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by William Gritzbaugh
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Not for the first time since Google Earth arrived in the early 2000s, I zoomed down on one of the many places I’d served in the Army during the Vietnam era. On this day I’d chosen my old Basic Training company area at Fort Knox, Kentucky. It was a bit of a shock to see that it had effectively disappeared. A huge office building now encroached on the site, leaving only the telltale dark, stained, coal dust footprints of where the barracks buildings once stood. Such ignominious destruction of that venerable training area was inevitable and, indeed, probably long overdue, yet seemed almost disrespectful to the tens of thousands of young men who’d passed through there.
I thought back to the weeks before I arrived for Basic when I sat at my parents’ kitchen table and felt the weight of the official-looking letter from Selective Service. Immature, lovesick, obsessed with living a fantasy life in Colorado and emotionally lost, I’d flunked out of college. I moved back home, worked odd jobs and took road trips with other lost souls, but losing that deferment was blood in the water for Selective Service in 1968; although my memory is sketchy, I may have volunteered for the draft during a visit to the local draft board to inquire about my status.
As a directionless young man, I was ready for an adventure, even though it led inevitably to Vietnam. Political polarization was even more severe than it is today, although those who didn’t live through the sixties can’t believe that. Assassinations (Robert Kennedy, MLK, George Wallace), bombings of the Pentagon and campus ROTC buildings, peace marches and “Moratoriums” and countless other manifestations of war protest roiled the nation for nearly a decade. I believed the war was the right thing to do, loathed the “hippies” and protesters but, having a childish concept of time, balked at enlisting due to the three-and-four-year commitments. Two years as a draftee sounded right to me. Call it optimistic fatalism, but I was ready and almost eager.
My adventure began at the central Post Office in Evansville, Indiana at three o’clock in the morning of May 7, 1968. A bus trip to the Louisville induction station and eventual arrival at Fort Knox took our group into the wee hours of the subsequent day.
Reception Station ran for a week before Basic began. This was when our heads were shaved, uniforms issued, batteries of aptitude tests taken, blood involuntarily donated, and shots given by pneumatic guns in both arms at once. Although Reception Station days were frenetic, the evenings were free time for the men to smoke and joke and drink beer at the tiny PX. A few men were married, and their wives were allowed to visit in the evenings.
When assessing the men/boys in my group of draftees, I was astounded at the variety. A couple were former high school friends who’d gravitated to other social groups and bumping into one another at the Post Office was almost comical. The balance was failed students, blue collar workers, unemployables and a few who had admitted to an adjudicated choice between jail and volunteering for the draft. The racial makeup was overwhelmingly Caucasian. The range of personal variables started with their newly shaved heads which revealed tell-tale scars, dermatological infections, and even lice. Their level of intelligence was easy to judge as conversations soon conveyed abject ignorance of or a fluency in current events. My personal sense of humor has always served as a filter and friend finder, and it served me well in that environment. I soon bonded with several guys from Indiana and Ohio. West Virginia, sadly, had a contingent of illiterates who were discovered and instantly sent back home.
I met Smitty during that first week. He was the quintessential Joe-College, cocky, handsome, outwardly urbane and manifestly out of place. During one of our friendly interactions, he described his new wife, a lovely, sweet young lady with flowing brown locks. She was living for the week off- post in a motel with another wife whose draftee husband was a friendly bumpkin with a mouthful of crooked, stained teeth. It seemed to me that the friendship between these two men and their wives had evolved quickly as a function of short-term mutual necessity as their socioeconomic paths would not have otherwise crossed.
Smitty, the bumpkin, and their wives strolled through our area in the early evening after our mess hall supper as if it were a park in a midwestern town. The wives, hand-in-hand with their husbands, smiled and nodded at our pathetic band of shaved-headed, baggy-fatigued, pseudo- soldiers as we sat outside in the dirt, leaning against the wall of the PX, drinking from pitchers of beer. Having just turned twenty, I could not fathom being married at such an age. Nor could I imagine the distraction of such adult responsibilities given the approaching trials most of us would soon face. Marriage was for the sergeants and officers, not the cannon fodder.
