Another day at the office

A teenager in Vietnam in 1971... me.

Shortly after I graduated from high school at the age of 18, I enrolled in college. Being 18 and in college full time gave me a deferment from the draft during the Vietnam "conflict." It was tough trying to work a full time job and go to summer school at the same time.

I decided to join the Army for a chance to have the GI Bill help pay for my education, which it did and I earned my BA degree in Mass Communication with specialization in Film and Television. Being a lifetime motor-mouth, working in television was a good career choice for me. And I look back and recall, being a soldier was a good thing as well.

My father was an Army Air Corp Instructor pilot during WW2. His brother was a Signal Corp officer and his other brother was a mechanic in the Army. And growing up in El Paso, Fort Bliss was in my backyard so to speak, and the obvious choice for me was the Army. Water kind of made me nervous, because I grew up in the desert in El Paso, so the Navy and Marines were out of the question.

I went down to the Army Recruiting Office one day, and took a battery of tests. I did well and one recruiter asked if I would like to go to helicopter school. "Heck Yes" I thought. I started flying lessons when I was 12 years old with my father... The Army recruiting station rescheduled me for a flight physical and sent me through additional testing and although I passed the written sections of the tests they gave me, I had great difficulty on the color vision test telling the difference between very subtle shades of green and blue... No helicopter school for me because I failed their very strict color vision test (much harder than what I've ever taken as a private pilot...)

My recruiter then asked me, "Well young man, what would you like to do in this man's Army?" I was afraid he might suggest Army Cook School and I was terrified of mess halls because I read Beetle Bailey comic books when I was a kid, and each time Beetle got into trouble, he was sent to an Army Mess Hall for KP. I immediately said, "I'd like to go to Vietnam and shoot film cameras." Now that I am an old man, I have reason to believe that my recruiting sergeant either had a "hearing problem" (probably because he was in Vietnam) or that he had issues with adult attention deficit disorder (or he had both problems) and a few months later I was in Vietnam shooting an M-60 machine-gun and not a 16mm film camera as I had expressed interest in... I think my recruiter only heard, "I wanna go to Vietnam and shoot" and heard nothing after that.