CHAPTER SEVEN MILITARY LIFE How I got into the military and more important how I got out of the military! If your a poor kid living in New York City, military life can be a real opportunity! I mean lot of kids growing up the city usually are faced with a choice early in life. Join up in the Army, Navy, Marines or go to reform school or jail. So obviously, the military is a real opportunity! I was seventeen and had quit school. My mom said to me that I was going to wind up in reform school or jail. I said that I was going to join the United States Navy and see the world! If she would sign the Papers that is. Willingly my mom sent me off to become a man... I will have to admit that for the first three and a half years or so I just loved the Navy. I was stationed in a place called Williamsburg, Virgina. The organisation I belonged too was called CHB I. This organisation was attached to the Seabees and our main duty during war time was to go in back of the marine corps and establish a beachhead after an invasion. During peacetime we were being sent all over the world for various different jobs. Like to Antarctica to build a base there. To the Mediterranean to supply the fleet there with supplies. Life was great, I had gotten some tattoos on my arms proving my manhood and I was beginning to get some peachfuzz on my face. Things got serious I think in 1961 under the Cuban Missile crisis or was it the Bay of Pigs? I don't remember which, however I was sent to the big American base on Cuba during the crisis. We were flown in as the wives of the people stationed their were being flown out. The marines were mining the whole fucking base perimeter expecting to do a last stand type Corregidor or something. I got to stand guard duty with an 30 calibre rifle, left over from the second world war! However I was not stupid. I did not walk up an down like a nut waiting to be shot. I found a nice dark place so if the shit started to hit the fan my ass at least would have a chance to survive. Because when it comes down to the cookie jar that is about the only thing I wanted to think about, saving my ass and not going home in a box. That my friends is the bottom line for most working class kids sent off to war. Staying alive! That has always been the bottom line. Its not patriotism, its not the John Wayne planting the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima Hollywood Shit. Its not I'm singin in the rain with Gene Kelly either...When the bullets start flying its my ass or his ass. Of course looking at it today I realise that the government certainly would have liked to have a sort of mini Pearl Harbour at the Quantanimo base in Cuba. Had the Cubans attacked us and wiped us out the government would have had and excuse to wipe Cuba off of the face of the map. However that certainly would not helped the guys who were there! We would have been dead!! The problem with Cuba was also an ideological problem for me. Yeah, it sure was. Me who had a 8th grade education had a real ideological problem with Cuba. The problem was very, very simple. All of my friends, my brother and his friends, were supporting the Cubans! Yeah,believe that? Most of the poor kids in New York City that I knew were on the Cuban side. Their reasons for this varied, however the reasons were usually quite clear and to the point. Tony a friend, and small-time gangster, supported the Cuban revolution. One reason was for the money. He would say things like. "Man, the pot (marijuana) in Cuba is just fantastic, and if we join up with Fidel maybe we can get a franchise". But Tony also had ideological convictions. he was Italian and knew people in the Mafia who hated the people who were running the casino's in Cuba before Batiste's fall. These were also Mafia people. But they never had worked on the docks or in the unions! Tony hated the companies in Cuba because he new the dockworkers who unloaded the bananas in New York City. There was eddie an Irishman who was running guns to the Cubans because he supported the IRA. He hated the English and " the fucking rats who ran the sugar companies and banana companies" in Cuba during the time of Batiste. Eddie knew what the English were doing to the Irish. He new that what the Americans wanted to do in Cuba was basically the same thing. Then there were my Puerto Rican friends who supported their brothers and sisters in Cuba. There were my black friends who said, " Man if I was livin dar, det would be me who was loaden dem fucking bananas". There was my brother who had his roomed filled with Russian and Cuban flags and was studying Russian. He had a more ideological believe in the guerrilla movement which came to power after leading the struggle from the mountains. Then there was another friend Zeke. He had even fought with the guerrillas in Cuba during the early years. After the Cubans got rid of the Batiste regime, Zeke was caught trying to smuggle lots of Marijuana from Cuba. Zeke got deported from Cuba but got to keep a medal he had received during the fighting. Zeke was pissed off at the Cubans for awhile but was on their side. Yes,and into all this I walked after three and a half years in the Navy. In fact I had just enlisted for 6 more years! However this was not to be. No, not at all. I came home to New York City for thirty days leave, little knowing that my entire life at this point would change course. It would be my first fumbling steps to political consciousness. My first encounters with the United States government and its Naval intelligence. My first encounter with the fact that poor people who join the military are used as a piece of meat to die so that the rich people can make alot of money, and if a poor person becomes aware of this, he is considered extremely dangerous and has to be stopped one way or another. So I had just reenlisted for 6 more years of the navy. I had gotten a whole bunch of money for that. I had also been informed at my base that I was going to be transferred! Transferred to a little fucking oil tanker based in Savannah, Georgia! I was upset about this because I had no idea why? All of a sudden I was being transferred. It was not until many years later I realised that it was my childhood friends and my brother and his friends and their activities which were behind this sudden transfer! No, I was so fucking naive, stupid, idiotic, yeah, just a complete asshole. I will get back to this later. But already 1963 the American government was on my ass. They