Sorry I’ve been away for so long. We’ve been focused on creating BlueNC … and have had some pretty good luck so far. But I’m back and eager to re-enter. Thanks for reading.
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I confess to a certain ambivalence about my status as a veteran. I was educated at taxpayer expense at the US Naval Academy. I served the absolute bare minimum required after graduation, which was five years. And I spent much of my time on active duty working aggressively against the war in Vietnam, to the bitter end. A third of the people I worked with were idiots, a third were assholes, and the remaining third – mostly people who were drafted or went to ROTC to avoid the draft – made life only barely tolerable.
When I graduated in 1972, my class standing was high enough to give me almost whatever duty assignment I wanted. I was the first in my class to choose a ship that had NO chance of going to Vietnam, ever. Stationed in Norfolk, I spent two years as the navigator on the USS Charleston, LKA-113. Every now and then the work was inspiring. It was my job to “shoot the stars” and pinpoint our location on gigantic charts. I was also responsible for being a weatherman.
But in general the work sucked. Taxpayer resources were wasted in ways you can’t imagine, and most of the people promoted were intoxicated with both testosterone and booze. Like George Allen, they hated faggots, niggers, grunts, spics, hippies and peaceniks. They hated women. And they hated thinking.
I made no attempt to hide my disdain for the system and before long, I was sentenced to a unit called 2nd Anglico at Camp Lejeune. ANGLICO stands for “Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company.” We were trained to jump out of airplanes and helicopters, mostly at night, to drop in behind enemy lines to call in air strikes and naval bombardment.
When I showed up at Camp Lejeune, I truly felt imprisoned. I wore a beard at the time, which was allowed in the Navy. But it didn’t go over very well with the Marines. It took less than 30 seconds for Major Dickhead to order me to go home and shave. He said he would court-martial me if I disobeyed.
Things got a little better after that sad start. I went to Jump School at Fort Benning, trained with Army, Air Force and Marine professionals, and got my gold wings for making more than 20 jumps. I got into better physical condition than I’d ever been, and I was a minor-league track star. Marines like it if you can run.
We deployed to Spain, Vieques, Italy, and the Middle East. We worked with NATO a lot. We lived in tents, sharpened our knives, and almost got sent to Uganda. I was the only one in my unit who was relieved when our orders were cancelled.
And then I got the fuck out. That was 29 years ago.
In 2004, I reached out to the people I went to the Naval Academy with. I asked them to join me in protesting Bush’s criminal war in Iraq. I wrote a “Dear George: letter and paid to run it in the Raleigh News and Observer. I had long, serious talks with my classmates. I wanted to understand how they could stand by and watch a draft-dodging frat-boy who went AWOL from the National Guard run our military into the ground. They assured me (some still on active duty) that there were weapons of mass destruction. They “knew” about intelligence that I would just have to trust them on. There were totally full of shit.
And just so I’m complete about this, I hate George Bush and Dick Cheney and all the cowards in the Republican Party who have enabled their tragic use of the military. I don’t like hating them, but I do. And if I were on active duty today, I would tell them all to go fuck themselves on my way to jail.
