Back Door Man * Chapter VII * Army

A memoir of the years 1944 - 2008 This chapter deals with my experiences in the US Army in Georgia, California, and Oahu leading up to my desertion and flight to Canada.

VII ARMY               

They drafted me just as our country geared up for what, as everyone knows, became an ignominious and drawn out defeat in Southeast Asia. The reluctance Washington put on was all puff; the scent of profit was high and business could hardly wait. Vietnam would be our first military defeat and the ignominy that followed would disillusion the populous. It was always going to be that; the grunts in the Service never doubted it.

In 1955 the French pulled out in haste, tarnished by their own defeat. Slowly at first, we, the Champions of Freedom, stepped in. A long while later, when the Pentagon could no longer deny what was going on, they made the news more palatable by billing interventionism as an effort to ‘stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.’ Also co-opted from the French was South Vietnam’s poppy industry. The billions of scored poppy capsules that give us raw opium promised high returns and the lure of money kicked off two decades of CIA involvement in the ‘protected illegal’ heroin trade. This led to low prices at home and a boom in its availability and with that, bang! �" you have the core of today’s drug conundrum. Not many saw twenty years of war coming and nothing could be done to get out of it until we found the will to admit our blunder. The North Vietcong would not stop short of victory and so, twenty years later, we had to leave as hurriedly as the French before us.

Before I was conscripted, the dominant military hawks, seeing only what they wanted through the eyes of conventional-warfare, sold Vietnam to a unenthusiastic JFK. Then it fell into LBJ’s lap. Johnson distrusted his generals, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the opposition. And no wonder, what with civilian and military doves alike moaning that Indochina was quicksand. I became a soldier while Washington duked out the question of whether and how aggressively to commit to all-out attack on North Vietnam, which represented their ‘new ‘strategy. This posturing debate among the power elite took place behind a curtain of fabricated public relations optimism that fooled no one long. The calmative was Hope laced with the imperative that this intervention �" not war - was necessary and unavoidable. Who but the USA would step up to participate and finance the South Vietnamese resistance to the Communist north? Waves of reiteration that, if full military involvement became necessary, the American armed forces were ready and invincible made the line easier to swallow. If our troops went in, the conflict would be brief, they said, and victory was not in doubt. The military was as ready as one-hundred-billion-plus a year could make them.

Along with thousands of other silent lambs, I delivered myself at the lower Manhattan recruitment station in March of 1966. There the first thing they did was to frighten us. When they shaved our heads, by submitting to it we owned up to helplessness. With our draft notices we knew this would happen but we were not prepared for the sight of ourselves ‘in-the-bald’. Without our hair, the Army had also deprived us of our manhood and left us awkward adolescents again. We stayed so until our hair grew back and we found our manly bearings. That took a month by which time we had adjusted to this kind of treatment. Just as the hammer changes flat metal to an infinite number of profiles, the razor can make units out of individuals.

Hairlessness was even harder on us than the public nakedness and digit insertion we endured next. Nudity was more bearable �" we had all seen it in the locker room. Bald, however, we now felt naked and vulnerable. Thus the Army began to redesign us to fit the rough silhouette of its own brand of men. The first steps of this process were the very things the Nazis did to the Jews before the slaughter.

Next, we boarded a bus to Fort Gordon for eight weeks of Basic. After the indignities at the induction center, Basic continues to strip away personality and reduce men to cannon fodder. All that is needed for this is liberal applications of humiliation and endless mind numbing drill to loud warlike cadences like,

“I don't know but I have been told,
Eskimo kisses are mighty cold.”

In charge of this was Master Sergeant Davis, a diminutive black man with a booming voice and a fearful countenance that made up for his stature. I loved hearing his mantra, “I... CAN’T... HEAR... YOU!” This bellow through a bullhorn would follow no matter how loudly we chanted the cadence.

 We may have been young, frightened, immature boys with a weak conception of ourselves and our ambitions but the Army’s problem was that some of us were stubborn m***********s who would never conform. Many dishonorable discharges were handed out during those eight weeks. Basic tests the mettle. If you are not strong and determined, it will turn you to mush.

I survived to grow intimate with Georgia’s red clay. While I have forgotten their names and faces, I know I went through Basic with seven other angry guys in a stifling tent. We were stuck with this additional hardship because the number of conscripts overwhelmed the number of bunks in barracks. The tent became a part of our experience with inconveniences like heavy spring cloudbursts seeping down on us from above and rivers of mud below. We missed space, privacy, and air circulation, and the canvas intensified the heat. Tents also gave us advantages. Because the light in the tent was dim, surprise inspections could only be less meticulous than those in the barracks.

