Tape 12, Side B
[Begin Tape 12, Side B]
So we had to… the car broke down. Now we were on leave; we had to get back by a certain time. So that night we were going to, Don was gonna stay with the car and George and I were gonna go back on a bus, but that night we slept in a field and had us another powerful vision where all these smiling dancing children were at dusk running silent, silent children, they were all golden children running through this field that we were sleeping in, not close to us, you know, we saw them coming and then they went away too, they were…
And it was another shared thing, you both…
Another little shared vision, yeah. Or at least we said we did, which is in some cases just enough. But that was the nature of this weed. When we got back for many weeks thereafter that was one of the things about this particular batch. We’d go out into the parade grounds there at Fort Lewis and get stoned and just look at something and little shows would develop, like I remember there was like a coffee can, there was just a coffee can, we were all sitting around it and suddenly a little spotlight came on and some little characters appeared and there was a little show right there around the coffee can and into the coffee can. Did you ever see Eraserhead?
Yeah.
Remember there was just that sort of thing in Eraserhead where he was looking under his radiator; he looks and looks and looks and then some little creature appears, a little woman appears and starts singing a song or, and then a spotlight comes. It was just that sort of thing: you look and look and look and soon enough something will happen. Now I don’t know that we actually saw, I mean we were probably suggesting things, like kids do: that cloud looks like a bunny. Oh yeah, it looks like a bunny. So we were doing that, so we were playing that sort of game with one another.
And it sounds like the three of you, part of your relationship was that you sort of fed off of each other’s imaginations in that way anyway.
Absolutely, yeah. But you didn’t want to get that George Hunt going too long because he would go into the horror stuff, you know, because he really loved the H. P. Lovecraft, yeah, the Cthulhu mythos, and he’d get this grimace on his face [spooky voice] and he’d start talking like this and say: You have no idea what you’re up against [laughter]. He was weird. He’s the guy we all should have looked out for, ‘cause when he got stoned his tremors got worse. Yeah, he was always shaking his head and, yeah.
It didn’t mellow him out.
Well it made him happier; he could go more into his dark places. If we were listening to music and records and stuff like that, when one of us had CQ, which is you stay up all night in the headquarters office, sometimes the other two would stay up also, and then they would have to get up and go to work, they’d have to go to work the next day and you got the next day off if you were… But that’s okay, it didn’t make any difference because it was all sort of… it was all part of the big show.
But you know it sounds like these were the first really solid friendships that you developed. Is that accurate?
Well yeah, yeah. I had some pals like John Martin and Richard Solario in high school and that sort of thing, but yeah, that’s right, these were the… You know we had to live together! [laughs]
And the whole idea that if one guy had CQ then the other guys would be with him on it, that sort of dedication to each other and all that.
Well yeah, I think it was because we were just hungry for the play, you know, because we were having so much fun playing off of one another.
So you just didn’t want to ever give it up.
Yeah, you know, we’d go in there in CQ and we’d go into the colonel’s office and take his bomber jacket off with the big colonel birds on it and do a little show: I’ll be the colonel and, you know…
Sounds pretty risky actually, I mean if you’d gotten…
Oh yeah, we’d have gotten in trouble but those officers they didn’t care, I mean they didn’t live there, they lived off base. Yeah, if something had happened, or if there was an alert or something like that, who knows what would have happened, ‘cause we would smoke dope there in the colonel’s office [laughs].
You did?
Yeah, and play records real loud and, ‘cause this was apart from where everybody was sleeping.
So you could play records there? I mean there was a record player and there was…?
Yeah, they have an office, probably had a fridge, that sort of thing.
So you just basically moved in when you...
Moved in, took over; that was just another backdrop that we could go into our flights of fancy with, you know, riffing, riffing on movies that we saw or TV shows or what was on the… what was where, what was out there. So then we ran out, we ran out of that fine fine weed. It’s never been the same since.
Big letdown, huh.
Yes. I should have stopped living then.
[Laughing] Has it been downhill since?
Weed, yes, yeah, never had anything like that. Of course it could have been set and setting. It’s all set and setting, as we learned from Timothy Leary later on in the psychedelic… Yeah, so you get the right setting with the right set and your psychedelic hallucinogenic experience will be different, will be increased, I mean as opposed to just doing it casually, catch as catch can. So it was like a magical, it was a magical deal, and we were all young, you know: eighteen, nineteen, something like that.
It sounds like you didn’t need to do acid, but did you guys do that?
