Bullies, military acquaintances

1969 Missoula

When I was eight years old a big kid chased me toward the corner of the school playground. Cornered, I ran at him as hard as I could. I threw myself at his legs, knocked him down, then ran to safety.

During the Vietnam war, our government was drafting young men to go to war. We had been told, in 1967, in a high school assembly by a recruiter, that every man owed the United States six years of military service. Generally, that would mean two in active duty, four in reserves.

Vietnam was killing thousands, according to the horrifying images on TV news. At the University of Montana in Missoula, I made friends with those who preferred smoking marijuana and taking a variety of hallucinogenic substances to being drafted. I pretty much lost interest in my student deferment. I thought it unjust that us white middle-class kids with the means to go to college should avoid danger, even though I didn’t want—was afraid—to go into the army.

I ended up doing something like I did when I was eight when I ran toward the pursuing bully. In 1969, I enlisted in the Marines. Because I was afraid.

Always in my mind was the thought of my uncle, Carl R. Bonde, Jr., Private First Class, 66th Army Division, who had been sent to specialized training to the University of North Dakota under the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). Uncle Carl was killed on Christmas Eve, 1944. Uncle Carl had been drafted. I didn’t want to be drafted. He had been enticed with high-tech training in a program that was abruptly discontinued.  He and thousands of others in the ASTP ended up in the infantry as army privates.

I enlisted in Missoula November 23, 1969,  on Penny’s twentieth birthday, a sad occasion, because we agreed to break up then.

 I said “goodbye forever.” I was off to Vietnam, of course. Everyone knew that’s what happened if you joined the Marines in those days. Didn’t they? I had my faith. I had been reading a bunch of Eastern religion stuff: Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism. All of them extolled mortifying the flesh and entering reality. The Vietnam war was my reality, naive as I was about the particulars. I knew I was a hippie, but I also knew I couldn’t stick my head in the sand or be a coward. Real hippies were brave and true. Or so I thought. I was also under the influence of Don Quixote.

I’m re-reading Don Quixote as I write this. In 1969 I read the Putnam translation, but now I’m reading the Ormsby translation. Mr. Ormsby used Putnam in his scholarly re-writing in English. Nonetheless, it was written by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Under the influence of Sr. Cervantes Saavedra, even joining the Marine Corps during Vietnam makes perfect sense.

My friends shouted at me to not go!  Many of them joined anti-war demonstrations.

Whereas people on the street had enjoined me to “get a haircut!”, my hip friends urged me to remain a “happy hippie.” However, life has its serious aspects. I knew I had to face front. I had to face the reality that seemed most real to me.

One Monday morning, I strode into the Marine Corps recruiter’s office on West Broadway in Missoula. “I want to join the Marines.”

A gunnery sergeant looked up from his desk with mild interest. “What are you running from?”

“Nothing.”

“Ever been arrested?”

“Drunk and disorderly in Dillon in 1967,” I replied (omitting the part about indecent exposure). (I pissed on the window of Skeet’s Cafe after a racist cook threw me out because I threw a rag at him.)

“Come back tomorrow,” said the sergeant.

The gunnery sergeant smiled and welcomed me when I returned. He had me take a test and answer a bunch of questions. What I remember about the test:

I had to identify parts of a car motor, including the ignition coil. Since I didn’t know the parts of a motor then, I don’t know if I got that one right.

Lots of other questions. I’m pretty good at taking tests, so I believe I answered most of them correctly. 

I had to answer if I’d been a member of a list of organizations, none of which I’d ever heard of. I think the gist was “young communist league,” and “communist party of America.” I’m making these up, but that’s the impression I got. I wasn’t able to say I was a member of any of them. 

I had to list all of my addresses. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the basis of my gaining a secret security clearance through something called an ENT NAC (This is a National Agency Check (NAC) on enlistees. I listed all my addresses. I was too naive to know if any of them were incriminating. Anyway, my address tended to change every week in those days. Depended upon the whim and generosity of friends like Bill Reynolds and Peter Koch and my brother Tom.

My friends who saw me off at the bus station in Missoula remembered that I flashed them the peace sign. Then the finger. Then the peace sign. Shows how mixed up I was. Brave/sad/hopeless/scared.