I would rather say that Basic was challenging, rigorous, and thorough and that at the end I felt like a competent soldier. It was not so. Basic was just as dreary and crushing as Joe had warned. The most detestable part of it, which he failed to mention, was the corruption and dishonesty kept from the electorate at large. For Basic was another sham that preyed upon the taxpayer’s gullibility and emptied his wallet. He, the taxpayer, paid for the billions squandered on ‘combat readiness’. Meanwhile, the Army weeded out the weak and the misfits while berating and humiliating the rest of us. Many boys lost their self-respect under that kind of stress and this reduced by fifteen percent those left standing, those supposed to be fit to fight. We would go on to more ‘training’ before we met the enemy. Combat under fire was where the real training took place. There casualties and deaths further reduced our fighting men by fifty-eight-thousand over the course of the war. In battle death is random. The weak and nonconformists were not the only ones shipped home in flag-draped coffins (a golden opportunity for the flag business). War profited the Party of Property and for that reason we would soon to be pitted against a motivated and acclimatized army of guerilla insurgents. In our tent in Georgia, we could not imagine how a deceitful government corrupted by the moneyed could lead to so many casualties. The poorly trained infantry soldier was cannon fodder in America’s newest army..

Draftees did not need to be more than reasonably healthy specimens but even in good health we were not all able-bodied. If those who conducted physicals had approved only those fit for their task, however, there would not have been enough feet to fill the boots earmarked for ‘acceptable casualties’.

Big Tobacco colluded with the Army to keep us addicted. Few of us did not smoke and cheap cigarettes only encouraged and accommodated the habit. Smoking may have calmed some of us but it was counterproductive to getting into shape. Quitting should have been among the first orders of business. Our breaks were called ‘smoke breaks’; we ceased training to light up. Eight weeks of Basic did not improve my physical condition and I failed at physical training. Despite that, however, I progressed to Advanced Infantry Training (AIT).

Two weeks of freedom came between Georgia and AIT in California. For those two weeks I worked at Brentano’s where they were delighted to have a soldier in uniform, a poster boy for the war effort. I spent as much time as I could with Eileen, who was proud to be dating a soldier. I seemed to be the only one not proud of me. Before I could say, “bang, bang, you’re dead,” I left again.

AIT was carried out at Fort Ord. I found it taxing, uncongenial and of little value. In my opinion, the Army’s effort to prepare us for the extraordinary conditions ahead was inadequate. We shuffled through it though and at the end, of those who finished, none felt ready for Ho Che Min’s committed guerillas. Only being there could make us ready. True enough. Implied in that message was another: those who had, like me, failed to measure up in Basic and AIT and who were not discharged were more likely die in Nam; our lives were cheap lives and expendable. Insane or addicted, when your time was up they would fly you home. If you did not develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you might put Nam behind you and pick up the threads of your normal life.

My anxiety had not diminished over that eight weeks. No one seemed to notice or care that I was not fit. Would they send me to Vietnam anyway? When my orders came, I was puzzled, relieved, and, briefly, pissed-off to find myself assigned to Schofield Barracks, Oahu. I’d never heard of Schofield and had the foolish notion that Oahu was a hillbilly posting. This, however, was the next stroke of good fortune in my charmed life. Ignorance accounts for not wanting to go. I did not want to go there or to Vietnam either or home. I did not know what I wanted but, in fact, if I’d it would have made no difference. I was now a soldier.

After another two-week time out in New York, I shipped out for the Eleventh Infantry Brigade in a place I would soon call paradise. It was a new unit with barely anyone in it when I checked in. Not knowing what lay in store, I expected the worst - a brief stay at Schofield before Nam. I never felt more afraid.

It took four days to adjust to the island climate, and no more than a week to realize Hawaii was all the heaven I would ever know. Schofield was a venerable old base, an hour from Honolulu. The grounds were magnificent, full of mature trees, manicured lawns and lush gardens. The Army had the manpower and time to maintain all this.

The Eleventh Infantry Brigade scarcely existed except on paper and I was among the first fifty grunts assigned. At first, we did not even have M16’s, fine with me. Then Fortuna smiled again. It was an opening for a typist in the Battalion Adjutant’s office that could not wait and would have to be filled from within. Five of us applied for the position and I stood at the end of the line in the dark, cool hallway outside the office.