No, no, we sort of knew about it… let’s see, 1966… We knew about it and we knew that there were people in Seattle who did it because there was a community of people around the university that the newspapers there—they didn’t have hippies, they called them fringies [laughs], yeah: fringies—and they were, you know, there was an underground newspaper of some kind and there were venues that the fringies would go to and some of it had to do with LSD. LSD was starting to rear its ugly head; and Timothy Leary was out there in some way I think, then even, but it wasn’t a reality to us. It took a couple of years for that to come down the pike.
I was just trying to remember what Seattle’s underground paper was called. I can’t remember now. The Tribe? or was that Bay Area?
I don’t know. I think there was a Berkeley Tribe. I think there was. There probably was a Tribe everywhere. No, I don’t remember, but I remember that’s how we found out some of these places to go to like this folk club.
The Portland paper was the Willamette Bridge, I remember that.
Oh, why, isn’t the Willamette a…?
Well the Willamette’s the river that runs through Portland and there are nine bridges so this was another bridge I guess or something.
Well then the weed ran out and then my time ran out. And the way it ran out was kind of…
Meaning you had to go?
I had to go somewhere and I knew it was gonna happen. And what happened was a clerk at a higher level—we were like, I don’t remember what we were, battalion level maybe—and a clerk at a brigade level that I knew slightly called me up and said: Looks like you’re going to Vietnam because the roster just came down, I’ve got it right here in my hands. He said: You don’t want to go to Vietnam, do you? I said: No, I don’t want to go to Vietnam. He said: Where do you want to go? I said: I don’t know, what choices do I have? I knew some people were being sent to Korea, you could go to Alaska. He said: How about Germany? I said: Germany. So that’s what happens. Clerks will run the army. And he said: Okay, you’ll get your orders cut to go to Germany, and in a couple of weeks you’ll get those orders. Have a nice time, thank you very much [laughs].
Now was this guy on your level or above?
He was on my level, I mean we had the same MOS, he was just at the brigade level. You know that in the chain of command there are battalions in brigades, brigades in—or maybe he was at the corps level or something like that. But he was the one who, all those things went through his hands. What went through my hands were all the people, the records of all the people in this headquarters company. So he saw more than that. There was probably some clerk at the army level—there were all these Sixth Army, Fifth Army, First Army—who could probably do him favors.
Now was he actually within his… was he doing something that would have been strictly against the rules or was he within his, was he doing something that was within his power?
Well yeah, it was within his power, but there should be reasons for doing these things, and he didn’t have a reason.
Besides being friends or something.
Right, some other reasons; but you could change things without supplying a reason, and he did.
Did you do any of that at that time?
Later, later in Germany I did a little bit of that. But nothing like that was coming through my hands. So I guess I had some leave before I went to Germany, but I don’t remember what happened, I mean the next thing I know I’m getting off the airplane in Stuttgart I guess. You know when you’re on an official flight you have to travel in your class A uniform, so I was all, I’ve got my tie and my class As and my little hat, and when you’re doing that—you know you’re on the airplane with other, just civilians—people will come up to you and say stuff to you, like… my favorite one was: Oh, so you’re in the war. I have a cousin in the war, do you know him? and he gave me his name. This was pretty common; but Vietnam was heating up by then so… I didn’t get any of this spitting on you. I think that’s all… I don’t think they’ve ever uncovered a single case where that actually happened.
So perhaps government sources were putting the word out that that what was going on.
Yeah, probably, yeah. But no one talked to me about any of that stuff either; it was more like: Well how do you like the war? [laughs] It’s like when I used to think that people in combat uniforms were called Americans; they would think people in these uniforms, they weren’t in the Army or the Navy, they were in ‘the war’.
Right, yeah, because that’s what people knew about it.
Some folk etymology. So I’m in Stuttgart with my duffel bag.
And your friends had already given you the lecture about watch out for…
Yeah, they gave me a lecture, and in fact they got the captain who was in charge of this company—he’s the guy that I was telling you that, he was getting out too and he used to walk around with his uniform all down singing: I really give a shit—they got him to counsel me too, you know, ‘cause we’re worried about him, we’re worried about Conkin, we don’t know that he’s gonna make it. He said: Oh he’ll be fine. You know I don’t remember any particular words of advice but it was all, it was just real touching that, and gentle, you know, that they would take this concern because, you know, we just sort of goofed around a lot most of the time, but they knew it was possible for me to get into trouble [laughs], and, you know, get... He said: You know they’re serious over there; they’re serious over there. You don’t want to be in a situation where you get bounced out of there and have to go to Vietnam, was basically their message.
So getting in trouble there would likely have meant being sent to Vietnam, something serious.
