Is This Any Way to Run the Army? — Stoned?
“Rock and roll music contributes to both the usage of drugs and the high VD rate among the enlisted men in the Army today.”
This statement from an Army Captain, represents the off-the-record opinion of most high-ranking officers in the Armed Services today. But there is nothing they can do about it.
The Armed Forces have changed radically in the last four years. The raising of draft quotas and the tightening of deferment and exemption loopholes has made for a different military, with a higher proportion of men who would otherwise be in college, and a far greater number of men of one generation drafted into the service.
Briefly put, there is a flowering of rock and roll and dope among the unwilling soldiers of today. It is altogether out of hand. It already involves so many men that the brass can’t even begin to crack down on it.
“Lots of guys come over here very lame but go home heads. Everyone is excited about trying it ‘back in the world’ because it is so groovy even at this down place. Guys have mustaches and long sideburns that the average citizen would never believe they were soldiers. We are anxious to get back and grow wild hair and beards without any restrictions. Beads and Peace symbols are worn with the uniform.” —A Corporal in PhuBai, Vietnam.
In the past year the Army has been directly responsible for turning on probably more than a quarter of a million young American innocents by sending them to Vietnam, and thousands of others merely by putting them together with others of their age — whether in Europe, Asia, or even right down home in Louisiana. But most of all it is Vietnam: the Army has taken hundreds of thousands of students out of school and plopped them into what seems like a marijuana-heaven on earth. In Vietnam, you can buy marijuana already processed into cigarette form, packaged 10 to the pack (200 to the carton) and a pack costs a dollar. At least in Nha Trang, it costs a buck.
In the highlands of Vietnam, where daily battle is waged, such amenities do not exist. Instead, it grows wild. And thus, so grows the United States Armed Forces overseas, wild as a march hare.
The Navy and the Coast Guard, favored duty for men facing the draft who want to avoid combat duty and bad chow, is filled with even more unmilitary types than the Army, especially among the Medical Corpsmen. The voluntary combat services, the Air Force, the Special Forces (Green Berets), and the Marines, are a different story —— but not altogether, as we shall see.
In order to find out what was going on, Rolling Stone recently sent questionnaires to a selected group of servicemen who reported from nearly fifty military stations — Air Force Bases, ships at sea, Pacific Islands, stateside bases, Saigon, huge military bases and even jungle patrols in Vietnam. Respondents represent just about every branch of the service, including Marines and Green Berets.
Allowing for the self-selection in the various branches of the service, you can say that young men bring the common tastes of their age-group with them when they enter the service. A Navy Personnelman 3rd Class with over three years’ service breaks down this way:
“The median sailor comes from a small town in the Midwest and comes generally from the wide middle-class stratum, is high school graduate, has dabbled maybe even with college, and may have been picked up by local police for some minor infraction. Well, here is the rundown: About 10% of sailors know rock in every form, can rattle off managers’ and band members’ names etc. About 20% have their foot in both deep rock and commercial sounds. Another 30% are R&B fanatics (mostly from east of the Rockies) and 10% dig country (in our idiom, shitkicking) music.
“Maybe 5% are classical buffs, maybe 10% folkies (the ‘Seekers’ and ‘Weavers’ types). The rest of swabs just generally drift around with either no musical tastes or completely absorbent so that it doesn’t matter to them what type —of rock or soul or whatever it is. I have offended some, converted others, and made some more music-deaf by playing my disks. But I guess we are still pretty good off, compared to the Marines and Airedales, anyway.”
The greatest difference is not between the services, however, but between upper-echelon officers (essentially, career military personnel) —all ranks above SP/5 (sergeant) — and enlisted men. As an SP/4 writes from near Thu Dau Mot, “Lifers can’t comprehend rock and roll, they’re completely disoriented doers of the establishment. Even ROTC and OCS three-year officers who should have some appreciation seem bound by some kind of unspoken code of conformity.”
“Ned from Nha Trang,” a GI stationed in Vietnam, elaborates: “The NCO’s are a belligerent lot who spend their free time drinking in ‘the club.’ Officers aren’t ‘allowed’ to associate with us lowly, peon, scum bag EM’s (that’s ‘enlisted men,’ what a fucking label, ugh).
“You must realize that lifer dogs (besides being the most sexually fucked up minority of society) are the most colorles and slow group of people (yes — can a lifer be considered a person ???), for it takes the act of war to make them face the reality that ‘something is happening but you don’t know what it is.’ Lifers are so out of touch with the emotionalism and combustion of rock that to a dog, ‘it all sounds the same’.”
A sailor stationed at Pearl Harbor: “Officers consider rock at best the music of a stage from which they have long since passed into ‘maturity.’ At worst, the braying of a smelly, dirty, leftist, commie, pinko, homosexual, dope (generic term) taking hippie. Or vice-versa, depending on which you consider worse: a screaming jerk-off or a smug condescender.”