Platoon 3213, Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego 

My Marine Corps experience was exhausting, at times beautiful. I disliked the drill instructor because he was sadistic, but he could sing when he called cadence.  I did enjoy the company of the other recruits, however. At least most of them. Not that we had much time to socialize.

We entered the Marine Corps in November 1969 during Vietnam. Some of us ended up getting the 0310 military occupational specialty (MOS), infantry rifleman. Others, like me, got an MOS for aviation technology. That’s another story. Every Marine was a basic rifleman, we were told.

I didn’t know anything about the Marine Corps when we filed through AFEES (Armed Forces Examination and Entrance Station) Butte for our physicals and tests. We got on a school bus in downtown Butte and they took us to the airport for a direct flight to San Diego. The pilot announced our presence. He said we would be flying over Camp Pendleton where we could look down to see night operations under flares that lit up the mock battlefield like day. Before we went home on leave months later, we had our turn with the night flares. I thought I’d freeze that February.

Minutes after we arrived at basic training, we stood on the yellow footprints and were made to read yellow words on a red billboard about the UCMJ: the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the law under which we had to live. Then we filed into a room with individually numbered tables, and were made to strip and pack up all our civilian clothes to send home by mail. We each received a service number. Haircuts. Showers and shaving. I nicked myself. Shaving cream in a tube. Barber missed one long hair near my ear during my half minute haircut. We got some dark green clothing and sneakers and a big green nylon sea bag to carry everything. If we accidentally touched any furniture while we filed through the supply depot, someone would curse at us. I got called a “hippie,” but I don’t know how they knew.

Eventually we ended up with our seabag of military stuff in the room with the numbered tables. My number was 43. Or perhaps 47. I was starting to go schizophrenic and decided the number was important and indicative of my place in eternal madness. 

I also decided (1) I didn’t like the Marine Corps, and (2) I would do my best work. A voice commanded us all to “sit at attention with our hands on our knees and our butts on the floor.”  I obeyed as carefully as I could.

We sat for a long time. Hours. Some of the others eventually quit sitting at attention and stretched out their legs or lay down on their sides. After another couple of hours just about everyone but me was kicking back. 

I decided that, as much as it sucked, I would stay at attention, hands on knees. Perhaps I would be the last of my family members ever to endure this (by then) painful position. I felt I was in an alien place and I didn’t want to get used to it.

Months later, I spoke with a fellow recruit later whose way of coping was to adopt a “soft look.” He explained he would make a wrinkle or some other purposeful imperfection in his uniform in order to thumb his nose at the Marine Corps. I sort of liked his idea, but by the time I learned of it, I was finished with training. 

Without warning, while sitting on the floor, we heard the loud voice of one of our drill instructors, Staff Sergeant Feyerchak. He hollered and swore at us because we got him up in the middle of the night to babysit us. I thought it ironic that he blamed us. Perhaps he was trying to be funny? No. He acted like he despised us. And, moreover, turns out he was the nice one. 

Took me weeks and weeks to realize that the drill instructor didn’t hate us, although he acted like he did.  He acted cold hearted, but good at teaching us how to march, make up our beds, and clean things up. 

Our first senior drill instructor, whose name I can’t remember, except he was a gunnery sergeant, disappeared for no apparent reason, replaced by SSgt Feyerchak, who became a couple degrees warmer once promoted. He’s the one who told us he wanted things done “neat.”

We started calling him “the grand old man of the corps” when he wasn’t listening. Most evenings, if he was on duty, he’d give us a “daddy talk.” He allowed us to ask him questions and he’d swear at us and throw things. Like our mail. Or packages, if one of us got one. I think those evenings were called “commander’s time.”

Of course I was a lousy soldier. Although I tried to develop enthusiasm for killing people and I professed wanting to go to Vietnam, I was afraid. I figured my salvation would always be asking to be sent to the infantry to Vietnam, like Brer Rabbit and the briar patch..

A dilemma I had in 1969 in boot camp: Each of us was issued a “cover block,” consisting of a 24” by 6” piece of 1/8” plastic with a screw and wing nut to fasten it into a hat-size cylinder. This device came flat, so we had to bend it into shape to hold our hats so we could brush on much starch. A starched cover looked much sharper than the flaccid cotton we started with.

My cover block had a screw without threads. No. The wing nut had no interior threads, but the screw was fine. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t block my cover to starch it. I needed a replacement wing nut-screw assembly.

