by Si Robertson
I rarely went to class because I didn’t have much interest in getting a college education. My partner in crime was Miss Kay’s cousin Charles Hollier. We called him Tinker Bell, and he was flunking out of school, too. We pretty much had our own fraternity—Kappa Tappa Kegga. If I wasn’t working at the mess hall or hunting and fishing with Phil and Tommy, I was drinking beer with Tinker Bell. He wasn’t nearly as bad as I was about the partying. It didn’t take me long to figure out there was always a party somewhere at college if you looked for it, and I usually took the time to find one!
Every weekend, we had a get-together at either Tommy’s house or Phil’s. Both of them were married, so Miss Kay or Tommy’s wife, Nancy, would cook us a big meal. They lived next to each other at the Vetville apartments, which the school built in 1945 to accommodate married veterans coming home from World War II. The red brick apartments were located on South Campus, about a mile from the main campus. Phil’s front yard was always littered with fishing boats, motors, duck decoys, and on occasion, animal carcasses. His neighbors loved him!
During one gathering near the end of my third quarter at Louisiana Tech, Harold, Tommy, and Phil started getting on my case about not going to class. They were calling me stupid and lazy, and one of them said I wasn’t smart enough to finish college.
“No, you’re wrong there,” I told them. “Being intelligent has nothing to do with this.”
It’s true that I was flunking out of school, and I’d only been there for a few months! I was already on double-secret probation with the dean as a freshman, and there wasn’t much margin for error before I’d get thrown out of school. I really wasn’t too worried about it. I made it to just enough classes so they couldn’t kick me out of school for truancy, but I didn’t expend much energy in studying for midterms and final exams.
With only a week to go in my third quarter, Tinker Bell came to me and asked me if I knew anyone who would give us the lecture notes for our classes.
“If I flunk out my daddy is going to kill me,” Tinker Bell said.
“What do you think we can do about it now?” I asked him. “There’s only a week until our finals, and we haven’t been to class in a month.”
“Hey, if you can get the notes, we’ll hit the books,” he said.
So I found a couple of girls who gave me copies of their notes from our classes. Hey, have you ever known a woman who could tell me no? Over the next four days, Tinker Bell and I studied seventy-four hours in a row. We never went to sleep! We went to the store and bought eight cases of soda pop. Look, I discovered that soda pop makes you drunk if you drink enough. This was back when they still used real sugar in sodas. We drank so many soda pops while studying that we were wired for four straight days. Hey, when we were done studying, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d blinked! If someone had given me a cup of decaf coffee, I might have slipped into a coma! Thank goodness they hadn’t invented Red Bull yet!
The day of my final exams, I did fine in my first three classes. I breezed through the final exams and was as alert as a one-legged man walking through a minefield in Vietnam. I was still wired from the caffeine. My last final exam was late in the afternoon and it was one of my least-favorite courses: Romance languages. Hey, what more could the professor have taught me that I didn’t know already?
Look, the final exam was about one hundred questions. I answered about fifteen of them, and the next thing I knew the professor was shaking me! I fell asleep in the middle of the test!
“Wake up,” he told me. “You don’t have but ten minutes left to finish.”
There was one thing in my favor: the test was multiple-choice! I didn’t give a flip anyway, so I went through the answer sheet, filling in bubbles with my no. 2 pencil all the way down. The test sheet looked like an Etch A Sketch when I was done! Fortunately, I remembered that C is always a good answer! It took me only five of the ten minutes to complete the exam. I handed it to the professor and skipped out of the classroom.
I figured I had probably taken my last college exam, so I gave Tommy one hundred dollars to buy us some steaks. Phil and Tommy were going to grill steaks for us the next day at an end-of-the-quarter party at Tommy’s house. I had a job in college, so I usually had a few more bucks than my brothers. I worked in the freezer department of the university’s cafeteria. The cooks prepared turkeys and then sent them down to us to wrap and freeze. When the cooks were ready to serve the turkeys to students, they’d thaw them out and warm them up. One day, I went to work without eating lunch. Every time a turkey came down, I picked a little piece of meat off it. Hey, when you’ve picked forty turkeys, you’ve had a full meal!
