Proper English

English was not my original language, nor one of my favorite subjects in school. My original language was gibberish. English is such a hard language to learn with all the silent letters and such, as a matter of fact my favorite subjects were shop and PE. I could always count on getting good grades on these subjects. School was always such a struggle for me, I didn't get much help at home because my mother dropped out of school in the fifth grade because she had problems with school. My father graduated from high school but he was hardly ever around and when he was he wasn't. I had a really hard time with spelling, no one ever taught me how to sound the word out, the only thing my father taught me was how to memorize words. I think there's only so much you can memorize and that was my problem.

I pretty much taught myself how to spell better. I loved writing letters to my friends, as I was writing the letter I would underline all the words that I knew where wrong. When the letter was finished, I would reread it and underline more words that I thought were wrong. I would then look up the underlined words in the dictionary and correct them, then I would rewrite the letter with the correctly spelled words. As time went on there were fewer and fewer words I had to look up. Now with all this techno stuff, "spell check", I once again have gotten lazy. That's why I say if you find a mistake please email me and let me know. I don't even care if you just leave it in a comment, I'm not embarrassed any more. I just love to tell stories and you can't do that without writing. I'm trying to train a talk it type it program, I started this writing with it but it got frustrating about half way through. Later y'all. UnclePaul

Armed Forces Indoctrination Center

I know I said I would be doing this the next day, unfortunately other things came up and I couldn't write any thing.

On March 12th at 1pm I was on the bus headed for Oklahoma City. I arrived at OKC around 5pm, I forget the name of the hotel that they had us in, it was across the street from the Holiday Inn. The Armed Forces Indoctrination Center rented the 5th and 6th floors. They gave me a voucher for supper at the restaurant across the street. When I got to my room my roommate was there, we meant with a couple of other guys and decided to see what kind of trouble we could get into. We walked around for a while and ended up in a bar. We told the bar tender that we were there to go into the service the next day. He said anyone old enough to join the Army and fight for his country was old enough to drink in his bar. We didn't leave till about midnight, everybody was buying us rounds, we didn't pay for anything. When we got back to the hotel there were more guys there, we were running the halls, Indian wrestling, and just having a good olé time. At about 2am the hotel called the MP's to come put us to bed. At 6am they were beating on our door telling us we had 15 minutes to be down in front of the hotel to get the bus. We were all out side waiting, making jokes and singing and just having a great olé time, most of us were still kind of tipsy. People in the Holiday Inn were shouting out their windows for us to shut up. An hour later the bus showed up, we could have had another hour of sleep. When we got to the indoctrination center they served us a continental breakfast, after they drew our blood of course.
First was the physical exam, which didn't take long at all, they checked all your holes. The last one, the butt check, we were all lined up in a circle with the doctor in the middle with a flashlight. We all had to turn around, drop our drawers, bend over, and spread our cheeks, I don't know what he was looking for, but what ever it was he didn't find it. After that was more testing, now with paper and pen, there were five different tests, they were all multiple choice. We had lunch in between. The rest of the day we were busy filling out forms, the same forms that we filled out at the recruiters office. Then you got a chance to talk to the “Career Counselor”. You were suppose to be able to tell him what you wanted to do while in the Army, but really it was he telling you what you were going to be doing in the Army. When my turn came up I told him that I wanted to be a carpenter. That I always did well with that in school, I liked making things with my hands. He told me that the army didn't have carpenters any more, that was all taken care of by civilians now. But with my test results I would be a great generator mechanic, I scored really well on recognizing tools. I said, “What's there to recognize, you showed a wrench, a pair of pliers, a flat head and a phi-lip’s head screw driver and a hammer?” I never had any interest in mechanics, I knew where the oil went and where the gas went, other then that I could look at the engine and shake my head all day. But then he said the magic words, “And you do some work with wood.” Now remember the emphasis is on the word “some”. I told him to go ahead and sign me up then, I was kind of naïve about how things worked, I didn't think he would lie to me, I mean, why would he lie? (I found out later that he had a quota to meet.)
By four o'clock we were sworn in, to protect the Constitution of The United States against any foreign or domestic enemies. So help me god. I wonder if they say that anymore? We flew in a small twin-engine 20 passenger plane, then a chartered bus ride for two hours. We were taken to our barracks at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, that would be home for a few days. We later called it Fort lost in the woods, Misery. The first week is spent getting you ready for the Army. The Sargent woke us up by beating on the trash can with a stick, this was 5am, we had 30 minutes to wash up, shave and be out in front of the barracks. We had thirty minutes to eat. Then we got our heads shaved, the bold head was nothing new to me because of my dad being in the service, I was never allowed to grow my hair. Then we had to fill out more forms, yes you guessed it, these were the same forms that we filled out at both the recruiters and the IC, talk about killing trees. After lunch we were lined up and taken through the warehouse to get our uniforms. They provided everything from underwear, tees and socks, to work clothes, dress uniform, pair of dress shoes, two pair of boots, duffel bag (which they gave us last), field jacket, rain coat. The rest of the day was spent getting our uniforms ready, and packing up what ever we brought with us to send home to mom with a thank you letter for putting up with us all these years. Day two was spent learning how to march, the start of getting shots. Every week we went through the shot line, there would be two medics, one on each side of the door and as you walk by they would give you the shots with these guns. Sometimes if you were moving too fast the gun would take a chunk of meat out of your arm, your doing half quick march the whole time. The next seven weeks you were nothing but Army, you talked Army, you read Army, you even dreamed Army. Everything you touched was OD green, OD stands for “olive drab”. Day four we were issued our field gear, back pack, again given to us at the end of the line, shovel, canteen, metal dish and cutlery, tent, field jacket, etc. etc. When we got everything into the back pack it weighed in at 40 pounds, you carried this everyday. The tent was funny because there were two different kinds. The old ones had buttons, where the newer ones had snaps, you always had to make sure you were buddied up with a person that had the same as you.
After our Drill Sargent got us settled into our new barracks, that would be home for the next seven weeks. “If you were lucky enough to be able call yourself Soldier”, when he got done with you. Do you remember the scene from Stripes? The one where they are all in a circle and each one took turns talking about themselves. Well, that's what our Drill Sargent did after we got all settled down. We had to at least say who we were, where you were from, and what you were going to do in the Army. I got very pissed when I found out that there were 3 guys going to carpenters school. I felt like I had been fucked and didn't even get a kiss. I think that is when my attitude started going down hill.

