30th Artillery Brigade Okinawa 1970-71

2010-06-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

This web site begins with a set of photographs that accurately display the kind of a US Army photographer I was on Okinawa, assigned to the 30th Artillery Brigade missile unit; and we had nuclear warheads on some of our 'birds'. After the photo series, there is a written piece about my childhood experiences growing up in a nuclear armed world. The rest of this site tells how my assignment to the 30th Arty Bgde was illegal and immoral and what my four decade long quest to prove this has been like, also what it all has done to me and how I have been struggling to be properly helped by the Veterans Administration.

My assignment to the 30th Arty Bgde was illegal because it broke numerous Army Rules and Regulations and immoral because the photo lab I worked in had been set up in a nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber and that meant the chamber could not be used in the prescribed manner. Had that decontamination chamber been needed in a nuclear war, the lack of its readiness could have caused millions of casualties in America because 30th Arty Bgde personnel who needed decontamination would not have remained alive and well long enough to perform their assigned tasks in helping the rest of the US Military defend those millions of Americans from enemy attack. That military madness made a mess out of my life. It nearly destroyed me.

Group Photo in Front of Donated Baseball Backstop

2007-01-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

Photograph by Specialist Fourth Class David Robert Crews

One mighty fine, beautiful day on Okinawa, in 1970, the US Army missile unit that I was assigned to as a photographer - the 30th Artillery Brigade - gave each of three Okinawan civilian schools portable, three section baseball backstop each to. I went along to photograph the giving and setting up of the three backstops.

There wasn’t much to photograph at the first two schools, because all that happened was a tractor trailer truck with the backstops on its flatbed trailer pulled up to the school and a small crew of lower ranking GIs, from my Army unit, got out of an Army car, that I was riding in with them, and then they unloaded the backstop while the school kids stayed in their classrooms. We had a couple of U.S. Army officers with us who were riding in their own car, I believe that the highest ranking GI there that day was a major.

At the third school, the GI crew took the last backstop off the truck and set it up near the school building on the school’s field. There was a group of official Okinawan school administration personnel there to meet us and accept the gifts for all the schools. That group included a Japanese-English Interpreter.

As soon as the backstops were in place, the school sent out some kids to be photographed in front of it, along with all the school officials and the GIs. Those GIs were the two Army officers, and five enlisted men--one enlisted man had driven the truck, one had driven the car, and three who were car passengers, along with me, had helped the two drivers unload the backstops. That group of Okinawans and Americans all lined up in front of the backstop, and I got down on one knee out there about 40 feet away from them to take some photos of that international gift giving scene. I focused my lens on the group, set the exposure on the camera, said smile, brought the camera up to look through it and squeeze the shutter, but no one smiled. They all looked back at me with solemn looks on their faces.

I asked the interpreter how to say smile in Japanese, he told me and I said it in Japanese three times, then English one more time, I gave them all big, friendly smiles when I was doing this, but every face in that group stayed the solemn same. That just wasn’t going to work as one of my photographs. Not for this dedicated photographer it wasn’t!

An idea flashed across my brain pan; I instantly knew that either it would work like a charm or I’d look dumb as the dirt I was kneeling down in. I wasn’t going to be satisfied that day unless I got a certain great photo that I had seen in my head when I kneeled down there, and if I ended up only looking like a fool then that gamble had to be taken.

I looped my camera strap around my neck, placed the camera onto my chest in a position that allowed me maximum recovery speed of it, and I stuck my thumbs in my ears, wiggled my extended fingers up in the air, stuck out my tongue at them, and went, "Nyaaaah!"

It worked!!

I swooped up my camera in my hands and grabbed that great shot which I was determined to get. That’s this photo here on this blog posting.

Left click on the photograph to enlarge it, look at every face on the photo and you will see how well my idea worked.

Imitating the Photographer

2007-01-13T12:57:00.000-08:00

Photographs by Spec. 4 David R. Crews

These two photographs were taken right after the previous group photo was taken, and before the kids did the ceremonial dance that is on the photos in the next blog posting below this one.

Those kids in these two photos were having the time of their lives by goofing around with a soldier from a foreign land who had just made their normally solemn faced school officials break out in smiles and laughter along with everybody else. And now the kids were being allowed to act funny too and to thoroughly amuse themselves in a place that was run on ancient, Asian style discipline which requires children to be quiet and polite during most times when they are in the company of their elders. You can see that the goofy kids were imitating a visiting U.S. Army Photographer who was had just acted real goofy himself.

The Thank You Dance

2006-12-27T12:32:00.000-08:00

Photographs by Spec. 4 David R. Crews

The kids did a traditional dance for us American GIs as a thank you for the baseball backstops.

I was amazed at how my first professional grade camera had frozen the action on the sand kicking up from the shoe of the girl in the front. This was the first time I had taken shots of people while they were moving around. Photography is all about learning something new every time you try something new.

If you take a good look at these photos you will see how the left sides are lighter than the rest of the photo and are slightly out of focus. This was because the enlarger in my photo lab had the wrong lens for it. But I couldn't do anything about that because the 30th Artillery Brigade was not authorized a photographer so I could not order any of the right equipment through my supply sergeant. This photo is actually a first print reject; I made several other prints that had the light part darkened by me 'burning in' that area, that's custom photo lab work. The schools we gave backstops to and the Army all got 4x5 and 8x10 prints of all the photos in this series.

The Big Pile Up

2006-12-26T17:32:00.000-08:00

Photography by Spec. 4 David R. Crews

The way this wild-fun-mayhem got started was, after the official ceremony and Thank You Dance were all over, I began taking a few candid photos out in the school yard which the kids all wanted to be in. They were being very happily competitive amongst themselves about this, the girls got squeezed out right away, so I came up with a quick idea to make it a whole lotta’ fun for the boys who lasted through the first round of competition.

I had the guys in the front line of the group stand there with their arms outstretched and holding the rest of the boys back; then I stepped back about twenty feet, stopping to draw a line in the dirt at ten feet; and then at twenty feet away from the group I focused my lens on that ten foot mark; then, as I watched through my camera, I raised my arm and dropped it suddenly to signal them all to dive in at the ten foot mark, where I photographed them at here in this shot. I did that three or four times till they almost got too wild.

I seriously doubt that any of them ever completely forgot this day, because in their society children are taught to be quiet and polite most of the time when they're around grownups. I was very aware of this while doing the photo assignment and was careful not to let the kids get too wild for too long. In fact, right after this shot was taken I began to slowly, carefully (cause they had almost surrounded me by then) retreat backwards towards the Army car that I had ridden there in with the crew of GIs who had taken the baseball backstops off the trucks and set them up. Those GIs were already sitting in the car, over there about seventy-five feet from me and my mayhem; they were having a great time watching all this fun and had noticed when I started backing up towards them. I was nearly tripping over krazy-kids while damn near falling down laughing, and those GIs were all grinning and smiling and laughing and loving life at that moment too.

I turned around towards them and yelled, "Hey man! I gotta get outa here!"

The driver hollered back, "Yeah, we can see that, hold on, we're comin'!"

Then he slowly inched the car towards me.

The other guys in the car were all bouncing around inside there and laughing and poking each other with elbows (while remembering bits and pieces of what it had been like some years before that day when they were just school boys too). As the car eased on towards me, while avoiding touching any of the krazy-but sweet and wonderful-kids, the guys were laughing uproariously and hollering stuff like, "Hold on Crews, we're coming, hold on there man, we'll getcha'. Don’t let ‘um knock ya down there buddy, stay on yer’ feet! We’ll getcha’ outa’ there." Them GI buddies of mine were bouncing around in the car and hootin’ and hollerin’ like a buncha’ krazy-kids themselves.

I was getting all tangled up in, and nearly pulled down on the ground by, hilariously laughing little Okinawan school kids when one of my buddies opened the back left side car door and jumped out and sorta' rescued my (nearly falling down from laughing) GI butt from the escalating mayhem.

Everyone who was there that afternoon in that dusty school yard on the subtropical Island of Okinawa had a great, memorable time.

The Kids Had to All Wash Their Hands Before Eating Lunch

2006-12-08T19:50:00.000-08:00

Photography by Spec. 4 David R. Crews

I thought it was great how the children had settled right down after that fun-filled-wild-mayhem, when their teachers told them it was time to wash their hands for lunch. They were back to being well disciplined, quiet and polite in the company of grownups again - as is 'the norm' in Asian societies.

I remember that while printing copies of this shot, I was fascinated by how I had frozen the water in mid-stream like that, because I was learning about what my new professional grade camera equipment was capable of.

The Kids Sit Down for Lunch

2006-12-08T19:11:00.000-08:00

Photography by Spec. 4 Crews

After I took this shot, the Okinawan interpreter came over to the Army Officer in charge and told him to go tell me that I could not use this photo for official publication, because the school lunches were substandard even though they were 50% subsidized by the U.S. Government.

Later, in my photo lab, I had to make myself one 4x5 print of it to see what the problem was, but the lunch doesn't show up well because all the other shots I had taken that day were outside so I was not using a flash when I grabbed this shot real quick. The second after I took this shot, as I lowered my camera from my face, I was deeply moved by the gentle, sweet looks on their faces; they must have felt surprised, honored, and pleased to be photographed so many times by an official American Army Photographer that day. That really made me feel warm inside; this made me want to take some more shots, so I had stepped back from the classroom door and was kneeling down and pulling my flash out of my camera bag when I was told not to take anymore photographs of the school kids and their lunches. The officer was very discrete about, and he cupped his hand halfway over his mouth as he bent down towards me to half whisper the official command, he had a genuinely friendly-hey army buddy smile on his face, and was thoroughly polite about it.

Growing Up with Nuclear War Fears in America

2006-12-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

So far, this web site has shown you the kind of a US Army photographer that I was. I also have a story of military madness to tell you. But before I get into the meat-of-the-matter, I am going to tell you how I grew up to be the full-blooded, Anti-Communist, Anti-Taliban, Anti-Al-Qaeda, Anti-Fascist, tried and true Soldier of Freedom that I sure-as-hell always will be.

Part One: The Home Show

I have lived in fear of nuclear holocaust my entire life.

When I was six years old, in 1956, my parents took me to a “home show,” which is one of those convention center kinds of affairs where all things new and fantastic, for the modern home, are demonstrated and sold. There was a family sized fallout shelter on display there that we took a salesman’s demonstration tour of. It was a cement block, above ground model of an underground bunker that was smaller inside than my bedroom. It had a little hand crank air intake filter that I thought was really neat. There were suggested supplies, in there, that should be stored in one, like board games, books, food and water.

I was a modest child, I saw that there was no place to pee and poop in private, so I asked the salesman about that. He said that you would have to use a bucket to pee in and have a small, lidded barrel to pour it into, and that you had to take a dump in the corner.

I blurted out, “Right in front of everybody!?”

My father laughed and asked the salesman, “Yeah, well then what do you do with it.”

The salesman showed us a tin container of chemicals that would cut down on the - offensive to humans but attractive to flies - fragrance from the feces and help to decompose that solid human waste.

That created a fearful, indelible impression upon my maturing young psyche.

During my elementary school days, we had monthly air raid drills in school. The first few years, we students had to craw up into a ball under our desks. That was the best protection if bombs and roofs began falling down all around you.

Then a new directive came down through guv'ment channels. This is what we children of the 1950s were taught:

The United States Government had realized that it wouldn’t be plane loads of traditional bombs that our enemies would drop on us anymore; it would be one, modern, muti-megaton nuclear bomb per wide geographic area. There would be no danger of multiples of bombs falling and crashing in school roofs down upon students and teachers any more. If a nuclear bomb fell in our area, it would be a giant horizontal shock wave blast with super heated gasses that got us. So instead of hiding under desks during monthly air raid drills, we went out into the hallway to "duck and cover."

If a nuclear bomb detonated real close to us, then we all instantly fried and died - in a mighty, mighty intense flash - right there sitting in our schoolroom seats. There would not be enough time to run out into the hallway to duck and cover.

If the nuke detonated far enough away, and we kids had time to run out into the hallway to duck and cover, the bomb blast's horrific shock wave would blow in all of the windows on the side of the building that the blast came from, pass over and around the school, and then deadly shattering glass of the windows on the other side of the building would blast back into the schoolrooms when the shock wave came back through on its return trip that is caused by a vacuum effect sucking it back towards the point of where the nuclear bomb detonated.

If we schoolkids survived that by being out in the hallway, we had to head for the basement, where fallout shelter supplies were stored. There are still fallout shelter signs on the elementary school building where I attended first through sixth grade.

We were all taught the new air raid response technique and the reasons for it in a school assembly one day. After that, during air raid drills, everyone went out into the hallway to duck and cover.

Eventually, schools stopped having air raid drills; people figured out that it was useless to try to survive a nuclear blast, due to the deadly nuclear contamination of everything and everyone anywhere near the where the blast had occurred. Everyone was probably going to be dead within two weeks, anyway.

Part Two: Better Dead Than Red

I have been prepared to defend my country, my family and every American’s freedom ever since I got a grasp on what it all meant.

That was way back when I was in elementary school.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, of October 1962, occurred while I was twelve years of age and in the sixth grade in elementary school.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember very clearly watching my father watch TV way more intensely than ever before. It was in the olden days, before TV remote controls were popular. So when my dad was changing the station dial on the TV, to choose which show to watch, he often sat on a foot stool right there in front of the TV. But, during the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis, he stayed there sitting on that stool instead of getting up and going to sit on the sofa and watch the TV show, that he had chosen to watch, as was his normal habit. He sat there all zeroed in on the TV like a cat watching a mouse hole.

He wouldn’t move.

It got weird to me, so I asked my Dad what all that stuff on TV about the underwater missiles being pointed at us and the Communist Cubans and Russians and Khrushchev vs. Kennedy really meant. I had always known that for my entire twelve years on earth we had had Communist Nuclear Missiles pointed at us every split-second of the day, from somewhere; so I was wondering what was so important about these new missiles being found only ninety miles from the southern shores of America.

My Father turned on his stool, looked me square in my eyes, his face never before and never again had such a soul draining seriousness about it, and he said to me, “It means that we may be going to war.”

Dad knew that it wasn’t going to be like World War Two, when he had spent so many harrowing moments, months and years at sea fighting in the US Navy, over in the South Pacific. This new kind of 1962 war was comin’ right there to him on that stool he was sitting on, with his family all around him, in the form of nuclear fire and brimstone raining down hell on earth.

When I was attending elementary school - Merritt Elementary School in Dundalk, Maryland - I had a male sixth grade teacher who was a twenty-six year old, recently discharged Air Force Veteran. He was the first male classroom teacher that we had ever had in my school. He had done his four years of college, then four years in the Boy Scouts, I mean Air Force (sorry, accidental slip on inter-service rivalry from an old soldier), then he came to teach at our elementary school. We children in the class liked the teacher a lot.

Sometime shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended, one day during class, in the sixth grade, our male teacher gave us a lecture on capitalism vs. communism.

He went up to the black board and started writing:

Capitalism vs. Communism

Better Dead Than Red (this is still my favorite)

It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. (I have always admired this sentiment)

Kill or be Killed (then as now, you betcha)

Meat Eaters vs. Rice Eaters (I fell for this one)

And maybe a few others, that I can’t remember.

I don’t know if he had been lectured on or brain washed with this subject in the Air Force, or else he had been enamored with the ideals when once spealled out during a lecture, when he had heard it in the military or somewhere, or it had come from his favorite American capitalistic propaganda pamphlet.

When my classmates and I had been about three years younger, we had had that air raid drill change of tactics school assembly, when American schools changed from practicing reacting to the threat of conventional bombs being dropped on them to the threat of one humongously powerful nuclear bomb being dropped near them.

