What I Did in the War

My Vietnam era Army experiences made a man out of me, although not the kind of man the military brass intended. Today I remember the guys I knew who went off to Vietnam and didn't come back.

Fort Ord, California (Wikimedia Commons)

I was born on Flag Day (June 14), but I’ve never considered myself very patriotic. That started to change in recent years, when politicians who have never been anywhere near a battlefield began launching wars for no good reason; claiming they knew more about war than the generals; or insulting war heroes who have made great sacrifices for what they thought at least was the good of their country.

I’ve never been near a battlefield either, but I can make one claim: I am a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam Era. At the height of the war in Vietnam, when I was in my early twenties, I was stationed at Fort Ord, California, for 17 months. The experience made a man out of me, although not the kind of man the Army intended.

Fort Ord, then a sprawling, militarized city by the sea, was nestled on some of the finest real estate on the Monterey Peninsula. It was one of the principal infantry training bases in the United States. When I was a guest there, most of the young men who grunted over its green hills and drilled with their M16 rifles on its fine beaches were later sent to fight in Vietnam. I was one of the few exceptions. I spent my military career cooking in a mess hall and fattening up the soldiers. If it is true, as Napoleon is supposed to have said, that an army marches on its stomach, I must have made a considerable contribution to the war effort. Yet my purpose for being there was to do just the opposite.

At this point I must confess something the FBI knew very well at that time. During the 1960s I was a member of a far-left group. We were so far left, in fact, that we thought Mao Zedong was a revisionist capitalist roader. We also believed that revolutionaries should join the military to subvert and destroy it from within.

I was an undergraduate student at UCLA when my turn came to carry out this mission. I mailed my student draft deferment card back to my draft board along with a letter condemning the war, and was promptly obliged with an induction notice.

At that time, few antiwar activists approved of this tactic. Inspired by the slogan, “What if they gave a war and nobody came,” most campus radicals advocated draft resistance. They doubted that soldiers could be organized and questioned the sanity of anyone who would try. Indeed, some individuals we knew then took drastic measures to stay out of the military. I remember one guy who, after dropping out of school and losing his student deferment, slept rough for several days, shitting and pissing in his pants during the entire time, before showing up at the induction center dressed just as he was. In his case, these extreme tactics were indeed rewarded when the Army declined to induct him on both mental and physical grounds.

As for me, I almost chickened out just days before I was inducted into the Army. I had a radical girlfriend whom I was crazy about, and I was worried that our relationship would not survive the separation. But one of the leaders of our group argued that she would lose respect for me if I appeared to be a coward, an argument I reluctantly found convincing.

As I kissed my love goodbye and mounted the steps of the Los Angeles induction center that rainy fall morning, I encountered two friends who were active in a local draft-resistance group. They were handing out leaflets urging people to refuse conscription. I took one with a smile. For several minutes we stood talking and embracing, acknowledging our common goal to end the war that had driven so many members of my generation half mad with outrage.

This poignant moment was interrupted only by the unexpected appearance of my father, a retired U.S. Navy officer, who had shown up to proudly shake my hand as I embarked on my patriotic duty. Naturally, I had not told him what I was up to.

But the Army certainly knew. As I learned years later when I applied for my records under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI had passed on my files to military intelligence. When I finished basic training — which in those days, at least, was just as bad as it’s portrayed in the movies — I was put under a “security hold” that kept me at Fort Ord pending the outcome of an “investigation.” But the investigation never seemed to end, because everything I did of a subversive nature created a new lead that had to be followed up (probably similar to Robert Mueller’s investigation.)

So, with plenty of time on my hands, I went about the task of organizing my fellow soldiers. In the minds of many anti-war activists, the typical soldier was an ignorant rube from South Carolina who just couldn’t wait to get to Vietnam and kill the “gooks” (the racist term for the Vietnamese used by nearly all officers and sergeants, clearly to dehumanize them so we wouldn’t feel so bad about slaughtering them.)

True, most of my fellow soldiers were ignorant, and many were from the South. But I met very few who wanted to kill anybody. Most of them were terrified and understood nothing about the war. They were in the Army because they had no choice. That was particularly true of the African-American and Hispanic soldiers, who usually could not afford to go to college and get the student deferments that kept white middle class kids out of the military for years at a time. Also, it must be said, the soldiers of color were often miles ahead of their white working class brethren in political understanding and knowledge (this was the 1960s, after all, and the Civil Rights movement was still in full swing.)

I smuggled large amounts of anti-war literature onto the fort. Everyone seemed happy to take a leaflet or brochure when it was offered. Whether they agreed or not, my fellow soldiers liked the idea of having a resident revolutionary among them. Besides, I had developed a reputation as an excellent cook. As mealtime is about all a soldier has to look forward to, this talent endeared me to those who, in civilian life, might have tarred and feathered me for my political views.

One day, Sergeant Woodruff, the portly Black mess sergeant for whom I worked, said to me: “Balter, I don’t care if you’re a Communist or an American. All I know is, you do a good job for me.”

The months passed. Several other comrades from my revolutionary group came to Fort Ord. We recruited dozens of ordinary soldiers to work with us, including many white working class guys for whom political activity had been taboo in civilian life. No one seemed to mind associating with hard-core leftists, even though our more extreme views were shared by few of the guys who came to the meetings.