At the end of the day, the foreman called us together.
“Hey, if you’re hungry, take some time and go upstairs and eat,” he said.
Then he walked us into the freezer. There was a bare turkey carcass sitting there. It was so naked I wanted to find it some clothes! Its breasts were sticking out and its legs had been picked to the bone! I guess I was a little hungrier than I thought!
Fortunately, the boss man didn’t fire me. It was a good job, and I always had a little money in my pockets when I was a student.
When I arrived at Tommy’s house the next day, Nancy wouldn’t open the front door for me. She was looking through the peephole, and then she started ranting and raving at me. The woman went slap insane!
“What is your problem?” Nancy said.
She worked in the registrar’s office at Louisiana Tech, so I figured she’d seen my grades. I knew I’d be on the next bus back to Gonzales, Louisiana, when Momma and Daddy found out I’d flunked out.
“Are you going to let me in?” I asked her.
She stood behind the door and hollered at me for the next five minutes.
“Hey, look, if you don’t open the door, I’m going to go back to the dorm,” I said.
She opened the door and screamed, “No, you’re not. Get in here and sit down!” She pointed her finger at me and said, “Did you go check your grades?”
“No,” I told her. “I couldn’t care less what my grades are, because I’m not coming back.”
She proceeded to chew my butt out for the next hour.
“You really didn’t go look at your grades, did you?” she asked.
“No, I know I flunked out,” I told her. “I don’t care what my grades are. I know one thing—college is not for me.”
By then, Tommy, Phil, and Harold were there, and they started in on me as well. They were calling me stupid and lazy again.
“Hey, y’all might as well get off of that,” Nancy told them.
“What do you mean?” Phil asked her.
“He partied for six months and never went to class and nearly made the dean’s list,” Nancy said. “He was three points from making an A average! He’s obviously not too dumb!”
Hey, I told you C is always the correct answer.
“One time in Vietnam, I saw a grizzly bear riding a scooter.”
Big Oaf
EVEN THOUGH I EARNED my way onto the list of possible candidates for Louisiana Tech University’s honors program, I didn’t return to school for the next academic quarter in the spring of 1968. I knew going into my freshman year that college probably wasn’t for me, but I gave it the old college try, and, hey, I proved to my older brothers that maybe they weren’t smarter than me.
For whatever reason, I couldn’t get into the routine of going to college. One of the things that really turned me off about higher education was that I met a lot of guys who had college degrees, and they told me they spent most of their time in classes like basket weaving and pottery. Then they’d tell me they majored in psychology! Hey, if you’re going to become a psychologist, why are you learning how to make a basket and an ashtray? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Some of the smartest people I know have sixth-grade educations and started working in the seventh grade because their families needed them to work. Conversely, some of the most educated idiots I’ve ever met have a
master’s degree or PhD. They couldn’t pour urine out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel!
Breaking the news to Momma and Daddy wasn’t easy. Even though I’d warned them about what was probably going to happen if they sent me to college, I knew they would be disappointed because each of my brothers and sisters was in school. They wanted me to have the same opportunity, and I’m sure they made some big sacrifices to make it happen. I think they might have even mortgaged the family farm to pay my tuition.
I broke the news to Daddy when we were driving to a duck hole one morning during Christmas break.
“Daddy, I ain’t going back to school,” I told him. “I know you and Momma really want me to go, but it ain’t for me.”
Daddy looked at me and sadly shook his head. I could see the disappointment in his eyes.
“Si, after all the sacrifices your mother and I made over the last few months to come up with the money to send you to college, you still say ‘ain’t,’ ” he said.
That was the end of our conversation.
After three quarters of college, I decided it was time for me to major in Si-cology. I was ready to get on living my life and finding my place in the world.