Then we had three more years of worsening nuclear fears, as we read more about nuke warfare in magazines and newspapers and also saw TV news stories about America’s nuclear war race with Russia and China.

When that male teacher started in on that capitalism vs. commie-ism lecture, we were ready to listen to that man. We students sat straight up in our chairs, then sat still, silent and serious the entire time he spoke to us.

Most of the capitalism vs. commie-ism lecture points, that the teacher spoke of that day, have fairly well stood the test of time. He had read the entire English language version of the Russian Commie Hand Book On How To Overthrow Capitalist Governments, and he pulled his copy of it out and showed us some of the written propaganda that is in it. He declared that it was all commie crap, and, basically, it was. I think? I don’t know. Was it a true translation of an actual Russian Commie pamphlet?

Even back then, I suspected that it may not have been a true translation or even a genuine copy of commie crap. It was written in the forceful style of all hard core propaganda that was a natural turn off to me back then and makes me laugh today.

I remember him showing us one page in it that had instructions for commie infiltrators and agitators. It instructed them to lie, cheat, steal, murder, commit acts of sabotage, disrupt the economy anyway that they could and do what ever else that they had to do to destroy capitalism in America and forcibly install a communist government on us here. Considering all that I have learned in my adult life about communist societies, that book definitely had some realistic facts in it. Not only are communist governing tactics miserable to have imposed on you, the gross national products of communist countries are dismal failures.

There was a part in the commie hand book that said that the best way to have a top notch nation is:

“From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. If one person drives a garbage truck, and another person is a doctor, as long as they both do their jobs the best that they can, then they each deserve the same rate of pay and to live in the same kind of houses.”

But the teacher said that life doesn’t work very well that way.

As a kid, that was confusing, because I thought that that meant that if everyone worked hard and shared everything equally, like we were taught to do all through elementary school, then the whole world would get along just peachy keen.

Oh my goodness!

That shows the juvenile truth about communism!

Well dog my cats!

You are a capitalist like me. You know that we humans need to be inspired by our food-clothing-shelter basic needs plus a desire to better ourselves and live finer lives, with our loved ones, in order for us to have the inner drive to be able to establish and maintain a good, safe, secure, prosperous society. That set of facts was in the pro-capitalist section of our teacher’s lecture.

“It’s better to live on your feet or die on your knees” (not according to that old guy in the hotel in Catch 22), and “better dead than red” are debatable ideals, and each has its time and place, but that all laid some heavy thoughts upon the minds of us sixth graders.

Although “kill or be killed” is always right in any situation that absolutely is a kill or be killed situation, it is not something that most twelve year old minds can think through to the point of knowing when to do what to whom.

That “rice eater vs. meat eater” bit in his lecture certainly fell short of its declarations, though.

That teacher assured all of us young Euro-American children, in our little segregated school house, that: we would always win wars against Asians; they are smaller in stature than us, and they live off of a diet that often consists mainly of rice, so therefore they are weaker than us; we are big, muscular, strong, healthy meat eaters; we will always beat little rice eaters in war.

That sure as hell ain’t so! Ask any Nam Vet. Before their first one year tour in Vietnam was over, many of them were calling that little lifetime rice eater called Charlie Cong: Mr. Charles or Sir Charles.

All in all though, on that day in 1962, my sixth grade teacher effectively instilled in me an already growing firm conviction to kill commies for American Mommies, until I was fed to the worms.

Part Three: The Blue Room

From as far back as I can recall - in my near-60-years of living on God's Good Earth - I have been aware of the hard, cold, brutal fact that communist controlled missiles are pointed at me anywhere I may be in the United States of America. Though the Cold War of American freedom loving countries verses freedom mangling communist countries has been declared to be over, there are still communist and other missiles that have their guidance systems programed to strike targets all over the USA.

When I was in the eighth grade, during 1963-64, at Dundalk Junior High School in Baltimore County Maryland, one of our teachers took our one class on a field trip to "The Blue Room" in Fort Meade, Maryland - where her husband was a captain in the US Army. He served as officer in charge of The Blue Room. It was a pleasantly lit room with all blue lights, no white lights, lots of radar screens with Army operators steadily watching them, and a clear, thick glass wall with a soldier on the other side very quickly and deftly - quite amazingly - writing backwards on his side of the glass - words which were frontwards on our side - then very quickly erasing some of the words and then deftly writing some more stuff backwards that we could all read frontwards from where we were standing.

First, it was explained to us schoolkids that blue lights are the easiest artificial light on the eyes and that is best for the army guys spending long hours everyday carefully watching the radar screens. Those soldiers were keeping track of the radar blips of every airplane flying in the Baltimore Washington flight corridor.

Then we were told about the guy writing backwards. It was then that we noticed several soldiers seated behind the backwards-writing soldier and the seated soldiers were talking on telephones. The captain said that the guys on the phones were talking to air traffic controllers at (what was then) Friendship Airport. The air traffic controllers were steadily telling the men on the phones the flight numbers and other pertinent info of planes that the air traffic controllers were in contact with. The men on the phones were telling the man writing backwards what the info was, so that he could write it on the glass wall for the radar operators on the other side of the clear wall to see and compare with what they saw as blips on their radar screens. Hence, any flying plane not double checked like that would be considered to be possible enemy aircraft sneaking around up there either spying on or ready to attack Americans.

It was right about then that I noticed right next to the closest radar operator man's hand there was a four inch wide, red, translucent, plastic, double hinged, safety cover over top of a three inch wide, solid black plastic button that had FIRE written in white on it. It was obvious that all the radar operator had to do was to move his hand a few short inches, flip that double hinged red, translucent, plastic, safety cover off of the top of that black plastic button with FIRE written in white on it and he could push the FIRE button down with the heel of his hand and shoot a missile up into the air. It was obvious, but I was so stunned at seeing it - THEE! BUTTON! (one that could begin a war) - there so readily accessible (I could have reached over and very easily had FIRED the missile me-own-young-self) that I blurted out, "You can push down on that button right now and shoot off a missile!?!?!"

The radar guy sitting there in a chair at the radar screen looked up into my quite animate, adolescent face, he smiled rather sheepishly, and with an ever-so-slight nod of his young-American-man's head and in a restrained, mild voice he said, "Yes."

I knew right then and there that he did not want to ever have to flip that red safety button off and push down on that black FIRE button. Everyone in that room was feeling the exact, precise, same train of thought as the young soldier by THE BUTTON.

Then the captain told us young, adolescent, eighth graders something that I could never forget. He told us that the missiles controlled by THE BUTTONS in the Blue Room were all located in hidden, buried underground missile bunkers all over Maryland. The captain said that at that very minute a farmer may be may be riding on his tractor, whilst plowing his farm field that is located over top of one of those buried bunkers, and if the missile in it had to be fired then the two feet or so of topsoil on top of the bunker would begin to quake and shake and slide off the bunker doors as the thick, heavy, steel, bomb blast proof doors spread open upwards and flipped the farmer and his tractor off to the side as the missile raised up and shot off into the wild blue yonder - at enemy aircraft that wasn't crafty enough to fool our radar systems and the dedicated soldier radar operators.

But that is not the most unforgettable aspect of the day.

The most unforgettable information we junior high school kids were given privy to, that afternoon in Ft. Meade, was that the US Army had missiles pointed at Fort Holabird in my great American hometown of Dundalk, Md. and some where also pointed at the Bethlehem Steel Mills in Sparrows Point, Md. a few easy miles from Dundalk and where I went several times a month during my entire growing up years, because my grandparents lived in the small American mill town there and my family went to church in that wonderful, family friendly mill town named Sparrows Point.

On that 1963-64 day in Ft. Meade's Blue Room, we junior high school children from Dundalk, Maryland were hit with the brutal realization that we not only lived 'under the gun' of commie-rat missiles - as we had always known - we lived with the very real possibility that American missiles would one final day wipe us and our families, friends and neighbors right off the face of the earth.

I accepted then, and still do, as completely reasonable and sensible why our own missiles had been pointed at me and mine during the entire time that I was growing up in Dundalk and Sparrows Point.

Fort Holabird contained the - top secretive and also positively pertinent to America's well being - U.S. Army Intelligence School. Bethlehem Steel was known for producing war armaments for America and our allies. If the United States' enemies were to set off one of the newest modern war terrors - The Neutron Bomb - over the Dundalk and Sparrows Point areas - the effects of a Neutron Bomb is to kill all life below its detonation area but not break a single twig on a tree - the enemy would capture Ft. Holabird and Beth Steel intact. They'd only have to conquer a small section of the East Coast of the USA in and around Maryland at first, then get the intel files, fact books, spy equipment and other Top Secret stuff from Holabird to know a whole lot more about how to conquer the rest of the United States, along with the entire world; in-depth intel files on America's friends as well as our enemies were maintained and stored at Fort Holabird; and the enemy would also have been able to produce fresh armaments made at Beth Steel to do the rest of the conquering with.

The enemy could not be allowed to capture Fort Holabird and the Bethlehem Steel Mills. I preferred, and still do prefer, death over the losses of such supremely valuable assets to my enemies.

Fug it. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

Introduction to A True Tale of Military Madness

2006-12-08T11:41:00.000-08:00

I grew up believing in just about everything that had ever been taught to me by my family and by my public education. Too many of those beliefs were smashed to bits and soon dissipated into thin air, while I served in the United States Army as ‘Official’ Brigade Photographer for the 30th Artillery Brigade Air Defense missile unit on Okinawa.

I was serious about soldiering, dedicated to doing a great job at my assigned tasks; I zoomed from Private E-1 up to Specialist Fourth Class in the first ten months of my military service; I knew that I had become an excellent photographer and was going to be one for the rest of life.

Unfortunately, I was illegally assigned to the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa, in 1970.

I was shattered by the facts that: I was never issued any camera gear to do army photo assignments; I could not order photography equipment or supplies; nor could I earn an advance in rank; and the hard, horrible fact that the photo lab I worked in was set up in a nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber was an intensely screwed up situation that had the very real potential of allowing millions of American casualties to occur during a nuclear war.

What was a young 20-year-old kid supposed to do about that?

Not one single US Army order ever given to me while stationed with the 30th Arty Bgde was legal. Not even the army discharge they gave me was legal. I am quite certain that, technically, I am still in the Army.

Keep on reading through this web site. I completely qualify, and provide witness information for, everything written here.

The Illegality and Immorality of My Assignment to the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa

2006-12-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

My first day at the US Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School in Ft. Monmouth New Jersey. Our first class assignment was for us brand new, and very happy, students to pair off and take a photo of each other. That's a 4 x 5 Graflex Speed Graphics large format camera, and at my feet is the rest of the issued gear plus the tripod that was mine to use for the next fifteen weeks. I loved every minute of photography school.

That's Specialist Fourth Class Crews there - yours truly - at the left side of this shot heading into position to photograph an approaching parade of 30th Artillery Brigade missilemen and all the other guys - every cook, clerk, and driver, etc. - who were my comrades-in-arms. The soldiers you see in the photo are the 30th Arty Bgde officers and their families. It was part of an all day change of command ceremony for our brigade commander. And I worked hard at photographing it all day then spent the the evening, till after 11 PM, developing film and custom, hand printing 90 4 x 5 photos of the event that were given out to all of the officers there.

I did several photo assignments of formal, 30th Arty Bgde events held at the largest officers' club on Okinawa. Those were quite relaxing and very tuned-in times for me; I was tuned in to any great photo op that popped up. My photographic specialty was - and always will be - candid photos with everyone in the shots looking their natural best selves and obviously enjoying each others' company. And I always got to sit down to eat the big, formal meal with the officers and their wives. It was the same with 30th Arty Bgde events held at the enlisted men's club. I also photographed the 30th Arty Bgde's family picnics, some command inspections, soldier of the month awards, and promotion in rank ceremonies. Everyone who asked, not just those who had the power to order me to, were given photos I custom hand printed for them. I was happy to do that - for the moral of the troops. It made those guys, along with their wives and children, feel good to send photos of themselves to their loved ones back home.

When I enlisted into the Army, in 1969, I signed up for three years - which was one year over the military draft’s requirement of two years of service. I voluntarily enlisted for a third year so that I could go to the US Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School at Ft. Monmouth, NJ.. After graduating from Photo Lab Tech School, I attained the rank of Specialist Fourth Class (E-4 after only ten months of military service, three months inactive - before I had to report to basic training - plus seven months active duty and I made E4 is an awesome accomplishment, which required hard work and dedication to duty). I had become a damned good soldier. Then I was sent to Okinawa.

My assignment to Okinawa was great news to me. Because, during the time that I was in Army basic training and studying at Photo Lab Tech School in Ft. Monmouth, not one soldier, whom I ever knew of, wanted to be sent to Vietnam. Neither did I.

Besides being trained in a set of professional skills, that I had an interest in, and natural talent at making good use of, the one thing that I wanted most, to get to do while serving my country in the military, was to be sent as far away from the East Coast of the United States as possible. I had lived all of my nineteen years on Earth there, and it was time for a change; I wanted to travel, and see some of the rest of world.

On Okinawa, the Army assigned me to Headquarters Battery 30th Artillery Brigade as ‘Official’ Brigade Photographer.

The 30th Arty Bgde was a missile unit. We had great big Nike Hercules Nuclear Missiles on some of my unit’s thirteen missile sites! And, we had smaller Hawk Missiles on some of our missile sites too.

Our brigade motto was, "Always On Target."

The Island of Okinawa sets way out from Communist China’s coast line, at just exactly the right spot for an alert, fully prepared missile brigade to be able to steadfastly maintain a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year missile defense shield. The 30th Artillery Air Defense Brigade was assigned to be there, on Okinawa, to help defend the free world from Communist Chinese nuclear attack.

I was the first Army trained photographer to be assigned to work as the 30th Arty Brigade’s ‘official photographer’. The 30th Arty had finagled paperwork to get themselves a real photographer. They wanted their-picture-taken as often as possible. The entire situation thoroughly violated countless Army Rules and Regulations. I do not know what I was listed as on the unit roster, or if I was listed at all.

Before I was assigned to the 30th Arty Bgde, their photographers had been soldiers from the brigade who were supposed to be working there as radar techs, company clerks or whatever their original jobs had been in the brigade. But they wanted to be photographers, so they eagerly volunteered to shoot and print photos of the 30th Arty personnel at work and play.

The man whom I was replacing, as brigade photographer, was Spec 5 Swigget (Swiggert? I’m not sure of the spelling). Swigget told me that his mother owned the franchises to three Pepsi Cola bottling plants somewhere in the Mid-West States, and that she used to send him a check every month that equaled half of his Army pay, so that she could declare him as a deduction on her income tax. His mother used to donate tons of Pepsi Cola to political campaigns. She used those political connections to help her son in the Army get away with lots of crap that no one else could. Swigget told me that he had "HAS POLITICAL INFLUENCE" stamped on his Army record folders, so that everyone knew not to mess with him and to outright coddle the guy.

When Swiggett gave me my inaugural tour of the 30th Arty Bgde photo lab, I was stunned by the real crotch kicker in this historic narrative == the brigade's photo lab was not only illegal, it was set up in the nuclear fallout decontamination chamber for an underground nuclear fallout shelter communications bunker called "The Mole Hole." That secretive bunker was hidden in a hillside next to the 30th Artillery Brigade Headquarters office building.

Holy cow chips Batman!!

That photo lab compromised our stated military mission!!!

The Mole Hole was snuggled into that hillside right next to headquarters, because if America got into a nuclear boxing match with Communist China, the 30th Arty would need a safe, secure nuclear fallout chamber full of radio gear and other equipment that we would need to be able to coordinate offensive and defensive strikes with our missiles, along with the missiles of stateside military units, US Navy submarines and other war ships, US Air Force and US Marine jet planes, etcetteras, against enemy aircraft with nuclear bombs aboard and passing overhead of us on their way to obliterate my family, friends, neighbors, former school teachers and school mates and everyone else in America.