That evening, I walked to the hut where our instructors had their office.

I reported correctly to my senior drill instructor in his office. “Sir, the private requests permission to speak, sir!

“Go ahead.”

“Sir, the private’s wing nut ain’t got no threads, sir.” (I thought I was being funny!)

I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination for what happened next. I mean, I knew it would provoke derision from the instructors. I wasn’t worried, and I can honestly say it wasn’t terribly painful, but I got no satisfaction, hardware product-wise. 

In the end, I think I rigged up a clothes pin to starch my cover.

Those are not my fondest memories.

Eventually, our platoon graduated from boot camp. My brother Tom, Penny, and Dana hitched rides from Montana to San Diego for the graduation ceremony.

After graduation, we newly minted Marines went to train at Camp Pendleton Infantry Training Regiment for weeks of practice with explosives and various weapons. We learned about booby traps and guerilla jungle warfare. Then we all went home for thirty days of annual leave before we were to report to our next duty station.

My next duty station was aviation electronics training at a Naval Air Station near Memphis, Tennessee.

Thirty Days Leave in Montana

I hung out in Dillon for a few days before returning to Missoula where I went to Peter Koch’s house. Soon I was hanging out with Tom and with Penny again. I sold my Gibson electric guitar for $200 so I could afford a ticket to Memphis, Tennessee.

The Vietnam war years (1955-75) had two important aspects as I recall. On the one hand: unspeakable stupidity, pain, death, and cruelty amid guns, helicopters, rice paddies, red gritty dirt, and jungles in Southeast Asia. And, on the other:  glorious psychedelic drugs; striped bell-bottom pants; and bearded, long-haired drug- and sex-crazed hippies stateside. I forgot to mention the arts. Rock groups. Big amplifiers, electric guitars, bands in every town. Also underground comics, newspapers, vinyl records, and head shops. Did I mention civil rights? Black Panthers, women’s liberation. Heroes, martyrs.

Freaking out in Millington, Tennessee

The $200 I got for my Gibson hollowbody paid my airfare to Memphis, where I got a shuttle to the training station in Millington.  Once I was assigned a training squadron my impression was that we had no leaders.  The sergeant in charge of us was asleep in the middle of the afternoon.  

I rejected the idea of learning about aviation electronics.  The idea of bombing people made me ill.  My aim was survival.

Therefore, choosing a path different from my uncle’s, I was uncooperative with going to classes and soon went AWOL for a week in Memphis, spending days riding city buses and enduring mosquito-infested nights sleeping in a park restroom. I remember feeling comforted by the foliage and hedges that seemed to thrive without anyone helping them.  Finally, confused, exhausted, I returned to the base.

I turned myself in to the officer of the day.  I was arrested and, the next day, sent to the Commanding Officer for non-judicial punishment. 

I knew I could refuse non-judicial punishment, so I requested a court martial.  I wanted to ensure that I would have an opportunity to explain myself and to get kicked out of school.  Nonetheless, I was told I had to see the Commanding Officer.

Nattily dressed in my best uniform, I entered the training squadron headquarters.  The first sergeant had me wait outside the Commander’s office.

After an interminable wait in the hall at parade rest, at last I was told to report to my Commander.  

He greeted me with “What’s so funny, goofy?”  I appeared to him to be smiling with my face, he later said.

I said, “Sir, Private Struckman reporting as ordered, sir.”

He said nothing for what seemed like five or ten minutes.  I stood at attention.  I wanted to tell him why I wanted a court martial instead of non-judicial punishment.  At last, I asked for permission to speak.

“You can speak when I tell you,” he said gruffly.

Major Waddell had my school record in hand. He probably saw that I was non-compliant with my training, refusing to take notes, purposely failing exams, and going AWOL.

He accused me of not being a man.  He said I had a yellow streak.  He said the Marine Corps had done about all it could for me.  His profane mouth mentioned my mother, but I don’t remember what he said. Nobody gets away with talking about my mother.

Finally, he asked me what I wanted from the Marine Corps.  I remained at attention.

“I’d like to see the Marine Corps flat on its back with its heels in the air, sir,” I replied. I felt angry and worn out from not getting much sleep in the Memphis park for seven nights in a row.  I didn’t like being called a coward, even if it was true that I was fearful.  Not the least of it, he mentioned my mother.

