I Say Wot?
Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs.
——Steve Martin (et al)
Those were the days, my friends. The sixties—sexy, seductive, sanguine, overflowing with hope and despair. Elvis dethroned by four lads from Liverpool as rock ‘n’ roll matures into rock; massive, multi–day music festivals birth soon–to–be superstars; Altman’s M*A*S*H, Kubrik’s A Clockwork Orange, and Anderson’s If… signal a cinematic revolution; James Bond and Matt Helm repeatedly save the world; teenage factionalism gives us flower children and hippies; a young president’s image adorns walls nationwide; a young president shot down, his brother shot down, a prince among men, aptly named King, shot down (everything happens in threes); America finally gets it right with Civil Rights legislation; the ‘space race’ builds National Pride; collegiate cognoscenti leverage students leftward; a hand–picked, Promethean powerhouse called the ‘best and the brightest’ create a boondoggle known as Vietnam. It certainly wasn’t boring. What did I forget? Oh yeah, the drugs.
A late–sixties ditty by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band is referenced in the title above. Rock musicians and drugs were inextricably linked in that era, but the Good Captain was a Frank Zappa protégé, and Zappa, being a genius, musical and otherwise, was smart enough to know why they call it ‘dope’. I don’t know much about the Captain; I’d bet he followed his mentor’s beliefs. Enough, it’s not rock musicians I want to talk about, it’s Vietnam and drugs.
Vietnam’s ‘drug problem’ is well documented. Easy availability is commonly blamed as a chief reason for our soldiers getting ‘hooked’ during their tour overseas. While it is true, from my experience, that marijuana was not difficult to obtain, I never saw, nor heard of, any of our troops using other, ‘harder’ substances. From what I observed, drug use was not exacerbated by facilitation. And, I was a trained observer, thanks to the Special Forces Medical School.
I only saw marijuana twice during my tour, which began February 22, 1966, and lasted exactly one year, until February 21, 1967. Most of us served a full year in Vietnam; unless you arrived with less than a year left on your enlistment or volunteered for another tour, the countdown sent from three hundred sixty-five to one. Everyone, every last one of us, knew exactly how many days he had left. When you got to the magic number thirty, you were officially a ‘short–timer’. In between, whether it was three hundred and one, or one hundred and three, you knew the number; you thought about it many times during each day. Only a few did slightly more than a year, without volunteering. The policy was: if you had more than one hundred and twenty days left on your enlistment when your year in Vietnam ended, you were sent stateside for reassignment. If you had between ninety and one hundred and twenty days left, your Vietnam tour was extended for the number of days that would bring you down to ninety. You were then granted an ‘early out’. I got lucky; when my year was up I had eighty-eight days to serve; I got, virtually, the maximum ‘early out’ without having to spend an extra day in Vietnam.
Nicky Leone got lucky too, he got hepatitis after he was ‘in country’ just a couple of months. As incongruous as that is, that sums up how we felt. We were there; we would do our darndest to honor our oath of enlistment and serve our country. Yet, anything was preferable to Vietnam, including serious illness (non–lethal, thank you) with a long recuperative period. Especially one with a long recuperative period. Nicky spent three months in the hospital; the hospital was in Tokyo, Japan. Nicky was a fellow medic; any in our virile group would gladly have kissed him goodbye if it meant we’d soon share the same visiting hours.
A couple weeks before he became ill, when we were back in base camp getting ready for our next ‘operation’, Nicky asked me, “Want to try something ‘cool’?” He had a white paper envelope on his cot, and from it he poured a bunch of dried up grass or weeds onto a sheet of paper. That’s what it looked like to me, I had never seen marijuana before, and I was completely unaware of the double–pun my thought created when describing whatever this was. Nicky was busily separating sticks and seeds from hi stash; when he finished he told me to take out a cigarette (Camel® unfiltered, the only kind of Camel® back then, was my brand. Camel® was the last of the major brands to offer a filtered variety.) He then instructed me to ‘empty out’ about one–third of the tobacco. I squeezed the end of the cigarette, rolled it back and forth between my thumb and forefinger, and dribbled tobacco crumbs onto the cement slab that was the floor of the forty–man tent we called home. Nicky took my cigarette, held it over the paper, pinched some of his pile between his fingers, and filled the space I’d created. He then tamped that down gently with the eraser end of a pencil, repeated this a couple more times, twisted shut the little bit of cigarette paper still empty, handed me what was now a ‘joint’, and, as he lit a match, told me to take a deep pull and hold it in as long as I could. I was a little hesitant; my knowledge of drugs was extensive from a pharmacological standpoint, nonexistent as far as ‘street drugs’ or getting ‘high’. I said, “What the heck.” and took a drag.
Good Afternoon Vietnam!. Spacy, dizzy, giggly, and quite relaxed, that’s how I felt. I took another ‘hit’ a few minutes later, and that was that. Half an hour later things stopped spinning and I took a nap. I didn’t try any more; when, on other occasions, Nicky offered, I declined. I didn’t have anything against it; I just didn’t see the point. It was ‘interesting’, but nothing I craved. When Nicky returned from Tokyo, hale and hearty, he went to town to get more. I tried it again, mainly to be sociable and to celebrate Nicky’s return. I still don’t know if I saluted that lieutenant who strolled by as I took a walk outside; I do know that I commented to him that it was an exceptionally fine day. That was the second and last time for me. The exorbitant propaganda we has listened to before heading to Vietnam, all that talk about saving the world from Communism, had become a chaotic reality. Still, I didn’t need to make my brain go ‘blooey’ to get by. I counted the days like everyone else.