If the area immediately around brigade headquarters and the Mole Hole bunker was not obliterated by a direct hit from an enemy nuclear war head, the area might be contaminated with nuclear fallout snow from war heads that had dropped on other parts of the island. In the case of that scenario, certain, pertinent 30th Arty technicians and command personnel, who were authorized and trained to use secret codes and all that stuff, had to be in the bunker. They had to be able to verify who they were when they contacted outside military commands to inform them of what condition the Okinawan US Military’s Bases were in and to supply any info that the Mole Hole guys had on enemy movements, casualty figures and all that jazz. If any of those pertinent personnel were not in the bunker at the time of the nuclear attack, they would have to hightail it over to the bunker; but before they could be allowed into the bunker, they would have had to have been decontaminated of any nuclear snow that may have fallen on them.

The main door that we used to enter the Mole Hole, to go to work everyday, was a large, thick, steel, bank vault style door that was to be closed, locked and guarded if a nuke attack occurred. About thirty feet from the vault door, there was a regular sized steel door that was the entrance to the decontamination chamber. That second door was never used and was always padlocked inside and out. In the case of a nuclear attack, there would have been armed guards at that door too, after the two padlocks on it - one inside and one outside - were removed.

When the hightailing technicians and command personnel made it to the Mole Hole, they were to identify themselves to the guards, then step through the regular sized door and into an outer chamber, disrobe, and step into a shower to wash off the nuclear snow - so that they did not contaminate the other soldiers who were already in the Mole Hole; then the authorized personnel stepped into an inner chamber to receive some of the clothing that was kept in the bunker in large wooden crates that were full of necessaries and were always kept there for a two week stay underground.

The lab’s photo enlarger and print developing trays were on a tall, heavy metal table that blocked the padlocked door which gave access from the outside into the tiny outer room of the decontamination chamber. There was also a refrigerator in that cramped space for keeping film and photo paper in. Black curtains were hung across both open sides of the decontamination shower, so that we could keep white light (it ruins photo paper) out of the enlarging area of the darkroom. Then, in a small, janitorial closet sized inner chamber, where the decontaminated soldiers were to be given clean clothes, was where the photographers' print washing and drying equipment was located. There was also shelving in there for photo supply storage. There is no doubt that all of that negated any possibility of any quick, efficient use of the nuclear emergency decontamination aspect of the chamber.

Had that decontamination chamber ever been needed in an emergency, it would have been quite a frantic mess when the Mole Hole guys would have had to try disassembling and moving all of those heavy metal photo lab furnishings, the darkroom and other photo equipment plus the photo developing chemical supplies out of their way while dealing with freaked out, semi-nuked soldiers who were trying to get past armed guards and into the relative safety of the underground bunker. Of course, there would have also been all kind'sa unauthorized personnel trying to bust their way in with their wives and kids and all. "JUST TAKE MY BABY; PLEASE LET MY LITTLE BABY IN THERE!!"

Clearly, my photo lab was against Army Rules and Regulations.

Then Swiggett informed me that I could neither order any photo equipment nor any kinds of supplies - at all - to do my Army photo assignments. I had to find some way to scrounge them up somehow. That really took me aback.

In those days, both photo and stereo equipment that was sold on Okinawa usually cost no more than 40% of its stateside prices. Naturally, at those low prices on Okinawa, I intended to buy myself some top notch professional camera equipment anyway, so I ended up using my personal camera gear, and sometimes my money for film, to do all of my Army photo assignments.

On my second or third day at the 30th Arty Bgde, Swigget informed me that I could not advance in rank while I was there.

I was assigned to that unit for eighteen months, and, at that time, in the US Army, anyone who was posted overseas for a year or more usually got a promotion in rank if they did just a half-decent job at their MOS (Military Occupation Specialty -official job). So, I asked him why I could never advance in rank at the 30th Arty.

He told me that his MOS was not photography, but that he was being paid, by the Army, to work in an office in the 30th Arty Bgde’s headquarters office building. Then it sure enough shocked me, when the next thing that he informed me of was the hard, cold fact that there was no slot for a photographer anywhere in the 30th Arty Bgde. Consequently, when promotion opportunities came down from above, I could not apply for one.

Swiggert told me that when opportunities for promotion came down they would be distributed amongst the various army units something like this: three soldiers in a unit get to go from E2 up to E3, one soldier gets to go from E3 up to E4, and so on. The individual soldiers in each unit then had to compete for the promotions by proving that they were most worthy for them through their personal conduct and efficiency ratings, their MOS evaluations, maybe recommendations from their sergeants and officers. I don’t recall all of the exact terms or requirements that he cited, but it was by achieving requirements like that that a soldier had to show that they were worthy of the prize of a promotion in rank. Swiggert informed me that it was the fact that I could never receive an evaluation of my MOS that prevented me from getting a promotion, because my MOS was not authorized to be in the 30th Brigade.

I received my discharge from the Army while in the 30th Arty, and I can show you on my discharge records this official statement: “Soldier has no record of evaluation in his MOS.”

There were two guys working as photographers for the 30th, when I was first assigned to work there. One was Swiggert and the other was named Medley (not sure of the spelling). They were about as lackadaisical, nonproductive and sloppy about their photography as could be. Medley turned in 8×10 photos printed backwards and with white, photo chemical thumb prints all over them. Medley was off photographing, then in the lab developing and printing, his own stuff more than the 30th Arty’s; because he had a contract with a travel magazine that had paid him to do travel photos of Okinawa. It infuriated me. Swiggert just didn’t give a damn. Them two individuals had reputations for taking three months to get photos printed after they had shot an Army assignment. But when I took over the lab, it averaged me three days from assignment to handing in a full set of prints.

I asked Swiggert how he got away with being the way he was in the Army. He replied, while pointing his finger over at the 30th Brigade Headquarters office building, “I’ve got too much on too many of them for them to do anything about it.” My immediate guess at the time was that he meant the ins and outs of our illegal photo lab situation.

I later figured out it had as much to do with his mother and her political connections as anything else. But I have heard that he had been selling Army photo supplies to certain officers - including medical officers who would write him fake medical excuses, so he could get out of being a real soldier.

Those two clerks/jerks masquerading as official photographers had been in the Army, and assigned to the 30th Arty, for long enough times for them to acquire the army know-how and contacts to scrounge up photo supplies. Unfortunately for me, they never took the time and made the effort to introduce me to the right supply clerks or photographers in other units who could help me to get into a photo equipment and supply scrounging and swapping circuit. Those two Army jerks didn’t mind using their own camera equipment to do the job, because to them it was much better than working at a desk tap-tap-tapping their days away on an Army issue typewriter, or whatever their official jobs were.

I have natural abilities and compulsions to work hard at photography, and I did that for the 30th Arty, despite my film stock running low, then running out at times. I had to buy some film with my own money now and then, and then my film stock would be replenished with any old stuff that my 30th Artillery Brigade Headquarters Battery Public Information Office bosses (non-coms and commissioned officers) could scrounge up for me. I had no choice on the black and white film types that I had to use, and most of it was past its expiration date. No professional photographer wants to have to go shoot a sunny, outdoor job using high speed film that is designed for low light conditions, or visa versa. Nor do we want to use any expired film at all to do a job, unless we want some hazy, muddy looking negatives to print artistic, special effects photographs from.

The Army had trained me for fifteen good weeks, five days a week for seven-eight hours a day to be a photographer. It was top notch training, no doubt about it. I loved that training.

But, when I enlisted and signed up for the United States Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School, my recruiter informed me that the Army only guaranteed that I be trained as a photographer, not that I would work as one. The Army could have assigned me to do any job that they needed me in. The 30th Arty Bgde could have made me work for them as a clerk, a cook, a missile crewman, garbage can scrubber or anything else where they had a slot to fill, but there was no slot for a photographer there. I would have accepted working at any MOS they needed me in, as long as it was legal, there was a slot for me there and they supplied the equipment and supplies.

Despite all of that illegality and immorality, I kept up my good photography work until those gross infractions of rules and regulations caused me too many unnecessary and insurmountable problems.

When a person is in the military, they are government property. If I had taken any kind of legal military action against the 30th Arty for stealing me, in order to make me their personal photographer, or if I had contacted my Congressman about it, or had done anything like that back then, it would have meant the probability of retaliation from the personnel at 30th Arty who were guilty of stealing me as government property. I knew that if they could finagle the paperwork to get me there when it was against Army Rules and Regulations, then they would most likely pull a fast one and send me to the worst duty station possible, or something, before I could do anything about it.

Despite all of that illegality and immorality of my assignment to the 30th Artillery Brigade HHB on Okinawa, I worked hard at being the best photographer that I could be for the 30th Artillery Brigade Air Defense Hawk and Nike Hercules missile unit on Okinawa, during 1970-71. The 30th Arty Brigade personnel were thrilled by my printed photographs due to the way that my photos of them at work and play turned out real nice.

I had to print photos for publication in our brigade monthly magazine and other army publications, plus for display on our brigade’s bulletin boards. Also, I was always ordered to print extra copies of my photos that were to be given to the troops who were pictured in them. That made me feel quite complete inside, because I knew that my work would be important to those comrades of mine and their families for years and decades to come.

The 30th Arty’s photo lab had been set up, several years before I got there, by a guy named Jim Whitcomb of Houston, Texas. I found Jim through Internet searches using – ”30th Artillery Brigade” + photographer – as a search term. Jim is a successful photographer, and he had been featured in an issue of the American Society of Media Photographer’s magazine, which was on the Internet.

I spoke to Jim on the phone about a year or so ago; we talked for over an hour about how he had scrounged photo equipment and supplies through contacts that he already had had in the military and about the lab being set up illegally in the decontamination chamber, etc.. Not only had Jim been in the 30th Arty Bgde for awhile before he set up the lab, his father was a career soldier. I didn't ask what rank his dad had held, but Jim was an enlisted man who hung out after work on Okinawa with officers, not the enlisted men in the 30th Arty Headquarters Battery, where he had a private room in the barracks. When Jim could not get a promotion in rank, because there was no slot for a photographer in the 30th, an Army General - who was a drinking buddy of Jim's, personally saw that Jim received a promotion.

You can contact Jim at:
Studio Houston Digital Photography
5401 Mitchelldale Suite B2
Houston, Texas
Phone 713 682 0067
Fax 713 682 0067
Email sales@studiohouston.com

I have sent numerous emails to Jim Witcomb, but he does not reply. The important ones are posted further along on this web site, and sending them constitutes direct action in the direction of having him help me to prove my case here. Other emails were sent so he knows who and what kind of a person I honestly am.

Because Jim refuses to help me, things are going to get real rough, one day soon. He will have to deal with it and admit the truth. I do not know why he hides from it, except maybe he feels extremely guilty for how he set up a photo lab that negated the prescribed - extremely important - use of the nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber.

Though most likely impossible, I prefer to be friends with Jim, not a guy who has to make him do something he does not want to. Jim is an excellent, successful digital photographer, and he could be very helpful in coaching me on digital photography - I need to become fully adept at it but do not know much about it at all. I have solid plans for how to make good use of digital photography.

I believe that there is government evidence to prove that there was no authorization for the 30th Arty to have any photographers. The evidence is in the morning reports and unit rosters for the 30th Arty Bgde that are on file at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, MO.. The evidence could possibly be the lack of any entries that state a person with a photography MOS was assigned to the 30th Arty.

Something that can help me must be there. I tried to get all of the 30th Arty Bgde HHB morning reports and unit rosters, but I cannot afford to pay for the research, copying and shipping of them.

I did manage to order an official list of the number of clerks, cooks, etc. that my army unit was composed of, I have a copy of the Table Of Organization and Equipment dated 31 July 1967 for Headquarters and Headquarters Battery Air Defense Artillery Brigade, and there is no slot for a photographer on it.

Depression Sets In

2006-12-08T10:35:00.000-08:00

I had arrived on Okinawa during the last week of June in 1970. Previous to that point in time, I had made it through the Army’s basic training and then their Photographic Laboratory Technician School with high enough class work grades, plus excellent Conduct and Efficiency Ratings, to earn me the rank of Specialist Fourth Class with only ten months of military service to my name — three months inactive prior to entering basic and seven active. That is a very quick rise from the rank of E-1 to E-4.

Then, beginning in the late summer of 1970, I began to suffer from severe depression and some troubling anxiety. It screwed up my sleep patterns something fierce; I couldn’t get to sleep till near daybreak, my dreams became so intense that they exhausted me, and I had trouble waking up in the morning. I never would have made it through basic and photo training if I had been like that previously. I was now suffering from an acquired sleep disorder.

My depression and problems getting to sleep had something to do with the anxiety which I experienced because of my reasonable concerns about that damned photo lab negating the intended use of the decontamination chamber during a possible nuclear attack on Okinawa. I did not possess unreasonable fears of immediate nuclear war, but the 30th Arty was part of the chain of defense against nuclear war - a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link - and the photo lab in that decontamination chamber rendered the 30th Arty into a very weak link, indeed.

I may have some kind of an anxiety disorder, but it has always helped me to be a safer person, it has never kept me from doing dangerous things that were either necessary or just for the thrilling fun and/or accomplishment of it. I just pay more attention to safety than most other people do when doing daring things.

Several times, when I was a kid setting on a beach watching all of the other beach goers playing and swimming around in the water, I was struck by deep, wrenching concerns for their safety out there. I wondered what I would do if any of them needed my help in the event that any of them had begun drowning. The consequence of those wrenching concerns was that I took Red Cross Swimming Lessons as soon as I was old enough to and finished up four swimming seasons later with a Red Cross Junior Life Saving Certificate, at the age of fourteen.

You had to be sixteen to take the Senior Life Saving Course, but I never got to take the Senior Life Saving Course because the beach down the street from my house - where I had to take my swimming lessons - was closed because of water pollution when I was fifteen years old. But the only difference in Junior and Senior Life Saving was the number of laps swum during training and the distance we had to swim during our final exam, when we had to "save" a lifeguard who was pretending to drown.

The point is here that although I may have an anxiety disorder, any extra anxiety which I may possess has usually served me well during my life, because it spurs me to be a safer minded and acting person.

Unfortunately, I was apparently the only soldier in the 30th Artillery Brigade who felt anxious about the photo lab being illegally and immorally set up in the underground communication bunker's decontamination chamber.

I sure as hell was the victim of too much unprecedented anxiety when I lay awake, tossing and turning, in my bunk at night in the 30th Arty Brigade Headquarters barracks while trying to figure out how my had life become so insane, how could I be the only soldier in the brigade not allowed to get a promotion, why do I have to buy camera gear and sometimes film to do army work, and if the Communists attack will my photo lab being in the decontamination chamber cause tens of millions of deaths in America?

Now hold on there, that tens of millions of deaths fear truly does sound nuts. Doesn’t it? It does to the Veterans Administration.

The decontamination chamber had to be there for a military reason. Right?

If the 30th Arty Brigade Headquarters Battery did not get instantly nuked to crispy cinders by an airborne Communist nuclear attack on the island, then we might get an indirect hit from a nuclear war head. In that case, the chamber was there so that any brigade personnel who were pertinent to the operation of the Mole Hole’s equipment, but who were not in the Mole Hole at the time of the attack, could wash any nuclear snow off of themselves, and then go underground for two weeks to complete their assigned mission of coordinating defensive strikes with other U.S Army units, and the other branches of the United States Armed Forces. The 30th Arty Bgde Mole Hole was part of a chain of defense that was designed to stop the Commie Rats who had nuked Okinawa from flying their bombers all the way across the Pacific Ocean and nukin’ the freakin’ United States and killing tens of millions of Americans.

Well, anyway, that’s sort of the way that Swigget explained it to me on my first day in the 30th Arty Bgde photo lab — the facts are from him, but the flavor of it is mine.