The application process was simple. Sergeant Davis, who ran the Adjutant’s office, asked the first in line, “How fast can you type, soldier?” He answered, “Twenty-five words per minute, Sergeant.” The second said thirty, and so on until he came to me. To the rest I answered “Seventy words a minute, Sergeant Davis.” It was a boast I never had to prove. The sergeant smiled and I smiled back. Possibly because I beamed at my own desperate audacity, he dismissed the others. I got the job on a trial basis, made myself liked in the office, and was soon a confirmed clerk-typist at Battalion Headquarters. Greatly relieved, I pinched myself hard and settled down to type away the next seventeen months. Promotion to Private First Class came with my new position and that was followed by other boosts to the rank of Specialist Fourth Class.

With time, job security, and my own typewriter, I unleashed a torrent of punishingly long letters, some to my family but most to Eileen. I must have spewed out three or four every day telling of everything that happened. If any recipient had held on to them, they would have formed a day by day expose of the minutia of what was happened. Hawaii was fine, just hot enough, but I would never measure up to the torrid heat of Southeast Asia. It was impossible to sustain such an intense anxiety in that verdant island and so, in the constant sunshine my fear of Nam diminished. After that, with the coming of new friendships and events, Oahu stole my heart.

Between the tirades in my letters, for filler I fell back on poetic expressions of imagined love and longing. The thousands of miles between us made it easier to believe that sentimental stuff. We would deceive ourselves for as long as possibility and need stirred our emotions. Since I’d played with dolls as a child, for that and other reasons they had long wondered if I would turn out gay. They would never acknowledge the elephant until they were made to, however. As far as they knew, and correctly, I was still a virgin and that made it a feasible, though scarcely, to skirt the issue. My parents and Eileen grew closer while I was gone. They had always liked her. All their dreams now fell on her. She would be the girl for me and answer their prayers.

Nevertheless, had it not been for the draft, Eileen and I would have already broken up. I would have found a way to do it, or fate would have stepped in. It had been foolish to bind her to me in my absence and if I’d ended it when I joined up we could have gone our separate ways with a free conscience. However, no such responsible initiative entered my mind and at first, once a soldier, I needed the home fires to cope.

After a few months, Sergeant Davis rewarded me with a permanent twenty-four-hour pass that allowed me to enter and leave Schofield as I pleased. I still had a bunk in the barracks but I no longer had to live there. Any pretense of further infantry training ceased when I put away my M16 forever. I was safe, but the question of when the Pentagon would order the brigade to Vietnam hung over all our battalion’s nervous foot soldiers like the blade of a guillotine.

Working at battalion headquarters, I was among the first to know the answer: it came from Sergeant Davis. “Relax, we’re going nowhere until we’re up to full strength. At the rate we’re going, we’re looking at a year or more.” Heavy losses in Nam had created an urgent need for transfusions of fresh combatants which rerouted all but a trickle of fresh recruits to our unit. This was good news for us. No one went overseas with less than twelve months active duty left in his tour so with a year under my belt would come my salvation.

In The City and the Pillar, Gore Vidal claims that the Army is a hot bed of homosexual activity. This may have been so for Vidal while he served as a warrant officer aboard Army ships, and for other more highly sexed souls, but it was not so for me. For me there would be none. Nor did I know or hear of any homosexual behavior at Schofield. Guys would lay, in briefs or naked, in their bunks and cry about how horny they were and how they missed their girlfriends or women in general but the barracks was not a safe place to do it. Masturbation was acceptable and ignored but the horny exclamations of these individuals came from men who did not jerk off. They may have been signals to other, equally frustrated soldiers that those complaining were up for sex with a mate. They might very well have called it ‘helping a friend’ and not gay. A lot of it may have happened behind the scenes. I, of course, was too anxious about being outed and still too naïve to let anything happen.

Once, however, someone made a tempting proposal and for him I’d fire in my belly. While I still slept in a bunk in the barracks, a beautiful black boy named Ethan, whose smooth and shiny body had long been in everyone’s sights for various reasons, slept in a bunk two down from mine. He was Frankie at the Institute and the stranger on Chapel rolled into one. He had the cocky habit of prancing around nude as he went back and forth to the latrine and the showers, waving his dick and shaking his a*s for all who cared to see. I mistook these flirtations for self-confidence. With my head in a book and one eye for action, I would wait for any eye-candy to appear. I could not keep cool while he put his round buttocks, his perfect chest, his abs and his magnificent genitals on show. Ethan may have been queer or straight but either way he was as horny as a toad in season.

