Why a Soldier? A Signal Corpsman's Tour from Vietnam to the Moscow Hot-Line

Why Not Join the Navy? It was New Year's Eve, 1963. I was seventeen years old, and Bill Swanson, a high school classmate, and I were out roaming the streets of Rockland, Maine, trying to find somebody who would buy two underage boys some alcohol. Our goal was Gluek Stite, a rank but strong malt liquor that came in small six-ounce cans. The stuff would gag a maggot, but it would get us drunk in minimum time. All of us who drank for the sole purpose of getting hammered used it. Earlier in the evening, as I left my house in Spruce Head, I had asked my mother for some money so I could get something to eat and go to the movies. Needless to say, I did neither that night. Bill knew a Coast Guard sailor called Reb who would buy kids beer. We found him in his room, above the Oasis Lounge in Rockland. We walked up the outside stairs to Reb's room and gave him the money. He went to the market across Park Street to make our purchase. Reb came back to the room, handed us the brown sack, and we drank down the malt liquor and waited for the buzz that would signify the first stages of adolescent intoxication. Reb just lay back on his bed reading a magazine, every once in a while looking at us with a big grin as we drank. A few minutes after having downed our six-packs, we left Reb's room for our first stop, the barroom downstairs. The operators of the place didn't question our ages. I proposed to one woman that she might dance with me. She gave me a quizzical look and impolitely declined the offer. We then strode valiantly, however unsteadily, out into the street. I was walking toward Park Street along Main when I was overcome by nausea. Right in front of Phil's Corner, a small luncheonette, I felt the immediate urge to throw up. To steady myself, I grabbed firmly onto a parking meter (a long since discarded fixture on Rockland's Main Street) and proceeded to spray yellow Gluek Stite all over my shoes and the surrounding sidewalk. Just then a Rockland cop, Officer Hanley, walked up and asked if I was all right. Bill had seen Hanley walking down the street and had put some distance between us, and he shouted at me to run. In an alcohol-induced haze, I ran as fast as I could south down Main Street. Figuring Hanley was hot on my tail, I ducked behind Phil's and then back out onto Park Street. Of course it wasn't the brightest choice; Phil's Corner was only about fifty feet square and there were no buildings around it. As I ran around the building, trying to look back and see if Hanley was following me, I blasted around a corner and ran directly into him. He hadn't moved an inch. "Better come with me, son," were his next words. We drove to the Rockland Police Department, where I was placed in a cell painted therapeutic green. It had a hole in the floor and no mattress on the bed. My mother's cousin, Bruce Gamage, was on duty that night and he saw some degree of humor in my situation. I knew he had done more bad shit when he was young than I ever had, so I was quite sure I was not the first adolescent to have this experience. My father and Sonny Drinkwater, a lobsterman friend of his, came to bail me out. It required some surety to obtain my release so Sonny put up his house for bond. In those days, drinking as a minor was quite a serious offense. I was unceremoniously dumped into the back of Sonny's car and we drove to Spruce Head. I made some comment to my father about never being thought of by anybody as much more than a waste. That drew a hard slap across the face. That was the last time I ever gave him reason to hit me. At the time, I lived in a rented house in Spruce Head with my mother, stepfather, and two sisters, Heather and Cheryl. My parents divorced when I was ten years old, and I had lived with each of them for aFitz-Enz, David is the author of 'Why a Soldier? A Signal Corpsman's Tour from Vietnam to the Moscow Hot-Line' with ISBN 9780345482259 and ISBN 0345482255.