Hey! Think about this: if you were alive when that photo lab was in the decontamination chamber, then that tens of millions of deaths number could have included you.

Too many people feel that because the nuclear war didn’t happen, it could not have happened; consequently, to their way of thinking, my problems with the lab being in that decontamination chamber are simply bullcrap. Which also means that - to their way of thinking - America's entire nuclear defense system is unnecessary and worthless.

If the war had happened, and the decontamination chamber had been needed, but the photo lab had negated the use of it, then most likely everyone in the 30th Arty Bgde would have died. So the individuals who were responsible for allowing that photo lab to be there had nothing to worry about.

The degree of probability of the decontamination chamber being needed in a nuclear emergency does not matter. What matters is that I believed that because the 30th Arty put the decontamination chamber there, it needed be maintained so that it was ready to do what the rest of the United States Armed Forces expected it to do. To me, it was a weak link in our chain of defense; and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Therefore, I still say that I was right, that it was healthy thinking, when I became deeply disturbed, shocked and depressed that the entire command staff and cadre of non-commissioned officers of the 30th Artillery Brigade allowed the photo lab to function in the nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber. I can not make it any plainer than that.

It seems that nobody but me, back then or today, was or is shocked about learning that the photo lab was set up in the nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber.

For many 30th Brigade personnel, it may be because by 1970-71 many of the soldiers serving in the 30th knew that at least one of the missile systems we manned was obsolete. We had medium sized, single stage Hawk, and larger, two stage Nike-Hercules Missiles.

I was not privy to any information about our missiles being obsolete, until after I had spent over six, long, frustrating, angry, demoralizing, depressing months worrying about the potential consequences of my photo lab being in that damned decontamination chamber.

The way that one of my 30th Arty comrades, and a few other guys who were relaxing with us in our barracks after work one day, explained it to me was that our Hawk and our nuclear war head armed Nike-Hercules missile systems couldn’t react fast enough to raise, aim, and fire any missiles before one of Communist China’s or Russia’s Air Forces’ newest, swiftest nuclear bombers could fly in on Okinawa, and do more damage to the island - in a few flashing moments - than the horrific World War Two Battle of Okinawa did in a month. Then the aircraft could head straight for the United States of America, where our families lived and were incorrectly, but proudly, believing that our military jobs were supporting and helping to maintain an around the clock - alert and ready - defensive position that was an important part of America’s chain of defense against Communist world domination, during the Cold War.

[I just searched the Internet for a web page to link to which explained that the missiles were obsolete. According to the web sites I saw, it was the development of intercontinental ballistics missiles that made the Nike-Hercules obsolete, not enemy Air Force bombers. The Nikes could not shoot down other missiles very well. I am leaving in what I was told by the guys who were part of our 30th Arty Bgde Nike-Hercules system, because that was all I had to go on back then. There still must have been at least some chance of enemy bombers coming at us at any time. Either way, in 1970-71, many of the soldiers of the 30th Arty knew that our missiles were obsolete.

However, the strategic landscape was changing and by the mid-1960s it was clear that massed Soviet bombers were no longer a credible threat while Intercontinental Ballistics Missiles (ICBMs) were. The U.S. defense posture shifted to deterrence and the Nike became obsolete. Most Nike sites were closed by the end of 1974, with the exception of batteries in Alaska and Florida that stayed active until the late 1970s. The last U.S. Army Nike Hercules sites continued on duty in West Germany and South Korea until 1984.

If our 30th Artillery Brigade air defense missiles were obsolete, when I was in that unit, it appears that we weren’t a reliable part of any defense. We may have been able to provide some help in thwarting a nuclear attack though; some 30th Arty Bgde missile sites may have gotten off a shot or two at incoming enemy aircraft; we may have had some chance of completing the part of our brigade’s mission that the Mole Hole was there for, even if we did not get to shoot down any attacking aircraft.

The problem was, the soldiers who had set up that photo lab and then the ones who had kept functioning, where it was in the decontamination chamber, may have figured that the fact that our missiles were obsolete meant that the photo lab wasn’t ever going to cause any deaths at all.

Was I a fool to at first believe that the 30th Arty Bgde was an integral part of the free world’s chain of defense against Communist military aggression, and was I a fool for fully believing that having the photo lab in the decontamination chamber jeopardized tens of millions of lives?

Maybe I was.

But, I didn’t hear that stunning tid-bit about our obsolete missiles till I was already real angry, deeply depressed and thoroughly stressed out to the max about my whole 30th Arty Bgde situation.

It bothers me that I may have had it wrong as to exactly why the Nikes were obsolete, and it will bother certain other veterans more. The Hawks may not have been obsolete, but they were upgraded in 1971 to keep up with our enemies developments in aircraft. What those guys told me in the barracks that day was all I had to go on, though, up till today. It was barracks scuttlebutt, but we all felt like we had been crapped on when we were talking about it. My buddies were correct about the Nike-Hercs being obsolete, that is what matters most.

Today, September 6, 2006, (I am adding this to my blog posting today) I found out, during more searching for historical facts about Nike-Hercs, that they were obsolete when the 30th Arty Bgde set up that photo lab in their Mole Hole’s nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber.

What I found just now on the Internet, during my second search for obsolete Nike-Herc and Hawk info, is the following:

After 1955, Hanford’s air defensive installations began the transition to Nike Ajax missiles; later replaced by Nike Hercules missiles. By the late 1950’s, the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles had rendered Nike missiles obsolete.

The Nike Hercules replaced the Ajax missiles in the late 1950’s. By 1960, however, the development of the intercontinental ballistic missiles had rendered Nike missiles obsolete, and the Nike sites were abandoned when Camp Hanford was deactivated in 1960 and closed in 1961.

Basic HAWK was developed in the 1950s and initially fielded in 1960. The system has been upgraded through a series of product improvements beginning with the Improved HAWK in 1970.

I have not been able to find info on the Internet to support a claim that the 30th Arty Bgde’s Hawk Missiles were obsolete in 1970-71, but there is historical info that the Hawk system was improved during 1970-71. On December 21, 1971, over a month after my discharge from the Army, the improved Hawk system was type classified Standard A. It appears that this means the improved Hawk was given a stamp of approval by the U.S. Military. Then, in May 1972, improved Hawk support items were first deployed to Germany. This historical info may mean that the improvements were made because the Hawks were more or less obsolete in early 1971, when my buddies first told me about any of our missiles being obsolete.

The 30th Arty’s photo lab was set up in their Mole Hole around 1968, so it probably never endangered anyone’s life. It is doubtful that the Mole Hole was ever going to be used in any nuclear confrontation during the time in which the lab was set up in there, because the missiles were not going to be used, because, after 1960 any Communist airborne attack would have most likely been by intercontinental ballistic missiles, not bombers.

This historical information just might exonerate Jim Whitcomb, and all the others responsible for that photo lab being where it was, from being considered negligent in their U.S. Army roles as defenders of the free world.

These newly discovered, to me, historical facts sure as flyin’ f### don’t help me to deal with what happened during my U.S. Army tour of duty in the 30th Arty though. It makes me feel worse to think that certain U.S Army and Government leaders knew these facts for ten g**damn years previous to my assignment to work in a Nike-Herc brigade.

I don’t know what to think. One Internet source claims that our Nike-Hercs known to be obsolete by 1960, others say it was in the mid 1960s. Either way, they were obsolete before I was ever assigned to the 30th Arty Bgde.

Now knowing that serving my country in the 30th Arty Bgde had been known to be a possible waste of everyone’s time, and tax payer’s money, for several years before my military service began, angers me even more than I have ever been.

I Applied for A Transfer Out of the 30th Arty Bgde

2006-12-07T19:38:00.000-08:00

Back in August or September of 1970, after several months of doing a great job at photographing the 30th Artillery Brigade personnel at work and play, because I loved doing it, I had spent all that I was willing to of my own money on the photographic equipment and supplies needed to do those photo assignments. Not only that, I couldn’t deal with the guilt of knowing that my photo lab’s location in the nuclear fallout decontamination chamber compromised our military mission - a mission which I believed in deeply enough to be willing to sacrifice my life for.

Consequently, I applied for an inner-island transfer out of 30th Arty Bgde. An inner island transfer request meant that they couldn’t use my request to send me to some place that I didn’t want to go - like: Vietnam, or back to the states.

When I joined the Army at age nineteen, my entire young life had been lived on the East Coast of the USA. I had hoped to be stationed anywhere about as far away from the East Coast as they could send me, and somewhere overseas. I'd rather have been stationed in Vietnam than on the Eastern Seaboard of America.

I waited about a week for the transfer paperwork to go through proper channels, and then I went into the 30th Arty Bgde Headquarters Battery First Sergeant’s Office and inquired as to the status of my transfer request. The First Sergeant told me that I was “too valuable” and had been denied a transfer.

An E-6 sergeant, army lifer, clerk, working in the office, showed me a printed piece of paper in his hand and said, “But, here, you can sign this, and we can get you to Vietnam in less then two weeks, if you want to put in for that transfer.” Him saying that really pissed-me-off, because he was an army lifer who had never been in, and probably was never going to be in, any war zone.

There happened to be three army office clerk lifers in the First Sergeant’s office on the day that they offered me a transfer to Vietnam, and not one of them had been to, or probably ever going to volunteer for, Vietnam. Each of the three with 6, 8, maybe 12 years of army time behind them, if they were willing to go get into the Vietnam War they would have done so already. I couldn't figure out how anyone could be living their lives completing a 20 or 30 year hitch in the military with a war going on and not go get into that war for at least one tour of duty and help fight that war. The way that one of those three army office clerk lifers in the First Sergeant’s office, who was a Specialist 6th Class, looked back over his shoulder and snickered to number two clerk, an E6 Staff Sergeant, who grinned snidely back at the Spec 6 clerk, and then glanced at the First Sergeant and grinned at him, and then the way that the First Sergeant reacted to them other two clerks by snickering into his cupped hand as he walked away from us and over to the other side of the room, indicated to me that a veiled threat had just been delivered to me.

The unspoken, veiled threat amounted to this: "Crews, you better shut up and get it into your thick head that we ain’t letting you go. We can’t replace you. If you don’t do what we say, no matter whether we get you any camera equipment and photo supplies or not, and especially if you go above our heads out of this brigade to try for a transfer, or if you are stupid enough to complain about your situation to the Army Inspector General or to your Congressman, if you keep it up and push this request for a transfer any further, then we will illegally finagle the paperwork to get you sent to Vietnam just like we illegally finagled the paperwork to get you here in the 30th Arty Bgde. Even though the 1970 Army was only allowed to make you do one overseas tour per three year enlistment, and you are legally allowed to stay on Okinawa if you transfer out of this brigade."

About 99% of the guys who went into the Army, when I did, were terrified of going to Vietnam. I wasn’t exactly terrified of it myself, the intense action and surging adrenaline aspects of war intrigued me. After all, during the year before I had enlisted into the Army I had been a Registered Maine Hunting Guide who specialized in guiding Black Bear hunters. I was familiar with firearms, but we guides had to leave our guns at the hunting lodge when we tracked wounded bears at night, or else we could have been arrested for illegal hunting at night. Of course, by the time we found them wounded bears, we were always hoping to find that they had finally dropped dead from the wounds which they had received from bullets fired by our paying hunters, whom we were guiding at the time. Between June 1st and late October of 1969, I walked unarmed into the deep, dark, nighttime Northern Maine woods, whilst in pursuit of wounded bears, 30 or 40 times while helping other more experienced Maine Guides, and at least 15 to 20 times all-by-me-lonesome. And I 'dug' it.

Some GIs think they will always make it through any war - that they fight in - without receiving any wounds (neither physical nor psychological) and without being taken prisoner by the enemy. Not me though, ever since I was a teenager in high school, I figured that I could be taken prisoner, be wounded, loose limbs, go nuts or die.

I did believe in the Domino Theory, which I had been taught, early on, sometime during my school days. In case that you're not familiar with the Domino Theory, it stated that if the country of Vietnam fully fell into communist hands, so would its neighboring countries. Then the commies would keep taking over more and more countries that are next to or near Vietnam, till they had enough communist soldiers and industrial workers to build up enough strength and power to take over the entire free world.

I have always wanted the whole world to live free. I put my life on the line for that cause, when I enlisted into the Army.

But, I was confused by the news reports I had seen about the deaths of my peers in Vietnam, and the protests against that war. Especially when I learned that Nam War Vets were protesting against the war - I figured that they knew what was really going on over there and whether it was worth Americans being involved in or not. When I was first stationed on Okinawa as an American GI, I wasn’t sure whether or not that the war in Vietnam was helping anyone in any way. That damned war was, and the history of it still is, to say the least, controversial. Because that confusing controversy was muddlin’ up my mind, when I was turned down for that inter-island transfer, I turned down the 30th Arty Bgde’s office clerk's 'kind, generous' offer to allow me to go take my chances in the Vietnam War.

The Army could only make a soldier do one overseas tour of duty per two or three year hitch, so I had the Nam scare beat when the Army assigned me to Okinawa for 18 months.

I am going to share this with you, and if you say that I’m lying, we can "step outside and discuss it":

One day, a few weeks after that 'kind, generous' offer to allow me to transfer to Vietnam, I decided to take them up on it. I had had it. It was over. I was no longer willing to pay my own way through my military service, and could not deal with any more of their photo-lab-in-a-nuclear-fallout-decontamination-chamber-horse-manure.

I went to the PX that evening, after dinner, and bought two cases of cold beer, then went back to my barracks. A friend, who lived in my barracks, had driven me to the PX, and when we walked into our barracks, I told my friend to go ask anyone hanging out in the dayroom if they wanted to drink a beer, I asked two guys coming down the stairs, when I was walking up them, to join us, told them two to check for other thirsty fellows, I banged on some doors and yelled into those rooms about the cold beer offer as I walked down the hallway and then went into my two-man semi-private barracks room and set the beer down on the floor.

It didn’t take but a few minutes for eight or nine of my old and new army buddies to come on into my room. Every guy gratefully grabbed a beer and found a place to sit or stand and lean against something, while they settled in for a welcomed session of sipping suds, swapping stories and relaxing.

Beer can tops popped, and we all took a few sips.

I allowed my guests the comfort of sitting on my bed and my roommate’s bed, he didn’t care if they sat there, others sat on the floor or leaned against a wall, and I casually leaned back against my dresser top.

“I’m going to volunteer for Vietnam in the morning,” I said.

The entire room, uncomfortably, shifted position slightly, with a deep, pained groan.

I didn’t actually know all of the guys whom I was speaking to. Two or three were close friends who were the type of men whom I knew I could trust beside me in combat. That is a measure that most warriors take of their brethren. A few fellows were known by me, but we hadn’t had many conversations together. A few had been on some wild time, Okinawa bar hoppin’ and brothel boppin’ excursions with me. One or two I had never spoken to before. Three of those men had just gotten back from Vietnam, or had been discharged from the U.S. Military Hospital on Okinawa after recovering from war wounds, and had been assigned to the 30th Arty Bgde in the previous several days or weeks.

When I told them all that I was volunteering for Vietnam in the morning, those three Nam Vets instantly became livid with me. One stopped looking at me, or anyone else; he was leaning against the inside of the closed door to my room, and he appeared to nearly curl up into a defensive ball and almost slide down to the floor. Another Nam Vet was standing close to the first, sort of in the corner of the room near the door’s hinges; he folded his arms - tightly - across his chest, twisted his body and looked away from me at a ninety-degree angle, and occasionally glanced sideways at me, in sheer disbelief. The third Nam Vet looked up at me, from where he was sitting on my bed, expelled a deep, tight breath, then barely inhaled another, and angrily said, “Do you know what you’re saying? DO, YOU, KNOW, WHAT, YOU’RE, SAYING? If you volunteer for Nam, and if you survive a year, IF you survive a year, then ALL that you will have done IS to survive a year; and you will have had your buddy’s guts blown all over you, AND you’ll have to kill people you don’t even WANT to kill. Now do you REALLY wanna go to Vietnam?”

