A 20-Year-Old Medic Describes Army Life: You Can 'Escape' But You Can't Dissent

In bayonet practice, you have to growl with each movement. This is to intimidate the enemy. Every five minutes or so the instructor will shout "What's the spirit of the bayonet?" and everyone shouts "To kill! To kill!"

Since I've been in the army, I've noticed quite a lot of drugs. I'd say between one-quarter and one-eighth of the people at my army base used drugs of some kind...In Vietnam the stuff grows wild and free.

Sergeant Swith was born twenty years ago in Eugene, Oregon. Throughout high school, he was an erratic student, played lead in several plays and helped write a new student body constitution. He earned a National Merit letter of commendation in his senior year and scored 1300 on the college board. Last year at the University of Oregon, he ran for freshman class vice-president during first term, lost by 20 votes, compiled a 1.2 grade-point average out of 4.0 and went on academic probation. Second term he flunked out.

His father is a building superintendent for a home town bank, and neither he nor Sergeant Smith's mother graduated from college. He is sending back one-half of his base pay to allow his mother to finish back courses for her degree.

He was drafted in September and, after completing Basic Training, entered army meric school in Texas. Presently, he is spending his furlough in Cambridge before entering Officers Candidate School. He scored 97 out of 100 on the National Draft Test.

(As told to Jeffrey C. Alexander)

After the reception station, where you report for induction, you go to your basic training company and they split you up there into platoons and they give you a DI, a drill instructor. He wears one of those little Smoky the Bear hats, like a forest ranger, you know, but you don't call them Smoky the Bear hats because they would get irked about this.

You get your first taste of army organization right away when you meet an executive officer, a commissioned officer and a training officer and you learn how to salute them. You spend three of the eight weeks on shooting a rifle, the M14. I'd never shot a weapon before--that's what you have to call it, not a gun--but they say the M14 is supposed to be pretty good.

They run you through courses--infiltration, obstacle courses--and they give you live ammunition to shoot. These courses have little pop-up targets on them, some of them have little Chinese faces which say "Joe Chink" at the bottom with little slant eyes and things. At first most of the guys are amused. It's funny to see a little target like that popping up in front of you and then you're shooting at it. It's funny, you know, but then at night when you think about it, maybe it's not so funny.

They run you through these courses with their little pop-up targets and you shoot them or you stab them with your bayonet until it becomes sort of a reaction, like Pavlov's dogs. I guess that's the point....

We had a lot of practice on the bayonet. They take you about 500 men at a time, actually between 300 and 500 depending on who has bayonet practice that day. They line you up in rows of 100 and you have all your field gear on--your packs and weapons--and the bayonet with the six inch steel head. In front of you on this platform is one of the drill instructors and he's got a megaphone and he shouts you through the various moves. You know like "On guard, ahh" and all this kind of stuff. You have to growl with each movement you make. This is to intimidate the enemy and every five minutes or so he'll say, "What's the spirit of the bayonet?" and everyone shouts, "To kill, to kill." And they're serious....

They give you about 12 hours of hand-to-hand combat which is a cross between Judo and Karate and boxing and, once again, you growl with each movement. They tell you it's very important that you growl. In the first place, it reduces you to an animal. I mean that's what you feel like, Tarzan the savage beast of the jungle facing unarmed a thousand foes. I don't know how much hand-to-hand combat I learned, but I developed a damn intimidating growl....

Army propaganda is funny because it hits at a very high level and also, at the same time, a very low level. It has a double meaning. But it's not so subtle--you can see it and ignore it. The best propaganda movie I saw was in my medic course. A guy gets up there on the screen and he says "Would you like to know what Communists call you in different countries? In London they call you bubble gum chewers. In France they call you gangsters. In Korea they call you murderers!" And he makes this a very personal thing. He points out at you from the screen and says "This is what they feel about you! How do you like being called a bubble gum chewer? You don't like it? How do you like being called gangster? How do you like being called a murderer?"...

Nobody ever talks about things like this, whether they're good or bad. Like they'll joke about going to Vietnam, "Well, you're going for sure" or "Any more demerits and your boots not shined and you'll be there for sure." But that's the only kind of thing you'll hear. They don't joke about whether or not we belong there. And there's a good reason.

When I was in basic training, I was talking to the basic training officer for my company, a young second lieutenant, and I was asking him what he thought about the war in Vietnam and he gave me this patriotic stuff that it's safe to put out. He asked me how I felt and I said I wasn't sure; I told him that if we were in there to gain something then we were wrong and we should get out. And that's all I said.

Because of that, I was called up to see the commanding officer, I had about seven security clearance checks--they check back into your life and make you answer all these questions about did you ever associate with a whole list of groups, all of which are associated with the Communist party, and they ask have you ever been a Communist or even known one, and I haven't--and for a long time they took away my application for officers' candidate school. They made me read all of those pro-Vietnam books telling about the atrocities the Viet Cong are committing on Americans. I remember especially a gory book written by a colonel in the army, called Why Vietnam....

We get many technical lectures during training, most on the sixth grade level. Although during medic training most were conducted on the eighth grade level. I learned that helicopters are really an amazing innovation: it's a brand new kind of war over there. They keep pounding it into your head that in Vietnam there is no front. You can just as likely be killed by a sniper when you step off the plane as you can out in the woods outside the city or in the Delta region. One of the friends I graduated with from high school was a medic and four days after he went into Vietnam he was missing in action. I've known as much as three hours after a guy stepped off the plane he was killed by a sniper....