Of course, I knew Uncle Sam probably had other ideas for me. Phil, Tommy, and Nancy warned me that if I dropped out of college, I would probably get drafted into the military and be sent to Vietnam. American military advisers had been involved in the Vietnam War since 1950, and then our involvement escalated in the early 1960s. The number of American troops in Vietnam tripled in 1961 and tripled again in 1962, and then U.S. combat troops were first deployed there in 1965 to fight the Vietcong and the spread of communism.
After Congress passed the Military Selective Service Act of 1967, if you were a male, at least eighteen years old, single, and not in college, you were going to Vietnam. Hey, I was four for four, Jack! Two weeks after I withdrew from Louisiana Tech, my draft papers arrived at my parents’ house. I opened the letter and it basically said, “Uncle Sam wants you—right now!” A few weeks later, I reported to the army recruitment office in Shreveport, Louisiana, where they gave me a physical and determined I was fit to serve my country. Was there ever any doubt?
I went home to Dixie for about a month, and then I boarded a train in Shreveport in April 1968 for basic training at Fort Benning outside Columbus, Georgia. As soon as I stepped off the train, the drill sergeants were in my face screaming, “Get down, maggot!” My basic training lasted eight weeks, and it was miserable. It was the start of a hot, sticky Georgia summer. Hey, it was so hot and humid that I saw trees fighting over dogs. That’s how thirsty they were! Even the squirrels were using suntan lotion! Growing up in Louisiana, I was used to the heat and humidity, but it’s a lot more unbearable when you’re going through basic training.
My basic training was especially hard because I had two drill sergeants with completely different personalities The first one lasted only a couple of weeks and left because of a death in his family. I didn’t even know the man, but it wasn’t very long until I was missing him more than my momma! After he left, a bunch of us were sitting on the barrack steps waiting for the next guy who was going to make our lives miserable. We saw a taxicab coming down the main road in the base, and there was something wrong with it. Most automobiles are equally balanced on four tires. But this taxi was leaning heavily to the right side! It looked like the right side of the taxi was going to grind the asphalt on the road!
When the taxi pulled up in front our barrack, King Kong climbed out of the backseat. My new drill sergeant was about six feet eight inches tall and weighed four hundred and fifty pounds! He was wearing a Smokey the Bear hat that I could have taken a bath in! The guy was enormous! He was a huge man! His name was Sergeant Oliver, but we called him the Big Oaf behind his back. It seemed that his objective was to make my life as painful as possible.
While the Big Oaf was determined to break me, I will give him credit for one thing. Fort Benning is an army Ranger base. Look, you do not walk on a Ranger base—you run everywhere! We ran to the mess hall, showers, latrines, barracks, and everywhere else we went. We ran while brushing our teeth! You did not walk; you did the airborne shuffle, which is running. As large as the Big Oaf was, he actually ran right next to us everywhere we went. You had to respect the man for that.
One day in basic training, the Big Oaf woke us at five A.M. and informed us we were going on a ten-mile run. We ate breakfast and then loaded our packs onto our backs. About an hour later, after most of us had puked up our breakfast, the Big Oaf yelled, “Men, you’re doing a great job. We’ve already covered five miles!”
I guess we felt like the end was in sight, because we picked up our pace. About an hour later, as we were really beginning to feel the weight of our packs, the Big Oaf yelled, “You’re doing fine, men. Just fine! We should reach the starting point any minute now!”
As much as he tried, I was never really intimidated by the Big Oaf. Since I was from a large family and had so many older brothers, people getting in my face and yelling at me never really bothered me. But some guys couldn’t handle it, and their lives were miserable during basic training. I always thought the hazing was funny, but my drill sergeants never found it to be very humorous. They didn’t like that I was laughing or smiling the entire time. Somehow, I made it out of basic training alive.
On the day I graduated from basic training in June 1968, we were wearing our dress greens on the drill fields as we waited for the ceremony to start. The Big Oaf got in my face and was screaming at me again. It was almost as if he wanted one more shot at me. He started yelling, and, of course, I busted out laughing. I couldn’t help it. It made him so mad. He yelled his favorite words: “Drop, maggot!”
