I Receive My Discharge

My depression became so severe that I couldn’t function enough to finally be able to write my Congressman or go to the Army Inspector General and report what was happening to me at the 30th Arty. The thought of reporting the situation had come into my mind on many days and it came to me everyday after there was no hope for my photography career to keep going, after I ran out of photographic paper.

The evidence to prove my case against the 30th Arty was all there. The lab was in the Mole Hole, I was still not working at a unit roster listed MOS (as far as I know), the Marine Corp crates were there at the Mole Hole. So there was enough rope to try and hang a few of the higher ranking enlisted men and officers of the 30th Arty Bgde who were guilty.

That is a lot to ask of a twenty-year-old enlisted man.

The guilty had so much more power than me that it seemed like a suicide mission, and it might have been. They may not have gotten to send me to Vietnam, but I would have spent the rest of my army enlistment watching my back to avoid being stabbed there, long distance style, by 30th Arty Bgde army lifers who had old army buddies in army units all over the world. My personal records could have been sabotaged, or they could have ‘disappeared’, especially my pay file. I knew of that happening as revenge tactics in the military. The word could have been put out on me that I was a trouble maker, or a rat, or something like that.

You must know from what you have experienced in your life, that the victim is often made to look like the bad person.

That is a lot more than most people expect a young man, who is just two years out of high school, to stand up and jump into by himself.

I left the crates of Marine Corp photo paper for Lt. Barber to worry about, I wasn’t going anywhere near them again. I wouldn’t go near the photo lab anymore at all. I wandered around aimlessly or laid on my bunk in a depressed state. That was not how I desired to perform my military service to my country. I had received those EXCELLENT conduct and efficiency ratings because I was an excellent soldier who had earned E 4 strips in then months.

Sadly, I couldn’t care anymore. The undo stress had depressed me to the point that it didn’t matter anymore what they might do to me. My spirit had been so thoroughly crushed that I was nearly of no use to anyone at all.

The only reason I can figure that they didn’t put me in the stockade for dereliction of duty was, they knew that they had no right to tell me to do photo assignments in the first place. It might not look good for the 30th Arty in a court-martial if I used that as a defense and brought it all to the attention of the right people — like soldiers who were out to advance their own career by putting the legal screws to any other soldiers, no matter what their rank or position was; any career minded soldiers could have done well for themselves by making a big fuss over that photo lab in the decontamination chamber. So the 30th Arty sent me to work in their Gunner’s Gym - handing out tennis shoes and basket balls to GIs who wanted to shoot some hoops after work.

That left me with nothing to be proud of.

I felt like a complete failure. I had failed to be an integral part of defending my country’s freedom, as I had expected to be doing one day ever since I had been a little boy growing up in the USA, amongst my loving family, my fellow Americans and American style freedom.

I have taken some flack from one or two other military veterans, about me being angry about not being able to requisition equipment and supplies. What they said was that during their time in the military they had to make do without certain pieces of equipment and some supplies which they had needed to complete their assigned military tasks, but they had learned to improvise and adapt to their given situations with whatever they could find or put together and get the job done. They asked me why I hadn’t improvised and adapted with what was available to do the job.

In the U.S. Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School, I was taught how to improvise and adapt to producing photographs in poorly supplied, out in the boondocks type, combat areas by doing things like adjusting photo developing chemicals for use in dirty swamp water and how to use any available medical or some of the cook's equipment to develop photos in and even to use steel pot helmets for photo developing. But, photo printing paper has to be manufactured and delivered to a photographer in order to get the job done. There is no paper substitute for actual photo paper. And the job requires camera equipment - that cannot be improvised.

An instructor at photo lab tech school had showed us how to make a “pin hole camera” out of an old box; but using one of those cameras requires a long film exposure time, each sheet of film must be loaded and unloaded into and out of the box in complete darkness, and that just ain’t gonna’ do the job at an officers club banquet or soldier of the month ceremony. In other words, “what the hell did you expect me to do, build my own damned camera out of scrap materials?”

I had to buy and supply my camera equipment, and some of my film, to do my assigned military photography tasks, when I was stationed in the 30th Arty Bgde on Okinawa; that was more than a fair amount of my money, from my meager army pay, being used by me to improvise and adapt to get the job done. I wasn’t paying for expensive photo printing paper too.

Had I gone ahead and paid for the photo paper, film, and then quite possibly photo development chemicals, out of my pocket, it would have either been a case of bribery or giving in to extortion.

Although I may have shown some sort of inner weakness or personal flaw by not stepping forward to ‘blow the whistle’ on the 30th Arty Bgde for having that illegal photo lab and also me as an unauthorized photographer, I would have been an even weaker person if I had given in to their extortion style, veiled threat that I either quietly acquired my equipment and supplies anyway I could and did everything they said, or else I would be ‘volunteered’ to go dive into that deadly quagmire going on in Vietnam at the time.

