My Only Friends Are Crazy: A Psychologist's Journey

MY ONLY FRIENDS ARE CRAZY: A PSYCHOLOGIST’S JOURNEY

by

DON E. MILLER, Ph.D.

COVER ART WORK BY YASUKO BOCKMAN

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

Speranza Productions on Smashwords

My Only Friends Are Crazy: A Psychologist’s Journey

Copyright 2013 by Don E. Miller, Ph.D.

Adult Reading Material

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE - HISTORY

CHAPTER TWO – HUDSON

CHAPTER THREE - BOOT CAMP

CHAPTER FOUR - FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA

CHAPTER FIVE - ALLEN’S LETTERS

CHAPTER SIX - ADMISSIONS WORKER

CHAPTER SEVEN - COFFEE BREAK KING

CHAPTER EIGHT - MISS PONVE

CHAPTER NINE - CLYDE

CHAPTER TEN - RACHAEL

CHAPTER ELEVEN - LONG BEACH V.A. HOSPITAL

CHAPTER TWELVE - RACHAEL LEAVES

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - CLYDE MOVES IN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - ALLEN’S PARTIES

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - ELIZABETH

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - RAOUL

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - ALLEN LEAVES THE ARMY

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - LEE IN JAIL

CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE BABY DIES

CHAPTER TWENTY - LEE’S TRIAL

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - UNWELCOME GUEST

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - SEPULVEDA V.A. HOSPITAL

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE – FUDGE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - VENICE PARTIES

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - LOSING FUDGE

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - BRENTWOOD V.A. HOSPITAL

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - CLANDESTINE PSYCHOTHERAPY

CHAPTER THIRTY – REDEMPTION

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE – FAREWELLS

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - DANCING YUCCA TREES

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE – POSTSCRIPT/EDITOR’S NOTE

END

DR. MILLER’S OTHER BOOKS

INTRODUCTION

I’ve wondered for a long time why my only friends are crazy. I’ve tried to trace back over my past, especially my relationships with people, to determine why my associations with normal, healthy people are transitory and fleeting. And why the people who have ended up my long-term friends were mostly insane. The obvious answer to this would evolve directly from that old saying, Tell me with whom you associate, and I’ll tell you what you are. In other words, I’m insane too. This seems a little too simple of an answer, too easy an explanation. The reason I find myself doubting it as a complete explanation is because I’ve managed to function (so far) in the world better than an insane person usually does.

Obviously, psychotherapy would help. In trying to accomplish a cheaper, do-it-yourself self-analysis, I find myself often following leads to potential explanation for my quandary but I always end instead against a dead-end brick wall. With a professional listening, someone providing the slight boost over these walls, I could no doubt find an answer. Unfortunately, I can't afford psychotherapy. The next best thing, I thought, would be to put down on paper an account in some detail of events in my life and the mentally deranged friends I made. Perhaps by the time I finish, I will have fresh insight as to why normal people seem to avoid me. Perhaps if anyone else ever reads this document, they will be willing to give me their opinion why the minds of my friends seem to stray so far from the beaten path. Or, perhaps the recounting of the details will merely confirm a growing fear, that I am actually insane, and this account will eventually lie moldering in a basement or attic somewhere while I babble incoherently and endlessly in a mental asylum. The events in this book cover the time period between spring 1957 and September 1960.

CHAPTER ONE: HISTORY

I should probably go into a bit of my history, and why this self-analysis is filled with psychological terms. In January 1957, at the age of 22, I was awarded a Masters degree in psychology from Long Beach State University. I applied to the UCLA graduate school of psychology. I was put on standby status. A few months later, apparently someone dropped out, and I was accepted into the program. I had obtained draft deferments for several years. I informed the draft board that I needed to go to graduate school at UCLA to get a Ph.D. and that I would need additional deferments for another five or six years. The Korean War had just ended. The draft board decided that I had enough deferments and it was time to serve my country. I didn’t want to go in the Army for two years so I found a program that allowed me to go for six months active duty then five and a half years of reserves. I told UCLA I had been drafted but I would start at UCLA as soon as I got out of the Army. While waiting for my six months Army active duty to start, I spent the spring of 1957 doing substitute teaching at high schools in Compton, California. At the same time I was finishing up class-work work on a General Secondary teaching credential and a School Psychometrist Credential.