My Career Path, Continued

Alright, so when we got back to the states, it was around Christmas time. When Christmas vacation was over I would be going to the same high school that my Aunt and Uncle went to. This was going to be an exciting thing for me, they weren't in high school any more. But I had started school at their elementary school when they were still going there. But it didn't quit happen that way. We ended up at some god forsaken abandoned Air Force Base in Burns Flat, Oklahoma, “Clinton AFB”. They were sending military families that had husbands going to Vietnam to live there while they were gone. No one had asked me anything about going there. I didn't want to go, and I knew if I asked to stay with a relative would have been out of the question. By the time we got settled in, school had already started. I need to tell you I was not very good at school, if there had been classes for slow people back then I would have been in them. I struggled all through school, with not much help from my parents, my mom dropped out of the sixth grade. My dad graduated from high school, but he wasn't around much and when he was, he wasn't. He would hit the bottle as soon as he got home from work. So catching up with the other guys wasn't going to happen, I think I knew it when they first suggested it in Germany. I tried for a few weeks but just couldn't hack it, so I dropped out of the tenth grade.

There wasn't much to do in Burns Flat, it was just a little ole' town, with a gas station on both sides of town. I guess it shriveled up when the Air Force moved out. So looking for a job was pointless especially at sixteen and a half. March came in like a lion and took me with it. I gave my mom an ultimatum, sign me into the Navy or watch me run away. We had a fight the night before, one of many, because she didn't like me going out every night and she needed me to take care of the kids, yada, yada, yada. Well, I was tired of being father, I was tired of taking care of everyone else. I had wanted to go into the Navy ever since I saw my uncles in uniform. So on March 11th we drove to Clinton, OK. In the basement of the courthouse is where the recruiters offices were. So I went straight away to the Navy office, which was across the hall from the Marines. The recruiter basically told me to go back to school and come back and see him when I graduated. Well, I knew that wasn't an option. Everything I had ever read told me that I did not want to be a Marine. You have to remember I had very low self-esteem at this point of my life. So down the hall I went, the Air Force guy told me the same thing. By this time my mom is grinning from ear to ear, she thinks she's getting her way. I was desperate, so I sat down with the Army Sargent. He told me that since I was volunteering for the draft I would only have to serve two years active duty instead of three and he could guarantee an AIT school (Advanced Individual Training) for me. Which means I wouldn't be a grunt, (infantry) , not that there is anything wrong with being shot at, “I'm just saying.” But they would talk to me about that after the testing in Oklahoma City. When we left there I had Trailways bus tickets in hand for the next day going to O KC.

