The Army Diaries by Mike Marino (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

double-wide trailer, a small Levittown for the leftovers of the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Rolling into basic training in the dead of night, the feeling of entering Buchenwald at 2 in the morning. Confusion of what is happening, and worse, of what is to come. The dread of dead of night, the fear of same, and the confusion and realization of what have I done?.

It was a nightmare in a million pieces, a jazzed up jigsaw puzzle, lights out, nights out, the dawns early arrival, more yelling, hut, hut, hut...followed by "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck" and with a faint sigh..."shit!" Fun Travel and Adventure...FTA!

Let me describe the abode we were aboard and learned to abhor. Wood, wood, everywhere. Square posts in the middle of a highly buffed gangway, with red butt cans hung on a nail, crucified as though they were facsimile aluminum Jesus' or Jes-i, forgiving everything in sight. The can itself housed doused cigs, or fags as we called them in those days, and as the tobacco percolated with the water, a strange brown brew was formed, that gave off a toxic odor, carcinogenically unnatural in nature, naturally. All it was missing was full-moon fog rising from the swamp with things that go bump in the night, and I don't mean a darkly lit stage with aging strippers with too much whatever happened to Baby Jane make-up and shaky tits and ass for an audience of masturbators from out of town. The beds were two, one atop another, in another parlance, top and bottom, who's who? The springs were thin and old, old barbed wire no doubt from the Maginot line salvaged for just such a purpose. The mattress as thin as a homeless man run over by a steam roller and the blanket as soft and cuddly as a horse blanket or a prickly pear cactus.

The military haircut we had recieved earlier was very butch and we were completly deforested of follicles, agent oranged and defoliated and bare as an Asian forest. Just a little trim please and touch up the tropics but not too short. A bit butch doncha think Bitch? I look like a cop or worse a narc.Sampson shorn of his locks, there goes his strength, his pecker power has pettered out. Delilah wins again.The clothing is another matter altogether. Dull, drab and green.

Not that Eco-green you hear so much about today, but depressing green, for hiding in the jungles, or marching in formation in parades on base, for lying in the dirt firing rifles at defenseless targets...and Gawd, ball caps! I never understood them in civilian life, let alone in the military, at best to keep a lid on a bad hair day...or on farmers in the sun working, or ball players on the field keeping the sun shielded from their eyes to catch a pop up high fly or some other play, but regular civilians? Ballcaps have replaced balls, and as for women who wear ballcaps, it gives them balls, or the feeling of masculinity that type of female obviously craves...remember they buy the Jeep Wranglers now-a-days and the SUV's...male turf intruded upon, and absconded with.

Reville blows, no, reville sucks, at 5 a.m. an alarm clock on Meth....you hit the floor, get dressed, run outside as though an angry husband was chasing your tail for having at his wifes tail, and the gang forms up, ready to run a mile before they reward you with breakfast, such as it is...then we get ready to train, to be killers, team players, the big green machine, patriots all in the image of the forces at Concord facing off with the Red Coats...today, Vietnam today, it's not red coats, but reds, with black pajamas, and straw hats, and booby traps, and syphillis and gonorhea, and the holy might of China and Russia behind them. I had no quarrel with them, nor did a lot of the guys...they didn't do anything to us except try to free their land for their people from numerous over the ages intruders and occupiers. I might have to die for this shit?

This is none of my business. Let the Generals lead the charge and die first, set the example. Let Kennedy go in first, Johnson, any of them that started this mess. Why me...why the guy next to me....let the politicians fight it out...let them eat the bullets, leave the family behind, and die for the greater glory of a country that likes to bully and flex it's muscle for no apparent reason on the playground. Better Red than Dead I always say.


Next stop...the firing range.

Chapter Four

Vietnam, Mike thought while training. Where the fuck is Vietnam, and who the fuck are the Vietnamese, and more importantly, yes more, what are we fighting for...one, two, three, I forget the numbers, and the reasons. It's one two, three, what are we fighting for..don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam.

At a cultural aberation known as Woodstock, Country Joe MacDonald sang it loud and and sang it proud along with "300,000 of you fuckers out there!" The hook and seed of the song, "Gimme an F" was screamed at the counter culture crowd, crowded, and packed tight in true cannery row style at a whacked out wonderland of color, drugs and mud. So many came, the gates fell in Jericho fashion and it was proclaimed..a free concert.

An ocean away, another free concert was playing on the rice paddy stage of Vietnam, a divided country by external forces beyond it's control, that was also ripping to shreds the social fabric of the United States. The counter culture was encountering clashes in the streets between riotious police in Chicago and street fighting baby boomer men and boomerette women...yip, yip, hoo-ray Yippies, with Jerry and Abbie acting as it's fulcrum. They, combined, were a lefty act of leftover vaudeville of guerilla political comedy, destined to fade into the dark nightime of changing times.