Something, something like that, or there’s a great big prison there, there’s a great big military prison in Mannheim that was full all the time. So I get off the plane and we’re in some sort of shuttle vehicle that’s gonna take us to the train station to go from Stuttgart to Mannheim, and it’s run by army people, and they start talking about the rads, how the rads are gonna do this, and yeah, I ran into this one rad, and that’s what they call Germans: rads, from Kamerad, you know, comrades, so who are these rads they’re talking about? Took a while. The other thing that they were always saying was: mox nix, mox nix, from macht nichts, you know, the German macht nichts: it doesn’t matter: it makes nothing.
[Simultaneously] It makes nothing… okay.
Mox nix: but it was M-O-X N-I-X, mox nix. That was about all the German that they got into. And so it was real late at night and we were on this deserted train platform in Stuttgart waiting for the train and it finally comes, just the few of us who are going to this 115th Supply and Support Battalion headquartered in Kaiserslautern, which is a little suburb of Mannheim, and boom, suddenly I’m in this whole new environment.
And you’d never… let’s see now, what all is new here? You hadn’t been to Europe, right?
Hadn’t been to Europe, and you know they don’t give you any—they didn’t then—any preparation, as I found out. They offered some classes or something like that later.
In language?
In language… just how to get along in another culture, I mean all these farm boys from hicksville and youths from the ghetto, they were all coming in and they didn’t give them a lick of intro.
So they were sort of blundering around.
Yeah, some of ‘em never left the barracks, never left the base, A, because you’ve gotta spend money and they maybe didn’t have money, B they couldn’t communicate with anybody or didn’t know, you know, were afraid, just afraid to get out into this foreign world, literally foreign. But the ones that were able to: the first level of German society you encounter are the level of Germans that want something from you, you know, that know how to manipulate GIs and make them feel comfortable: they all speak English, they were in clubs.
So they’re the ones that actually go out of their way to be in contact with you.
Yeah. So I was going to be the new company clerk for the headquarters company of this 115th Supply and Support Battalion; and don’t remember exactly how it kicked off, but you meet with the first sergeant and you meet with the commanding officer, those are the two people you deal with most because you need their help in setting things up and getting organized. I had to organize the whole office because it was a mess, and get all the forms done correctly and…
What had the previous clerk been like?
I don’t know, just sloppy, just real sloppy, as far as I remember. So I took some thorns out of their paws early on and that came in handy later on when I needed some favors.
What kind of things? I mean they had some problems because of the disorganization?
Yeah, they had some problem; I think there was one person they couldn’t account for that was supposed to be on their TOE, their table of operations, and they didn’t know exactly what happened to that person, so I had to figure that out, straighten that out.
And you found out, did a little detective…?
Yeah, it was just some glitch. And later on I started helping the first sergeant with some of his private paperwork, you know, because I could read and write—not that he couldn’t, it was just he was dealing with… The way I remember it—and jeez I wonder if this is true or something I made it up—he was trying to adopt a Korean child. Now maybe he had been in Korea earlier and had this child or there was something about it.
It might have been his child?
No, I don’t think so; I don’t think so because… and I don’t even know if the child was in Korea or back in South Carolina where he was from, but there were some forms and paperwork and bureaucratic junk that I helped him with, and so that stood me in good stead. But from that time the only stuff I remember is getting some really… first I wanted to get some dope [laughs]. I said: What do you guys do for dope around here? And basically they didn’t have access to weed but they could get this really, really fine Afghan hash. Whoa! that stuff was a killer.
So that was coming over through Turkey and Greece and…?
I guess so; I guess so. You just took a little bit of that, that was really… that would just knock you out, it was so powerful; so, you know, you learned how to make a little hash pipe and smoke your little bit of hash; and it was expensive too. And all these people in the headquarters company, you know, they were just characters; they were just characters. The guys that were there already, you know they had been there a while and they were looking to get out soon, so they were doing some strange stuff. At a certain point discipline breaks down when people are ready to get out, but they still have to play it safe ‘cause anything can happen, you know.
So there were a bunch of short timers.
There were some short timers there, and there were just some characters, like, well the one guy I remember, his name was Spenger, and he was older, a little bit older than the rest of us, and he had gotten in trouble earlier because he was involved in selling DD2-14s, which are discharge papers, to guys. He was a clerk in some higher level before he got bounced down to where he was then, and he was in, he must have been in a sensitive position because those things are really protected; so he was selling—you know for hundreds of dollars—selling DD2-14s to guys and making sure that they got out.
So DD2-14s are basically your release from…?
That’s right; discharge papers say when you got discharged, how you got an honorable discharge, what your permanent rank is and the dates and everybody’s signatures and so on. And the way he got busted, I mean he had a good thing going for a while, he got busted because one of these kids’ mother called up his commanding officer in Germany and, you know: How can my son—I know my son—how can he have gotten out of the army after ten months with an honorable discharge? [laughs]
She just didn’t believe it huh?