One day the two of us were alone on our bunks in the barracks. Ethan was wearing briefs and I boxers when I went to piss in the latrine. I was startled and speechless when all of a sudden a now nude Ethan sidled up next to me close enough to feel his heat. With no preamble and almost apologetically, he went on to beg me to kindly screw him. In just one aspect he was not like the stranger in New Haven or Frankie. This time a horny black Narcissus was coming on to me. “Could you… Would you mind…? Please…” he continued while I wondered “How were you raised, beast?” We were two animals in need of one thing but he wanted penetrative sex while I still used my right hand. I squirmed my way out of doing business with polite excuses. Even while covering up how long he had been the feature attraction in my fantasies, he must have noticed the throbbing boner tenting my filmy shorts. As my eyes feasted on his ebony skin, he kept repeating “You’re horny, too, PFC. I can tell. So let’s get it on. Please, man, help me out. I’m good, I really am. You’ll like it, I promise”. I held both of us off with breathless whispered admonitions that I was not like that. I refused to say, “I want to but it’s my first time, Ethan. Show me.” If only he had ignored my lies and taken me. I would have melted into him.

To me, straight men were perfect. I wanted no butch gays or Fems. There was a connection between the seeming implausibility of having sex with straight men and my avoidance of physical intimacy: they were different sides of the asexual being. My standards for a live sex toy were such that the right one could only live in my imagination. Ten years later, before I understood these things, I discovered that straight men might be so horny as to be not particular about how they got off. Confident in their own skin, they are not as fussy as I about their partner’s looks and doing it with men was sometimes as good or better than it was with women. and ‘a bit of the brown’ was alright with them. For it is only pleasure and release they want and in the right circumstances they will jump into bed with almost anyone.

Fifteen months on Oahu altered my reality. My experiences shook up my political misconceptions. I became more sure of myself as this awareness took hold of me. What happened? I identified with the dissenters, not the war mongers. I made friends with a number of soldiers from different social and economic backgrounds and listened to their honed, strong, and tested political perspectives. I believe that in the human bouillabaisse this epiphany would happen to any open, unprejudiced mind.

When I became acquainted with him, Steven Head became my first Anglican friend. He was a lanky, nearsighted, and genteel Southern boy from Atlanta. He had a sharp nose and chin, blue eyes and severely parted dirty-blond hair. Before the Army took him, he had aimed to join the Anglican ministry. With no other living relatives, he was his Mother’s sole support. Mrs. Head was an incapacitated widow, seriously ill and totally dependent on Steven. He was honest and honorable but too trusting. The Army taught him that not everyone was so plain spoken. Steven should have been classified 4F; they had drafted him in error. Unable to act quickly enough, he went along with it but continued to appeal for a discharge while his mother’s state of mind and circumstances worsened by the day.

He had every reason to hope for a compassionate discharge and got one after a drawn out wait. The Army lumbers like a centenarian tortoise, and it took several months while his Mother fended for herself. She phoned him in distress with tales of one calamity after another that left him in emotional knots. There was little Steven could do from Oahu. All he had was his meager Army pay and he sent most of it to her.

It was November when I first noticed him and how troubled he seemed. I asked what was bothering him and it relieved him to tell someone. His tale stirred up my sympathy and we became confidants about our feelings in present time, our different pasts, and our stateside family. With each new day his Mother’s news grew more alarming. She was in acute financial difficulty, and her landlord was threatening eviction. By then Christmas was nigh. I’d a little money in my account in New York so I called home and aroused their compassion for Steven and his Mother. I asked them to send Mrs. Head a hundred dollars from my account and suggested that instead of sending me money they might add theirs to mine. Without a word to anyone, my parents sent Mrs. Head $300 and a letter such as only an caring Mother could write. When the money arrived, on December 23, she opened the mysterious Christmas card and phoned Steven with the first good news he’d had in months, Christmas tidings of the Miracle of 1966. With what he sent out of his pay, she now had enough to see her through until February when Steven got his discharge.