In August 1957, I went to Army boot camp for two months and the next four months I was at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina First Radio and Leaflet Battalion for advanced training in psychological warfare. When I left the Army in February 1958 I told UCLA I would start graduate school in the fall of 1958 (just a year later.) They wrote back saying that I had only been marginally accepted and that many more qualified candidates had since then applied. I wrote back saying that I had intended on going to UCLA but had been drafted into the U.S. Army and was doing my patriotic duty. I noted that I had been legitimately accepted at their graduate school. I then said that there would be a great deal of press coverage involved regarding this incident. I detailed how I would inform the press about how a patriotic citizen was accepted to graduate school but their attendance at the school was disrupted because they had been called to serve their country. And how, when they returned from the Army duty to try to get their life back, they were told to forget it. I got a letter back from UCLA saying I could go after all. Meanwhile, I filled the time from March 1958 until September 1958, when I started at UCLA, working at the Los Angeles County General Hospital as an Admissions worker, evaluating eligibility for free medical care. I was at UCLA from September 1958 to September 1960. I was a half-time psychology intern at several Veterans’ Administration Hospitals spread around Los Angeles County for the two years I was at UCLA. In September 1960 I was forced to transfer to another graduate school. This book ends at the point I left UCLA.

CHAPTER TWO: HUDSON

I met Hudson in spring of 1957, a few months before I went into the Army, while I was doing some substitute teaching and finishing up the credits for my credentials. I was editing the campus literary magazine, The Hornspoon.

Anna, who had contributed a couple of poems we used, was a giggly, matronly type whose ebullience always gave me the impression she wanted to love the world to death. She worked part time at a Post Office and her 21 year-old daughter Lydia worked full time, to help send mom through school. Both did their share of loving the world to death. Legend had it that in order to sleep with Lydia one had to sleep first with the mother. I didn’t find it that way at all.

After discussing life, the magazine and her poems one afternoon, I gave Anna a ride home from school. I met her daughter Lydia. It wasn’t long before Anna’s daughter Lydia who was plumpish but bright and imaginative had me out in their back room reading lines from This Is My Beloved, to me. Hudson isn’t here yet, she said, so we can stay here awhile.

Who’s Hudson? I asked.

Well, my mother always takes in strays, lost cats, dogs or people. Hudson seemed to fit into the category of a stray.

The room where Lydia had taken me and where Hudson slept was an unconverted garage. By that I mean that it was still actually a garage, but he had moved in there. It was perhaps to the messiest place I had ever seen in my life.

There wasn’t a square inch of space in the converted garage that didn’t have paper spread out, or boxes stacked up precariously, or dirty clothes discarded in bundles. There was a persistent odor of excrement. That turned out to be the droppings of one of Hudson’s Siamese cats. It had the bad habit of sneaking behind stacks of boxes to do its duty. It would have taken several hours to even get to the place of the dirty deed so nobody ever bothered. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that eventually, perhaps, the cat would start going outdoors, and after a time the droppings would dry and no longer smell.

Lydia asked, reading lines from, This Is My Beloved, Does this excite you? She was reading from Benton about coming inside his beloved like rockets. I took my cue from this and allowed myself to be seduced.

After, Lydia and I decided to take a ride. Somewhere along the way, Lydia became comatose, so we returned to her home. I shook her awake several times and when I did, her hand feebly reached for her purse and pills, which she couldn’t stay awake along enough to locate. Lydia was on a diet and taking Benzedrine to cut down on her appetite. She actually lost 50 pounds in about a four-month period, but after a week of being pepped up, without her pills, she would sink down into a state of almost amoebic non-existence. She also had thyroid and/or metabolic problems. Without outside help, her system didn’t work fast enough to keep her going at the same speed as the rest of the world.

Having left her asleep in the car in front of her house, I returned to Hudson’s room to retrieve a sweater.

I walked in unprepared. Several males were lying about kissing each other. I picked up my sweater and began to leave. Hudson followed me. Oh, I’m so sorry you had to see this, he said. I imagine you are shocked at what was going on. He had been in the process of changing records. Perhaps nobody found him desirable. Just what did you think of that, he said when I made no answer to his other statement.

Free love, I said, always wanting to approve of others (and therefore gain approval.)

Well, that’s an extremely mild viewpoint, even liberal, Hudson said. And I’m glad it didn’t shock you. We stood on the sidewalk talking for a couple of hours. The other people left by ones and twos, bidding Hudson goodnight.

