Uncle Sam Ain't Released Me Yet...Memoirs of a REMF, Chapter 20, Next Stop Vietnam

Uncle Sam

Ain’t Released Me Yet

Memoirs of a REMF

Copyright© 2016 by Robert B. Martin, IV

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. I have attempted to recreate events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them.

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Chapter 20

Next Stop Vietnam

“Maybe I’m old school, but I always thought you honor a contract.”.....Brett Favre

Our orders for OCS arrived about four or five weeks before graduation from AIT. Almost two-thirds of the class received orders for Field Artillery OCS. The rest of us were divided between Combat Engineer OCS and Infantry OCS. I was in the group with orders to report to Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the Army Infantry School. I don’t know how the assignment process worked. All of us were “supposed” to go to Field Artillery OCS. I don’t believe the selections were based upon grades because I was not in the bottom third of the class. It’s just how the Army seemed to work back then.

In no time at all I was standing in line at the First Sergeant’s office to sign the papers declining Uncle Sam’s kind invitation to Infantry OCS. The First Sergeant explained that I did not have a contract as the recruiter had led me to believe. It seems the paperwork I signed when I enlisted merely indicated my preference for Field Artillery OCS (even though the form, of which I have a copy, was headed “Enlistment Contract”). Therefore, the Army had made me no promises, said the First Sergeant. I told the First Sergeant that there was no way I was going to Infantry OCS. He was very quick to inform me that I would be breaking MY promise to Uncle Sam and would therefore be sent to Vietnam as an enlisted man in the field artillery. That was OK with me. I really did not want to go as an Infantry Second Lieutenant, yelling “Follow me!” while being the first off and the last back on the helicopter in a “Hot LZ” (a Landing Zone under enemy fire). By remaining an enlisted man in the artillery I would be in a Tactical Operations Center (TOC) bunker somewhere in the rear listening to the Artillery Second Lieutenants calling for fire support on the radio. I would also be out of the Army in two years as opposed to the three that would be required if I were an officer. It would mean not going to the “O” Club, but, although disappointing, I could survive that slight.

As a consolation prize I was offered the opportunity to stay at Fort Sill a little longer and attend an NCO “shake and bake” school. Graduates of the six-month training program received the rank of SGT (Sergeant E-5). I declined the offer because it would prevent me from being home for my son’s birth in July.

As promised, my orders for Vietnam arrived just before graduation from AIT. I would get a thirty-day leave after graduation and then proceed to the Republic of South Vietnam via military transportation. I would not be transferred into the Medical Service Corps to serve as a pharmacist. Uncle Sam, as his representative explained to me once more, had spent thousands of dollars to train me as a 13E20 and by God that was what I was going to be.

I asked my AIT commanding officer if there was any way I could at least get the orders delayed until my baby was born. Carol Ann’s due date was about three weeks after I was scheduled to leave for Vietnam. “Sorry” he said, “See what the Red Cross can do.” Nothing, I found out. They were sympathetic yet helpless.

I began my thirty-day leave after graduation from AIT but it would be over and I would be in Vietnam before our baby’s due date unless I could somehow pull a rabbit out of the hat. The Army certainly wasn’t helping and the Red Cross couldn’t do anything. It was time to call in the big guns, the Senators from Georgia. Richard B. Russell and Herman Talmadge. I couldn’t pick up the phone and call them but mine and Carol Ann’s parents could. My dad had campaigned for Sen. Talmadge and was an honorary Colonel on Talmadge’s Gubernatorial staff before he became a U.S. Senator.

I don’t know the specifics but something did happen and it happened quickly after our parents contacted the senators. I received a phone call from an Army Lieutenant Colonel in the pentagon. He identified himself and confirmed that I was indeed Private Robert B. Martin, IV. I could tell from his tone that he was highly pissed off at having to speak to me, a private soldier, on the telephone − especially at the behest of a U.S. Senator. He asked if Toccoa was near any military installation. I told him that Atlanta’s Fort McPherson was the closest, only ninety miles away. He said I would soon be receiving new orders for Vietnam. I thanked the Colonel and thought briefly about asking him to give my best to Senators Talmadge and Russell but decided that would not be a good idea.

 I received my new orders a few days later. I was to report to Atlanta’s Fort McPherson for six weeks of temporary duty (TDY), which would begin at the end of my current thirty-day leave. This was no small victory. It was pretty big but I had a lot of help. I still chalked it up as another win for me against the machine.

At the end of my thirty-day leave I drove to Atlanta in Carol Ann’s new 1969 Buick Grand Sport, which her father had given her to make my leaving a little more palatable. When I reported in at Fort MacPherson (aka, Fort Mac) the personnel officer asked for my MOS.