I spent my only Christmas on the island with Steven. We went to the service at St. Andrew’s, the Anglican Cathedral at Queen Emma Square. I did it to please him, and for the novelty of a Protestant ceremony. I actually enjoyed it though it was only a slight departure from the Mass. The liturgy in English, the different color of vestments, and different hymns were not sufficient to restore faith.

Two friendships that exerted greater influence over me followed the three months I’d spent Steven. They had similar story lines but different and atypical conclusions. The first of them was with Bill Taylor, an intelligent and witty Yankee from New Hampshire and a teacher’s son. This helped make him a cultured, educated man in advance of his age. He was inducted when he took a semester break from college to reflect and cool down. Instead of that, his draft notice arrived. He had learned in college about US meddling in other countries and our two centuries of imperialist adventurism. Vietnam was its current disguise, he said. At length he discussed chicanery in Washington and demonstrated how foreign policy affects everyone. All this had given Bill a sceptical eye and a troubled mind with respect to the nation’s future and to the more immediate danger facing the troops now on the ground. He was serious and knowledgeable and I came to agree with him.

Conscience is honorable but it only added more complexity to the choices Bill faced and prolonged his indecision. It did not allow him to put his own interests first. He knew America had no business except Business in Nam, and that the Propertied class would willingly trade lives for profit. Why number himself among them? Why take lives only to prop-up the Military-Industrial-Complex, he asked himself. In all probability fear was the only answer. Out of fear. To get a dishonorable discharge would take courage And what good would that do him? None. People would scoff and it would make finding any work more difficult. All his options would impact him adversely.

We had all been led to believe that deserting was the worst decision a soldier could make. Besides being unpatriotic, going AWOL would criminalize you and lead to marginalization, separation from family, and dysfunction. The Army told us that sooner or later everyone who goes AWOL gets caught. Like the ‘spanking machine,’ we feared it enough to believe what they told us and we believed the message because they drummed it in. Bill did not see how to untangle himself from his dilemma and it required a great deal more agonizing before he did. While he worried, Bill joined a radical anti-war group, mostly students from the University of Hawaii (U of H), and brought me into their orbit. These experiences in Hawaii radicalized me as much I would ever be. I never was at home with extremism and political activism though, and, out radical influences, I would cast it off as one does a pair of uncomfortable shoes.

Another friend I made then, Gene Sanger, also went to the U of H meetings but only sometimes. Like Bill, before the Army conscripted Gene he already had his own deep convictions on a range of topics including Vietnam and US politics. Again, like Bill, Gene bestowed the honor of his trust on scarcely anyone. He kept his own counsel, observed, and listened until he was sure of a person before he opened up. Gene was the son of a civilian engineer. He was with the State Department and Gene had traveled with him a great deal. Growing up, Gene has lived in Canada, North Africa, and Afghanistan, among other places. His dad’s last station abroad had been Kabul and Afghanistan was Gene’s current favorite foreign country. Gene was the only one of us with firsthand knowledge of how different life can be in other countries. With that he could that much more intelligently discuss the politics and the layers of lies and secrets that underpinned our presence in Vietnam. When we met, he had premature wisdom leavened with a pinch of lively paranoia deeper than Bill’s.

 

Bill could be too open about his beliefs and when he felt free to speak his mind he did not hold back anything. This often got him in trouble. Gene held his tongue longer than Bill did until he, too, grew more outspoken. The result was the same.

 

Gene, Bill, and I were not the team players the Army wanted us to be. We felt marginalized. All we shared with our brothers-in-arms was loathing, fear, and some degree of homesickness. With me, they set aside their paranoia. I was not a good enough actor to be in the service of the enemy and so they found me trustworthy, harmless, concerned for their safety, and devoted to knowing their opinions. Kindred in some ways �" free thinkers, s**t disturbers, contrarians - we grew close while loving our own company.

 

The three of us worked in clerical positions with passes and permission to live off-post and soon we rented a tiny two-bedroom house in the nearby hamlet of Wahiawa. There we lived for a few months, out of sight and hearing of those who would disagree and free to engage in long tete-a-tetes that stoked resistance. Though I was now out of danger, they were not. As company clerks they might be relatively safe, but that did not change their hating the Army and the war. Their conundrum lay in whether to desert, protest in uniform, or remain in the grey zone and do nothing - the third the least likely.