Nicky was the only soldier I knew of or saw use marijuana during the year I was there. I’m not saying he was the only one; just that it certainly wasn’t widespread, or I would have noticed. Also, marijuana has a singular smell; I never noticed it the entire year I was there except when Nicky lit a joint. What about other drugs? Heroin use was a problem in Vietnam in the late sixties and the years that followed. In 1966, I doubt anyone in our regiment used it. I say that, because, as a medic I carried morphine syrettes in may Aid Kit. Morphine is pharmaceutical heroin. The real McCoy. Pure, unadulterated magic, if those are the tricks you enjoy. Pleasure plus, if that’s your idea of fun. Medics were supposed to have five morphine syrettes in their inventory; I always had close to fifty. I knew I wouldn’t run out, no matter how bad things got. My medical bag was not always right by my side; the contents would have been irresistible to anyone with a heroin addiction, and lots of other addictions. Neither I, nor any other medic, ever had any morphine syrettes disappear. We counted them daily, as we were supposed to do. There was plenty of opportunity for someone to rifle through our bags; it never happened. Also, no one ever asked me for any.
Other drugs I had learned about that had a high potential for abuse were amphetamines, barbiturates, and tranquilizers. I had all three in my mobile pharmacy, and, like the morphine, I didn’t skimp on the amount. Thinking back, I carried enough potent pills and liquids to keep a baseball team zonked for the season. (Sorry Roger, Barry, Manny, A–Rod, et al, I didn’t have steroids.) I had Phenobarbital, Nembutal, Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Biphetamine, Dexamyl, Ritalin, Thorazine, Placidyl, Tincture of Opium, and Coedine, both in pill and cough syrup form. Toss in the antibiotics, anti–fungals, antiseptics, creams and powders, cold remedies, anti–allergenics, anti–helminthics, milder, but still potent, analgesics such as Fiorinal and Darvon, dressings, bandages, IV equipment, sutures, and more, and I was a walking Walgreens®. I even had injectable, five–milliliter ampoules of some of these drugs. Except for the Saline IV bags and a couple bottles of liquids, nothing weighed much. A good thing, for I also carried everything an infantryman did. Plus a .45 (When asked, the first day in Vietnam as I was getting my ‘equipment’, if I wanted an M–16 or a .45, I said, “Both.” And that’s what I got.) I would estimate I lugged thirty to forty pounds of medical paraphernalia with me; I had something for everything, I wasn’t going to tell a soldier I was lacking what he needed for treatment. Thanks to my intense, thorough, and high–quality year of training, I knew how to use all these items. The average medic only had an eight–week course; I got the deluxe version, studied hard, and was confident I could do everything I was trained to do, and do it well. My training paralleled that of today’s top Emergency Medical Technicians; there were many things I learned that are only done by doctors in civilian life. As a recon medic, not knowing when or if I could get a patient to a hospital, I had to be able to perform a host of procedures that ER doctors handle when that option is available.
When on patrol at night, it was essential that we be alert. No one could afford to fall asleep; we needed to be highly attuned to our surroundings. Amphetamines are central nervous system stimulants. The analogy I remember is: amphetamines are to caffeine in terms of stimulation, as morphine is to aspirin in terms of analgesia. Talk about a jump–start! You were wide–awake and focused with this stuff coursing through your veins. I had lots of amphetamines, lots. These things were lifesavers; they literally spelled the difference between life and death. I always offered them to troops I was with on night patrol, and to other night patrol that I didn’t go on. I explained what they were, what they do, how long they would last, and what feeling to expect. Not everyone wanted one; one was all I offered. Many guys could stay alert the whole night on their own adrenaline–high. On average, a little more than a third of the men would take a pill. No one, not a one, not a single G.I., ever asked me for another one of those pills when they got back in the morning. No one ever asked me for any pills except what they obviously needed, such as aspirin or something for diarrhea. More often, they told me their symptoms and I dispensed accordingly. I wouldn’t have given them anything had they asked; I would have told them that I had learned these pills could be ‘habit–forming’ (that was the term in those days) and they needed to be careful. I never gave that lecture; I never had reason to. Amphetamines are ‘speed’. Extremely addictive and very dangerous. If there were any ‘speed freaks’ in Vietnam when I was there, there were very, very few. Opportunity and supply existed; the safe that contained the narcotics and other restricted drugs was in the doctor’s tent, and it was always open. No one ever counted or questioned what the medics took from the safe. The safe was always fully stocked. There was no reason to keep close tabs; here was no drug problem in Vietnam in 1966.
I’m not trying to whitewash things, or make it sound as if we were better than the men who arrived after us. The drug problem in Vietnam began in the States and was shipped overseas. My generation, I graduated high school in 1961, knew next–to–nothing about drugs. Belting down a six–pack in the woods on a Friday night was our altered–state adventure. Kids deep in the bowels of big cities may have had exposure to drugs, but not your average teen that grew up in the fifties. As drug use increased among our youth in the United States, it did the same among our fighting men. Ease of procurement in Vietnam was a factor, but not the significant one. The desire for drugs was already present in some of our troops before they set foot on Vietnamese soil. It was a generational aberration; those men fought, and some of those men died, just like we did; it is at their expense that the life we enjoy, the safety we feel when we are in our homes, and the cherished freedoms we exercise every day, continue to exist. And that is the stone, unstoned, truth.