I stood there and laughed at him.
“Hey, I’m in my dress greens,” I told him. “I’m not getting down and getting dirty. You’re out of your mind.”
The Big Oaf looked at me in disbelief.
“Am I hearing you say what I think you said, Private Robertson?” he asked.
“Yeah, I ain’t getting down and dirty,” I told him.
“Am I going to have to put you in the front, leaning, rest position, maggot?” he asked.
“Are you serious?” I said.
“Dead serious,” he yelled.
So I dropped and did twenty-five push-ups. I jumped up and was smiling again.
“Wrong answer, maggot!” the Big Oaf yelled.
I dropped down and gave him twenty-five more. I was in the greatest shape of my life, so it wasn’t a problem, but I was obviously still as stubborn as a mule.
It took three hundred push-ups before the Big Oaf finally wiped the smile off of my face.
With my deployment to Vietnam right around the corner, I feared I wouldn’t be smiling for much longer.
“Your beard is so dumb, it takes two hours to watch 60 Minutes!”
Passing the Test
ONE OF THE MAIN reasons I left college and went into the military was because I didn’t want to have to attend class—and I really didn’t like taking tests. What’s the first thing the army did with me once I graduated from basic training?
Uncle Sam gave me a test!
To assemble an effective fighting force, the United States Army believed it needed the right kind of man as well as the right kind of equipment in Vietnam. Hey, it didn’t take the army long to realize it had the right kind of man on its hands, but it had to figure out what kind of equipment to put in my hands to make me a killing machine. When I joined the army, there were over three hundred occupations available. The army wanted to make sure it didn’t waste my talents and abilities, so it gave me a long test to determine how I could help America the most.
Fortunately for me, it was a multiple-choice test!
Before the army assigned me to a unit, I was required to take the Army Classification Battery (ACB), which graded incoming soldiers in areas such as electronics repair, general maintenance, mechanical maintenance, cleri
cal skills, radio code, surveillance and communications, and, of course, combat. If a soldier scored well in electronics repair, he would probably be assigned to something like missile or air defense repair. If a soldier scored well in general maintenance, he might be assigned to areas like construction and utilities. Someone who scored well in combat might end up in the infantry or armor units, and high marks in clerical skills usually correlated well to desk jobs.
Shortly after I was assigned to Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Lee in Virginia in the fall of 1968, I took the ACB for the first time. Hey, I can recite the alphabet after drinking a twelve-pack of soda pop while blindfolded and standing on one leg, so I knew the army’s test wouldn’t be a problem. A few days after I completed the test, my commanding officer called me into his office.
“Hey, Robertson, your smoke-blowing days are over,” he told me.
“What are you talking about?” I asked him.
“The ole country-boy act you’ve got going isn’t going to cut it anymore,” he said. “You’re in the top five percent in the world.”
“What world are you talking about?” I asked.
“What don’t you understand?” he said. “You just scored higher than ninety-five percent of the army on the ACB. You’re on the fast track.”
Now, you have to understand one thing: people were bombing the ACB worldwide in the army in 1968. It was a big scandal throughout the military, and the Pentagon couldn’t figure out if the test was flawed or if its troops really weren’t that smart! A seventy was considered a passing score on the ACB. I scored a sixty-nine! Somehow, I was still better than nearly everybody else entering the army at the time.
When I saw my test results, I was surprised to see the areas in which I scored the highest. I scored extremely high in architecture and engineering, followed by clerical, mechanical maintenance, and surveillance and communications. As I sat there looking at my scores, I pondered what my vocation was going to be in the military. Would I be a spy? Hey, I’m kind of like Victoria. She has her secrets and so do I! Need a secret Santa? I’m your man! The Vietcong would never detect me behind enemy lines. I’m the master of distractions! A couple of hand gestures and—bam!—I’ll pull the underwear clean off your butt!