 

Bill and Gene were both handsome and never gave reason to doubt they were straight. These factors had something to do with befriending them and I fantasized in private. they did not think I was queer because all three of us were under the same delusion that I loved my beard. Poor Eileen. As I grew more and more confident that I would never see Vietnam and after we became firm friends, my letters grew brief and less frequent, down from three or four to one or two a day. I may even have skipped days now and then, which may have led them to think I’d adapted. At last.

 

Despite having become more immediate and more personal, I still loathed politics. With our future riding on the decisions of a remote Washington, however, I’d to follow my friends’ example and face the issues squarely. Merely to loathe Washington politics was not good enough; you had to understand them, too.

 

We knew something was afoot but, being a brother and not wanting his actions to turn the spotlight on us, Bill told no one what he would do. He would not let the Army decide his fate and thought his plan the most effective way to stop them. His shot at a compassionate discharge on psychiatric grounds soon followed. He could pass for crazy and, with a large dose of LSD in him, he planned to create a bizarre scene at his company headquarters �" bizarre enough that the MP’s would take him into custody. A sympathetic psychiatrist would see him and a discharge for psychiatric causes could not but follow. This was not too much to expect of the US Army in which he still believed there was some integrity.

 

I only learned this after the MP’s arrested him. Through the network of other company clerks Gene learned that Bill had appeared stoned and nude before his company commander and raucously refused to serve in Vietnam. They took him into custody at once, made short work of his court marshal, and handed him a dishonorable discharge �"a badge of honor in many circles. After what he had done, we could not risk our own safety by seeing him in gaol and Bill disappeared from our lives. The three of us had assumed the Army knew our minds, yet Bill’s discharge cast no shadow on us. Taking it for granted that the U of H group had been compromised by military infiltrators, Gene did not go to any more of their meetings. However, it was only a healthy paranoia that made us think someone was observing us. Nevertheless, Bill’s attempt made us even more cautious.

 

Gene’s did not feel the same allegiance Bill did to his country and it made desertion a

more reasonable thing for him to do. He was a company clerk in an infantry unit training for Vietnam. He would be there soon. Also, he was making waves in his company office, unable to keep his mouth shut about what he knew and what he suspected. He had made himself so obnoxious that his Commanding Officer threatened to make him a point-man in Nam. In the infantry, the point man leads his platoon into enemy territory and he is most likely to die first. With no reason to doubt that his CO meant what he said, Gene was determined to thwart him. Nothing less would appease his resentment.

 

We continued to thrash out the pros and cons and how best to do it. The more we discussed it, the more reasonable it seemed. Sweden and Canada were the two most hospitable countries. Sweden welcomed deserters on principles of sympathy with the antiwar/peace-and-brotherhood movement. Canada did so less for that reason and more for the more pragmatic one - that American immigrants were better educated, wealthier, and more desirable than most from more foreign countries. We agreed he should go to Canada; it was closer, he spoke the language, and getting there would be less expensive and less risky than reaching Sweden. One plane ride and one border crossing would get him to safety.

 

His real hurdle was having no money. Without elaborating on the reasons, he made it clear that he could not approach his family for help. In July, I phoned my parents and asked them to empty my bank account so I could visit Tokyo. It would be expensive, I added. They were excited by my travel plans and did as I asked. Gene could have procrastinated until it was too late if I’d not loaned him enough to fly to British Columbia. He stalled only until September when we put on our civvies and high tailed it to the airport. There he bought a one-way ticket to Seattle. He had been to B.C. before and liked it. There he could lose himself in vast tracts of wilderness along the coast or inland.

 

I stood outside the terminal where I could observe his plane taking off. I watched him board. When it took off, I waved at the plane until my arm became too heavy hold up. I missed him from that moment and my heart filled with pain. Abruptly I became undecided over what, if anything, I ought to do. We had discussed my deserting, always half in jest and with no sense of urgency. Oh, lucky man! I’d no reason to desert - I was sitting pretty. Why should I jeopardize my future? Why should I follow him? Yet, being left behind felt like I’d failed at something. It grew worse. Had the departure of my army buddies made me a bit of a thrill seeker then? While searching for a reason to follow Gene, I kept asking myself what, really, was stopping me.

 

The alternative to deserting was to wait out six more months on Oahu living alone in a private house and to end up discharged in New York. Two weeks later, even the pastime of clerical work disappeared when they reassigned me to a shadow posting with no duties. With that came the freedom to do whatever I wanted, only without money. Anyone would have envied what seemed like a safe and cushy finale. I’d hoped to hear from Gene but no word came, and, after a few weeks, his whereabouts and fate was the only thing on my mind.