No, she didn’t. I don’t even want him back here. I counted on him being gone for two years and I want him gone for two years! He would have gotten sent up the river except one of his… he had a part time job as a bartender in the officer’s club and he had made connections with all these generals and colonels, and so he goes to one of his buddies and says: What do you think? Can you help me out? Sure. So he just got a slap on the wrist and got dumped out of there, otherwise he would have gone to prison, to military prison big time, gotten court-martialed and all that serious stuff.
A lot of networking.
Networking [laughs], that’s it.
It’s really important that you be liked it sounds like or at least somehow regarded as…
It’s just, yeah, it’s just human nature. I mean you know you will find your real hard-nosed people in there like, you know, Patton, who will go down the, no matter who you are, your own son, your own butt boy, whatever, if you stray you’ll get the… it’ll be by the book, but there’s plenty of people who it’s not, it doesn’t have to be that way, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Damn human nature. So it was good that he ingratiated himself with those people. The draft was really kicking in in there and there were a lot of people from all over the country, you know, cosmopolitan guys from big cities and rubes and everything. There was this guy Jay Henson who was always urging me to read Rimbaud and Verlaine. He was always talking about le vermeillette fente which is the little, the violet slash, which is some vagina-like thing that he picked up from Verlaine*. So, you know, there were all these people. There was a guy there, his name was Manuel, I don’t know if it was his first name or last name. He wasn’t hispanic. He reminded me of pictures I’d seen of W. H. Auden. He was really—I mean he was a young man, but he looked real old and wrinkled; but he was extremely dry and funny. For some reason I think he had a doctorate in English literature or something like that ‘cause he was always spouting this stuff off. He’d been in some… He’d been in the Navy too—maybe he was a little bit older; he wasn’t sixty though.
[Laughing] But he looked it huh.
Yeah. He always used to say… I think he was in the Navy ‘cause he always used to say: Well fuck me silly with a handy billy! [laughter] And then he would explain that a handy billy is a Navy fire hose, you know, one of these great big things that pumps out huge gallons of, twenty-thousand gallons of water a second. That was his imprecation. But he had all sorts of literary allusions too. And there was Archy Hamilton I remember, he was a—I remember him real well—he was a black guy from ah… I don’t know, from Georgia, but he was from a, I pictured him from a very long line of a genteel black southern family: good education, money, that sort of stuff. He was a pipe smoker, so, and he was always talking about Hodding Carter and, you know, people in the publishing world in Atlanta and famous southerners and that sort of stuff.
So he was pretty well connected and…
Pretty well connected, you know, kind of collegiate. In fact he ran into problems with some of the other black guys ‘cause they thought he was too uppity or too white, but he wasn’t, he was just, he didn’t talk like them and he had a wider experience than them. But we were all thrown in together, you know, there was no... That’s one thing about the Army, when they decided to desegregate—Truman in ‘48 or so—they went at it all the way. I mean I said before: your drill sergeants could be black or white, everybody slept together in the same barracks, and there was absolutely no discrimination, none whatsoever, except on the local level where you were on your own time, more or less, and in Germany they had the bars that all the black guys went to and they had the bars that all the Okies went to, and they had the bars that all the, you know…
Really?
Yeah. So there was that kind of division.
So they sorted themselves out that way.
Yeah, but when you’re in uniform and you’re on work you might be reporting to a black person or a white person or a Hispanic person, and, you know, whatever their insignia was, that’s how you treated them. It didn’t make any difference; and if you tried anything else you’d get smacked down so quick. They were real serious about it, and it worked.
So did some of the guys—you say there were a lot of rednecks and everything—did some of those guys have trouble with this?
Yeah, but they had to eat it [laughter]. They just had to.
They just had to suppress whatever their feelings were…
Yeah, but there were fights, there were bunk-adapter fights and that sort of thing.
I definitely want to… so this is the bunk-adapter fight era?
This is bunk-adapter central, yeah. Well on the barracks there there’s hundreds of guys living in different sectors all over the barracks. We didn’t have, those of us in the headquarters company, didn’t have much to do with them, you know the guys out there who belonged to the battalion proper. We were just doing the central office stuff.
Were your living conditions very different from…?
Yeah, I think we were a little more privileged, like that picture shows, I was in a room with just one other person, but there were people who lived in barracks, bunk beds and all that sort of stuff. We didn’t have bunk beds where I was, you know, just one set, sitting right on the floor, one bunk, bunkum.