My second Nam Vet buddy standing there in the corner of my room, barely muttered single word agreements with the third Nam Vet sitting on my bed, and that second Nam Vet punctuated his own curt, one word statements with hard, serious glances in my direction. The first Nam Vet buddy, who was leaning against my door, never moved or made a sound. He had nearly completely blocked me out of his, pained, conciseness. F.N.G. syndrome - in Vietnam, F-ing New Guys often didn’t live very long; if a guy who had been in Nam for awhile didn’t get to know any new guys, it wasn’t so bad for him when the new guys got wounded or killed. If I was going to volunteer for duty in Vietnam and maybe go off and get myself killed, for what the Nam Vets had devastatingly learned wasn’t worth it, then that Nam Vet leaning against my door didn’t want to know me, either.

My other five or six buddies sitting and standing around there in my room mostly looked down at the floor and barely breathed, because they were, perceptively, quite uptight with me. I had bummed them out.

My reply - to all of those friends in my room - was, “No, no you’re right. I really didn’t understand. I won’t do it. I won’t volunteer."

Their reaction to what I had said about volunteering for Vietnam convinced me that it would have been a foolish waste, of at least part of my young life, if I had volunteered to go to Vietnam, in the late summer of 1970.

Those eight or nine true friends of mine probably saved my life that day.

The fact that Okinawa was a safer and much more fun place to do my overseas tour, than what Vietnam was, has sometimes been and still often is thrown up in my face when I explain to certain people about my illegal assignment to the 30th Arty Bgde. They always say, “You coulda’ gone to Vietnam; what’s your problem?”

I am lucky that the United States Army sent me to Okinawa instead of to Vietnam. This is true.

The only thing is, for me to have passively gone to work everyday, as a photographer for the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa, and to have kept on paying out a big chunk of my personal paycheck money to produce my excellent photographs of them, at work and play, always having to use my own camera gear, would have meant that either I was bribing them or giving into extortion. I couldn’t have lived with that shame.

I was born a soldier - just like many millions of people before me and many millions more to come.

A short time before that evening in my barracks room, when I was talked out of volunteering for duty in Vietnam, I had begun to have problems sleeping. I couldn’t get to sleep until close to daybreak, and my sleep was not restful. A good, solid, restful sleep each night would have been the best possible way to get some relief from the daily insanity of being ordered to complete photographic assignments without the benefits of being given enough equipment and supplies to complete my assignments, and from my deepening, disturbing guilt which came from knowing that the photo lab I worked in negated my missile unit’s ability to respond in full to every conceivable scenario of a communist nuclear attack that the United States Government expected us to be able to respond to, and, hopefully, help thwart.

From that time on, it was a steady slide off the edge for me.

Some Kind Of An Emotional Breakdown

2006-12-06T18:34:00.000-08:00

At 10:00 hours on October 20, 1970 I had some kind of a nervous breakdown. It was an emotional breakdown of some kind. I do not know the exact psychiatric term for it. Numerous times, the VA has dismissed what I say about what happened on that day, because if it isn’t diagnosed in their official terminology, than they don’t have to recognize it as real mental health event. They refuse, by they I mean many VA employees over the years, they refuse to make a psychiatric determination on what happened to me that on awful day.

On that day in October, the First Sergeant woke me up in my bunk at approximately 09:30 hours. I should have been at work by then, and he ordered me to get up and report to his office. He was pissed off at me for the problems caused by my acquired sleep disorder; and I was becoming more and more pissed off everyday, as I struggled to understand how in the hell I had gotten into such a lousy situation as that 30th Arty photographer’s job was.

In the First Sergeant’s office he asked me what my problem was that he had to go wake me up after I should have been at work.

I more or less said, I requested a transfer out of the brigade, you said that I was too valuable, so you won’t transfer me. I can’t order equipment or supplies. I don't have what I need to do my photography assignments. Now I can’t get to sleep, then I can’t wake up. Just let me transfer out.

The First Sergeant told me to move out of my semi-private two man room in the barracks and move down the hall into the twenty man squad bay. "Maybe when the lights there go on in the morning and all those other guys get up for work then you will too," he said.

On my way down the stairs to the First Sergeant’s office on that October 20th morning, I had become determined to fight for my rights and not leave the First Sergeant’s office without an agreement to allow me to transfer out of the brigade. Instead, I gave in, tossed my self respect into the small, olive-drab green trash can sitting down there beside of his desk, walked back up stairs to my room, and on the way had a nervous breakdown of some kind. It was brain battering, gut grinding and soul crushing. It culminated with me punching my fist through a barracks window. It was the most humiliating, devastating and embarrassing thing that ever happened to me.

I still haven’t completely recovered from that trauma. Something snapped inside of me that day — some circuit breakers went off, and they have never been reset. I have pleaded, begged, threatened and calmly explained to many employees of the Veterans Administration that I need help resetting those circuit breakers, but none of them have ever believed my 30th Arty Bgde story.

I think about these things everyday. Sometimes at night I rehash the individual parts of this story over and over again. They are on my mind first thing on some mornings. I think through the details of them during daily activities. I don’t see or hear parts of TV shows and movies at times when these memories overwhelm me. I think about how to get these truths acknowledged by the Veterans Administration.

My sleep patterns are still horrible, sheer horror at times and debilitating. I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat, and I have to change my frigid, dripping wet undershirt. I hate living like this. It is humiliating.

I had disturbing dreams about Okinawa for over twenty years after I was discharged from the Army. Over and over again I dreamed that I was trying to get back to the 30th Arty Brigade to finish doing something. I love doing photography, and I just wanted to do my job, but ran out of supplies and couldn't.

At any time during my assignment as a photographer for the 30th Arty Bgde, I could have taken the chance of writing my Congressman about the situation.

You must know very damned well that ‘whistle blowers’ are often retaliated against by the individuals or entities whom they had ‘blown the whistle on’. Had I ‘blown the whistle’, and consequently screwed with the careers of the lifer soldiers who were responsible for having that photo lab in the decontamination chamber, and then finagling the paperwork to scam the Army into sending them a real photographer to be their personal property - all soldiers are government property - those lifers would have done all that they could to retaliate against me and try to send me to the worst duty station possible; that probably meant getting me sent so far up into the jungles of Vietnam that I’d never get back home again.

At this point in my story, I will again receive the usual feedback, from some people, who will say that my assignment to the 30th Arty Bgde was better than being sent to Vietnam and getting wounded or killed or captured by the enemy and held as a Prisoner of War. Yep, that’s probably true, but it does not make what happened to me in the 30th Arty any more right, or less devastating. I took the chance of being sent to ‘Nam when I enlisted, same as everyone else. If the cards would have played out that way, and I had survived fighting in that war, I might be much more proud of my military service today.

My Efficiency Ratings and an Article 15 for Breaking A Barracks Window

2006-12-06T18:33:00.001-08:00

Here are my efficiency ratings from my army discharge papers. Number 1 rating is from basic training, and as you see my conduct and efficiency was EXCELLENT. Number 2is from early in Photographic Laboratory Technician School. It says my conduct was EXCELLENT but has nothing about efficiency. Number 3 I do not understand, but it was at the end of my photography school, and I came out high enough at the top of my class to earn the rank of Specialist Fourth Class at graduation; and that was only after I had been on active duty in the Army for seven months and there were three months of inactive duty before I had to report to basic training. That proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that both my conduct and efficiency were EXCELLENT. Number 4 has CASUAL ratings, because it was during the time I was home on leave, traveling to Okinawa and waiting there for my permanent station to be assigned. Number 5 covers from when I was first assigned to the 30th Artillery Brigade until I suffered that life ruining emotional breakdown that caused me to put my fist through a window in my barracks room. From then on, as number 6says, both my conduct and efficiency was rated as UNSATISFACTORY - which was due to me gradually refusing more and more illegal orders from the 30th Arty personnel and gradually refusing to pay for photographic supplies and to use my own camera equipment for completing illegal 30th Arty photo assignments and gradually refusing to work in that damned illegal and immoral photo lab set up in the nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber. Eventually, I ran out of photo paper, could not order any because I was illegally assigned to the 30th, no one else in the 30th knew where to get me the right photo paper, and it nearly destroyed me not being able to do my dedicated photography work. I ended up nearly completely depressed beyond all hope of recovery. I still am - forty fucking years later. I hate it.

This is part of the Article 15 non-judicial punishment papers I received for breaking that barracks window.

My Final Photo Assignment

2006-12-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

Several months after learning that some of our 30th Arty Bgde missiles were obsolete, I did the last 30th Arty photo assignment that I can remember doing.

That final photo assignment was shot at the officers club. The 30th Brigade’s officers’ wives had a fashion show up there, on a weekday afternoon. The best part about it was that I spent the afternoon surrounded by curvaceous female anatomy. I was twenty years old at the time, and the youngest officers wives were a year or two older than me, because most officers had a college education and many of their wives had met them while they were both in college. There were plenty of pretty college graduates all around me. I was the only man in the room.

The next to the worst part of the afternoon was when I had to have the duty driver, who rode me to the officers club, stop at the PX so I could buy some film to shoot the assignment.

The very worst part was when one young, pretty, slender, but shapely officer’s wife leaned in close to another sweet young thang' standing near me, touched the other woman’s arm gently with her fingertips, and she said to the other wife, in a hushed, giggly tone, "You know of course? that the missiles are obsolete."

It was obvious that those two young women did not care that their husbands’ jobs, in the Army, were not very important to the free world’s defense against Communist world aggression. Then it hit me that they didn’t mind about the taxpayers not getting their money’s worth out of any of us 30th Arty personnel. I became instantly aware that the reason that they didn’t care was, most likely, because all that mattered to them was that their husbands were not in Vietnam.

Due to me being worn down to a frazzle by the entire 30th Arty photographer situation at the time, you could'a knocked me down with the false pony tail that one of them pretty young wives was wearing.

Not only did I already know the stunning fact that some of our missiles were obsolete, I also knew that many of our 'birds' were not in operable condition - thanks to a sergeant buddy of mine from one of our missile sites who had told me, one sad day, that some of his section’s missiles didn’t have all of the parts that they needed to be able to fire. Add to all of that the experience of witnessing those two wives giggling about it, and you end up with one fully frazzled soldier.

No Photo Paper Meant No Way To Do My Job

2006-12-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

The 30th Arty Bgde’s officers, their wives and kids, the enlisted men and their families all appreciated the way that I treated them as my photography subjects. They loved it when I gave copies of my photos to all who asked, not just the ones who ordered me to, and anyone higher in rank than me often either requested or outright ordered me to give them copies. I gave what was right and fair, because photography of that type is there to boost the troops' moral. It is all about promoting good moral, so that soldiers can feel good and do their jobs well. I figured that “we were all in it together”, and that the cooks should cook good, the clerks should get their paperwork done right and in a reasonable amount of time, etc.; I believed that everyone of us should do our jobs the best we could, after all, we all worked for each other’s benefit. I kept up that hard work, and the freely giving of my work and my natural, God given photography talents, until my photo paper ran out. It is that pure and simple.

After most of the photo supplies ran out, I simply refused to pay for anymore them out of my own pocket.

We soldiers didn’t have pocket money all the time back then; our pay was low and most guys ran out of cash in the first week after payday. On days when there was no film in the lab or money in my pocket for film, I had to go on 30th Arty assignments without film for my camera - that drove me nuts.

When there was no usable photo paper left, the 30th Arty individuals who were in charge of me still expected me to do photography for them.

It was an impossible situation, a living nightmare - with no way out, no way to do what I was ordered to do.

Should I Have Ever Been In Possession Of Crates Of U.S.M.C. Photographic Paper?

2006-12-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

Sometime during springtime in 1971, shortly after shooting that officers’ wives fashion show, I completely ran out of photographic printing paper. I told the lieutenant who was in direct charge of me, Lt. T. Gordon Barber (Thomas Gordon Barber eddiebar@bellsouth.net, 770-740-0419, 600 Glen Hampton Dr Alpharetta, GA 30004-3067), to get me some photo paper, or there was not going to be anymore photos printed. He didn’t like that at all, but he came back into my photo lab later and handed me an army supply company order form which had photographic supplies listed on it. I immediately, happily filled it out and turned it back into him that very same day.

Two weeks later, Lt. Barber comes up to me, in my barracks mess hall right after I had eaten lunch, and excitedly says that he has something to show me over at my photo lab. I hadn’t been over there very often during those two weeks, because I had no photo paper to print my negatives with.

When we got to the entrance of the Mole Hole, I saw that a big pile of heavy, wooden crates had been dropped off in the short entrance tunnel there just outside the large, underground vault style door to the bunker.

Lt. Barber gleefully, proudly said, "Look what I got for you!"

I was pleasantly surprised; I was so happy to see those desperately needed supplies that I was nearly jumpin’ up and down; there was a huge, wide smile of relief on my face, for about a lightning fast second and a half, until it registered in my brain that the crates had PROPERTY OF U.S.M.C. emblazoned all over them in large, black, painted letters - those crates were stolen from the United States Marine Corps.

It was a crushing experience for me, because I was in the U.S. Army, therefore, to the best of my knowledge, back then and now, I had no right, in any way, shape or form to be in possession of any U.S. Marine Corps property.

I looked at the U.S.M.C. logos on the crates and thought, "Holly shit! I’ve got way too much stolen Marine Corp property to hide in my little photo lab."

The reason that I say stolen is because it was Marine Corps stuff. I just talked to a Marine Corps Recruiter on the phone about this. We spoke for a few minutes, and he had enough time to spare for us to concur that in the eyes of most Marines, it would have been stolen property, and if certain ones of them had caught me with the stuff, I’d a been in for some kind of a butt whuppin’.

I stared hard at the U.S.M.C. logos on those contraband crates and angrily asked Lt. Barber, "Where the hell did you get these?"

He was still gleeful and proud of himself as he replied, "I have a friend who is a captain in the Marines."

That Marine captain had done his friend the Army lieutenant a personal favor that probly was a returned favor or it had to be returned at some later time. You can bet your butt that both of their butts would have been in a sling if certain other Marines had found out about it. Marines are famously dedicated to Semper Fi; they are ever faithful to their beloved Corps; that captain had done his fellow Marines wrong.

As I stood there surveying the scene and focusing in on the shocking facts of the situation, I realized the fact that the crates were stacked up nice and neat right out there where anybody who walked anywhere near them would definitely see the U.S.M.C. logos painted on them, and therefore identify them as stolen Marine Corps property. I could feel an avalanche of painful, shocking realizations pouring down on me and adding to the weight of the crushing anxiety which I was feeling as a result of me suddenly, unexpectedly being in possession of those stolen crates of photographic paper.

I was pissed-off.

I realized right away that this could cause me serious legal problems, if the wrong person found me to be in possession of those crates. It may have been enough to send me to Ft. Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary to do hard time. The Marines were America’s worst supplied branch of military service, at the time, so I seriously doubt that their photographers were willing to peacefully part with any supplies at all.

I felt even more crushing weight coming down on me, when I looked closer at the crates and saw that they were clearly marked — THIS PAPER FOR USE WITH RED SAFE LIGHT ONLY. My photo lab had a reddish orange safe light.

I informed Lt. Barber that this paper could not be used in my lab.

"Whaaat?" Lt. Barber said, looking a bit unbelieving of me.

I nearly snarled at him, like a bear who had just stepped into a solid steel, jagged toothed, leg hold trap, and I growled, "Comere! I’ll show ya."