“13E20,” I replied. “Fire Direction Control.” 

He quickly informed me that there was no artillery unit on post to which I could be attached. I mentioned that I was a pharmacist so he assigned me to the post hospital where I would work in the pharmacy for pharmacy officer CPT Joseph H. Thompson. The Army would actually put my five-year university degree to good use for at least six weeks, even though they had spent thousands of dollars training me to be a Fire Direction Control Specialist.

I enjoyed working in the hospital pharmacy and it was where I could be of the greatest help to the Army, whether they knew it or not. I discovered that the Army was actually short of pharmacists. They were hiring civilian pharmacists as contract workers! Not only at Ft. Mac but also in plenty of other Army hospitals. Let’s review. I was a pharmacist. I was drafted and being paid a little over $100 a month to be an artilleryman. The Army didn’t have enough pharmacists and were paying civilian pharmacists about ten times what they were paying me. It just didn’t make any sense at all. But hell, that was the Army!

CPT Thompson proved to be a really nice guy and allowed me to leave work on Thursday afternoons and not return until noon on Mondays for the entire six weeks I was there. I would be in Toccoa early on Thursday evenings and not leave until the following Monday morning. I was assigned to a barracks but I only spent three nights a week in the barracks and four nights a week in Toccoa. Other than working in the hospital pharmacy, I didn’t attend any formations or participate in any other activities at Fort Mac. What could they do? Send me to Nam?

I was driving the Grand Sport on post one day when I was stopped by an MP who said I was speeding. He had clocked me at something like twenty MPH in a fifteen MPH zone. I was given a citation and told to see the Provost Marshall about it. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me and I didn’t even know what a Provost Marshall was, so I figured, “what the hell,” I would soon be out of there and on the way to Vietnam. So I just ignored it. Bad decision. CPT Thompson received a phone call a few days later. He called me into his office and told me that I was to report to the Provost Marshal’s office ASAP. That’s when I found out that the Provost Marshal was equivalent to a Police Chief in the civilian world. I got directions to his office and hurried over to see him. He gave me a very real reaming out for not coming to see him immediately after receiving the speeding ticket. Fortunately, I managed to get off with only a verbal reprimand by playing my Vietnam and baby cards.

For my entire six weeks at Fort Mac, CPT Thompson and the hospital’s Commandant never stopped trying to have me reassigned to Fort Mac’s hospital as an enlisted pharmacist (see CPT Thompson’s letter in Appendix A). All of the requests made on my behalf were denied because of “the thousands of dollars that had been spent to train me as a Fire Direction Control Specialist” even though the Army was being forced to hire civilian pharmacists. Because my training was in artillery and since there was no artillery battery at Fort Mac I was not allowed to stay.

CPT Thompson had me write a “narrative resume” to use as an attachment to his requests. I was somewhat embarrassed when I re-read this “narrative resume” for the first time after so many years. It really wasn’t very good. I don’t believe it would have impressed anyone in the Pentagon. However, re-reading it after so many years did help bring to mind a couple of things I had forgotten. The first was that I had actually contacted my local draft board in October of 1968 and learned that I would soon be drafted. The second was remembering that I had written letters to the Surgeons General of the Army, Navy, and Air Force about the possibility of a direct commission into the Medical Corps. I never received any replies.

I received my draft notice much sooner than the “few months” mentioned by the clerk of the board. The notice had to have come almost immediately after my contact with the board in October of 1968 because of the “approximately one hundred days” delayed entry I was given before being sworn in on 30 January 1969.

My son, Robert B. Martin, V, was born on July 17, just six days before I left for Vietnam. We named him Robert the fifth because we weren’t sure I would make it back from Vietnam and also because we didn’t wish to disappoint my father, Robert the third, whom we thought may have been expecting us to carry on the dynasty.

Knowing Carol Ann and our baby were safe with her parents, I was as ready to leave as I ever would be. It would be a long year but I knew that I was not the first man to leave a new mom and baby behind in the service of his country. My dad was sent to the Pacific during WWII before I was born and he didn’t see me until I was almost three years old. Still, I did not want to go to Vietnam.

I remember Sunday, July 20, 1969 very well. I was standing in the door of my in-law’s bedroom watching a historical moment on their television. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 had landed on the moon. I watched as Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind and thought how I would rather be on the moon with Aldrin and Armstrong instead of leaving for Vietnam in just three days.

I would have the opportunity to vividly relive those memories during the Christmas holidays forty-two years later when I had the honor of meeting and chatting with Buzz Aldrin at a small cocktail party in Sun Valley, Idaho. That’s the only time I have ever talked “rocket science” with anyone.