On the technique of being a soldier in Vietnam, one of the movies that's probably the neatest is the one on counter-insurgency. I saw it three times, twice, in basic and once in medic. This Communist dude with his little flying cap, he's the Communist guerrilla and he's in the jungle with his executive officer who looks an awful lot like Fidel Castro. They have this salute where they close their fist and shoot out their arm. It reminds you a little of Nazi Germany, just enough so you know the tie-in is there.... :

This guerrilla goes around and you see him intimidating and he always gives the same big speech. He says "give me your sons to help fight your battles" and one of his assistants always sneaks behind a little peasant back in the crowd and forces him to raise his hand so they can take his son away. In the end everyone is killed, the Americans win, and they tell you how the Americans have counter-insurgency schools in all the military units. In the Marine Corps they have a sniper school. Oh yes, the scar-faced leader escapes like a coward and then they finish by telling you: "Counter-insurgency will pop up again somewhere until all insurgency has been wiped out to the last man and only then will we be safe from the Communist menace....

There are three things you do in the army for entertainment: you go get drunk--about half the people use this method--or you find a woman--this is big too--and then there's drugs. Since I've been in the army, I've no iced quite a lot of it. I'd say between one-quarter and one-eighth of the people at my army base used drugs of some kind, even if it's just pain-killing pills they get from the dentist and, you know, sort of get the prescription refilled again. They take like five at a time of Darvon Compound 65, which is a pain-killer and also a kind of groovy trip. It's easy to get for everyone. Just get one tooth pulled or filled....

Where I train in Texas there's a lot of smoking of grass because it's close to the border and so easy to get. The Airborne paratroopers, especially the ones who have been to Vietnam and are coming back for their medic training, are all potheads because in Vietnam the stuff grows wild and free and you can sit around your camp fire in the Mekong Delta and they say you can just reach out and put up a handful of hemp leaves and throw them on the fire. They also tell me there's a terrific black market on narcotics for the troops in Vietnam.

Once when I was doing my rounds on the base, I walked into an Air-borne barracks because all the shades were pulled down in the afternoon and there everyone was lying on their bunks sniffing the groovy air. There's an old saying that only two things come out of the air: birdshit and Air-borne--and personally, that's the way I feel about it....

The soldiers will get letters in the mail and you'll see them opening the letters and it's completely blank paper inside, which was soaked in LSD. They'll tear off the corner and chew on it. You see a soldier and he'll be soaking the sleeve of his fatigues and then you'll see him chew on it later during drills. He soaked it in an LSD solution.

In the gas mask the army supplies you with, they have a little metal box of amyl nitrate. It's to be used if you've been exposed to syanide or another blood gas. It comes in little ampules and your supposed to break these ampules and then put them in the eye pieces of your gas mask. It smells something like banana oil and it's about a 15 to 20 minute mind-expander. I don't know how much gas warfare there is in Vietnam--they don't tell you--but they make damn sure you know how to use your gas mask so I assume there's some. They say you can't be exposed to nerve gas for more than nine seconds and live.

So they teach you how to mask in nine seconds. Like if you were to holler "Gas" right now I would automatically reach for my mask and would have a little moment of fear when it wasn't there. It's another one of those reactions I was talking about. So I don't know how much gas there really is, but I do know that not many guys can mask in only nine seconds. Most have sort of this fate attitude, at least I do. If I'm going to go, I'd rather go happy, sniffing on my amyl nitrate....

Every once in a while they'll have shakedown inspections at the bases. They'll go through every inch of the barracks. But the old generation does not really know how much of it there is and they don't know what to look for or where to look. So it's pretty easy to get away with. In fact, it's damn easy. When I was a sergeant in Texas, I had a room to myself and we used to have pot parties in my room in the barracks right in the middle of the army base. We'd close the windows and sit around and blow a few joints. If anybody walked in, they probably wouldn't know what it was.

If they catch you, it's six months in Leavonworth, simple as that. And six months of Leavenworth is nothing to laugh at because it doesn't count on your army time....

There's not much discrimination in the army. For all you know your life may depend on someone and you just don't go around making enemies because it's possible some day he might have the choice between saving your life and not saving your life. In fact, a lot of medics who aren't good end up getting killed by their own men. After all, they're conscientious objectors....

There's only one story I have heard about our treatment of the captured. About six Viet Cong were captured in the Mekong Delta region and they were questioned by intelligence officers and they wouldn't talk. So they took them up in a helicopter--all six of them--and then opened the door and asked them again. They still wouldn't answer. Then they pushed them out, one by one. They'd push one out and then ask the next "will you answer?" and they go a little higher or lower and they still won't answer so they pushed another one out until all six were gone....

I don't know whether I would kill if I were in Vietnam in a battle. I would like to say I wouldn't, but I suppose, in reality, that's what makes people afraid of being drafted--not knowing whether or not they'll kill someone. I can truthfully say I don't know. I don't really particularly like to think about it....

I was unmotivated before I went into college. I was unmotivated in my junior year in high school, for that matter. As far as worrying about the draft, it was always the furthest thing from my mind. It happened, you know, to other people. When finally I realized it for the first time I was on the airplane for basic training. If I'd known--if I had any inkling--what it would be like I would have forced myself to stay in school somehow. Not really because I'm scared of getting killed, but I just don't like the army....

A lot of people just can't adapt, it's so entirely different. I've seen people who get an order and then just sit down and cry. They have what's called a Mental Hygiene Clinic. They have psychiatrists there who decide whether or not you're bad enough to get out of the army. Actually, first they try to decide where they can put you to get maximum use out of you and then when they find this