The Chicago Seven, Angela Davis, jet black Panthers, wild and wooly Woodstock, hap, hap, hempy Haight Ashbury, with it's plethora of psychedelics in the chemical rainbow of a multi-colored psychotropic of cancer ablaze with a hallucinogenic explosion caused by mushrooms, pills, tablets and crumbly weed and hashish for paper and pipe.

Arlo was coming into Los Angeles carryin' a couple of keys, while numerous other Americans were heading north of the border carrying only a backpack, a pack of rolling papers and visions of a life free from war living under the maple leaf canopy of protection of the war resisters movement. Either way...we pleaded..."don't touch my bags if you please, Mr. Customs Man.


Leviathan demonstrations to levitate the Pentagon, which led to the demise of the short lived garden of Hedon spawned by the tender loving care of love and peace of the Flower Power Generation would be trampled underfoot and suffer from Flower Power Degeneration as Kent State added four more dead in Ohio to the land fills body count, (as though 50,000 plus American lives, not to mention the untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese) weren't enough to feed the hypodermic needle of the junkie needs of an addict addicted to a sense of false democracy with war machinations.


Democracy is a noble movement, but as practiced in America, it's a diluted illusion of freedom, similar to taking pure grade heroin and cutting it to dilute it's potency in order to stretch the softer product in a futher effort to increase volumn and thus, street profits. Uncle Sam is the proverbial school yard pusher of low grade democracy to countries who don't want it. Dick Gregory, Black activist and comedian stated in the Sixties regarding Vietnam.."Shit, I don't know why we have to shove democracy down the Vietnamese throat at the point of a bayonet. In my old neighborhood, if something was THAT good, we'd steal it!"

The B-52's in the Sixties weren't just some damned mindless band on the radio, and napalm was not a froo froo drink on the veranda in a tropical paradise. Hell..the Sixties were on fire with anti-war sentiment and all some of us wanted to do was avoid the draft, go up country, jump in the water and stay drunk all the time. Some of us had those options, the Vietnamese did not. It was their country being told to bend over and take it in the ass. Hell where could they go to get away, and did they want to?


The answer to the last part is no! The Vietnamese are not only one of the most effective guerilla fighting forces on the planet but with a long history of unrest and revolution, they are some of the most resiliant as well.

The "Vietnam Problem" didn't start with Dwight David Eisenhower, the golfing goofbag of Presidents, nor John F. Kennedy, the male whore of American history. The "problem", for the Vietnamese began over two thousand years ago, under the ruling thumb of a dynasty far, far away, and eventually ended with a victorious kick in the American red, white and screwed balls.

Black and blue and all we have to show for it is untold buried dead of our young and a lousy wall with names of the not so grateful dead etched for eternity or not, which ever comes first. How do those t-shirts read? Oh yeah, "I went to Vietnam and all I got was this lousy T-shirt and a body bag!" As the song goes.."be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.." Today we are more enlightened and forward thinking with Iraq and Afghanistan.."now your wife, mother or sister can also come home in a box"

Thank Gawd for liberation and equality, eh? Vietnam is an egomanical stain on the American conscience of a nation not used to loosing, a school yard bully that got it's ass kicked for once. It's never recovered it's national pride. America was born of revolution over 200 years ago, and the resultiant overthrow of an occupying force. Vietnams history goes back much further as revolution was fomented against a phalanx of formidable foes.

I will dispense with an in depth look at American involvement..that has been done to death on the History Channel, we know what happened, we know we got our ass kicked. Case closed. Move on, and now into the time machine we go for some information that may help understand the voracious determination of these Asian peoples, who believe me, if I had to go to war, I'd want them on my side!

Two-thousand and five hundred years ago, Vietnam was under Chinese control for over a thousand years. They regained independence in the early 10th Century, and complete autonomy after another century had passed. By the 19th century, the land was ripe for picking again for foreign intervention by one or another Imperialistic powers. This time the brass ring was won by France in 1854. This lasted into the 20th Century until WWII, you know, the big one, when those madcap Rape of Nanking Let's Bomb Pearl Harbor Japanese occupied what is today Vietnam.

Once hostilities had ceased, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong version of George Washington, creates the National Liberation Committee of Vietnam to form a provisional government. Japan, dow broken and beaten, transfers all power to Ho's Vietminh.

Ho declares independence of Vietnam, and wouldn't you know it, like a bad stage play, here come those bloody Brit redcoats as British forces land in Saigon to help return authority to the French. (Never mind that Ghandi was kicking Brit butt in