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When you go to Vietnam, you're prepared
to play the Marine Corp role. You're assuming the role of a
professional marine, and a killer, whatever.
And you're going to play that role out
exactly the way that it's been defined to you.
Things like this work on the mind.
And if they can deteriorate portions of the mind for any period of time,
see, then they can just about gear you into doing anything they want.
In fact, I was so weird after Vietnam,
I carried a pistol around in my back pocket, you know, for no apparent
reason to myself for six months, until one day I pulled it on somebody
at school. I'd torn up something, a janitor had come up to tell
me, "Hey, man, you can't do that," and I pulled a pistol on him.
And it occurred to me, "Man, there was something wrong with me."
And it took me about a week and a half to realize, to remember the
incident where we stoned the kid. I never thought that my mind
would hide anything from me. And it's very strange when it does.
It came as a real surprise when stuff just started coming back.
Once you come back from Nam your
awareness of not only the Vietnam war, but of the government is
fantastic. It's like "Whoa. Hey! Wow. You mean,
this is what I've been asleep under all this time? Jeezus Christ,
somebody hit me with a baseball bat! I've been asleep.
What's going on?" So no wonder they come back and say, "You ain't
go nothing to show me."
It was really a totally unreal
situation after a few months. I think that what should be brought
out is the horror of the everyday, the commonplace. My duty was to
go out and serve as a perimeter guard on the ___ ramp. And this
was an LCU ramp on the ____ river where navy ships would come up and
they'd offload supplies.
And we took our truck outside the
combat base every night at 5:30 to set up at the ramp for our night's
duty.
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