Or, if I had eagerly gone along with the 30th Arty’s bullcrap and had willingly paid for most of what was needed to produce nice pictures of them at work and play, I would have been some kind of a conniving briber. If I were the type of a man who would have paid money out my personal funds to go along with that crap in order to stay out of Vietnam, well then, instead of being the low income, depressed and lonely victim of service connected mental health disorders which I am today, I’d probly be a back stabbing, lying, cheating, conniving individual who may have been financially successful in his life, but who was a dismal excuse for a human being. I’d be the self centered kind of a man who only looked out for his own good, a man who had no love to share with this world of ours. You probably wouldn’t want an individual like that setting across the table from you at one of your family holiday dinners. That is not my cup of tea; I couldn’t live with being like that.

For most Veterans Administration personnel, U.S. Army personnel, politicians, and others whom I have related the facts of my time stationed in the 30th Arty Bgde to, this is all either a figment of my imagination, or it doesn’t mean a thing to them because it’s my problem, and they don’t wanna’ hear about it. It seems to me that as far as those government personnel are concerned nothing about my life means anything in this world at all.

I was ready, willing, and able to work hard at any job that the Army assigned me to do, whether it was as a photographer, a typewriter tapping clerk, an infantryman, a trash can scrubber or whatever the Army needed me to do. I had expected, though, that the Army would give me at least most of the equipment and supplies needed to do the job. I also expected to be given the opportunity to work hard for promotions in rank.

My personal military records are a full of crap. The 30th Arty Bgde sergeants and officers, who were in direct charge of me, self-servingly placed that crap in my army records saying that I refused to continue doing my photography job, not that I was illegally assigned to the brigade and had worked hard for them until my supplies ran out. Either the Army’s records are incorrect, or I have just written one outstanding piece of fictional literature.

Old military records are brought up in situations like court cases, political endeavors, and employment opportunities every day. I have been living with the fear of dealing with the lies that are contained in my incorrect personal army records, in one of those type of situations, for my entire adult life. As long as those incorrect records are there to haunt me and possibly be brought up and used against me by someone, the traumatic effects of those lies will continue to effect me in a negative way.

Though I had enlisted for three years, one year over the military draft’s requirement of two years, so that I could be guaranteed photography school, I was discharged from the army on a General Discharge due to unsuitability after only two years in the service of my country. I still have full veteran’s rights and benefits, but that unsuitability garbage takes all of my pride of service away from me and my family. If to be suitable for military service means that I pay for my own equipment and supplies, and most importantly that I do not ‘blow the whistle’ on any gross infractions of military rules and regulations, then it is most certainly true that I am unsuitable.

My army discharge may not have even been legal. If the 30th Arty Bgde was not authorized to have me there in the first place, then were they authorized to sign the paperwork to give me a General Discharge?

I believe that because they were not legally authorized to have me in their brigade, they were not legally authorized to fill out and sign the paperwork that lead to my discharge from the Army.

Sometimes I wonder if I am still legally in the Army. This is a serious question. I have often thought that the way to get the Army to investigate my claims about my 30th Arty Bgde situation is to sue for my back pay, but then the Army would probably say that I allowed this to happen, so they might declare me to be a deserter. My three year enlistment was sure enough up a long time ago, but the Army still had to legally discharge me for it to be all over. It’s a set of possibilities that a good lawyer might have an answer to.

My army discharge was upgraded to honorable, about twenty-five years ago.

The upgrade was not because of my particular situation, it was due to some class action suit won against the Army by other veterans who had received unsuitability discharges and had disagreed with the way that the Army determined unsuitability or some part of the process. What this means is that I still need to clear my name.

On November 18, 1971, when I returned back to the United States of America, from Okinawa, to receive my General Discharge, and I stepped back onto American soil, I did not feel at home again in my own country.

When the actions and lies of those individuals in the 30th Artillery Brigade, who had kept that photo lab situation going, had crushed my soul, and when that devastating bullcrap of theirs had prevailed over the plain truth, I not only, justly, put the blame on them, I saw it as a failure of the entire system of American military rules and regulations. I also saw it as a failure of all who had taught me to value America as the best country that the world has ever known, and a land worth working for, fighting for and dying for. That made me feel like I had lost my country, my home, my family and all that used to be me.

I don’t know what my family believes happened on Okinawa, or what my father and mother and grandparents and a few of my aunts and uncles believed before they passed away; I’ll never have the chance to make sure that they all know the true facts now. But it sure-as-hell hurt them all bad to see me come back angry, depressed and a totally different young man from the one they had nurtured and loved as he grew up and whom they were proud to see do his duty by joining the military instead of running off to Canada or dodging the draft in some other way like many other young American men did at the time.

Due to my severe depression, and acquired sleep disorder, among other problems, I am now living on a small non-service connected Veterans Administration disability pension. I am non-service connected for it because the VA only recognizes the fact that depression has screwed up my life something terrible; they do not acknowledge the cause as being service connected, because they don’t believe a word that I have said here in this non-fictional narrative, even though VA doctors and staff have heard these facts from me over and over again for over thirty long, suffering years. Consequently, the VA refuses to treat the cause of my depression and to help me to recover as fully as possible.

All in all, it feels like I had been shot at and missed - but shat at and hit.