Whenever I hear the title of the movie "The Year of Living Dangerously", I think of 1971. But not Southeast Asia. I think of Texas. I remember what it was like go to bed on a mattress flat on the floor listening to KRLD until Garner Ted Armstrong came on. We lived in Lampasas in a shack for part of the year, amidst some pretty interesting people. Eventually we moved to Copperas Cove, to a better house but not necessarily a better neighborhood; but mostly I remember what it was like to be at Fort Hood. Just before we arrived there a columnist in a national newspaper said that if it were a city, Fort Hood would have the second highest crime rate in Texas and that if the world needed an enema, Fort Hood is where they would insert the tube. It was a lot like living in Dodge City. Fort Hood had become a designated dump zone for soldiers returning from Vietnam. There was no money for training or for anything, really. The guys coming back from Nam weren't interested in pretend war, anyway. They'd had their fill of the real thing. I always found it ironic that one of the few real missions that we trained for was riot control. Day and night you could hear the sound of formations of soldiers with plastic shields and face-guards shuffle-stepping up the company streets, preparing to manage the civil unrest in America's cities when no one could control the military unrest always simmering at Fort Hood. The day I signed in to the replacement station there was an article in the Post newspaper about a unit's First Sergeant being found cut up in a dumpster. I was thinking that I didn't want to go to that unit when they called out my name and gave me orders for that unit. There were cowboys from Killeen and Waco driving through the company streets throwing molotov cocktails at the barracks and lighting off shotguns at the troops. This in retaliation for what ever the troops had done in town.
It seems that in my platoon I had two types of soldiers. Almost half my guys were buck sergeants who had been to Vietnam, done a good job, made sergeant and came back. The rest, with the exception of one private who got sent there right out of training, were privates who had gone to Vietnam, screwed up, got busted, and came back. The small advantage to this was that I could put one NCO on each private for supervision. But private or sergeant, there were very few who had not had a taste of the weed and many were steady users. One of the guys who was a HEAVY user was named...well...call him M. M had a fairly new Ford convertable. The fellas said that so much grass had been smoked in M's car that the upholstery and the rag top were saturated with it. One of the guys told me that towards the end of the month, when everyone was broke, they would go sit in M's car and get a contact high. I don't even know if that is possible but they swore to it.
It was a different time. The Army didn't really allow, or even condone drug use, but there was no active anti-drug policy, either. You might do a little time for having pot in the barracks, if there was enough of it, and several of the guys did...that's how they got to be privates. But very few were getting kicked out of the Army for drug use...unless they were REALLY hopeless. But that was the Army. Texas, on the other hand, had a very different view.
Several of the fellas became extremely interested in Texas' drug laws when a couple of GIs from Fort Hood were stopped by a cop in Brownsville. He searched their car and found a matchbox of marijuana under the seat and arrested the boys. There was a very hard-ass judge down there in those days who had made it known that possession of MJ in Texas could get you a 99-year sentence. As this trial unfolded, my guys became glued to the news. Seems that the same weekend that those boys got caught, M and some others had also been in the Brownsville area. They could have shared a similar fate as these newsmakers -who, incidentally, were convicted and sure enough, they drew the ninety and nine. When I left Texas, the appeals were still flying...illegal search...no probable cause...illegal stop (out of state plates), etc. But I can say without a doubt that that one trial did more to clean up the drug issues in my platoon than a dozen random shake-down inspections.
This memory came to me the last day or two as I considered the case of the Lockerbie bomber and his attempt to be released after serving ten years because he has cancer and wants to die at home in Libya. I wonder how that appeal process sounds to however-many Texas prison inmates there are that didn't kill anyone and drew "Hangin' Judges" at their trials. Just a random thought.
Yeah, 1971 was a very interesting year...lots of good music, though...and a new baby