The major got up from his chair, walked around his desk, got about a foot away from me at my side, and said, “I represent that Marine Corps!  Let’s see you put me on my back!”

I was afraid.  At first I told myself I was a coward, I wanted to back down.

I suppose these thoughts took mere seconds.  His words echoed in my head.

Did he just ask me to hit him?  His exact words were, “Let’s see you put me on my back?” 

Yes.  The message was clear.  He asked me to hit him! 

I had a mental image of my fellow Marines, many of them black, standing out in formation. Wouldn’t any of them jump at such an opportunity? Of course they would. Clearly, I had no choice.  I had to do something I was afraid to do.

So I turned toward him.  I made a fist, and hit him in the jaw, although my arms felt heavy from many minutes of standing at attention.

I confess I felt sorry for the major.  I think I surprised him.

I was in a heap of trouble.  The first sergeant, of whom I was previously unaware, had been standing behind me.  At the major’s order, he pushed me toward a wall and called the military police (MP) to come arrest me.  I stood up against the air conditioner, listening to the hum, waiting.

An MP escorted me, handcuffed, through the squadron administration section to the exit.  I started to say something and someone in the office yelled at me to shut up!   I wondered if it would be appropriate to snarl.  The MP walked me about a block to the brig, where a sailor put me into a holding cell.

Perhaps two months later,  after several visits with a Navy lawyer, I got a summary court martial before a Navy Captain. After a day-long trial, he found me guilty of assault of a superior commissioned officer and sentenced me to four months confinement at hard labor, four months of forfeiture of $75 a month, and a BCD (Bad Conduct Discharge). I fully expected to celebrate Christmas in the brig before becoming a civilian.  I was told an appeal of the verdict would be automatic.

Life in the Navy brig

We all had nicknames in the brig in Memphis. Mine was “Buzzard,” given to me by a guy in a nearby cell who seemed to hate me. I guess the most surprising thing in the hard cell were the peace signs scratched into the stainless steel walls. I guess I never did know what the anonymous folks did the scratching with. They had no coins, no keys. Perhaps they used the eraser end of a pencil, the metal band holding the rubber. 

Sure, the usual curse words also graced the walls, also messages boasting about how long they endured being locked up. Also, the home towns. I can’t remember many specifics, except one guy was from Tupelo, Mississippi. I played checkers with him. I beat him, so I joyfully leaped up and down on the metal bed frame and a guard thought I was killing my cellmate. That was after I slowly thawed.

I was surprised, at first, by the peace signs because I believed that the marines and sailors were largely killers. Even the ones in the brig, I thought. Oh, intellectually I knew I would encounter other anti-military people more like me, and I was really staking my life on that being true. One guy—a marine I met in the brig—was from North Dakota and he had an entire community giving him emotional support for his being noncooperative with the war in Vietnam. I know because he showed me a letter from his hometown. I envied him. 

I was against the war, but not for any noble reason. I joined the Marines because I was “running toward the bully,” afraid for my life, and I didn’t feel like I even had much of a home in Montana anymore because I joined the service in opposition to my hippie, anti-war friends. 

At first my lawyer suggested that my motive for going AWOL was for honest, political, moral reasons like the guy from North Dakota had, but it wasn’t.  

My thing was that I didn’t want to follow in my Uncle Bud’s footsteps and get killed.  As far as hitting the Major, well, he asked me to do it.  I was merely doing what I thought anyone else would have done in those circumstances.  I was depressed, I felt disgraced. And stupid.

In the brig I was the “buzzard,” and I hated my nickname. It embarrassed me. Therefore, that first night of confinement, I turned my face to the wall and wished Skutch would shut up. That wasn’t really his name, but that was sort of like it. I just can’t remember. 

He was damned bright, Skutch, and boasted about his gift for talking. That made him sort of scary, because I felt I had terrible secrets. I hallucinated mean voices. It was hard to know if Skutch was mean or friendly. He was certainly persistent. I believe he spent most of my first night in the brig regaling me with insults and mocking me because I was silent. I felt confused, profoundly alone, sad unto death. I didn’t know why Skutch wouldn’t just leave me alone. I didn’t know why he repeatedly called me “Buzz, Buzz Buzz. Buzzard, the Bizzzzzerk Buzzard.” I eventually met him. He was a rather tall, pudgy, bland-looking 19-year-old with a charismatic, animated, talkative manner. My trouble was that I didn’t have anything to say. That was monstrous for me. I was very tall and skinny, very quiet, and very stupid.