The day soon arrived when our drill sergeants arrived shrieking orders, dropping us for pushups, and forming us up for the march to our training company area. That day was endless, agonizing and now barely a blur in memory. But something else had happened, something unfathomable, and as the day’s pandemonium slowed in the early evening, a story moved through our sweating and exhausted platoon.
“Hey, did you hear about Smitty’s wife?” the bumpkin whispered to a group of us.
“No, what happened?”
“She’s fucking dead. She got raped and killed herself!”
“Holy shit! How do you know that?”
“She and my wife were staying together at a motel. The MPs came and she sent word to me that she’s ok, but Smitty’s wife is dead.”
We hadn’t noticed that the bumpkin had disappeared for a half hour as he’d been informed by the MPs of the tragedy. Smitty, in another platoon, was taken away by the same MPs, and we didn’t see him again for several weeks.
In the darkness of the barracks after Taps, the bumpkin gave us the details he knew, which wasn’t much. But he kept emphasizing one fact that I could only ascribe to his need for personal reassurance: “My wife wasn’t raped.”
He confided that he and Smitty knew their wives had attracted the attention of the company First Sergeant, a career soldier. Had the wives believed that innocent flirting and talking with that man was just common courtesy, or might smooth the way for their husbands in the upcoming ordeal? Maybe the husbands, busy with processing, had been updated about what interactions took place between their wives and the sergeant during the several days before Basic began. Yet on that first Basic day, when the relative freedom and communication evaporated, the sergeant made his move. So many questions went unanswered because we were all caught up in the intensity of Basic and no one had the time or energy to ask. How had the sergeant separated the women to get Smitty’s wife alone? Could the suicide have been prevented by bumpkin’s wife if the level of despondency had been known? No one knew how she took her life, only that the rape caused her to do it.
A day or two later, I jogged past the First Sergeant and made eye contact. He looked dazed and lost. I wondered what he’d been thinking as he cultivated the relationship with Smitty’s wife. Had he planned to attack her? Had it been a game to him? Had there been others who had kept silent thus exciting him for more conquests? Had he conjured up a demented jus primae noctis should a rube draftee dare to bring a wife within his sphere of control?
Within a week they replaced the First Sergeant, and he was gone. I have no idea what charges or military discipline he faced. The Army never made an official comment to us nor, indeed, even an acknowledgement of the tragedy. A few weeks into our training cycle, Smitty showed up in the company area accompanied by his father. The friendly and cocky frat boy, now a dejected, red-eyed shadow of himself, was quickly surrounded by our small group of the friends he’d made at Reception Station. He cried as we stumbled through greetings and well wishes. But in less than a minute our Drill Sergeant jogged over to break up the group, his usual artful string of profanities restrained by the presence of Smitty’s father. Smitty hurriedly told us he was getting a hardship discharge and was in the company area to finalize paperwork. In hindsight, I suppose that Smitty, having served his country for barely a week before having his life ruined by a sociopathic senior noncommissioned officer, had endured enough in the Army’s estimation, and a trip to Vietnam with the rest of us too much.
Soon the tragedy faded with the reality of the impending weeks of arduous combat training, leaving no time to dwell on it. I became physically hardened and disciplined, was offered and accepted an appointment to Officer Candidate School (OCS) and did my best to rationalize the abuse and hazing we all endured as an American coming-of-age ritual. The naive and lost young man I’d been when I arrived at Fort Knox had become a wary survivor and somewhat cynical player of the game. As we departed for specialized training at other posts, another 250 man-boys marched in to fill the barracks.
I know that, like me, each man who passed through Fort Knox and numerous other posts will have indelible memories of the experience. And while some of those memories will elicit knowing smiles among old comrades, most will not. Soldiers during wartime generally do not have warm memories of traumatic separation from family and friends, brutal training, exhaustion, and fear of the next unknown. While I hoped that other soldiers would be spared the sick predation that had scarred my introduction to military service, the sad truth is that predators are always lurking in the shadows that surround vulnerable groups.
In the fall of 1974, a new job brought me to Louisville, Kentucky, only thirty miles from Fort Knox. I felt compelled to visit as soon as time allowed.