I opened a crate, took a box of paper out of it, and then walked into the lab with him following me closely; he was sporting a mean scowl on his face and was mumbling curses lowly towards the back of my head.

I opened the box of paper in my photo enlarger room, where it was very dark, except for the reddish-orange glow from my safe light, and put the paper into the developer. It turned completely black, very quickly.

"See, it’s the same as taking it out in the white light," I growled at the scowling, and still mumbling curses lowly, lieutenant.

Then he marched on out'a there in front of me, whilst cursing and mumbling lowly down towards his shoes.

The facts of this matter get worse.

Those damned crates had been placed right next to where the 30th Arty Brigade commander’s chauffeur driven official U.S. Army car’s official parking place was. Anyone visiting the brigade commander, who may have ridden around with the him while touring the island and/or our missile sites, could have seen the U.S.M.C. logos on those large wooden crates. Any visitor who was given a tour of the Mole Hole would have had to wind their way around the pile of crates in order to enter the underground communications bunker. I wasn’t worried about my brigade commander, who was a full bird colonel, seeing the crates, because I figured that he had to be in on it all - in some way.

But, if those Marine Corps crates had been discovered to be there in the entrance to the Mole Hole by a visiting Marine, or any high ranking U.S. military or government official, or any one of the Japanese Army Officers or government officials who were occasional visitors to our missile sites, which the Japanese were going to take command of after Okinawa reverted to their control in upcoming 1972, or if the crates had been seen by any regular GI who thought that it was his sworn duty and obligation to report the situation, or who just wanted to start a bunch of trouble, and possibly get himself a promotion for doing it, if any of those completely feasible scenarios had occurred, then I would have been in deep doo-doo, for sure. It could have cost me hard time in Ft. Leavenworth Penitentiary.

Angry, racing thoughts had created fleeting visions of fragments of each and every one of those feasible scenarios across the inside of my forehead, as we walked back out through the entrance way, past the U.S.M.C. emblazoned crates, and I looked from that angle out towards the colonel’s parking place and back to the crates and back out towards the side door of headquarters office building.

If I had been charged with possession of stolen Marine Corps property, anyone who believes that Lt. Barber would have owned up to giving me those stolen government goods please raise their hand. OK. If all of you who raised your hands will kindly give me the numbers to your bank accounts, I have millions of legal dollars that I wish to store in your bank accounts.

I had given Lt. Barber a complete list of the supplies that I needed to be able to continue working in my photo lab, and all he got me was a great big pile of serious problems.

As furiously fleeting thoughts about all of the facts concerning this Marine Corps property situation were racing through my mind, the scowling, growling, mumbling and cursing Lt. Barber and I walked all of the way out of the underground bunker’s entrance way and into the brightly sunlit outdoors.

Lt. Barber turned, shook his hands and arms up and down in his unjust furious frustration, stomped his right foot down and forward towards me, and said, "You have friends in other units who are photographers don’t you?’

I was hotter than the east end of a west bound Nike-Hercules Missile, and getting warmer by the split-second, as I dryly answered, "Yeahhh."

Lt. Barber then inquired angrily, "Well then, why don’t you get what you need from them?"

I had asked myself that question many months before that, and I gave Lt. Barber the same answer as I had given myself, "Because they aren’t into that kind of a thing.
You gotta be some kinda hustler to know how to do that and not get caught. They’re not like that."

Then I angrily laid into him with, "Damn it! I gotta have them supplies! I ordered ‘um two gah-damned weeks ago, now where the hell are they?"

"Well bitchity-bidgidy-boop (unintelligible gripes) Crews! I’ll see what I can do, but you ought'a try and do something yourself," Lt. Barber blubbered, in a tone more pleading than an army officer should allow himself to use when speaking to a lower ranking enlisted man, like I was.

I had two friends who were also U.S. Army Photographers stationed on Okinawa. Both had attended Army Photo Lab Tech School with me. One was Bruce from Pennsylvania, and the other was a southern boy named Bob.

Bob had landed a job in the smallest and most top secret army intelligence unit on the island. Bob sure as hell had to have a good clean record to land that intel job. I wasn’t thoughtlessly ignorant enough to ask him to take that chance for me. Or more precisely, I wasn’t thoughtlessly ignorant enough to ask him to take that chance for the 30th Artillery Brigade personnel who wanted me to produce photographs of them at work and play.

Bruce definitely wasn’t capable of pulling off any midnight scrounging maneuvers for me. He was too gentle of a person. He couldn’t deal with the natural guilt and the worry of getting caught. He also had a good job. He worked for the public information office of a large Army Intelligence Unit. There are scroungers in the military, and there are non-scroungers who often make good use of the scroungers. Bruce was not the scrounger type.

I couldn’t deal with asking Bruce or Bob to scrounge up (steal?) stuff for me. It would not only have jeopardized our friendships, if they got mad, but if they had gotten caught it could have meant some real trouble for them. I was born and raised with an ample supply of common sense, so I was not going to ask a man who is assigned to a military intelligence unit to take stuff from their company for me, because, as you probably know too, they have spies there who spy on the spies.

On top of that, in the springtime of 1971, I was far too stressed out from being saddled with the guilt of knowing that my photo lab negated the emergency use of the decontamination chamber, and worn down by the anger that came from me having to pay out of my pocket for photo equipment and film to do my 30th Arty photo assignments. I was not going to add midnight scrounging anxieties to that load of garbage that I was saddled with.

Bob and Bruce loved their jobs. When Lt. Barber had tried to talk me into jeopardizing their choice photography jobs, his tone of voice and body language insinuated that I was neither smart enough nor dedicated enough to my job to have considered the idea of asking them to scrounge for me. He was also insinuating that I should go door to door to every army photo lab that I knew of and to beg like a stray dog for the supplies that they may have been short on themselves, that every other army photographer was allowed to order via his company’s supply clerk. That was a like a painful kick into my groin.

It was one painful, crushing thing after the other, for me, over at the Mole Hole, that day.

There was, is and always will be scrounging and swapping of equipment and supplies going on amongst people in the military. I knew about it as a kid.

For one thing there are plenty of scrounging and swapping scenes in war movies. John Wayne often had him a slick scrounger in amongst the troops who were close to him in his war movie’s, and they were always funny and popular to the audience; in the movie The Green Berets the character Peterson was my favorite scrounger of all times. I also knew of a few real scrounging and swapping stories from my military veteran father and uncles. I understand and endorse the afore mentioned activities.

Right after I had informed Lt. Barber that I would not ask my photographer friends to do the lieutenant's and the supply clerk's job of securing me photography supplies, as he furiously stomped on over to, opened, and walked through the side door of the 30th Arty Bgde headquarters office building, I turned back around, looked hard, and unbelieving, at the pile of U.S.M.C. crates.

I thought about it all.

I realized that I couldn’t get my supplies through regular channels, Lt. Barber couldn’t scrounge up the supplies that I needed, I never lucked into a friendship with an army photographer who was in a position to help me out with scrounged stuff, I hadn’t had the right connections amongst supply personnel to be able to scrounge up the supplies myself, I came to the shocking, crushing realization that I was never going to get the supplies that I needed. That still hurts. I wanted to continue doing good photography.

During that lightning fast second and a half before the Marine Corps logos on those crates had registered in my mind, my soul had soared; and when I had believed, for a pleasantly surprised, jumpin’ up and down, happily relieved, fleeting moment, that I was finally going to be able to print up the photo assignments that I had shot in the previous three weeks plus all of my future photography assignments, I was very happy. But after realizing that I was never going to get the supplies that I needed in order for me to do the job of an army photographer, which I had voluntarily signed up in the Army to be trained to do, my spirit was just about thoroughly crushed to death.

I had done a great job as a photographer for the 30th Artillery Brigade, until my supplies ran out.

Lt. Barber wrote some untrue, unkind words about me in my personal army records. He came to the 30th Arty Bgde in January 1971, which was well into the period where I had become fed up with the photo lab situation. I would understand his point of view and why he wrote those things in my records, except that he had to have known that my assignment to the 30th Arty and the photo lab were against Army Rules and Regulations.

I Receive My Discharge

2006-12-06T18:23:00.000-08:00

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.

The History of My Quest for A Service Connected Disability Rating

2006-12-06T18:17:00.000-08:00

Another thing that I have gone through over the years, when I deal with the VA and talk to them about my mental health condition being service connected, is that the VA’s pamphlets and guide books to a veteran’s rights all say that a service connected disability is only awarded for “a disease or injury incurred in or aggravated by military service.” There are plenty of veterans receiving service connected disability ratings for mental health disorders. I know veterans with such disability ratings. But, several times VA employees have told me that there are no service connected ratings for mental health disorders. About two years ago, I found a web site that lists the number of veterans in each state who receive service connected disability ratings for depression and other mental health disorders. Unfortunately, as far as I am concerned, in the minds of the certain VA staff, that all does not exist. That’s another aspect of the living nightmare they are putting me through.

I have gone to several different VA psychiatrists about establishing my service connection. The most recent one, at the Greene St. Baltimore VAMC, told me that the VA mental health clinic staff cannot help me with it. It appears that the staff at Greene St. can only help the VA to deny me a service connected disability rating.

My assigned primary care giver VA psychiatrist said that he didn’t know me back then in 1970-71, so he could not make a decision on what had happened.

The next one said that he could not make that determination in the time allowed for an appointment, or several appointments.

The next one, Dr. Jacob Tendler of the Baltimore, Maryland VAMC, took the time to interview me. He had to, because the Board of Veterans Appeals ordered him to as part of my disability rating process.

Dr. Tendler said that my problem was something which I have never been diagnosed with before. Not by the myriad of VA and civilian mental health care doctors and councilors whom I have seen since my army discharge - some for many therapy sessions. He said that I have Adjustment Disorder.

By the definition of Adjustment Disorder, its symptoms begin within three months of a person’s life going through a traumatic change, and then the symptoms last for no more than six months. As far as I know, he never identified the causing stressor, so it must be my arrival in Okinawa that he says caused my traumatic stress. I loved that place. Read my story entitled A Wild Start, that is published on the Japan Policy Research Institute's web site, to see exactly how nicely I adjusted to Okinawa, like a hatchling Snapping Turtle swimming in a creek for the first time.

Copies of my army personal records, that I put in my VA file, clearly state in several places that the symptoms of my problems were first recognized by the 30th Arty on October 21, 1970, on the day after my nervous breakdown, or whatever that terrible event was. Evidently, he is saying that me simply going to Okinawa was the traumatic change, but I had been there for four months, since June 1970, before the symptoms listed in my records occurred. And it is in my records that those symptoms lasted for over a year till I was discharged. That does not fit their definition of Adjustment Disorder - one iota.

My problems from being assigned to the 30th Arty Bgde, and all that entailed, are all similar to what the VA’s, and the Army’s, definition of symptoms of several mental health disorders are. The definitions say that one symptom is that a person with certain disorders makes up lame excuses for not doing their job. Can’t do the job without being supplied the necessary equipment and supplies. That is no lame excuse. The VA doesn’t believe it happened that way. They believe the 30th Arty’s version that I simply quit working.

I am sick and tired of individuals in the VA, such as Dr. Jacob Tendler, declaring me to be lying about the situations which I have described to them quite adequately, at all times.

Tendler also lied about me. He declared that by telling him the details of the photo lab’s placement in the chamber, I was “preoccupied with minutia and details on today’s exam.” How the hell could he understand the strange situation if I did not explain exactly how the photo lab was set up in the nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber. It is a minute detail to him that the 30th Arty Bgde photo lab negated the prescribed use of the decon chamber, which - in the event of nuclear war - could have allowed millions of American lives to be lost.

He also declared that I “brought to this examination a prolific amount of evidence that he has compiled over the years, concerns about legal matters, fostering significant frustration and anger how the Army treated him, and he showed to the undersigned copies that he has written to the White House as well as to the Vice President and other public elected officials indicating how the Army treated him and why he should be compensated for.”

That “prolific amount of evidence” was copies of papers that were already in my VA file, but I knew that it would take a long time sorting them out of the large file so that we could talk about them during the examination, so I brought my own copies for us to discuss.

During his examination of me, Dr. Tendler launched into intense questioning about “perseveration or obsessiveness as well as compulsiveness type of symptoms, veteran denied.”

He was trying hard to diagnose me for some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder or other disorder that I have never been diagnosed with before, something I do not suffer from, something absolutely non-compensible as service connected. Dr. Tendler did all he could to find something wrong with me that he could use to stop my quest for a service connected disability right then and there.

I ‘turned the tables’ on Tendler during the examination, and outlined for him what it would be like if the VA did the same kind of thing to him as had happened to me. The man became very indignant, looked askance at me, leaned back slightly, as if to put more distance between us there in his office, he looked down at me and haughtily declared, “I would sue them.”

I said, “Yeah, you see what I’m talking about? By me applying for a disability is the only way that I can sue them for what happened to me.”

He became intensely indignant then, stood up to shuffle some paperwork around his office, and nearly tried to back up away from me all the way through the wall behind him and then blurted out, “You can’t sue the VA! You can’t sue the Army for this! You can’t sue the government at all! You can’t sue anybody! You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

I had no reply to that idiotic outburst.

Dr. Tendler’s misdiagnoses of me having Adjustment Disorder has been declared by the VA as non-compensible. But I have seen lists on the Internet of the numbers of veterans who receive such a service connected disability.

I have been trying to establish a service connected disability rating from the VA ever since the mid 1970s.

The first time that I asked a VA employee to begin my paperwork for a disability rating, I was in real bad emotional condition. My depression had overpowered me, and it looked like I could travel no further on the road of life. I dropped off a hand written note at the downtown Baltimore VA Regional Office which was a serious cry for help. The note briefly explained my frustration and anger over the way that I could not stop feeling depressed ever since Okinawa, the way that my army photography job situation had turned into a nightmare, and the way that VA staff had dismissed me as a person of merit. After leaving that note at the reception desk, I went out and walked around downtown with a rather dismal, dejected look draped about my person. A few passersby walked a wide path around me.

I waited three hours, then called the VA. They wanted me to come in and talk to them. The first employee that I spoke to was a wise-ass; he was not concerned about my problems at all. I hung up the phone and called back a half hour later. That time a fairly decent guy spoke to me. I tried to stand my ground and hold out for a guarantee that they would begin a full investigation of my claims about the 30th Arty Bgde, and begin the disability claims process for me. But they talked me into coming in to their office without that.

When I sat down next to the desk of the fairly decent VA employee, the first thing that he did was to wave my note in front of my face, poke his forefinger into the written words on it, and with a friendly, earnest smile on his face he said, “Look at this! You can write in complete paragraphs! We have guys who come in here who can’t even write a complete sentence. You don’t have any serious problems. You’re an intelligent man. You’ll be all right. Those other veterans don’t have a chance, but you can do whatever you set your mind to do.”

That flabbergasted me. I had no problems? Because I could write a full, high school English class acceptable paragraph?

Wasn’t much that a dragged down, depressed guy could do in the way of instantly formulating an opposing debate against that nonsense.

They set me up for an appointment with a psychiatrist, and I went on back home a still depressed, and even more dejected man.

The VA psychiatrist, whom they set me up an appointment for on that sad day, turned out to be the only VA staff member who has ever truly understood me. He was Dr. Hadir Babaturk.

Dr. Babaturk was a great guy to talk with, we got along fine. He had a good, positive attitude about life in general, his profession and his patients. He was the only one who ever put any merit upon what I have to say about that 30th Arty Bgde situation of mine. Up until just now, I had forgotten about Dr. Babaturk, I suppose that I should now rewrite this whole thing and say that all but one VA staff ever believed what I say in this document about my 30th Arty experience, but that would take too much time, so just consider it done the best I can. Besides, his opinion of me doesn’t seem to hold any merit in my quest for my records to be set right and a fair disability rating to be established for me.