I wanted to just close my eyes and sleep. I was in the cell farthest from the end of the hall. The fourth one. I wasn’t sure if Skutch was in the third one, but I thought he was. The voices that tormented me sounded through the bars at the front of our cages and down the thirty-foot hall in front of them. Most of the cells had windows that could open across the hallway, but not mine, because it was the last one at the end of the hall. Summer in Memphis smelled good, like mowed lawn and clean sheets. The grassy yard surrounded our wooden, converted WWII barracks on three sides. A chain link fence with concertina wire further reminded us how unwelcome we were anywhere else. A double gate down a short sidewalk led to the front entrance. You get the idea. The building was white two-story with heavy screens bolted to all the windows. 

Toward the left rear of the building first floor was the receiving area and an elaborate gray panel with levers and a hand crank with the mechanics for opening the four cell doors in the hard cell area. That’s where I was at first. We slept on the smooth concrete floor every night but one. While I was there, I wrote a letter complaining about conditions, so an inspector visited us. Just prior to the visit, for one night, we all got mattresses that were too wide for our narrow steel bunks, so we put them on the floor.  We also all got an additional wool blanket. We never got pillows. Instead we used the Bibles or the rolls of toilet paper for our heads. The guards always removed the heavy paper cylinder from the toilet paper, but I never found out why.  They also took our boots and belts.

Skutch never again played much of a role for me after the first couple of days. I desperately wanted to be able to thaw out and speak, but like I said, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I had voices in my head in addition to those I heard from Skutch and whoever else was there that first night. Someone else always chimed in with “There it is!” when Skutch said I was a “Buzzard.” I thought I heard other voices too, but I never did know about them.

The longer I was unable to speak, the worse my situation was, I thought. I felt myself disintegrating into smaller and smaller life forms. I started as a human, then to smaller and smaller animals. A cat, a mouse, a cockroach, an ant, then smaller and smaller plants. I fell asleep after being certain that I had split into an infinite number of barley plants. A year before I joined the service, I had moved irrigation pipes in high school and college in barley fields. Even my brother helped me one summer. Another summer a girlfriend helped me for a while until I started smoking lots of cannabis. Then I got too lazy for work and quit.

Because of the seriousness of the offense I was charged with, the command required that I be evaluated for mental health. I took a multi-page multiple-question examination. It was difficult because my short-term memory was terrible and the questions were ambiguous. The questions repeated every few pages, just worded differently, and I couldn’t remember how I had answered before, so I had to guess. I wanted to be insane, sort of. Or I didn’t want to be insane, because being so was terrifying!

In Memphis, in the brig, I no longer wanted to be insane. Therefore, I was glad to visit a clinical psychologist soon after I had taken the written test. He looked bored as he wrote in a notebook. He asked me a probing open-ended question. I told him about the voices in my head. I told him about feeling fragmented into smaller and smaller creatures, even barley plants. He was scribbling on his notepad, so I slowed so that he could keep up.

“So you just want to get out of the Marines?” he said. Wow, he really knew how to get to the point. I knew I was confused and miserable.  I couldn’t relate to people in a friendly way.

“I want to be able to talk to people again,” I answered truthfully. 

By that time I really didn’t care where I was. I didn’t even care if I went back to Montana because I no longer had a sweetheart. I didn’t care if I stayed in the brig forever. Even the thought of staying in the Marines didn’t seem so bad.  I sort of blamed the Marines for the fix I was in, and I thought they could jolly well keep me until I was in better health.

“You are a schizophrenic 240,”  the psychologist said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s just a diagnostic code,” he said. But I didn’t believe him.

Strangely, I felt much, much better after telling the bored psychologist my most heartfelt thoughts and fears.  And I started to thaw.  Back in the brig, I tried speaking to the other prisoners briefly.  I told this one and that one about the I Ching.  It was the best I could do. I didn’t insult their intelligence.  I told them it was ancient common sense–wisdom–in a book, not a religious text, like the Bible.

Within a week or so, I was assigned to go with a group to work unloading trucks at the commissary.  Hard, sweaty, physical work with a bunch of good people.

About then, someone gave me the nickname, “Stork.”  I liked it.