As I approached the gate of Fort Knox, I felt nervous and a bit silly. Afterall, Fort Knox is the site of the US gold depository, and rubbernecking tourists, even old soldiers, driving around seemed out of the question. However, upon explaining that I’d gone through Basic there and hoped to check out my old company area, the MPs waved me through with a salute; no doubt they rolled eyes at each other as I passed.
I drove around aimlessly for a while, surveying the horizon for a huge water tower with military checkerboard paint that had loomed over my company area. Soon it appeared in the distance, and I headed towards it. After passing one more lot filled with M-60 tanks, it appeared, just as I remembered it. But it was completely abandoned. Incredulous, I rolled to a stop at the edge of the asphalt pad upon which we’d learned close order drill and held countless formations. Feeling a strange combination of angst and gloom, I forced myself out of the car. For a moment the last six years melted away, and I literally couldn’t move. I didn’t take a step in any direction, almost expecting to be shrieked at by some yet unnoticed military authority. A bachelor’s degree, respectable job and new car gave me a modicum of respect in the outside world, but here, on this asphalt, I was that young draftee again, lower than dog shit, mere seconds from incurring the wrath of Drill Sergeant Lewis, fifty pushups and yet another trip to the low-crawl pit. I shuddered.
Though Knox was teeming, here I was utterly alone. In the absence of hundreds of green-clad young men, the sounds of sergeants shouting orders and threats, boots on pavement, deuce-and-a-half trucks and M-60 tanks roaring by, the place seemed a dead and anachronistic blight on the landscape. The door of my old barracks building banged open and shut with each puff of wind. Weeds and debris tumbled by like on the set of a western movie. Fear of encountering a ghostly drill sergeant (or humorless MP) kept me from entering the barracks, so I just strolled around feeling sad. I didn’t know why. After all, I had found my footing as a man in this place, and I owed it respect and even a bit of reverence.
I was bombarded with memories and thought of Smitty for the first time in years. It occurred to me that he was the very first casualty of my Army experience. The list soon grew with those injured in training, and with classmates from OCS and the Special Forces Officers Course killed or wounded in Vietnam. My assignment with Special Forces placed me among Vietnamese and Montagnard troops. I’d held the dead in my arms, dragged their bodies to helicopters and sat with them as they died in the dispensary, but they weren’t my friends and countrymen. The emotional burden I carry would have been far worse had they been.
I’d known Smitty only a few days, but somehow his personal destruction stayed with me as a subliminal reminder that fate can bitch-slap the unwary in an instant. Hence, be on guard, trust almost no one, suspect everyone, authority can and will corrupt, watch your back.
Now, in the age of Google Earth and from the perspective of my advanced years, I realize that Smitty could be a metaphor of the American experience with the War in Vietnam. American society was violated just as Smitty’s wife was due to its naivety and its inability to perceive danger in an unfamiliar environment. Our society’s implosion of the sixties and early seventies was tantamount to the young girl’s suicide. Our government and military leadership, cocky and self-sure, paraded our society in front of the First Sergeant in the form of the USSR and Maoist China, who were delighted to fight a proxy war against us via the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. Those two enemies were eventually successful in the war and in injuring our society but suffered catastrophically themselves–China via its Cultural Revolution, and the USSR’s demise a few years later.
Nearly a half century since that nostalgic 1974 visit, I imagine a modern-day recruit route-stepping to a Fort Knox target range, knowing his formation of trainees will be marched up and over two steep hills that generations of soldiers have cursed with the monikers “Agony and Misery.” As he adjusts his load-bearing gear and weapon to ease the soreness of his shoulders, he’ll glance over at that abandoned acre. Seeing the rotted asphalt and oddly stained dirt, he might ponder what structures once stood there and when they served their purpose. And, maybe, he’ll wonder what the guys were like during that era of the US Army and, indeed, American history. If his perspective transcends his years, he’ll know that they were him, perhaps from a more desperate time, maybe less educated, probably less optimistic about the future. The loss of innocence they experienced won’t be his. But I believe the ghosts on that scarred ground smile at him as he passes and feel pride.
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William Gritzbaugh is a Vietnam veteran (draftee), currently retired, and volunteers with the Red Cross, VA Hospital, and USO. He has several nonfiction works published in As You Were: The Military Review and is the author of a novel, A Long Day to Denver.
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