[End Tape 12, Side B]
So we had to… the car broke down. Now we were on leave; we had to get back by a certain time. So that night we were going to, Don was gonna stay with the car and George and I were gonna go back on a bus, but that night we slept in a field and had us another powerful vision where all these smiling dancing children were at dusk running silent, silent children, they were all golden children running through this field that we were sleeping in, not close to us, you know, we saw them coming and then they went away too, they were…
And it was another shared thing, you both…
Another little shared vision, yeah. Or at least we said we did, which is in some cases just enough. But that was the nature of this weed. When we got back for many weeks thereafter that was one of the things about this particular batch. We’d go out into the parade grounds there at Fort Lewis and get stoned and just look at something and little shows would develop, like I remember there was like a coffee can, there was just a coffee can, we were all sitting around it and suddenly a little spotlight came on and some little characters appeared and there was a little show right there around the coffee can and into the coffee can. Did you ever see Eraserhead?
Yeah.
Remember there was just that sort of thing in Eraserhead where he was looking under his radiator; he looks and looks and looks and then some little creature appears, a little woman appears and starts singing a song or, and then a spotlight comes. It was just that sort of thing: you look and look and look and soon enough something will happen. Now I don’t know that we actually saw, I mean we were probably suggesting things, like kids do: that cloud looks like a bunny. Oh yeah, it looks like a bunny. So we were doing that, so we were playing that sort of game with one another.
And it sounds like the three of you, part of your relationship was that you sort of fed off of each other’s imaginations in that way anyway.
Absolutely, yeah. But you didn’t want to get that George Hunt going too long because he would go into the horror stuff, you know, because he really loved the H. P. Lovecraft, yeah, the Cthulhu mythos, and he’d get this grimace on his face [spooky voice] and he’d start talking like this and say: You have no idea what you’re up against [laughter]. He was weird. He’s the guy we all should have looked out for, ‘cause when he got stoned his tremors got worse. Yeah, he was always shaking his head and, yeah.
It didn’t mellow him out.
Well it made him happier; he could go more into his dark places. If we were listening to music and records and stuff like that, when one of us had CQ, which is you stay up all night in the headquarters office, sometimes the other two would stay up also, and then they would have to get up and go to work, they’d have to go to work the next day and you got the next day off if you were… But that’s okay, it didn’t make any difference because it was all sort of… it was all part of the big show.
But you know it sounds like these were the first really solid friendships that you developed. Is that accurate?
Well yeah, yeah. I had some pals like John Martin and Richard Solario in high school and that sort of thing, but yeah, that’s right, these were the… You know we had to live together! [laughs]
And the whole idea that if one guy had CQ then the other guys would be with him on it, that sort of dedication to each other and all that.
Well yeah, I think it was because we were just hungry for the play, you know, because we were having so much fun playing off of one another.
So you just didn’t want to ever give it up.
Yeah, you know, we’d go in there in CQ and we’d go into the colonel’s office and take his bomber jacket off with the big colonel birds on it and do a little show: I’ll be the colonel and, you know…
Sounds pretty risky actually, I mean if you’d gotten…
Oh yeah, we’d have gotten in trouble but those officers they didn’t care, I mean they didn’t live there, they lived off base. Yeah, if something had happened, or if there was an alert or something like that, who knows what would have happened, ‘cause we would smoke dope there in the colonel’s office [laughs].
You did?
Yeah, and play records real loud and, ‘cause this was apart from where everybody was sleeping.
So you could play records there? I mean there was a record player and there was…?
Yeah, they have an office, probably had a fridge, that sort of thing.
So you just basically moved in when you...
Moved in, took over; that was just another backdrop that we could go into our flights of fancy with, you know, riffing, riffing on movies that we saw or TV shows or what was on the… what was where, what was out there. So then we ran out, we ran out of that fine fine weed. It’s never been the same since.
Big letdown, huh.
Yes. I should have stopped living then.
[Laughing] Has it been downhill since?
Weed, yes, yeah, never had anything like that. Of course it could have been set and setting. It’s all set and setting, as we learned from Timothy Leary later on in the psychedelic… Yeah, so you get the right setting with the right set and your psychedelic hallucinogenic experience will be different, will be increased, I mean as opposed to just doing it casually, catch as catch can. So it was like a magical, it was a magical deal, and we were all young, you know: eighteen, nineteen, something like that.
It sounds like you didn’t need to do acid, but did you guys do that?