Tomorrow I'll talk about my time in O KC, and my start in the US Army

In 1966 my mother was pregnant again and had a boy. He became very sick and they had to transport him to San Antonio, the nearest Army hospital that had a heart specialist. While my mom was in the hospital giving birth to my little brother my dad came home late one night drunk. I had already gone to bed. I woke up to find my dad in my bed playing with my penis, then he made me play with his and I don't want to talk about what else took place. I didn't know what to think, he kept telling me that he loved me. My mom had become very sick during this pregnancy and I had to take care of my brother and sister. When I would get home from school it was my job to take care of them till bedtime. I had to feed them, bath them, and put them to bed. So to say the least I was not happy that she was going to have another baby, I knew that I would have to take care of him too. When my dad told me to pray for him, before leaving to escort him to Texas, that's exactly what I did. But I didn't pray for him to live, I prayed he would die. Guess what? He did die, he was missing one of the oxygen tubes to the heart. I carried that guilt around with me till I was an adult. When my mom got home from the hospital I couldn't talk to her about what had happened because she was so depressed about my dead brother, she had her tubes fixed after giving birth to him. The next time my dad did it to me, I tried to tell her but she wouldn't believe me, she told everyone that I was just a trouble maker.
About six months later my dad got orders to go to Germany and this time he took us with him. A couple of months after we got there I found a job working with the Beer-man. This guy, Rolland, had a flat-bed truck and it was loaded with beer and soda cases. He went around to all the American housing complexes delivering the beer and soda. There was 24 bottles to a case, the cases were either wooden or plastic, the beer bottles had those ceramic caps held on with wires, just so you know how much they weighed. I got to where I could carry one on my shoulder and two with my other hand. During the summer I worked with him all day, during school I only worked after school til we were done usually between 7 and 9. Got pretty good money too, and of course I had to pay rent and buy my own cigarettes and what ever food items I wanted for myself. I even had a suit tailor-made for me, it had the Nehru jacket and was made from shark skin material, bell-bottoms pants with a Spanish waist, three buttons on each side above the zipper. I wore it with a turtle neck shirt, or sometimes just a dicky.
My shoulders had already stated filling out because of the hay hauling days, by the time I started playing football in the fall my shoulders were out there. That's why I played defensive guard. When we got to Germany I stated the eighth grade, the school I went to was run by the Department of Defense. The local school only went up to the ninth grade, the high school was in Frankfort about 20 miles away. You could live on campus if your family could afford it, or you could catch the bus every morning at about 6am. When it came time for me to go my folks said they couldn't afford for me to live on campus. They had also heard that there were a lot of drugs on campus and they didn't trust me. School started in August and we were being transferred back to the states in December because my dad got orders to go to Vietnam. So my folks talked me into not going to school till we got settled in the states, I would only miss one semester and would be able to catch up. I don't know why they didn't trust me, when all my other friends were smoking dope I didn't. I didn't start smoking marijuana till I was in the Army, but that's another story for a later time.

My Career Path, Continued

There wasn't much to do in Louisiana and I didn't have a lawn mower so I couldn't go around cutting grass. Back in those days there weren't any aluminum cans. Everything came in bottles, and they were recycled. When you bought a bottle of pop you were charged any where from 2 to 5 cents deposit. Most people were too busy I guess to take them back to the store and like the aluminum cans of today people would just throw them out the car window. That's where I come in. I found another use from my wagon of many colors. I would tie it to the back of my bike. Then I would hit the road picking up bottles as I went, by the time I got to the store I had enough for a couple of dollars.
Then my folks got the idea to move out into the country, twenty miles from town. We lived on a farm with cows, horses, chickens, rabbits, and homing pigeons. The rabbits and pigeons were mine. My buddy who lived in town gave me a few of his birds when we moved. I had two beautiful pure white fantail pigeons. By the time we left, we never stayed any where more than a couple of years, there were over 180 birds in my flock. I started out with two rabbits and before I knew it I had twenty of them. I didn't know how fast they would multiply. My dad worked at the mess hall on base. He was a cook for the Army and he would bring home these big boxes that the eggs came in. I would fill those up with cow dung and sell them on the side of the road going into town along with the rabbits. I would charge $5 per box or rabbit.
In the summer my teacher, Mr. Jetters had a tractor and a hay baler. He would go around to the local farms and cut their hay and bale it. The cutter would cut the hay and pile it in the center of the tractor in a neat row. Then after it dried he would come around with the baler attached and scoop it up and bale it into a three', 12” by 12” bale. The tractor didn't do so hot on corners, that's where I come again. He would pay me to go around to all the corners and rake them into a pile for the baler. When that was all done we would throw these bales weighing about 60 pounds onto a flat-bed trailer and haul them up to the barn and stack them inside. One cutting would fill this huge barn they had.