Stork Man

In the main part of the brig, upstairs, each of us had a small locker along the sidewall of the great room that was our collective home. The room was about forty feet by 150 feet long, with many windows covered with steel mesh. The front half of the room had our bunks, the back half had picnic tables, toilets, showers, and the cage. During the summer, when our prisoner count was low, the beds were simply lined up side by side with no spaces between. You got in bed by climbing over the foot or the head of the bed. They were standard steel gray Navy bunks with sheets but no blankets. Millington, Tennessee, was damned hot in the summer. In the winter when the prisoner count was higher we made them into bunk beds by fastening one atop the other.

In the summer there was a fan, but it was in the cage with the chaser. Guards were called chasers.

The cage. Near the back end of the great room along one wall was the cage with a locked door. The cage always had a guard inside at a desk.  The cage surrounded the one stairway.  The cage had a firehose.  I heard a rumor of a riot when the prisoners got a hold of the firehose.  I didn’t like the idea of riots.

The cage was nearer to the showers and toilets. No privacy in the big room. Toilets were in a line at the center of the room near the picnic tables. The showers were on the wall and had no enclosures. Just a large concrete area on the floor caught the shower water and allowed it to drain.

The stairway in the cage was the one exit, leading down to the brig offices for the warden and the dining room. The minimum security prisoners, about a dozen in all, lived and worked the laundry at the far back end of the building downstairs. The chow for our meals came in carts three times a day and the dirty trays and empty food containers were taken out on the same carts. The dining area had a television up near the ceiling in one corner. Each evening those of us with recreation privileges got to play cards in the dining area after supper.

If the place ever caught fire I don’t know how we would have gotten out.

I nearly forgot to mention four maximum security “hard cells” were also on the first floor.

The Navy supplied us with towels and took away our dirty laundry every day. We marked our own clothes with permanent markers and when they came back from the laundry on the first floor, everything was jumbled together in one big cloth basket. We picked our own things out. For a while there were some disputes and the chasers handed out the laundry the way they handed out the mail, one piece at a time when they called our names.

Our mail was censored. I said the word “fuck” in a letter to one of my friends and I got it back unsent. I was allowed to write to my mother and one girlfriend only. I actually wrote to more than one girlfriend, but the jailers didn’t seem to notice. I had several friends who were girls. We got note paper and pencils for writing letters and we were allowed to write a letter each day. They opened and inspected our incoming mail before we got it.

My introduction to the brig some five months earlier had been being escorted to the “hard cell.” That was the place where prisoners torment each other by taunting and hollering. Prisoners who have discipline problems in the hard cell can be put on diminished rations: no dairy, no meat. Just water, starches, and vegetables. Oh yes, I almost forgot. No smoking if you are on diminished rations.

I was on diminished rations for Mother’s Day and the chaser brought me a giant serving of turkey dressing. Best meal I ever ate.

At first I didn’t know what to do with myself in medium security. Seemed like the prisoners had already formed themselves into groups with no room for me. I solved that problem and got to know the other prisoners by meeting and greeting the new ones, the vulnerable newbies. I was always welcome to speak with them, and I learned how to help them get adjusted to the brig. Often they were scared. I made it a point to find out about them without asking them why they were in the brig in the first place. I didn’t tell them that I was in for assaulting my commanding officer. Most of the inmates were prisoners because they had left the service to avoid going to Vietnam. In fact, almost all of them were in for that reason. After several months I learned just about everyone’s names and their stories.

I got a copy of the I Ching because my hippie friends in Missoula mailed it to me, disguised. It had a book cover from Sam Jones’ Latest Sermons. I shared the wisdom of this miraculous and ancient work with anyone who would listen. I found most of the men receptive to the idea that the universe is organized around the creative (sky) and the receptive (earth). I showed them how to ask the book a question, then throw coins for the answer. Only we had no coins. I used three buttons from one of my shirts.

Getting to know the black and indigenous inmates was more difficult, but again, some were open to a white guy like me getting to know them. I didn’t press too hard on anyone. I liked to sort of skip around from person to person. After a while we were singing made-up songs and playing games. By the time I was released from the brig, I was enjoying myself. I made lots of pretty good friends.  I wrote to some of them after I got out, but I received no replies.

I was so successful at being in medium security that I was promoted to minimum, but I didn’t stay long because I didn’t like being away from my friends upstairs. 