He had a moustache, was very slim, had a spasmodic twitch on the left half of his face and smoked one cigarette after another in a long filter. He poured his heart out to me. He told how he had been in the army and couldn’t get along. He had tried to live off the post but the only way you could do that is if you were married. He mentioned that a little difficulty with the WAC he tried to bribe into saying they were married resulted somehow in his medical discharge with a schizophrenic reaction diagnosis, with zero percent service connection. This meant that he didn’t get a pension, but could get medical care for his disability whenever he needed it. This all sounded very fishy but I was never one to doubt other peoples’ stories, they might reject me if I did. All this was fascinating to me. So Hudson and I became friends.

He began to drag me to different types of cultist meetings. The schizophrenic will often be found at the flying saucer clubs, the séance groups, and the astrologists. They are looking for something, somewhere, and always hope that they will find it in some sort of spiritual connection to another world or through another cult. Sometimes they do. They get with others of their kind, talk things over in a group therapy sort of way, and start functioning better because, at last, they belong to something. I went to these bizarre meetings because I had no plans or ideas about what I should do to amuse myself. Left alone, I usually ended up humming sad songs to myself. Two or three times when Hudson and I were listening to music at his place with the magnificent stereo system, the police knocked at the door to inform us that since it was 3:00 a.m. and the sounds could be heard for two blocks, could we turn the music down.

One of our trips took us to a lecture on palm reading. After the lecture, the kind fat speaker was introduced to me, and placed his hand on the back of my head and asked, Does it hurt there? I was a bit tired of Hudson’s many fingered friends coming up and laying on of hands, but this fat man’s gesture, I finally decided was perhaps more of a genuine show of concern.

Hudson was trying to learn palm reading, without realizing perhaps, that he probably liked it more because he got to hold hands with people of the same sex. Hudson talked the speaker into reading my palm. He clucked, mumbled, and finally told me his grave doubts about my lifeline. It seems that it only went partway down my palm. If I will be dead when I am thirty as predicted, I will be sorry I doubted and would have to conclude that they obviously knew something I didn’t know. At a later date, Clyde, another schizophrenic, also told me the same thing that Hudson’s Guru had said, that I had a short life-line and would only live to be 30. Clyde used cards to tell my fortune. Maybe schizophrenics do have some inside channel to the nebulous spirits out there. If this so, it is too bad there is no way to separate sick hallucinations from genuine contact with the nether worlds. It is easier for scientists to just label the whole works as sick.

I don’t know exactly when Hudson’s verbal beatings began, but it was shortly after I had met him. The first time he insulted me I should have told him I would have no more of it. I should have said that we couldn’t discuss anything at all if in our discussions he was going to take side swipes at me unrelated to the topic. But I didn’t. One thing I remember being remonstrated for was my Master’s degree. I had just received my diploma and was to find out later that people with Masters Degrees in psychology were a dime a dozen. You couldn’t become a therapist in California unless you had a Ph.D. Whenever Hudson introduced me to any of his friends (he had hundreds and I had none) I managed before long to slip into the conversation the fact that I had a Master’s degree. Of course, it was being exhibitionistic, but it still didn’t seem to warrant his long tirades about my using my miserable achievement to win prestige. He, himself, had begun enough courses to have a Master’s degree, but had left three fourths of them with incompletes or Fs. Whether I believed it or not, I should have said, Look, I worked hard to get this degree, maybe I deserve to have some recognition for it. But I didn’t, I just apologized for being so conceited.

He also would attack me on the way I dressed, walked, talked, ate, and so forth. He claimed that I didn’t use the English language correctly. He said that I slurred words and that I used slang un-necessarily. All that may have been true, especially using slang words. I had worked in factories, oil fields and garages at various times, part time and summers. I have a tendency to become like those around me. Is that the result of a poor concept of self, lack of identity, or perhaps that deserves a new label, the Chameleon Syndrome. I probably spoke at times like the bums with whom I had worked. At times, I have role played without knowing it and found myself completely at a loss when two people with whom I played different roles, were together. I would turn to one person and be the educated, aesthetically inclined young student. When turning to the other person, I would be the gruff laboring type who knew all the good dirty jokes. What’s that question? Will the real Don Miller stand up? Who was I, really?