No, no, we sort of knew about it… let’s see, 1966… We knew about it and we knew that there were people in Seattle who did it because there was a community of people around the university that the newspapers there—they didn’t have hippies, they called them fringies [laughs], yeah: fringies—and they were, you know, there was an underground newspaper of some kind and there were venues that the fringies would go to and some of it had to do with LSD. LSD was starting to rear its ugly head; and Timothy Leary was out there in some way I think, then even, but it wasn’t a reality to us. It took a couple of years for that to come down the pike.
I was just trying to remember what Seattle’s underground paper was called. I can’t remember now. The Tribe? or was that Bay Area?
I don’t know. I think there was a Berkeley Tribe. I think there was. There probably was a Tribe everywhere. No, I don’t remember, but I remember that’s how we found out some of these places to go to like this folk club.
The Portland paper was the Willamette Bridge, I remember that.
Oh, why, isn’t the Willamette a…?
Well the Willamette’s the river that runs through Portland and there are nine bridges so this was another bridge I guess or something.
Well then the weed ran out and then my time ran out. And the way it ran out was kind of…
Meaning you had to go?
I had to go somewhere and I knew it was gonna happen. And what happened was a clerk at a higher level—we were like, I don’t remember what we were, battalion level maybe—and a clerk at a brigade level that I knew slightly called me up and said: Looks like you’re going to Vietnam because the roster just came down, I’ve got it right here in my hands. He said: You don’t want to go to Vietnam, do you? I said: No, I don’t want to go to Vietnam. He said: Where do you want to go? I said: I don’t know, what choices do I have? I knew some people were being sent to Korea, you could go to Alaska. He said: How about Germany? I said: Germany. So that’s what happens. Clerks will run the army. And he said: Okay, you’ll get your orders cut to go to Germany, and in a couple of weeks you’ll get those orders. Have a nice time, thank you very much [laughs].
Now was this guy on your level or above?
He was on my level, I mean we had the same MOS, he was just at the brigade level. You know that in the chain of command there are battalions in brigades, brigades in—or maybe he was at the corps level or something like that. But he was the one who, all those things went through his hands. What went through my hands were all the people, the records of all the people in this headquarters company. So he saw more than that. There was probably some clerk at the army level—there were all these Sixth Army, Fifth Army, First Army—who could probably do him favors.
Now was he actually within his… was he doing something that would have been strictly against the rules or was he within his, was he doing something that was within his power?
Well yeah, it was within his power, but there should be reasons for doing these things, and he didn’t have a reason.
Besides being friends or something.
Right, some other reasons; but you could change things without supplying a reason, and he did.
Did you do any of that at that time?
Later, later in Germany I did a little bit of that. But nothing like that was coming through my hands. So I guess I had some leave before I went to Germany, but I don’t remember what happened, I mean the next thing I know I’m getting off the airplane in Stuttgart I guess. You know when you’re on an official flight you have to travel in your class A uniform, so I was all, I’ve got my tie and my class As and my little hat, and when you’re doing that—you know you’re on the airplane with other, just civilians—people will come up to you and say stuff to you, like… my favorite one was: Oh, so you’re in the war. I have a cousin in the war, do you know him? and he gave me his name. This was pretty common; but Vietnam was heating up by then so… I didn’t get any of this spitting on you. I think that’s all… I don’t think they’ve ever uncovered a single case where that actually happened.
So perhaps government sources were putting the word out that that what was going on.
Yeah, probably, yeah. But no one talked to me about any of that stuff either; it was more like: Well how do you like the war? [laughs] It’s like when I used to think that people in combat uniforms were called Americans; they would think people in these uniforms, they weren’t in the Army or the Navy, they were in ‘the war’.
Right, yeah, because that’s what people knew about it.
Some folk etymology. So I’m in Stuttgart with my duffel bag.
And your friends had already given you the lecture about watch out for…
Yeah, they gave me a lecture, and in fact they got the captain who was in charge of this company—he’s the guy that I was telling you that, he was getting out too and he used to walk around with his uniform all down singing: I really give a shit—they got him to counsel me too, you know, ‘cause we’re worried about him, we’re worried about Conkin, we don’t know that he’s gonna make it. He said: Oh he’ll be fine. You know I don’t remember any particular words of advice but it was all, it was just real touching that, and gentle, you know, that they would take this concern because, you know, we just sort of goofed around a lot most of the time, but they knew it was possible for me to get into trouble [laughs], and, you know, get... He said: You know they’re serious over there; they’re serious over there. You don’t want to be in a situation where you get bounced out of there and have to go to Vietnam, was basically their message.
So getting in trouble there would likely have meant being sent to Vietnam, something serious.