The guys in minimum security got to drink coffee and did the laundry.  Also, they worked at the base commissary in the butcher shop.  Butchers talk. All. The. Time.  All that meat made me feel a bit ill, so I told the warden I wanted to be back in medium security.

I found out later that my older sister Carol may have gotten me sprung from the Navy brig a month early.  Carol once babysat in Missoula for a law student who would later become a Navy JAG lawyer.

Or it may have been the letter I wrote to the Commanding Officer asking to be released from confinement and to get orders back to regular duty.  I promised I’d behave myself.

One morning, one of the Navy chasers spoke over the intercom, “Struckman, report to the quarterdeck with your personal effects.” The quarterdeck was a sort of anteroom at the entrance of the brig. Everyone had to enter and depart through the quarterdeck.

When I was called to the quarterdeck that last day, I emptied my locker. All I had was a pack of cigarettes, my I Ching, shaving stuff, soap, a couple pairs of pants and shirts, socks and underwear. 

I was surprised that a Marine captain escorted me from the brig to a storage facility to get my sea bag of uniforms.  He made sure I would be in a freshly laundered dress uniform when I departed the base, shoes and brass polished appropriately.  

Then he escorted me to squadron headquarters, the same building where I hit Major Waddell five months earlier.  That’s where I got orders to Southern California.  I was surprised to learn that Major Waddell had been relieved of command.

After receiving my orders, the captain ushered me out of the administration section. Someone started clapping and others joined him.  I felt happy, even if I was a convict.

That day I remember thinking that Memphis, Tennessee, wasn’t so bad after all.

1970 MCAS(H) Santa Ana, California 

The cosmos, the stars were beginning to align again after I was transferred to a helicopter squadron on a small base near Los Angeles. This was MCAS(H) Santa Ana, California.  Marine Corps Air Station (Helicopter). I didn’t know how fortunate I was. 

I was assigned to a helicopter squadron supply section. Two immense blimp hangars housed all of the helicopter squadrons on the base. The doors at each end of the Quonset hut-shaped building were six-stories high. Someone told me a jet flew in one end and out the other at an airshow. Or not, I thought.

To my surprise, the others treated me with kindness. Sergeant Bobby Haines didn’t make me stand duty. Said I had been through enough already. This, from a guy back from Vietnam. SSgt Crossland advised me to tell anybody who asked that I had been in “legal trouble” in Memphis.

The officer in charge of our section, Warrant Officer John “Gunner” Robertson, told me he didn’t care what trouble I had been in; I could start fresh. He fixed me up with a tiny office under the stairs in the aircraft hanger, under the stairs leading up to the administration offices. The tiny room formerly held the armory, but now it held Marine Corps property: field jackets, canteens, bayonets, haversacks, stuff like that. My job was to take care of these things and check them out to the guys in our squadron who wanted them. I kept a card file the way a library would.

I got a guitar from somewhere and played blues in my tiny room. The commanding officer heard me and admired my playing. Said I had an educated little finger. 

I inventoried and kept track of a list of equipment. Almost nobody hassled me, but no one ignored me either. Soon, I had a variety of friends throughout the squadron. My friends called me Stork. Even Gunner Robertson called me Stork.

One stocky aircraft mechanic got in my face once, while I was in the base exchange looking to buy shaving supplies, but I faced him down then and there. He didn’t bother me again.

Here’s my story: I was starting my second year as a Private E-1, having never gotten promoted because of my altercation with the Marine major. Just because you get your sentence shortened for assaulting one of them, doesn’t mean you’ll get a promotion any time soon. 

Hydraulics technician Corporal Ed Bonk advised me to get promoted. “You’ll never make any money, Stork,” he said. He also advised me to quit smoking if I wanted to live to see my grandkids.

On base, I lived in a big concrete barracks with the rest of Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 161. Many of the members of my squadron had recently returned from Vietnam, from Bien Hua. One of these was a fellow named Sergeant Sergeant. 

The guy with this unfortunate name was officious, punctual, neat, and personable, even charming. 

Nobody could stand him.

“He’s a real dipshit,” said Sergeant Haines.

Sergeant Sergeant was on duty at the barracks the day one of my fellow squadron members, a kind of sleazy guy named Jerry, offered me some marijuana to smoke. 