thought I was running an operation for the Cubans! Perhaps involved in gun smuggling, smuggling information about all the secret shit underground in Williamsburg used later on to support the bay of pigs! Well the government wasted alot of fucking money because I at this time did not know my ass from a hole in the ground. Back to this later on... So after three years I came home to New York City. I had not been in touch with my brother or my friends during this time. What I walked in on was the following, besides the stuff about Cuba above. Most of my friends were doing the Village scene at this particular time in history. The village scene was different things to different people usually depending on where you were coming from. There was the jazz scene, the coffee houses, the west village scene, the east village scene, and the general street scene. There were a lot of kids coming into the village from the suburbs, mostly middle and upper middle-class kids. On the east side there were lots of black people and lots of "junk" mostly heroin going on there. On the west side lots of marijuana although a lot of junk on the jazz scene. And finally there was also Timothy Leary , a Harvard chemist, who was on everybody's lips LSD. Not to forget the speakeasies where people like Lenny Bruce were appearing . My friends, most of them into dealing pot ,(marijuana) hash and LSD or selling paintings to the middle-class kids from the suburbs would sleep all day and go into the city at night. This is how most of my childhood friends were living at this time. They did not look like hippies or junkies but were usually dressed in a Manchester jacket, jeans and shirt and tie. Others had deguises and dressed up like hippies in order to sell paintings. Some of the women women I knew were into a lot of speed and being witches. Yeah, that's right witches. I was swept into this world of my childhood friends and immediately decided that my career in the Navy had to end as quick as possible. I would love to tell the reader about some of the incredible events going on at this time in the village,however these people are probably alive today and I feel that it would be better to avoid mentioning anything that might endanger my childhood friends, especially since the government has always in one way or another been interested ! Before we go futher there is: Another thing I would like too take up here is morality, and intellectual snobbery! There have been many times I have met people in my life who because of circumstances have had better education's, better morals, better everything, if one were to believe all their bullshit. Some of these people have, but the majority of them were and are bullshit artists. You would think that these people would treat people like me and my friends at least as equals. But that is never so. They are always trying to twist and turn our heads in all kinds of directions. All the isms, Communism, Capitalism, Fascism were introduced to poor and working class people by people who came from another world. These ideologies were introduced into the workers movement and the workers and poor people were tricked into walking under one flag or the other, usually leading to devastating effects for the worker themselves. One thing these people have in common is that they think that working people and poor people have to be enlightened, educated, brought into the light, to just some sort of ideology, in order to lead a better life. Sort of reminds me of the missionaries who went out into the bush in Africa to learn the natives how to be civilised. Or the white Europeans who wripped off America from the Indians by making deals like, "buying Manhattan for 24 dollars in trinkets" stuff. In reality these people imposed there lifestyles on the Africans and enslaved them. They killed off most of the American Indians and later on in history they have been using working class people and the poor as meat to be killed off for their latest ideological whim. They are so self serving and smart. They think that poor and working class people can't think and therefore are always trying to stuff more bullshit down our throats! Well many of us certainly can not express our thoughts in terms exceptable to these circles. Nor even put forks and knives on the right side when setting the table. Yeah, the rich even have rules for this kind of stuff... But we have one thing that they do not understand at all and that is historical experience... That is, I mean poor and working class people have the experience of suffering from the various ideas presently popular in the upper-class circles. We are beginning to understand that when these people start pointing their finger at the enemy and scream kill, we had better watch our asses, because it is usually poor and working class who wind up killing each other. Everytime in history the rich became convinced of one particular theory or another poor and working class people died in the millions. During the second world war there was Imperialism, Nazism, feudalism, and Stalinism. That little ideological trip cost the poor and working class millions and millions of lives. I took up earlier in this book a little Vietnamese girl running down a highway in Vietnam with Napalm burning holes in her little body. Well that little girl, who was running for her very life had something very much in common with myself and my childhood friends. We were and are running for our lives just as she was. We were running from the enemy. For this little girl the enemy came from the sky, the ideology was the domino theory. Nick was and still is running for his life, he was a smalltime gangster and the they was capitalism, i.e. rich people exploiting poor people likes Nick's dad on the docks so that they could drive cadillacs. Eddie was running away too, his experience was how the English were and still are trying to colonise Northern Ireland and Eddies relatives were trying to stop it by building the I.R.A. Bob was running too...When I was a kid I was running from my stepdad Harry. Harry was being destroyed down on the docks by the rich people. He was a union man and the rich were trying to destroy the unions. The problem with Harry was that he was pointing the gun at his own stepkids instead of the fatcats. We were all running from something that rich people and there intellectual lackies were trying to push off on us. Our experience is a common one. Our history is a pyramid of skulls! Our skulls!