Something, something like that, or there’s a great big prison there, there’s a great big military prison in Mannheim that was full all the time. So I get off the plane and we’re in some sort of shuttle vehicle that’s gonna take us to the train station to go from Stuttgart to Mannheim, and it’s run by army people, and they start talking about the rads, how the rads are gonna do this, and yeah, I ran into this one rad, and that’s what they call Germans: rads, from Kamerad, you know, comrades, so who are these rads they’re talking about? Took a while. The other thing that they were always saying was: mox nix, mox nix, from macht nichts, you know, the German macht nichts: it doesn’t matter: it makes nothing.
[Simultaneously] It makes nothing… okay.
Mox nix: but it was M-O-X N-I-X, mox nix. That was about all the German that they got into. And so it was real late at night and we were on this deserted train platform in Stuttgart waiting for the train and it finally comes, just the few of us who are going to this 115th Supply and Support Battalion headquartered in Kaiserslautern, which is a little suburb of Mannheim, and boom, suddenly I’m in this whole new environment.
And you’d never… let’s see now, what all is new here? You hadn’t been to Europe, right?
Hadn’t been to Europe, and you know they don’t give you any—they didn’t then—any preparation, as I found out. They offered some classes or something like that later.
In language?
In language… just how to get along in another culture, I mean all these farm boys from hicksville and youths from the ghetto, they were all coming in and they didn’t give them a lick of intro.
So they were sort of blundering around.
Yeah, some of ‘em never left the barracks, never left the base, A, because you’ve gotta spend money and they maybe didn’t have money, B they couldn’t communicate with anybody or didn’t know, you know, were afraid, just afraid to get out into this foreign world, literally foreign. But the ones that were able to: the first level of German society you encounter are the level of Germans that want something from you, you know, that know how to manipulate GIs and make them feel comfortable: they all speak English, they were in clubs.
So they’re the ones that actually go out of their way to be in contact with you.
Yeah. So I was going to be the new company clerk for the headquarters company of this 115th Supply and Support Battalion; and don’t remember exactly how it kicked off, but you meet with the first sergeant and you meet with the commanding officer, those are the two people you deal with most because you need their help in setting things up and getting organized. I had to organize the whole office because it was a mess, and get all the forms done correctly and…
What had the previous clerk been like?
I don’t know, just sloppy, just real sloppy, as far as I remember. So I took some thorns out of their paws early on and that came in handy later on when I needed some favors.
What kind of things? I mean they had some problems because of the disorganization?
Yeah, they had some problem; I think there was one person they couldn’t account for that was supposed to be on their TOE, their table of operations, and they didn’t know exactly what happened to that person, so I had to figure that out, straighten that out.
And you found out, did a little detective…?
Yeah, it was just some glitch. And later on I started helping the first sergeant with some of his private paperwork, you know, because I could read and write—not that he couldn’t, it was just he was dealing with… The way I remember it—and jeez I wonder if this is true or something I made it up—he was trying to adopt a Korean child. Now maybe he had been in Korea earlier and had this child or there was something about it.
It might have been his child?
No, I don’t think so; I don’t think so because… and I don’t even know if the child was in Korea or back in South Carolina where he was from, but there were some forms and paperwork and bureaucratic junk that I helped him with, and so that stood me in good stead. But from that time the only stuff I remember is getting some really… first I wanted to get some dope [laughs]. I said: What do you guys do for dope around here? And basically they didn’t have access to weed but they could get this really, really fine Afghan hash. Whoa! that stuff was a killer.
So that was coming over through Turkey and Greece and…?
I guess so; I guess so. You just took a little bit of that, that was really… that would just knock you out, it was so powerful; so, you know, you learned how to make a little hash pipe and smoke your little bit of hash; and it was expensive too. And all these people in the headquarters company, you know, they were just characters; they were just characters. The guys that were there already, you know they had been there a while and they were looking to get out soon, so they were doing some strange stuff. At a certain point discipline breaks down when people are ready to get out, but they still have to play it safe ‘cause anything can happen, you know.
So there were a bunch of short timers.
There were some short timers there, and there were just some characters, like, well the one guy I remember, his name was Spenger, and he was older, a little bit older than the rest of us, and he had gotten in trouble earlier because he was involved in selling DD2-14s, which are discharge papers, to guys. He was a clerk in some higher level before he got bounced down to where he was then, and he was in, he must have been in a sensitive position because those things are really protected; so he was selling—you know for hundreds of dollars—selling DD2-14s to guys and making sure that they got out.
So DD2-14s are basically your release from…?
That’s right; discharge papers say when you got discharged, how you got an honorable discharge, what your permanent rank is and the dates and everybody’s signatures and so on. And the way he got busted, I mean he had a good thing going for a while, he got busted because one of these kids’ mother called up his commanding officer in Germany and, you know: How can my son—I know my son—how can he have gotten out of the army after ten months with an honorable discharge? [laughs]
She just didn’t believe it huh?