I gladly accepted his offer. Because of a forfeiture of pay for my crimes in Tennessee, I couldn’t afford the $0.25 per pack of store bought smokes, so I usually rolled my own with Prince Albert and Top papers. I mixed some of Jerry’s pot in with the tobacco for a mellow smoke and a welcome high. I figured the tobacco would mask the smell of pot.

After I lit up and took a couple of hits off my cigarette, into my cubicle charged Sergeant Sergeant!

“Private STRUCKMAN!” he yelled. “Report to the quarterdeck!” His desk was at one end of the squad bay and was technically known as the “quarterdeck.”

I figured I’d be busted and kicked out of the Marines. 

Nothing to lose, I hollered at him, “Sergeant Asshole! You are one dumb motherfucker!! I’m smoking a tobacco cigarette, SEE STUPID? (I held up the can of Prince Albert.) It’s nothing but P A! IN A CAN, STUPID!”

Poor Sergeant Sergeant got apologetic, mumbled something, and slouched away.

In retrospect, I think he was glad not to bust me, a guy who was notorious for assaulting his commanding officer, a major. Whatever the reason, I was glad to escape prosecution!

I, of course, quickly took the evidence to the toilet and flushed it!  

Tobacco will not mask the smell of weed.

Corporal Jim Harrington worked in squadron supply with me. He got orders overseas, so he gave me his ten-speed bike, a Peugeot, and a stack of interesting books. After work each day, I explored Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach, and UC Irvine, all places within easy biking distance. 

A lascivious old man in Laguna Beach propositioned me once when I stopped somewhere for water. I guess I looked skinny and vulnerable. I managed to escape.

The bike was my free entertainment, but I had to avoid storm drain covers on the coast highway.

I spoke by phone with Penny once a week, or so, until her mother refused my collect calls. So I also communicated with Penny by mail. She told me she was pregnant and I was sympathetic, as a friend would be. 

However, I couldn’t bear the thought of her facing her troubles alone. I wanted to rekindle our relationship.

Then I suggested we marry. I had almost no money. I told Penny I thought marriage might be impossible, but I wanted to establish if it really was. So in my off time, I investigated the feasibility of getting married.

I started by making an appointment with the base chaplain, who suggested that, as a private, I wasn’t entitled to a wife.  Perhaps when I became corporal, he said. 

However, when I pressed him, he refused to say marriage for me was impossible; he sent me to Navy Relief, where volunteers counseled young married couples. I took notes, learned about budgeting, learned what the resources were. I recall visiting the volunteers at Navy Relief several times. They liked me! Getting married wasn’t impossible, in fact I proposed to Penny and we set a date for January, 1971. We decided to keep the wedding low-key and quiet. I applied for annual leave and arranged to spend the night at Malmstrom Air Force Base before catching a bus to Lewistown.

I started saving as much of my approximately $100 per month as I could. The reason my pay was only $100, was because I was still forfeiting two-thirds of my pay for being found guilty of assaulting an officer.  I opened an account at the credit union on base. Soon, I told my squadron friends that I planned to get married. Gunner Robertson told me not to call my fellow Marines friends. 

“Call them military acquaintances, Stork,” he said, puffing on a cigar.

I don’t remember how I got to Los Angeles to fly to Great Falls to get a bus to Malmstrom, then get another bus to Great Falls, then another bus to Lewistown.  I walked from the Lewistown bus station to Penny’s mother’s house and knocked at the door.  It was early in the day.  Penny answered.  She acted surprised I was there!  I had to do some fast talking.  I begged Penny’s mother for permission to marry her daughter.

Over the next week, Penny and I visited Father Boyer at the nearby Episcopal Church for premarital counseling and planning. We got blood tests and a marriage license at the Fergus County Courthouse. We bought wedding rings downtown in Lewistown. We are still wearing them, fifty-two years later.

I didn’t know word would get out about our plans. To my surprise Tom, Dana, Peter Koch and Peter’s girlfriend drove over from Missoula. My mother drove from Dillon. My sister Carol and three of her kids came from Bozeman.

Penny’s nephew Waylan was toddling around her house at the reception where her mother, Lillian, served an immense flat cake, complete with plastic bride and groom.

It was January 30 and a blizzard swept through Lewistown. I recall driving my mother’s car into a snow berm in the center of Main Street.