Other people always seemed to catch on to things before I did. There have been a few people who haven’t taken advantage of my confusion in identity, and I resent Hudson’s exploitation in this regard to this day. Perhaps at least part of his anger came about because I resisted or ignored his hints of possible intimacies between us.

Shortly after Hudson moved into his new apartment, he asked me to go with him to visit his mother. He had an old dodge. He commented as we began that it needed water. It was about 150 miles up the coast to his mother’s place. After about an hour of driving, he decided to stop and gets water again, commenting briefly that the radiator had been dry and that there was some sort of leak. I made no comment at all because I had already learned submission. Anything I had said by way of suggesting some action to stop the leak would have been met with terrible anger on his part because I was trying to run his life again. He would have claimed that I was trying to show off my knowledge of cars. I had learned to make a few repairs on my old cars myself, instead of standing by curiously when something evil was happening to the car. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I have the impression that he no longer regarded it as an old Dodge with a leaky radiator, but some horrible device constructed by man that somehow now had a life of its own and was out to destroy him. He immediately began massive retaliation. Namely, he ignored the car completely. I remember suggesting once that perhaps we should watch the heat gauge, and I glanced over at the heat gauge. It appeared to be in the red, or danger zone. At this point, he insisted that he was in charge, and that everything was under control, and that if anything needed to be done about the car, he would do it. There is some good old-fashioned delusional omnipotence in those last statements of his.

After a time, the motor began to falter a bit, as though it was missing. In about five more minutes of driving, it began to knock. About two minutes later there was a loud clunk and the car stopped, with a rod through the side of the engine. I began to say, I told you so, but thought better of it.

Hudson was unconcerned about the whole business. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seemed that he had even a bit of pride at somehow contributing to the untimely demise of an evil machine.

We finally got a push into the next town and by pooling our resources (I had $30, he had $20,) we bought a 50 Buick for $50 and continued on the trip. The visit to his mother was uneventful. I did observe that she was almost as crazy as he was. First they had a long discussion on tranquilizers, how much each was taking, who had given them up and for how long and which ones worked best. Then they compared notes on their various mystical experiences. It seems that she had somehow affiliated with a club up there in that isolated coast town that also specialized in crazy thoughts.

After we returned from that trip to his mother’s place, during which time he had been particularly cruel to me, I didn’t see much of Hudson for a time. Perhaps he had convinced himself I was worthless, as he so often had claimed during that trip. Or, perhaps he didn’t come by because of the $30 I loaned him for the car. He had only one way to handle debts, it seems, and that was to avoid them.

CHAPTER THREE: BOOT CAMP

I feel as though I cheated them in my Fort Ord California basic training (boot-camp) for two reasons, one, the days ran together like the nights. I never really woke up at all, and without really trying not to, I couldn’t hear what they told me a lot of the time. If they spoke to me individually, they had to scream at me three or four times before I knew it was me they were screaming at. The other reason was that I caught poison oak on the second day of a five day basic training program. I had to return to the barracks where alone I slept for four days, waking only for chow or to read a book or magazine, or to itch some more, re-wrap all parts of me in dome-burrows solution, five times the normal strength. They would have re-cycled me, except my orders had come through and it would have been too much red tape to hold me over and delay my going to my next assignment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They signed me through the gas course, the infiltration course and the night firing course.

With my feet swollen like balloons, they didn’t think I could walk or move or anything. I took advantage of my invalid role, falling out to muster only when they absolutely made me fall out. I wore my Japanese sandals and short pants looking ridiculous in formation with my swollen feet until they felt so sorry for me, they dismissed me. I made sure though that I always made it to chow. I was usually either very close to the front end of the line or at the tail end of the line. I never could get used to the idea of standing in line, so I would fall out either way before or way after them so that I didn’t have to wait in line for chow. The squad leaders would always tell me to never ever do it again and I would promise not to but the very next meal, I couldn’t stand the idea of waiting in line. I would hide behind a locker, swollen feet and all and read a book for the precious 15 minutes I gained while they did chin-ups on a bar by the mess hall. The squad leader, finding me later, would grow a bit angrier each time. I was always contrite and finally when the sergeant told me about it, I really thought I would start falling out with the troops for chow. I did it just once and didn’t like it, so I started hiding behind the lockers again. After a while, most of them, except the squad leaders, gave up talking about it or maybe it was that I gave up listening.

