My Army records say that I refused to do my duty. This is the end of my suffering caused by those devastating lies, which are continually corroding my soul like rust eats at a solid steel structure, which has been the case for forty miserable years. It will be proven false very soon, or I can’t go on. I worked hard using my own camera equipment, until I eventually had no photo paper to do my job with. I ran out of photographic paper, and could not order any or finagle any nor could the 30th Arty Bgde supply room or anyone else who could have ordered it if the 30th had been allotted a photographer and photo lab.
It’s do or die.
This isn’t just something that happened forty years ago, and it’s about time for me to forget it and move on. It is not only in my records, it is in my relative’s memories of me, it is in the way I feel about myself, it is still there in other ways, it still hurts me today, it is part of the way that I will be remembered after I die. It is my right as a free American to clear my name.
My emotional trauma compounds upon itself as the years go on and the losses caused by my non-participation in society, the non-production of my photography, etc., the constant disrespect from the VA, the lack of respect that my service in the Army should be continuously giving me from my family and others, all build upon each other and add to the trauma that I experienced as a result of being forced to work as an Army photographer without any photographic equipment or supplies being issued to me.
Read the other 30th Artillery Brigade stories of mine on An American GI On Okinawa 1970-71. You will see what it was like over there for me when my buddies and I were having good times. It will be clear to you exactly what kind of a person I was back then. It shows that this American, Western Culture lad adjusted real well to being stationed on the Far East Island of Okinawa.
Read the stories on my Maine blog about Northern Maine Adventures Photo Album. Most of those true tales take place just before I entered the Army. They are stories of a kid who went from the Dundalk suburbs of Baltimore to way on up into the deep North Maine Woods and fit right in with a completely different type of social scene than he had ever known before. See if that fits the Adjustment Disorder diagnosis. Those stories show that I adjusted quite well to a new, radically different way of life in Maine.
That guy in those stories is not the one who is portrayed in the part of the U.S. Army personal records of David R. Crews that record what certain individuals of the 30th Arty Bgde’s personnel have to say about him after October 21, 1970. From November 17, 1969 to October 20, 1970, my conduct and efficiency ratings are “EXCELLENT”. They had to be for me to make the rank of Specialist Fourth Class with only ten months of time in the Army.
From Oct. 21, 1970 on, they are listed as “Unsatisfactory”, but that is the word of a group of soldiers who had violated Army Rules and Regulations so seriously to my detriment that it could be said that they “broke the book of rules and regulations right over my head.”
I have kept my army discharge records for all these years in order to use them in a fight to make the Army and the Veterans Administration set my records straight. My efforts to do so began in the mid 1970s.
In 1977 I wrote a nice, informative letter, that was sent to the VA, and my Congressman, amongst others whom I can’t recall. That letter contained the basics of what is in this narrative which you are reading now. There was no response from anyone to indicate that my problems are believed to be real or of any interest to the government entities that the letters went to.
I wrote a letter in 1999 that explains my Army and VA problems quite well and concisely. It was sent to many elected officials, from the President of the United States on down, to the VA, to the U.S. Army, and to some news media peoples. It did no good for my cause to remedy my situation.
I have been working at this off and on for four decades.
If the emotional trauma and damage from my military experience is not real, then I am severely mentally ill in a way that I have not been diagnosed to be by any of the myriad of doctors and mental health care workers who have treated me for the past forty years.
The bottom line is: one story is real, one is fiction.
If the story which certain individual soldiers from the 30th Artillery Brigade Headquarters Battery on Okinawa created about my dedicated service to my country is real, then the Veterans Administration is responsible for treating me for the mental illness that causes me to believe that my version of the facts is real.
Mine is the real story.
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