Out of the Wilderness

by Steve Stroble

them if they got pregnant."

  "Man, what happened to you? You've changed."

  "I don't know. I used to believe all that stuff about helping your neighbor, but I guess I gave up on it."

  "Why?"

  "I think it started when we moved away from here in 1964."

  "Didn't you go to the South?"

  "Yeah. Some heavy scenes were going down. The blacks were marching, registering to vote, trying to go where and do what only whites were doing. I remember when we went to fish night at some local diner and a black couple came in. The waitress sure dragged her feet before seating them. You could cut the tension in the air with a knife. Lots of the customers were grumbling and staring. My friends would tell jokes at school about blacks."

  "But I thought Catholics were big on civil rights."

  "Some of them, I guess. But not down there. The only ones really pushing it were the priests and nuns. Wouldn't have made much difference if every Catholic had been for it. My Dad told me that the state we lived in was two percent Catholic. He said the city we were in was one percent Catholic."

  "How long were you there?"

  "Four years. Then Dad got orders again. We wound up on an island in the Pacific for two years."

  "How was that?"

  "Okay. Until I worked as a volunteer at the base hospital one summer. When I saw guys from Nam without arms and legs or burned to a crisp, I couldn't stand it. You know what was the worst?"

  "No." Dave started to think of Gil.

  "I was the assistant to the Red Cross lady. We went down to the basement one day and there's this group of guys in their pajamas standing around smoking and talking. Nothing, and I mean nothing looked wrong with them. So I asked her, 'What's wrong with them?' And she says, 'They're junkies. They're getting off heroin.'"

  "Ugh." Dave winced as if Sam had punched him in the stomach.

  "The suckers looked as normal as you or me except they were skinny."

  "So what happened next?"

  "Man, I flipped out. Went from a red, white and blue 'Kill the commies' patriot to a left wing radical. My parents and I argued over the war a lot. My mom wanted me to go into ROTC at college so I wouldn't end up carrying a gun in Vietnam."

  "You listen to her?"

  "Nope. Most of my graduating class enlisted or went off to college."

  "So they could get a deferment from the draft?"

  "Not unless they went into ROTC. They had started the lottery by then. My number came up."

  "What'd you do?"

  "By that time we were back in the States. I was doing dope and ?"

  "What kind of dope?"

  "Pot mostly. The lids were usually three or four fingers - about an ounce for $10. Smoked a little hash. It was expensive, $5 or $10 a gram.

  "Anything else?"

  "Yeah. Some acid. There were so many kinds around - blotter, purple haze, orange sunshine, yellow sunshine, windowpane, green monster, blue cheer. Some dealers sold what they said was mescaline or magic mushrooms."

  "Psilocybin?"

  "Yeah. Never knew for sure what was in any of it, though. Good high for 10 hours for only a buck or two."

  "Have any bad trips?"

  "Does a bear caca in the woods?"

  "Last time I checked."

  "Yeah. I had some bad ones."

  "Went up to the mountains one time and took what I thought was a single dose. I was out of my mind for hours. Turned out to be a four-way hit."

  "Bummer."

  "Yeah. Anyway all the drugs and the peace and love message tweaked my thinking."

  "How?"

  "When I got a low number, I applied for conscientious objector status. They gave me 1A-O draft status instead of the IA status I got at first."

  "What's 1A-O draft status? I always heard that 4-F status was the one to get."

  "1A-O was eligible to be drafted, but not required to carry weapons."

  "So what did you do? Drive a truck?"

  "No. They made us medics."

  "So where did you go in at?"

  "Oakland Induction Center. Someone had bombed it about a year earlier. Then there were people giving us pamphlets on the way in trying to talk us into resisting or going to Canada. After that we went to Fort Ord. I met some crazy dudes from New York there. Two of them had enlisted to go to Nam. They told them they weren't sending any more troops there and they could either get out on a breach of contract or stay in. Either way they weren't going to Nam."

  "What did they do?"

  "I don't know. I was only there for a week before they sent all the conscientious objectors to Fort Sam Houston."

  "How was basic training? As bad as in the movies that show it?"

  "Modified basic training for us. No weapons training. We'd get up in the morning, run a mile, eat breakfast and then do all the Army stuff - march, go to class, do PT. They showed us how to kill rabbits and chickens for the survival training. Then we barbecued and ate them."

  "So how many of you were there?"

  "About 60 in our cycle. They'd start up a new one every week or so."