 

Now I considered what waited for me back on the east coast: my much loved parents with no idea of who I’d become but longing to have me home again, my little upstairs room, our little house, our claustrophobic neighborhood, our parish church, more American politics on which I’d now been radicalized. And Eileen. How was I to deal with her? Did I love her? The answer was no. I loved Gene, even knowing it was an infatuation. Admitting I’d always been attracted to men, I’d to admit that my beard and I’d no future.

 

It would have been too mortifying and hurtful to tell her such things when she had replied so faithfully to hundreds of my anguished letters. Telling my parents that I was an atheist, anti-American, and gay was an equally horrifying thought. And there was also that which was part and parcel of the other option and yet less and less of an option at all - going back to New York. After what I’d learned about myself thus far, the idea of going back and hiding these things, the thought of burrowing into deception made staying in the USA impossible. Though I knew I would miss it, from my perspective on Oahu in October 1967, I saw no way to find fulfillment and be happy anywhere but with Gene in Canada. Hence, I came out to myself.

 

I would follow him and send a message to those I left behind. I wanted to believe that my desertion would send the message to despairing draftees that it was possible to do it and not get caught. Canada would put them as well as myself out of reach of military justice. There, out of the orbit of past and family, we could be whoever we wanted to be. I would do this somehow, when I felt secure and settled above the forty-ninth parallel. I would wait still longer to explain these matters to those whom it would hurt the most.

 

Neutral Canada was just different enough and just enough alike that I would not miss the land of my birth too greatly. My only fear, besides the border crossing, was that I would never forgive myself if I did not do it.

 

It was two weeks before I was ready. Still no word from Gene. He probably feared the Army would intercept a letter from him. Some slight wavering on my own part lingered until I inquired whether I could take my discharge in Hawaii instead of in New York. I wanted to see if it would change my mind about deserting. I did love Oahu. I already knew the answer. It was no and that settled it.

 

In the meanwhile, I went on my own to two more anti-war meetings and befriended a couple from that circle. When I confided, in private, a general outline of my plan, they became excited and offered to help. They were young and in love, with each other and with the anti war movement both. The man was Steve, a student at U of H. His girlfriend, a Japanese American, was Diane who had been born in Hawaii. When I met them, they were pregnant. After meeting and talking with them a few times outside the circle, they told me that if they had a son they would name him after me. They seemed to be constantly stoned and offered me acid more than once while they praised its virtues, its pleasures, and its rewards. “You have to try it. It’s a trip. Real fun…” they said. I was afraid of the effects of ‘tripping’ and I’d never taken drugs. I declined to join in the fun. It was not the time. I hope my namesake was born healthy. If he lived, Paul would be in his forties

 

With my plans made, when the time came for aloha, the peaceniks drove me to the airport. They were in a deliriously happy state when picked me up. Even as preoccupied as I was with the journey before me, I knew they were tripping. Steve and Diane were used managed the driving well under the effects of hallucinogens. Like children, they were delighted by their good deed, helping me. It was one of their bits to end war.

 

In Canada, I felt concern for these two for a long time, the last people I saw in Oahu. They seemed too childlike for their own good. They were too close and too much like one person. Still, I envied them the happiness and comfort of their intimacy and I have never forgotten them or their kindness. It is a great pleasure to remember them now, smiling and laughing on the way to the airport in their open convertible Volkswagen. Steve drove and as the wind whipped through Diane’s long black hair, she leaned over to kiss him and turned to talk to me in the backseat.

 

We kissed and said aloha before I went to board a plane to Seattle. The rest is a blur and before I knew, I was airborne. As I headed off to another life I addressed many other silent alohas to my beautiful green Oahu as I watched it grow sadly small and then vanish like the past. I reflected that had been, as always, fortunate in the Army. It had not been too hard on me. I’d suckled eighteen months on its teat and now I’d dropped the moorings of twenty-three years: home and family, old friends, the CIA, Eileen.

 

When I landed in Seattle, the sweet scented white and purple orchids they gave me were still around my neck. I kept it on until I reached the Canadian border crossing in Blaine. Not to raise eyebrows, as I left the bus I placed them carefully on my seat, perhaps for someone else. There I was, twenty-three, afraid, posing as a tourist, and wishing I were a fly on the wall.