One day, as I was just sitting down in Dr. Babaturk’s office to begin our appointment for that day, a young veteran stuck his head in the still open office door and spoke to the good doctor. Dr. Babaturk then reminded the young man to go get his shot. As the doctor closed his office door, he discreetly informed me that the young veteran was so severely mentally ill that he had to receive potent psychiatric medicine once a week by a shot in his arm.

The doctor then turned to me and said, “He’s getting the disability checks that you should be getting for what happened to you over there. He never made it through his basic training, he had to go to the recycle platoon. You know what that is, right?”

I replied, “Yeah, that’s where they put men who can’t make it through basic, and they keep training them over and over till they get it right. Our drill sergeants used to threaten to send guys there who tried to act incompetent on the firing range or something or just act stupid because they thought it could get them out of going to Vietnam.”

“Well,” said the doctor, “that guy was discharged from the recycle platoon and given a full disability for being so mentally ill. But he was like that before he went in. He never should have been allowed into the Army in the first place, but he gets full disability pay for life. It's not fair for you. Did you try to apply for your disability again?”

I told the good doctor that I hadn't.

When Dr. Tendler was interviewing me, he said that he had read all of my VA file. After relating this Dr. Babaturk story to Dr. Tendler, I inquired of him whether Dr. Babaturk’s notes were in my file, and if he had read them. Dr. Tendler was standing and shuffling paperwork around his office at that moment, and he got all bent out of shape, I mean it, he literally got physically bent out of shape, as he said to me, “I don’t know if they’re in there. We (the VA) didn’t bring all the files with us when we moved up here to Greene Street from the Federal Building. I don’t know anything about those files.”

I recently received a full copy of the file that the VA is using to decide on my disability case, and Dr. Babaturk’s notes are indeed in the file. But there is no mention in Dr. Babaturk's notes of him believing that I should be receiving a disability. When he had said that about me deserving a disability, it was during what was more of a casual conversation about that seriously ill young veteran than a part of our doctor-patient session.

I can remember filling out the paperwork to apply for a disability in the late part of the 1970s, up at the Togus, Maine VA Hospital.

A weird, burnt out looking old psychiatrist helped me to fill the paperwork out, because I told the staff in administration that I didn’t know what to define my disability as. The emotionally shrunken acting shrink and I were up on a heavy duty psyche ward at the time. As soon as we sat down at a desk to start on the paperwork, a severely mentally ill patient walked by us and muttered some indiscernible words to the old doctor. The doctor looked at me, shook his head, pointed to the patient, and said, “Look at him. He doesn’t even know what day it is. He has no idea when his birthday comes around. Do you know what day it is. Sure you do. What day is it?”

I told him.

“What is today’s date?” He added.

I said what it was.

He added, “You know when your birthday is, right? What is it? ”

This seemed to me like a bad start, as I said, “July 2. I was born on July 2, 1950. But I don’t remember a thing about it.”

He continued, “You can talk normal? Right? Sure you do. You’re talking normal to me right now. You have no problems, he has problems. You really want me to fill this out?”

Yes I did.

“OK,” he said, “what is your disability?”

“I don’t know what to call it, that’s why they sent me up here to see you,” I replied.

Then I briefed him about the 30th Arty photo lab thing and told him a little about my Oct. 20, 1970 nervous breakdown.

“Well?” he says, with the usual VA staff style dismissive attitude towards me, “let’s put down nervous disorder. Do you think it’s a nervous disorder that you have?”

I was getting aggravated with his attitude as I replied, “Yeah, I guess. I had that nervous breakdown. You’re the doctor. What is it? What do you say?”

He put down nervous disorder.

That term is neither defined, nor mentioned in anyway, anywhere, in any official VA disability guides. It is not recognized by the VA as a term for any disability. He was a VA doctor, he knew that.

That weird old, burnt out shrink purposely sabotaged my attempt to establish and receive my service connected disability rating.

About five years ago or so I applied for a service connected disability again.

Two VA administrative staff helped me to fill out the application. I did not know then, nor do I know now, what the correct term is to describe my disability. It may be depression, depressive disorder, I do not know. And my VA doctors won’t tell me. One of the two VA administrative staff saw one of my former civilian mental health care worker’s notes which had in them that I have PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That staff person put down my disability as “acquired psychiatric disability, to include PTSD.” Those two VA staff were very nice to me, they were kind and considerate, they did what they considered to be right. Unfortunately, they did not look to see whether the VA’s requirement of a direct life threatening incident for a PTSD diagnosis was present in my file. The civilian mental health care councilor who put the PTSD diagnosis had made that determination using a civilian definition of the disorder.

(Crap! They have it in Internet news stories about VA PTSD requirements that a direct life threatening event must have occurred. Vietnam Veterans are denied PTSD claims because they have nothing in their records to support the direct threat requirement even though they were in a combat company. Now I see nothing on the VA’s web site about a direct threat.)

From about 1993 to 2003, I was treated by a civilian mental health care worker. She diagnosed me as having depression and anxiety disorders. She also put into my file that I have PTSD.

I used to tell her over and over again about my 30th Arty Bgde problems. It’s a wonder that she didn’t tell me to take a hike or move on with my life in some other way. She was excellent at her profession, she always got me to talk about that day’s goings on in my life, but I inevitably gravitated back to talking about the army photographer thing.

PTSD can be caused by several different types of traumatic situations. She agreed with me when I told her that it was a thoroughly traumatic thing which I had endured in the 30th Arty Bgde. She agreed that due to the fact that I believed that because the photo lab negated the decontamination chamber’s intended use, in my mind tens of millions of lives were in jeopardy. They were. Maybe not in terrible danger of nuclear annihilation, but that weak link in our chain of defense, which was where my photo lab was, that link should have been maintained properly. That had indeed caused me uncalled for traumatic anxiety. I may have been a dupe for believing in the 30th Arty Bgde’s missile systems’ importance to America’s defense, but that shouldn’t mean that I’m the bad guy.

My mental health councilor’s diagnosis of me having PTSD is based on the fact that I suffer from many of the universally recognized symptoms of PTSD, as a result of my 30th Arty Bgde experiences. Those experiences include that nervous (?) emotional (?) break down experience of Oct. 20, 1970. Or whatever that tragic event was. The only problem is that she was using her civilian definition of PTSD. The VA’s definition requires a direct life threatening incident.

Last night, at this point in my writing, I stopped working on this manuscript and went onto the Internet to find some links about PTSD to put in this when it is published. What I reread, I hadn’t seen these web pages for about eight months, has now confused me more as to why the VA refutes my PTSD civilian diagnosis.

On the VA’s own web site, I found this:

Who is most likely to develop PTSD?

Those who experience greater stressor magnitude and intensity, unpredictability, uncontrollability, sexual (as opposed to nonsexual) victimization, real or perceived responsibility, and betrayal.

Those who report greater perceived threat or danger, suffering, upset, terror, and horror or fear.

Those with a social environment that produces shame, guilt, stigmatization, or self-hatred.

I say:

I was traumatized by real or perceived responsibility about tens of millions of potential deaths in a nuclear war, and I was betrayed by the 30th Arty Bgde soldiers who had forced me to work in a job that was not authorized by the U.S. Army, and then when blamed me for not having the equipment and supplies to do my job. It sure as hell was a fairly uncontrollable situation for a young, 20-year-old soldier.

I perceived a great threat of danger to American defense against Communist aggressors, I was in fear of the consequences of the photo lab negating the decontamination chamber’s intended use. I certainly was intensely upset about it all, and I suffered everyday on Okinawa, in the form of severe depression.

The army social environment produced way too much unearned shame and guilt in me.

I am still stigmatized by the false information in my personal army records, and my General Discharge for unsuitability.

I have hated myself ever since I did not stop the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa from making me pay for the camera equipment needed to do my army job, and from keeping me assigned to the unit when there was no slot for me, but mostly because I had not gone to my Congressman or Inspector General and made them take that photo lab out of the emergency decontamination chamber.

The VA’s PTSD web pages also say:

People who suffer from PTSD often relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks, have difficulty sleeping, and feel detached or estranged, and these symptoms can be severe enough and last long enough to significantly impair the person’s daily life.

I say:

In this document, I have adequately described most of these things to be a debilitating part of my life.

To the VA’s way of determining PTSD, the bottom line is a direct life threatening event.

My situation was an indirect threat to tens of millions of people, and the indirect threat of me dying for no good reason. I was willing to die for freedom at anytime, but to know that I may die because some other soldiers wanted pictures taken of themselves at work and play, at the possible expenditure of tens of millions of American civilians’ lives in a nuclear holocaust, caused me great traumatic stress at the time.

I experienced traumatic stress at the 30th Arty Bgde. Until the Veterans Administration acknowledges the truth about what certain individual soldiers of the 30th Arty Bgde did to me, they cannot give a correct diagnosis of my mental health disorders. That is the true bottom line in my quest for a fair VA disability rating.

That brings us up to where my case for a service connected disability rating is today. It has gone all the way up through the appeals process to the Board of Veterans Appeals. They say that they believe that I believe what I say about my 30th Arty Bgde experience, but that it may or may not be true. That is as close to the truth as the VA has gotten.

There is one serious dilemma in this. No lawyer will take my case because of the lack of VA required direct life threatening event to support the PTSD part of my claim. The two VA employees who helped me to fill out my application for benefits should have known that this would happen. The application is in the handwriting of one of them. I don’t believe that it is their fought though. They should have been trained to look for the VA’s required life threatening incident to be documented in my file.

They put down “acquired psychiatric disability, to include PTSD,” as “The Issue” which I am seeking “entitlement to service connection”. That makes me think that proving that I do have a VA recognizable acquired psychiatric disability, even though I may have PTSD which does not fit the VA’s definition of it, I should be eligible due to the acquired psychiatric disability. But the VA has their strict ways of seeing things, and I may have to begin the process all over again without “to include PTSD” included.

Pile those two mind boggling VA disability rating written requests on top of the times that VA employees have told this veteran that mental health disorders are not grounds for a VA recognized disability rating, because they are neither a disease nor injury, even though I knew of veterans receiving disabilities for problems the same as mine, and now the VA is processing my claim that is based on my mental health disorder, top that off with the two recent times that VA doctors had lame excuses for not allowing me to speak to them about my desire to establish a service connected disability rating, add all that up and you have all that is needed to thoroughly depress any veteran.

Over Thirty Years of Compounding Trauma

2006-12-06T18:13:00.000-08:00

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.

My Entries Into Guest Books of Okinawa and Army Missile Unit Veterans' Web Sites and Some Important Emails

2006-12-06T18:07:00.000-08:00

When I first began to use the Internet to research for info about the 30th Artillery Brigade Headquarters Battery on Okinawa and for witnesses from the former 30th who knew that my assignment there as a brigade photographer was against Army Rules and Regulations and that the photo lab that I worked in at the 30th was illegal and militarily immoral, I made some postings in Okinawa and Army missile unit veterans' web site's guest books. I have been doing anything I can to prove my case for three decades. Unfortunately it was not until I began to go on to the World Wide Web's information highway that I made any progress in my quest for good ole American truth and justice. I cannot find all of the postings I made, but here are a few:

From Naomi's Okinawa Connection

On Tuesday, August 28, 2001 at 17:22:45

From: david Robet Crews

Subject: 30th Arty Bgde Sukiran

Dundalk, Maryland USA

I was brigade photographer for the missle unit the 30th Artillery Brigade headquartered in Sukiran, Okinawa back in 1970-71. My photo lab was in the underground communications bunker next to headquarters office building. My lab was in a nuclear fallout decontamination chamber which made the use of the chamber impossible. I was ilegally assighned to the unit and could neither advance in rank nor order equipment and supplies. I have written this story to many elected and military officials but they can't prove me wrong so they don't want to deal with it. Can you help me in my quest for the truth?

On Tuesday, August 28, 2001 at 17:26:29

From: David Robert Crews

Subject: info correction

Dundalk, Maryland USA

This is my correct name and e-mail for precceding entry to guest book. Sorry, it was my typing mistake

Ed Thelen's Nike People:

Crews, David, Brigade Photographer as my Mos was 84G20 Photo Lab Technician. The problem with that was the 30th wasn't authorized any photographers so I could neither advance in rank nor order necessary photo supplies to do my military photo assignments. This caused me a lot of problems. I had some truly excellent friends in the 30th who helped make my time there be a great adventure. Most of us guys loved being in Okinawa with its Asian culture. I'd like to hear from anyone who knows just how the heck the 30th ever finagled the Army paperwork to get me assigned to them.

Ft. Bliss Guest Book:

Name: David R. Crews

Email: ursusdave@yahoo.com

Remote User: Date: 09/19/06

Time: 14:36:13

Comments

I have written a story about my time in the 30th Artillery Brigade missile unit on Okinawa which is entitled "Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corp Property". It is necessary for me to name certain men who served in the 30th Arty who I am sure prefer not to be named in this story. It may be quite controversial to some individuals, but I defy anyone to prove anything that I say in this story as being false. You are invited to read my story on maineoutdoorstoday.com/crews/ My contact information is at the end of the story.

My Posting On The 30th Arty Bgde Site That The Son of Former 30th Arty Bgde Commander Col. L.G. Hergert Saw and Responded To

I posted the following in the guest book for the More or Less Official 30th Arty Bgde Site linked from this web site over at the left. I have placed guest book entries on that 30th Arty web site because I am challenging anyone, anywhere, anytime to prove anything which I am writing about in my postings and publishing's on the World Wide Web to be incorrect in anyway.

David Robert Crews

Sunday, 5/8/05, 9:42 PM

Anyone remember 'The Mole Hole' at Headquarters 30th Arty Bge on Okinawa? It was an underground communications bunker hidden next to Headquarters Office Building in Sukiran. I worked in there back during 1970-71. I was Brigade Photographer for the 30th and there was a Photo Lab set up in the Nuclear Fallout Decontamination Chamber to the Mole Hole.It made the Chamber useless for its designed purpose but I printed some great photos out of it. Gave many away to the Officers, Non-Coms + Enlisted Guys in the photos and I hope that my photos still give people pleasure when they pull the pictures out and show them to their grandchildren etc. After the celebration to welcome new Brigade Commander Col. Louis Hergert and his family to the 30th I gave out 90 photos just for that day. I'd be pleased to know if my photos from back then are enjoyed by anyone today as my life heads towards the last Missile Firing Test.

Emails Exchanged Between Col. L.G. Hergert's Son and I:

From: "Gus Hergert"

To:

Subject: Photos on Okinawa

Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 01:21:01 -0600

Thanks for the posting on the 30th Arty Site. I am the son of Colonel L.G. Hergert, Jr. There isn’t a day we don’t go through old picture taken on The Rock, and there is no doubt now that you took most of them. It was the best place I had ever lived, other than being born and raised on Hawaii in the mid-50’s. If there is any way you have any other pix of my family, even of me and my brother (me –dark hair probably red dbl-breasted coat, and younger brother-tall, slender, blond) I would pay for replacements or duplicated.

Thanks so much for your posting. It fired back great memories!

THANK YOU-
Gus Hergert III
Downing Sound Studios, LLC
Huntsville, Alabama, USA

From: David Crews [mailto:ursusdave@hotmail.com]

Sent: Friday, November 17, 2006 11:38 AM

To: gushergert3@bellsouth.net

Subject: 2 more Okinawa pics

I have to do this in the limitations of dial up on an old PC, but I love to be sharing my photos with some folks who lovedvbeing in Okinawa too.

From: "Gus Hergert"

To: "'David Crews'"

Subject: RE: 2 more Okinawa pics

Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 23:55:51 -0600

I'll send more thanks over the weekend when I have a chance, but suffice to say, you said very kind things about my family and I am going to share the pix and email with Mom and Dad.

