and some serious extended conversations with officers later when I was in Germany about this very subject, and you know they didn’t want to go, they weren’t happy with this kind of war, and even some of the real fighters, people who’d go anywhere just to get that fighting experience, ‘cause officers, you know, they’re not gonna get promoted unless they have some battlefield experience in their records, they’re not gonna get promoted very far, so you can’t be a major or a lieutenant colonel or a colonel, not to mention a general, unless you have combat time.
So they needed combat time but they thought this was the wrong war.
Yeah, by that time it had become pretty clear that this was the wrong deal; we weren’t being attacked—the whole thing—because it was a civil war, you know, even on the most superficial level, but you know a lot of them were serious about it. But none of it, in training, in official presentations and even in unofficial ways, none of it came through that this is our glorious mission, there was none of that talk, none of it. So it was always, I mean it was definitely something to be avoided, having to go to Vietnam, but if you went, you know, if you were a lifer and you got the orders, you went.
But they weren’t happy.
No, they weren’t happy about it. So I spent my two weeks in… Gene sort of remembers a situation, now I don’t know… I think I talked to you about this before, he has different memories depending on when I speak to him about the last time he saw me and it always has something to do with an airport and I’m walking around, I have every piece of clothing I own on, I have several different layers of clothing and I’m stoned out of my mind and I’m going into the army or something like that now. So I have no recollection of any such meeting, but you never know [laughs].
He makes that out to be when you were going to basic training or at this point between?
No, when I was going apparently, that’s what… or maybe it was this point in between. Yeah, I don’t know, it’s all confused.
Do you remember this or were you too stoned? [laughs]
There you go, how can I answer? How can I answer? Yes and no and yes. It could be. It could possibly be but I don’t recall that because, I mean I recall the telephone conversation, and possibly when I was back in Hermosa Beach during this little period between, after basic training, I rang up some of, one or two of my buddies that were in, in fact I probably did ring somebody up because I remember some sort of deal where we went out and got some Chivas Regal and downed a couple of pints of that and we were walking around Hermosa Beach in a drunken happy daze.
Do you remember who it was?
It was probably Richard Solario, the Chicano artist, and I think he went into the Army shortly thereafter too, I’m not sure.
Would you say that he was the person that you were closest to?
No, there wasn’t anybody I was close to. I mean it was all very casual, superficial, and we never talked about our feelings, but then I didn’t really talk to myself about my feelings or any of that stuff; I was just moving from moment to moment; so there wasn’t anybody; I had no friends. I was like…
…Deputy Dan [laughs].
Deputy Dan*. So that time was over and that was an interesting little break of freedom in between those two periods, but I knew I was… I was ready to go to Fort Knox too. So I wound up on some prop plane from L.A. to Dallas, Texas and then a regular plane from Dallas to Kentucky, and then I was in… you know I spent, I don’t know how long that was, another couple months maybe in advanced training for my military occupational specialty, which was company clerk. And what they showed you was how to deal with all the forms, the most important of which was the morning report. The morning report form you had to fill out every single morning, and if somebody was on leave you had to note that, and if somebody was sick you noted that, and if somebody was in jail you noted that, whatever it was, and there were particular little requirements for doing that, and there were a couple of other forms, and aside from that the only other class was typing: that’s where I learned to type! [laughs]
Really? You didn’t know how before?
No, I’d never, didn’t have a typewriter, didn’t have any occasion to type.
So did you get good?
Nah [laughter]. It’s school! It was a classroom. I never did well in school. I was always just joking around, and I never practiced so I never got that good, but I could whip out a morning report, you know, and that typing class was taught by a WAC, so that was real fun for all of us, oh yeah, a little exposure to the… I love a woman in a uniform. But there was a lot of free time in Fort Knox, Kentucky; I was walking around a lot, you know, and let’s see this is, what was on the radio was, oh, ‘Monday Monday’, you know, doesn’t it have a [sings]: If I was in L.A.…
Oh yeah: I’d be safe and warm…
I’d be safe and warm, ‘cause it was cold there in Kentucky, and even though it was, gosh I guess it’s April-May, something like that; even then it’s kind of cold. It was a pretty good walking place. It was real nice. Walked by the depository where all the gold is. Got into trouble; that’s one of the times when I first got into trouble.
I’m gonna have to turn this over and I don’t want to miss this.
So we’ll stop here. Okay.
[End Tape 11, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:22 PM
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