No, she didn’t. I don’t even want him back here. I counted on him being gone for two years and I want him gone for two years! He would have gotten sent up the river except one of his… he had a part time job as a bartender in the officer’s club and he had made connections with all these generals and colonels, and so he goes to one of his buddies and says: What do you think? Can you help me out? Sure. So he just got a slap on the wrist and got dumped out of there, otherwise he would have gone to prison, to military prison big time, gotten court-martialed and all that serious stuff.
A lot of networking.
Networking [laughs], that’s it.
It’s really important that you be liked it sounds like or at least somehow regarded as…
It’s just, yeah, it’s just human nature. I mean you know you will find your real hard-nosed people in there like, you know, Patton, who will go down the, no matter who you are, your own son, your own butt boy, whatever, if you stray you’ll get the… it’ll be by the book, but there’s plenty of people who it’s not, it doesn’t have to be that way, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Damn human nature. So it was good that he ingratiated himself with those people. The draft was really kicking in in there and there were a lot of people from all over the country, you know, cosmopolitan guys from big cities and rubes and everything. There was this guy Jay Henson who was always urging me to read Rimbaud and Verlaine. He was always talking about le vermeillette fente which is the little, the violet slash, which is some vagina-like thing that he picked up from Verlaine*. So, you know, there were all these people. There was a guy there, his name was Manuel, I don’t know if it was his first name or last name. He wasn’t hispanic. He reminded me of pictures I’d seen of W. H. Auden. He was really—I mean he was a young man, but he looked real old and wrinkled; but he was extremely dry and funny. For some reason I think he had a doctorate in English literature or something like that ‘cause he was always spouting this stuff off. He’d been in some… He’d been in the Navy too—maybe he was a little bit older; he wasn’t sixty though.
[Laughing] But he looked it huh.
Yeah. He always used to say… I think he was in the Navy ‘cause he always used to say: Well fuck me silly with a handy billy! [laughter] And then he would explain that a handy billy is a Navy fire hose, you know, one of these great big things that pumps out huge gallons of, twenty-thousand gallons of water a second. That was his imprecation. But he had all sorts of literary allusions too. And there was Archy Hamilton I remember, he was a—I remember him real well—he was a black guy from ah… I don’t know, from Georgia, but he was from a, I pictured him from a very long line of a genteel black southern family: good education, money, that sort of stuff. He was a pipe smoker, so, and he was always talking about Hodding Carter and, you know, people in the publishing world in Atlanta and famous southerners and that sort of stuff.
So he was pretty well connected and…
Pretty well connected, you know, kind of collegiate. In fact he ran into problems with some of the other black guys ‘cause they thought he was too uppity or too white, but he wasn’t, he was just, he didn’t talk like them and he had a wider experience than them. But we were all thrown in together, you know, there was no... That’s one thing about the Army, when they decided to desegregate—Truman in ‘48 or so—they went at it all the way. I mean I said before: your drill sergeants could be black or white, everybody slept together in the same barracks, and there was absolutely no discrimination, none whatsoever, except on the local level where you were on your own time, more or less, and in Germany they had the bars that all the black guys went to and they had the bars that all the Okies went to, and they had the bars that all the, you know…
Really?
Yeah. So there was that kind of division.
So they sorted themselves out that way.
Yeah, but when you’re in uniform and you’re on work you might be reporting to a black person or a white person or a Hispanic person, and, you know, whatever their insignia was, that’s how you treated them. It didn’t make any difference; and if you tried anything else you’d get smacked down so quick. They were real serious about it, and it worked.
So did some of the guys—you say there were a lot of rednecks and everything—did some of those guys have trouble with this?
Yeah, but they had to eat it [laughter]. They just had to.
They just had to suppress whatever their feelings were…
Yeah, but there were fights, there were bunk-adapter fights and that sort of thing.
I definitely want to… so this is the bunk-adapter fight era?
This is bunk-adapter central, yeah. Well on the barracks there there’s hundreds of guys living in different sectors all over the barracks. We didn’t have, those of us in the headquarters company, didn’t have much to do with them, you know the guys out there who belonged to the battalion proper. We were just doing the central office stuff.
Were your living conditions very different from…?
Yeah, I think we were a little more privileged, like that picture shows, I was in a room with just one other person, but there were people who lived in barracks, bunk beds and all that sort of stuff. We didn’t have bunk beds where I was, you know, just one set, sitting right on the floor, one bunk, bunkum.
[End Tape 12, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:19 PM
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