Continued in Chapter 21, The Oakland Repo Depot…

What Did Congress Leave Under Your Tree?

Get comfortable, this one is a little long.

Christmas is over and Congress, as usual, is on vacation. Let’s take a look at what Congress left under our tree before they beat it out of town.

Wow, it looks like something really, really big! Let’s unwrap it. Aw shucks, it’s just a big stack of paper, over 1600 pages of a new $1.1 trillion spending bill. But at least it will keep the country operating until October 2015.

Nobody really knows what’s included in the entire bill because no one has actually read the entire bill. However, a lot of people have read parts of it and have commented on what they like and don’t like about the bill. I read a lot of these reviews and pulled out a few things that caught my eye. These provisions make up only a very small portion of the bill so you may be able to find a lot more weirdness than I if you look through it. I would like to share what I found with you:

·      There was some give and take with small businesses. The “give” was a bone tossed to them exempting small businesses from commercial trucking regulations related to “truck weight limitations, truck driver hours of service, and hazardous material permitting. So watch out for that overweight truckload of no-permit-required hazardous substances whose driver can now log 82 hours of driving time a week.

·      The “take” from small businesses is that the Defense Logistics Agency has redefined a small business from one having a maximum of 500 employees to one having a maximum or 1000 employees. So what, you say? The DLA did this in order to force lower prices for stuff they buy for the military. How? By increasing competition for small businesses.

·      Farmers also received a little help with Congress cutting the EPA’s budget by 20%. Now the EPA won’t be able to enforce the Clean Water Act as it applies to ponds and irrigation canals. Farmers can dirty up the water all they wish to.

·      Congress reduced the Department of Education funding by about $133 million. Apparently our illiterate students are smart enough for Congress.

·      You know those Wall Street “too big to fail” financial institutions that we swore we would never bail out again? Well, Congress is looking after those fat cats by promising that the FDIC (aka the taxpayers) will bail them out should they fail as a result of the extremely high-risk derivatives trading (whatever that is) they are doing. Nobody is quite sure who actually wrote this part of the bill, but the provision is suspiciously almost word-for-word as that suggested by the Citigroup lobbyists. There are 196 lobbyists’ reports on file requesting this guarantee from Congress.

·      Anybody out there living on a pension? Well, unions can now cut pension plan benefits by as much as 60% pre-emptively by as many as 19 years into the future to protect the plan from insolvency.

·      The ultra-rich can buy even more government now that the maximum contribution to a national political party has been increased from $97,200 per individual per year to $777,600 per individual per year.

·      Now that we seem to have plenty of “cheap” oil again, Congress has decided to shift some of the funding for renewable energy research over to fossil-fuels research and development. The oil and gas industry has a lot more money and lobbyists than do the forward-thinking environmentalists.

·      Because of the lobbying efforts on behalf of the coalmine owners, the bill now authorizes the Export-Import Bank of the US to fund coal-fired power plants. That’s really going to help reduce our carbon footprint.

·      Congress decided to prohibit implementation of the International Arms Trade Treaty, which would have established common standards for the international trade of conventional weapons in an attempt to reduce the illicit international arms trade. I suppose the NRA was afraid the treaty might somehow infringe on the right to arm one’s self to the teeth. I guess it could do that if you were arming yourself with illegal weapons from the international market.

·      Congress has decided not to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility and move the prisoners to prisons in the US, even though tons of money would be saved. Of course, it would be more difficult to torture the prisoners if they were on US soil.

·      To keep some of their constituents happy, Congress is barring the Department of Agriculture from closing or consolidating redundant Farm Service Agency offices. Again, why would they want to save money?

·      Over the protests of the Department of Defense, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to dump an extra $4 billion into the Defense budget for tanks and airplanes the Department says it doesn’t need. The Army got an extra $120 million for the M1 Abrams Tank Upgrade Program even though the Army Chief of Staff told them that the Army has more than enough tanks, including 2,000 sitting idle in the California desert. Of course, the M1 tank has suppliers across numerous congressional districts. In the past ten years there have been 37 earmarks (pork) for the M1 program, costing taxpayers over $788 million.

·      At least $8 billion of the Pentagon’s budget is devoted to a single aircraft, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The aircraft has been nothing but a problem and is fast becoming the most expensive weapons system in Pentagon history. This program is number one on the GAO (Government Accountability Office) annual report of “at-risk” Pentagon development programs. The F-35 is ten years late being put in service and total cost is around $400 billion so far. The 2001 estimate was $233 million. The additional money has gone to contractors to pay for additional research and redevelopment of goals set by the Pentagon that the contractors failed to meet. I didn’t realize that failure to meet contractual goals resulted in bonuses for everybody. In the real world the contractor would more than likely pay a penalty.