Having padded to chow in swollen sandaled feet for five days, walking through the line out of uniform and so forth, it was pass time. I hadn’t managed yet to obtain a pass in boot camp. But that Saturday, after lying in bed stricken all morning, when pass time came, I slipped into my shoes, forced them over my swollen feet, got on my other clothes and I went to the pass sergeant. They had a pass for me. They do these things automatically, making out passes for everybody except the ones where some sergeant or officer had put in a special request that someone not be given a pass. Since I was always in trouble I didn’t get passes in boot camp. Except that one time I was too sick to get in trouble. Since I never lined up for chow that always was trouble for me. Apparently nobody bothered to report me that week. So I went to see a friend in Monterey who was studying language at the Monterey Presidio. I drove around being as abandoned as possible on $2.00. I had somehow lost my wallet with $45.00 the week or so before in a post cab on a night that I had snuck out to the beer club. Monday, I reverted to my swollen feet and sandals, having to change again on Tuesday because it was my day to leave Fort Ord and head back to L.A. for a two week pass before I had to report in to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

At the time I went into Army boot camp in August of 1957, I hadn’t seen Hudson for about two or three months. I was home on a short pass in October 1957, having finished my two months of basic training, when Hudson mysteriously showed up. He had purchased an Isetta, one of those very small cars that looked like a bubble. He drove over the lawn, up the sidewalk, popped open the front end and jumped out. He had come to pay the money he owed me. He wrote me a check. I looked quizzically at the check but accepted it. It seems that there had been a further settlement of the will, rather, he had talked to his stepmother and convinced her he needed part of his father’s money now. Hudson claimed that he was to get a quarter of a million dollars when she died. She gave him $2000 on the condition that he bothers her no more. With this, he went about happily paying off debts, buying clothes, tiny cars, and good will. The coincidence was that he had arrived precisely when I was on pass from the Army, without his knowing that I had been gone. I briefly visited with my family and my friend Hudson. I then departed for North Carolina to fulfill my other four months of active Army time. I said, Friend not friends because that’s the way it was. My isolation probably helped me get my B.A. and M.A. in just four years instead of the average five and one half, but it was about three more years before I finally stopped prefacing almost every statement with I have no friends.

CHAPTER FOUR: FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA

I spent a few days at my parent’s home after basic training until the day before I was to be at Fort Bragg. I got on the plane and watched us circle over the ocean from the international airport. The light speckled land faded into the black ocean. There was a two-hour stop in Washington before my plane would take off again.

I got on a bus and rode into Washington, expecting big things such as at least a million secretaries walking around the streets because it was supposed to be a five to one ratio of girls to boys. Instead, there were pigeons everywhere but I had seen pigeons before. There were men with jackhammers on a street where I stood watched for a while because I had run a jackhammer for four days myself. I watched them bob with the jackhammer music almost faster than the eye could follow listening to what Washington had to say over my radio. I was glad I wasn’t running the jackhammer because my back was sore for four days after that time in the refineries.

I went into one big building that had just opened and walked around looking at the stuffed animals in glass cages with beady eyes, grass and things to make it look real. I tried hard to be impressed and I finally was when I thought of Bradbury’s short story about the walls that had movies with tigers that would eat up the parents if the children wanted them to do. I was thinking that the people who had shot the tigers and leopards and little glass eyed monkeys were dead too, getting some enjoyment out of this even if it wasn’t true. The place seemed empty. I walked by a plaque saying something like The ibis is found in the southwestern portion of the northerly plains of Istanbul but also in the arid tropical sections of easterly Mongolia, especially in the southern tips of… There were only four or five floors to go in that big museum but I had only 40 minutes. I dashed into another building, also empty, that had been opened for an hour. The other section, the part where they keep the important constitutional papers, wasn’t to be opened for another ten minutes. I thought about it and decided to wait. I sat on a bench next to a girl reading Peyton Place who smiled at me once. The door opened finally, a key clanking guard shoved aside the rib-door, the kind they pull over open air supermarkets at night. The Peyton Place girl and I went inside. She went to a desk marked information, hid Peyton Place in a drawer that opened enough for her to see it, but closed fast enough for no-one else to see if things got busy. She sold pamphlets too. I walked around looking at the important papers, wanted to see the constitution rising out of the vault, but it was already up. Thinking this time not about Bradbury but about how fine it would be to be in a class someday telling students how wonderful it was to see the fine large script saying, We the people… and so on. That I had seen it personally, but decided later that this type of story grabs nobody by the heart strings anymore. The place was empty, a tomb, part of America buried and forgotten there, eclipsed even by Peyton Place.