I was amazed at the courage of these young men in the face of the Army’s close surveillance of our activities. We began to publish a newsletter, which attacked the war and exposed the Army’s harassment of Black and Latino soldiers. When Cesar Chavez called a strike of lettuce pickers in the Salinas Valley, we organized a lettuce boycott at the base — no small thing, as Fort Ord was the single biggest lettuce customer in Monterey County.

For my part, I refused to prepare any salads that contained lettuce. It didn’t seem at first that the other cooks were going along with such extreme measures. But one evening my barracks roommate, a white working class guy from Michigan who did not share my politics, confided to me that he had personally stopped eating lettuce. In the Army, loyalty and solidarity meant more than anything.

It would have been surprising had I not gotten into trouble for my activities, and I did. I was court-martialed twice, once for passing out leaflets, and then again for disrupting a riot-control class and “compromising military discipline.” On the latter occasion, anti-war groups from the Bay Area were planning to demonstrate outside the gates of Fort Ord. The military brass put out the word that “secret documents” had fallen into their hands, indicating that the protestors intended to march onto the base and physically take on the troops.

All leaves were cancelled, and the entire base was put on alert. When, in front of a squad of soldiers training to repel the invaders, I questioned the likelihood that a mob of unarmed hippies was any threat to the security of the fort — and suggested that the passes had been revoked because the Army was afraid that some soldiers would join the protests — I ended up before a tribunal of officers who busted me down to the lowest sort of private and confiscated most of my already laughable pay for several months.

That episode marked the beginning of a decline in my military career. Although I continued to live in that company, my commanding officer thought I was a bad influence on the soldiers and had me transferred to a mess hall in another company to work during the day. But it turned out that company already had too many cooks, and so the mess sergeant there gave me what at the time seemed like one of the best jobs in the Army: Night baker.

The night baker showed up in the evenings, made the pies, cakes, cinnamon rolls, and other goodies for the next day, and then went his merry way until the next evening — leaving him (and me, for a short while) free to sleep late and do whatever he wanted during the day.

But I obviously didn’t know how good I had it. The cinnamon rolls were made with yeast, which took time to rise once the dough had been mixed. I was often impatient to get to the evening political meeting, and on too many occasions I told the mess sergeant the next day that the dough had failed to rise (which actually was the case from time to time.)

One morning I came in to look at the menu for the next day, and the mess sergeant took me to one side. “Balter,” he said, “I’m taking you off night baker. You are going back on the line.” I was shocked. That meant getting up at 3 am in the morning every other day, to work one of the routine split shifts. “Why?” I asked. “It’s just not working out,” he replied.

Dazed at my misfortunate, I wandered into the kitchen were my fellow cooks were working away, searching for an explanation. “Have you been out back?” one of my colleagues asked. I went out to where the large metal trash cans were kept. It had been a warm and humid night. Peaking out from under the lid of one of the cans — the one into which I had tossed the cinnamon batter the night before — was a huge mass of yellowish, yeasty dough, bursting forth from its shiny receptacle.

Life, including political life, went on. Despite my court-martials, our group was mostly treated with kid gloves, carefully watched rather than suppressed. It seemed the brass didn’t want anyone to think that you could get out a discharge just by passing out leaflets against the war. The Army’s patience had its limits, however, as we found out shortly after the Saturday afternoon we held a demonstration on Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey.

The sight of more than 100 uniformed soldiers carrying picket signs emblazoned with anti-war slogans must have been a curious one to passersby. But for the Army, such a public display of dissidence in the ranks was apparently beyond toleration. Within two weeks, the hard-core instigators of the protest had been scattered to the winds. Two of us, including myself, were given early discharges, one activist was sent to Alaska, one to Vietnam, another to Texas, and so on.

All this happened nearly 50 years ago. My political views have undergone some moderation since, but I am still proud of what I did at Fort Ord. Never since have I had the opportunity to act out so completely the principles in which I believed. That may sound like a bit of 1960s nostalgia, but it is a sorry statement for a life-long political activist to have to make. Yet at least I can make it. Unlike so many people I knew in the Army, my name isn’t inscribed on any memorials in Washington, DC.

About 25 years ago, apparently running out of wars to fight after the Cold War ended, the Defense Department decided to decommission Fort Ord. Debates immediately began about what to do with the land. When I heard about it, I had the mixed emotions of glee and nostalgia that a former boarding school pupil might feel upon learning that his alma mater has been nailed shut and the headmaster dispatched into early retirement. Today, thanks to a proclamation signed by former President Barack Obama in 2012, most of the land is preserved as the Fort Ord National Monument; California State University, Monterey Bay also calls it home.

Fort Ord is now also a haven for some important endangered species, including the Smith’s blue butterfly and the California tiger salamander. Every once in a while, when I am in the area, I will drive onto the fort to check out its current state. The last time I was there, a few years, many of the barracks were still standing, although they have fallen into ruin while officials wait to decide what to do with the land they were built on. I can still find the company I lived and worked in, and the remains of the Doughboy Movie Theater where “Mash” was shown when it first came out. We laughed our asses off, wondering if the military brass had actually seen it before they showed it to us and amazed that they did.

It was a different time, a different war, and, for me, a different life. But the memories are seared in my consciousness with the heat of a rifle stock.

Note: This story is a revised and expanded version of a piece I published in the 1990s in Buzz, a Los Angeles-based magazine owned by a Thai billionaire. After a few years the billionaire disappeared, and so did Buzz. My editor there, my dear and talented friend Greg Critser, died last year of brain cancer. This is dedicated to his memory.