·      Congress has also provided the Defense Department with a “slush fund,” which is exempt from spending caps that apply to the rest of the government. Does that mean they can spend as much as they want, even though they said they didn’t need the extra $4 billion?

·      To help pay for the extra $4 billion and the unlimited slush fund, Congress has slashed the planned military pay raise from 1.8% down to 1%, they have increased military prescription co-pays, and decreased the military housing allowances. That’s thanking the military for a job well done over in those shit holes!

·      Congress set aside $65 million for the Center for Domestic Preparedness, Homeland Security’s Weapons of Mass Destruction training center in Anniston, AL. If you are a state, local, or tribal government emergency responder your training will be completely funded by Homeland Security, including all transportation, meals, and lodging costs.

·      $25 million is provided to the National Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program. This program provides funds for hazard mitigation planning and projects that should, supposedly, reduce local, state, and tribal governments’ reliance on federal funding if an actual disaster were to occur.

·      Funding was cut for the Independent Payment Advisory Board, the group charged with achieving cost savings for Medicare. Healthcare doesn’t cost enough?

·      In a flash of brilliant insight, Congress added $5 million to the $12 million LEFT OVER from previous years for abstinence education. Since 1966, more than $1.8 billion has been spent on abstinence education in the US. And, believe it or not, he rate has actually dropped. From a birth rate of over 90 per 1,000 teenagers in 1960 to just a little over 25 per 1,000 teenagers in 2013. Could the fact that oral contraceptives became available in 1962 have had anything to do with this decrease, or was it indeed due to abstinence education?

·      The Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation received a paltry $150,000. This program provides cash awards to outstanding individuals and groups, primarily middle and high school students, who innovate ways to serve their communities. If it is such a good thing, why only $150,000?

·      There is a provision for $5.5 billion to combat Ebola, with nearly 90% of the money going directly to Africa (probably war lords and such). There are no accountability safeguards to prevent corrupt misuse of the money. This is more money than the US spends annually on cancer research, it is double the aid to Israel, and it is five times what WHO (World Health Organization) said was needed.

·      The bill provides $1 billion in “war funds” for a “European Reassurance Initiative: to enhance our military’s presence in Europe,” where we are not at war. This will allow us to deploy more troops in Europe, including Poland, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine among other countries. Maybe we can get a war started over there.

·      Congress is providing Egypt, a Muslim country run by a military dictator “President,” with $1.3 billion in military aid and $150 million in economic aid. Egypt bars US citizens who bad-mouth their “President” from entering their country. Unless, that is, he happens to be carrying the $1.3 billion check!

·      Another Muslim country, Jordan, is being given $1 billion in military and economic aid plus additional funding for refugee assistance.

·      To make sure that Egypt and Jordan don’t go crazy with our military assistance money, Congress is giving Israel $3.1 billion in overall aid plus $619 million in military aid. This is in addition to the $225 million we gave them a few months ago.

·      For all you yachtsmen out there, you will be happy to know that your next cruise out to Catalina Island should be more pleasant as a result of the $8 million Congress is giving California to dredge the channel for pleasure boats.

·      Not forgetting themselves, Congress has granted themselves an extra $1,000 per year to help cover their luxury car allowance.

·      Congress has also renewed a Nevada travel promotion program championed by Harry Reid and the Las Vegas casinos.

Just in case you didn’t realize how well our US Representatives and Senators are supported in their lavish lifestyles (even though the majority of them were millionaires before being elected to Congress), here is a partial list of what is included in their compensation packages:

·      Annual base salary of $174,000

·      Only 112 work days in 2014 (averages over $1,500 per day)

·      Free airport parking

·      Free on-site gym for House members

·      Weakened insider trading restrictions

·      Health-care subsidies under Obamacare despite making more than four times the poverty level

·      A better retirement plan than Social Security ($59,000 annual pension after 20 years service)

·      Most of their flights to and from their home states are funded by taxpayers.

·      The family of a Congressman killed while in office receives $174,000 while the family of a U.S. serviceman killed in action only receives $100,000

·      Members of the House receive a $900,00 annual allowance for a staff plus a $250,000 annual allowance for travel and office expenses while each Senator gets an annual budget close to $3.3 million

Unfortunately, it seems that the U.S. taxpayers still can’t match the rewards from corporate lobbyists, as our Congressmen seem to listen to them more than to their constituents. Like they say, we have the best Congress money can buy!