I went to the gallery but they weren’t going to open for another hour. I had seen all of Washington that I could in two hours and if I didn’t want to miss my plane I had to get going. I got on the bus back to the airport and got on the plane that was headed for North Carolina.

The first thing I noticed when I got to Durham was that there was a door marked Men, but when you went in there were two more doors, one marked colored men and one marked white men. I had to think for a minute, because this was a new experience. I finally went into the one marked white men, having read about the whole thing wondering why it bothered me, wondering if the one marked colored men was any larger or if ours was any cleaner, if the colored men’s room sold prophylactics for .25 from a machine marked for prevention of disease only. I finally arrived at Fayetteville, North Carolina near Fort Bragg, expecting big things. Right away I did the wrong thing by walking into a USO there; looking over a record collection of Beethoven and finding the record player didn’t work anyway. As I was leaving I was told by another soldier that the USO was for colored people only.

Things started happening fast. I went into a restaurant and talked for three hours with a waitress who had a child at home. She said she was getting a divorce since her husband had left her anyway. She gave me her phone number. I tried to call her later but she had quit that job and had gone back to Hope Mills which was too far when you didn’t have a car. I kept trying to be cool and listened to what she had to say but it wasn’t until I had been there a couple of months that I caught more than every third word because the southern accent was just that different that I couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t at all like Elizabeth Taylor’s or somebody else’s southern accent on radio, TV and movies but just plain incomprehensible. The real gasser was the you all bit she threw in now and then. I had believed that it, like anything that well publicized was legend.

Arriving two hours late at the fort and four hours late by the time I got a bus that was going in my direction; I found they hadn’t missed me at all. In fact they hadn’t even really expected me. They didn’t know for sure where I was supposed to go. They decided that I could stay there that night and as an RFA (mystical term meaning six month soldier) I would be put somewhere else in the morning.

There is no need ever to describe an army barracks because there are two types, old ones and new ones. The new ones, steel reinforced ones at Fort Bragg were for the airborne troopers. Fort Bragg wasn’t really a big place where mainly it was psychological warfare that mattered but a place where troopers walked around in shiny black boots swapping tales of one jump after another, drinking six or eight cans of PX beer, pretending they were drunk and calling everybody but officers Laigs. I assume that meant everyone walked but they flew. The Special warfare unit occupied smoke bomb hill and the Psychological Warfare Unit, the First Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet Battalion, occupied an even smaller, subsidiary part, of smoke bomb hill. I was disappointed to find that I and psychological warfare and psy warriors weren’t too important to the army after all.

The new steel buildings were all right except that no radio would work inside them but in our old wooden barracks we could enjoy music. I remember listening to Wake up Little Suzie, over and over and how embarrassed we were that the Russians had just put Sputnik into orbit.

Walking through the small town with many more soldiers, always, on the streets than girls, the girls were protected, bundled up and taken away by relatives. All except for the few who stayed to work in the bars knowing it was their job to do their bit for the United States Army of 20,000 parked on the outside of town at Fort Bragg.

Walking through the small town, from one end of the street to another in 8 ½ minutes, you saw about 20 army stores, where the same brass, the same pins and buttons sold at the PX were sold for 3 times the cost, yet, they made a living.

Then, especially at the separation centers, but anywhere for that matter, there was the constant flow of stories from airborne soldiers who jumped out of airplanes. There was this lieutenant one time who wouldn’t jump and the sergeant said, ‘by God, sir, you just better jump,’ but he wouldn’t anyway and he lost his bars. Another story: Each jump was worse, the first I wasn’t too scared but the last time, I started puking before I was out the door and suddenly half way down, I thought of something and looked up to see if my chute was open. It was, so I just puked the rest of the way down and that damn Texan, he don’t say much, arms like a gorilla. George was sailing past and just as easy as you please he reaches out and plucks George from the air. They ride down together on the same chute. You never hear them say they can take it back and get a replacement if it doesn’t work. Not because they wouldn’t or were afraid but anybody can say that. They would say anything to help be part of an audience but that one is just too old. Things that were all right to say were things like "He planted a foot on each side of the door, a hand on each strap, the Sarge let go with the biggest arch I ever seen anybody put