  "Were the guys pretty religious?"

  "Some of them. When we finally got a pass to leave the fort, the ones who weren't religious went to Laredo and into Mexico where the sex was $5. Most of those got VD. Basic training lasted six weeks. At the end we went on bivouac where they taught us how to avoid booby traps, use a compass and a gas mask. The gas mask was a trip. We put it on, went into a building that had tear gas in the air and then the drill sergeant told us to take it off and say our name, rank and serial number. Some of us started barfing. Then we went to medic training. They had just cut it from 10 weeks to 9 weeks because Nam was almost over."

  "What did you learn?"

  "Everything. How to give shots, take blood, do first aid, start an IV, deliver babies. They showed us movies of how to start a tourniquet, deliver a baby, even how to cut off a leg at a MASH hospital. They gave us tests every week. If we failed one we were recycled back to relearn that week. If anyone failed 3 times, they made them cooks."

  "None of you went to Vietnam?"

  "Not one. About 90 percent of us went to Europe. The rest went do Korea, Hawaii, some VA hospital, or back home to a reserve or National Guard unit."

  "Where did you end up?"

  "Germany. We'd go to Graf, Hoenfels and Wildflicken and train while the Russians did the same just across the border in East Germany."

  "What about the rest of the time?"

  "There was an energy crisis. Gas got so expensive that we didn't train much except when we went to the field. We just sat there in our ambulances in case someone got run over by a tank or crashed into something. There was a lot of dope so there were lots of accidents and fights all the time.""What kind of dope?"

  "Lots of hash. When I first got there you could get 7, maybe 8 grams for $10. Then the dollar fell against the German Mark and you could only get 4 or 5 grams. Good hash, too. Black Pak and ?"

  "Black Pak?"

  "Yeah. Black hash from Pakistan. It had a gold seal stamped on it sometimes. Then there was Afghan Red, Red Lebanese, Trip Green from Morocco?"

  "Trip green?"

  "Yeah. Smoking it was like a real mild, mellow acid trip. But there was a lot of bad dope, too. The crank was only $30 a gram, cocaine was $100 a gram. So most of them did crank."

  "Methamphetamine?"

  "Yeah. The poor man's cocaine. It would suck all the minerals and vitamins out of their bodies. Then they wouldn't eat much. Twenty-year olds were losing their teeth. One guy who got out wrote the top sergeant and said that the doctors at the VA hospital said he had permanent nerve damage from too much crank."

  "Not much heroin?"

  "Seemed like it was getting big just when I left and went home."

  "You know that Gil got addicted to smack in Nam?"

  "Gil? No way."

  "Yeah. He finally got in some program and got straight."

  "I'm glad. Whatever happened to Bob and Larry?" />
  "Bob got part of a leg blown away from a booby trap in Nam. Last I heard he's getting the GI Bill and going to school to be a lawyer."

  "A lawyer?"

  "Yeah. He says he wants to help the vets hurt by agent orange."

  "How about Larry?"

  "Only smart one of the three. He joined a reserve unit and never went to Nam. He's still a session drummer and making big bucks."

  "Big bucks. That's what I need. Then I'd have my pick of the chicks. Remember how you talked about getting a band together with Gil in your letters to me?"

  "Yeah."

  "Now's the time All this disco is driving all the old rockers crazy. A hot rocking band right now could be big."

  "Well, Gil is happy to be a family man and I'm trying to come up with original worship music."

  "Worship music? What the hell is that?"

  "You know. What you have at church."

  "Oh. Haven't been for a while. I did go to a couple of those Jesus freaks' concerts a few years back though."

  "Yeah?"

  "The first one was weird. Some guy that I bagged groceries with at the commissary invited me to it. One of my friends was out in front of the concert hall selling some blue cheer acid. I bought a hit for another friend cause I hadn't started dropping acid yet. During the concert one of the musicians said he had gone to San Francisco and gotten into drugs and come back to turn on all his friends a couple of years earlier. Then he got into Jesus. He said he was back to turn people on to Him. When the guy who took me to the concert took me home he wanted to buy the LSD from me so that he could flush it down the toilet. When I said no he asked me if he could pray for me. Man, that was weird."

  "Did he?"

  "Yeah. Something about God taking over and changing me. The other time I saw a Jesus freak show was when I went to a rock festival down South."

  "Which one? The one in Atlanta or was it the one they had in Arkansas?"

  "It