SQUELCHED

5 Part I: Squelched, How I Lost My Voice Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Fort Benning, Georgia. I already knew that Fort Benning was famous for infantry training. No way. One of the captains became visually disgusted with me during the interview process, and he noted and underscored in my permanent file that I couldn’t make a decision. I couldn’t care less, because I knew saying “yes” to OCS was a free ticket non-stop to Viet Nam, everyone’s biggest fear. I knew that if I was given orders to go to Viet Nam I could always delay my departure by saying yes, I’ll go to OCS. Once I graduated from basic training, I was shipped off to Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, “The Home of the Army Dollar” (the mili- tary financial center). I spent six weeks at Fort Benjamin Harrison, where I learned how to run and operate an Army Postal Office (APO). My fellow Army buddies and I had the time of our lives. Every day we wore our dress blues … our Army-issued dress suits, with a shirt and tie. My first chance to play executive, all dressed up but nowhere to go except to work in the APO training school. After work, it was another matter; we were back in our khakis, our casual dress, and on the road again off base to chase the local chicks. Finally, it was graduation day from AIT; I received my postal worker certification papers and my orders for my first tour of duty. To this day, I wonder why I was picked out of hundreds and hundreds of graduates to be the only Private First Class (PFC) who wasn’t shipped to Viet Nam. I never had to play the “I’ll go to OCS” card to delay my trip to Viet Nam. (I was learning to play “the game.”) Everyone else I met at basic training in Fort Lewis, and my fellow Army buddies at Fort Benjamin Harrison, believed that we were all going to be shipped overseas. With my “orders” to report to Frankfurt, I felt like I was off on a government-sponsored vacation for two years. Yes, I was the luckiest guy in the world; I had in fact just won the military lottery. Freedom and safety. Once I had my overseas shipping orders, I could not get out of Fort Benjamin Harrison fast enough. Several of my Army buddies, friends for a season, resented my good fortune to be traveling east rather than west to Southeast Asia with them.