They'll love the.

I'll drop more of a note over the weekend.

THANK YOU-
Gus Hergert III
Downing Sound Studios, LLC
Huntsville, Alabama, USA

From: David Crews

[mailto:ursusdave@hotmail.com]

Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2006 1:19 PM

To: gushergert3@bellsouth.net

Subject: and 2 more Okinawa pics

Here are two shots of the Okinawan kids doing a traditional dance as a thank you to us for the backstops. As a barely experienced photographer, I remember being amazed at how neat the spit of sand being kicked up by the girl in front looked. Freeze action photography!

I wanted you to know that though my "A Wild Start" story is on the Japan Policy Research Institute web site I do not agree with all they have to say on there. I understand why the Okinawans want our military bases off their island, I’d want us off my island too; the JPRI literature gives some dynamic, thought provoking arguments against our continued occupation of the island; but I can’t stop believing that it is a superb, natural strategic location for a military position that helps thwart Chinese, and other county’s, world aggression. It is a location which the Okinawans can’t defend from any aggression—they have a multi-century long historical record of not being able to stay free from Japanese or Chinese occupation. And that occupation always suppressed them, at least America built the place back up after we had to bomb it to bits, because the Japanese hid in caves, behind the backs of Okinawan woman and children, in a self righteous attempt to prolong a lost war of attempted world domination Then I think of all the men we lost there in taking that military position from the Japanese, and I feel that those sacrifices by my country paid part of the rent for the Okinawan property occupied by our bases for a long time coming.

For the past several years, I have read everything I could find on the Internet about the 30 Arty Bgde. I am wondering if you can fill me in on some missing facts. When I left The Rock the 30th Arty was about to turn our missile sites over to the Japanese Army. I did several photographic assignments when Japanese Army Officers visited the missile sites (and guldamit, I never kept copies of them photos). The US Army decommissioned our last Nike Hercules Missile sites in 1979. Can you tell me what became of our missile sites on Okinawa?

I apologize if this is a lot to email about. I am doing all I can to overcome service and non service connected disabilities and you happened to contact me when I have been working at that goal by writing out about my life and publishing my stories on the Internet. I need all the contacts who have info about Okinawa I can find right now. My stories and web site postings about my time on The Rock have gotten me a lot of emails from other ex GIs and their dependents who just can’t believe they still love that little island and their memories of it so much. By the way, you know that there are some great web sites for the alumni of Okinawan US Military Schools. Web search your school’s name if you are not posted on that site
already.

From: David Crews [mailto:ursusdave@hotmail.com]

Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2006 1:56 PM

To: gushergert3@bellsouth.net

Subject: That's About It For Pics

I have some color slides from The Rock that I need to get into digital files and also a few 3 1/2 x 5 commercially printed color pics too. I don't have the scanning equipment nor access to any to complete that intended task yet.

I sure wish I had put together a good portfolio for myself while I was on The Rock. These 8x10 B+W photos I have are all actually rejects (by my standards). They needed more burning and dodging type custom hand printing technique. I love to burn and dodge. I sent the final copies of the prints to the schools and some went up on our bulletin boards or to the soldiers in the photos.

Through the years when I thought of Col Hergert, now and then, I wondered what his background and military experience is. He seemed like a CEO for a major technical firm to me, but one who was willing to sacrifice all for his country and live on a lower salary than others who worked in similar positions in the private sector. The 30th Arty was basically a group of warrior technicians who there to deter nuclear war with communist China and Russia by maintaining a 24/7/365 missile defense shield.

Now that I am writing about my times in the 30th Brigade, I'll be using my riding around the beautiful island in the Col's car and the change of command ceremony memories in my stories somewhere. I am thinking ahead here, and the way it will look will be something like "the Col was in the (blank brigade) before he came to the 30th and had worked his way up through the ranks as a leader of warrior technicians. He wasn't a guts and glory guy, but a level headed leader of technician warriors." or whatever it turns out to be. Serious writing takes a lot rewriting to get it right. Anyway, if you could tell me a short bit about his immediate background prior to his assignment to the 30th or anything I might have found out about him at the time we served together through casual conversation with him, your family, and/or other soldiers who knew him a long time, I can include that in my story. I won't insinuate that I learned it back then though unless this story turns into a fictional novel.

And don't forget about my request for scanned copies of the photos you have, I was hoping that between you, your staff at the studio, your tech savvy kids, most under 30 yr olds are far more tech savvy than me, I was hoping it would be easy enough if there's enough time in your schedules. Fattest raw files are the best, I am begining to work on my photo shop skills a lot more as there are no more old fashioned wet labs in my area.

Happy Thanksgiving. Mine will be a bit more happier as I tell my family about how my old Army photos are still held dear by the folks who have copies of them, and that I got to send my regards to my old brigade commander and his family. Any middle aged veteran would be pleased to have this heart warming event happen in their aging years.

From: "Gus Hergert"

To: "'David Crews'"

Subject: RE: That's About It For Pics

Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 01:31:44 -0600

Dad was assigned to the Secty of Defense, Robert McNamara in the Pentagon before we came to Okinawa. After leaving The Rock, we came to Huntsville, Alabama where Dad commanded the SAFEGUARD Project Office. That was the genesis of what became the Ballistic Missile Defense Command or STARWARS. It was light-years ahead of whatever the public knew, and that was back in 1972-76. Dad retired after 32 years in the Army rather than accept promotion and took over a small R&D company called Science Applications International Corp. He helped build it into a multi-billion dollar/Fortune 500 company which went public on the NYSE (SAI) just a month ago.

Hope that helps.

THANK YOU-
Gus Hergert III
Downing Sound Studios, LLC
Huntsville, Alabama, USA

From: "Gus Hergert"

To: "'David Crews'"

Subject: RE: and 2 more Okinawa pics

Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 01:40:36 -0600

I really have no idea what became of the missile sites. I know they were taken over by the Japanese during Revision, and they were active for a long time. I have no idea if they have the PAC2 Patriot system over there or not. I know we still have portions of the 7th Fleet and almost all of our overseas Marines are located on Okinawa. So some missile shield seems likely.

THANK YOU-
Gus Hergert III
Downing Sound Studios, LLC
Huntsville, Alabama, USA

Emails Exchanged Between Former Lt. T. Gordon Barber, and I. The Name Says Karen Barber and the Email has eddie In It, but Gordon Identifies Himself In A Following Email.

Thomas Gordon Barber was a Lieutenant in the 30th Arty Bgde who was like my section leader or something. He was the officer in direct charge of me and the photo lab that I worked in. He is featured in my stories about Okinawa because he could not requisition the photographic equipment and supplies which I needed to do my Army photo assignments. He could not get those necessary things because the 30th Arty was neither authorized a brigade photographer nor a photo lab for one. Consequently, our supply sergeant was not authorized to order any photographic equipment or supplies.

I bought my own camera gear the very first week I was on Okinawa and had to use that to do my 'official' Army photo assignments. I also had to buy film at times to do assignments. When I ran out of photo printing paper and neither I nor Lt. Barber nor anyone else could not manage any way to 'midnight requisition' any paper that I could use, it meant that I could no longer do my job at all. Unfortunately the 30th Arty still expected me to. As a result of that mind boggling, soul crushing situation, I became one rather insane young man. One day Barber saw some of my written work on the Internet and this set of emails were exchanged between us:

From: "Karen Barber"

To: ursusdave@yahoo.com

I read you memoirs and it brought back a lot of memories. I remember Captain Sawyer. He was followed by Captain Atkinson. I remember Lt Fox. Did you know Jim Lenstra? I believe he was PIO E5 for the 30th Artillery Bd? When did you leave?

Re: 30th Artillery Brigade

Wednesday, August 16, 2006 12:26 AM

From: "David Crews"

To: "Karen Barber"

WOW! I finally found someone who knows some of the main people in my experience. Lenstra was my direct boss, and he ended up taking some flack cause of what happened to me. He was there when I started and he wrote a fair review of what I was like. He had a wife and 2 kids there if I remember right. He was a nice guy all round, but when the illegality of the situation got to me he had to endure some unnecessary crap too because he had to try his best to make me do the impossible. He was the editor of the Brigade Magazine--a little black and white thing cheaply printed. Lt. Fox was a nice enough guy but he had no idea what was really up with the lab and he had to take some stuff from me and for me. I have a certain question I'd still like to ask him but that's not for this email. I believe that he took over for Capt. Sawyer as temp battery commander after I left, if you know anything about that I'd like to read it. I wouldn't doubt that Sawyer got the boot for the way he handled the battery. He was about as despised a human as I ever knew of, good leadership and results could have balanced that out for me as I think things over from my 56 year old point of view but Sawyer was not fit for the job--not just my opinion he was every 30th arty headquarters man's worst enemy when he was there and he set out to make it that way! I left there Nov 17, 1971. I have a lot more to write about this and my stuff on the web is nowhere near finished. I need some pro editing help amongst other types of help to get it to a final copy. This is a lifetime ambition that is a lot more work then I expected, I thought that because had I told many of these stories over and over again to different people through the years that I could
just write down what I said but that is not the way writing works. I’m trying to think, there was a Lt. Barber, yeah he was in there somewhere, I think I remember trying to get him to get me photo supplies but nobody could get what I needed. He was a nice enough guy too, but we had to butt heads. I have been paying a heavy price for all that. I am writing about that part too, but I need people to understand what happened to me before I tell about how I reacted and what the rest of my life was like up till now. If you read all the stuff from nuclear war fears on and realize that I was a regular kid with a strong understanding of why I had to be ready to fight and die for my freedom and my family's freedom but then I was put in a position where my service to my country was turned into a sham by the 30th Arty Bdge (as I have written out and you have read), well it should be understandable that I gave Lt. Barber and others a hard time when they insisted that I do more photo assignments without supplying me the necessary photo gear and lab supplies to do them. I have put this all up on the Internet hoping that some of my comrades from that time may see it. I am setting the facts straight. I encourage anyone to try to prove them to be different then what I have said. I tried to get unit roster records from St. Louis to prove that the 30th arty was not authorized a photographer, but I have to pay for the research, and I live on a small monthly VA non-service connected disability check, so I cannot give them my banking info not knowing the final cost. I found the guy who set the lab up, he is a successful photographer in Houston TX named Jim Whitcomb. I have been web searching 30th arty for 5-6 years now and Jim was in a pro photog's magazine and he said that he was official photographer for the 30th so the search engine found him. We talked on the phone for over an hour about 2 years ago. I never told him what I was doing by writing about my experience but we hit on all points about the illegality of the lab and how he had plenty of connections to get supplies so it worked for him. His father was career Army so Jim hung out with the big brass, not with the GIs in the barracks, and when he could not get a promotion because of the 30th was not authorized a photographer then a general he partied with gave him the promotion.

I was the first army trained photographer to work there, the others were GIs who wanted to be photographers.

I’d like to know who you are and how you found my writings. This is a life saving experience for me to get this stuff out there and to receive replies from other people who were on The Rock. But the others who replied are from other units or different dates of service. There are several web sites about that time there which I have found and it seems we were very fortunate to be stationed there.

Here are several links to Okinawa Vets sites

http://www.madracki.com/usarmyhawk/page1.html

http://pages.prodigy.net/johna/sobe.htm

http://www.62ndmpco.org/

http://www.navycthistory.com/okinawa_intro.html

Please respond to this, I have more written and in the works. I am assuming you read my stories on my blog, it is a poor man’s web site to me. Did you see the
photos? I have some stories on other web sites but maineoutdoorstoday.com/crews/ has the most stuff. You need to hit the 30th Artillery Brigade button at the left or under the blog entry’s title to see all the writings in a row without the other entries in the way. If you are related to former Lt. Barber please email me back and tell me. I had no choice but butt heads with him, he had to do what he was told but I couldn’t do what he told me to. Also, I was quite upset that my photo lab negated that nuclear fallout chamber from being used. One more thing, were you there for the missile test firings in early 1971 when the Hawk Missile went part way up, stalled out a bit and nearly fell on the launcher crew or the crowd in the bleachers watching but then it took off? There were several wives and kids there that day. Yes, this is something I have been hoping for, to set the story straight with some of my old comrades. Let’s talk.

T Gordon Barber Re: 30th Artillery Brigade

Sunday, August 20, 2006 3:17 PM

From: "David Crews"

To: "Karen Barber"

Are you related to T. Gordon Barber? I found his name
in my old Army files.

Re: T Gordon Barber Re: 30th Artillery Brigade

Sunday, August 20, 2006 7:29 PM

From: "Karen Barber"

To: "David Crews"

That would be me.

Your Take On My 30th Arty Stories

Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:12 AM

From: "David Crews"

To:"Karen Barber"

Hello T. Gordon Barber, and thank you for emailing me. I think you got me a bunch of photo paper one time that I couldn’t use in my photo lab, because it was for use with a pure red safe light only, and my 30th Arty Bgde Mole Hole photo lab had a reddish-orange safe light. I showed you how my safe light turned the paper totally black in the developer right away.

I know you probly weren’t told back then but that lab was not supposed to be there and neither was I as a photographer; the 30th could have made me be a cook, a clerk or anything else, even though I had just graduated from Army Photo Lab Tech School, but there was no slot for a photographer in the 30th Arty Bgde--“This is a true historical fact” (one of my favorite lines of Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie Little Big Man). It’s a bummer we had to butt heads over the photo supply problems, but both our backs were up against opposing walls. It was the 30th Arty Bde command personnel who set up the lab and kept it going who caused the problems, not us.

I am very interested in what happened with the photo lab in the Mole Hole after I left. I believe that the arms room clerk took over for me as photographer when
I left the lab. There were always guys working in the brigade as clerks, etc. who owned some new, pro-grade, super low priced at the PX, photo gear and who wanted to be photographers; they couldn’t have cared less about the lab being in the decontamination chamber as long as they got a shot at the much more glamorous occupation of photography.

Did the 30th Arty ever get another Army trained photographer?

The Japanese were coming to take over the 30th Arty Brigade, but did they take over the Mole Hole?

What dates were you there?

I have searched every web site with anything about the 30th Arty Bde and looked at every guest book posting and memoirs story on them but have only found 2 people who were in the 30th Artillery Brigade Headquarters Battery in Sukiran the same time when I was, but then their email addresses are no good anymore.

It is good to hear from someone who was there at the time.

And I am open to reading anyone else’s take on anything which I am writing about---including Capt. Sawyer, the illegality of the photo lab, whether or not the lab compromised our defensive capabilities in anyway, etc..

Also, what were typical officer’s lives like when you were off duty?

My story is still only a working manuscript; so far I have had a good number of Okinawa Veterans send me emails, including some about how The Bush was established as a segregated, all black GIs, bar district and on the percentage of girls who were sold into prostitution by their fathers, and a few do contradict my take on things a bit, and adjustments for those contradictions will make it into the final rewrite of my manuscript. I know from the amount of feedback I’ve received that I do write these stories for and on behalf of many people who have lived on Okinawa, but it is still basically about this ex-GI’s personal memories. I am determined to write out the true facts though, if my written memories are known to you as being incorrect in anyway, please email me about them. I will appreciate any insight into my stories which you may have.

http://www.30thbrigade.org/ is the best site for the 30th Arty Bge

Re: T Gordon Barber Re: 30th Artillery Brigade

Sunday, January 28, 2007 2:10 PM

From: "David Crews"

To: "Karen Barber"

I have a blog site now titled 30th Artillery Brigade Okinawa 1970-71. It is at www.ursusdave3.blogspot.com

I have no way to set up a web site for this so I had to use a free blog as web site.

It starts out with a set of really nice photos and then goes into the text of a story that you are featured in---in fact it is named after you. I go into nearly full detail about everything about my time at the 30th Arty Bgde then also into the crap I have had to endure from the Veterans Administration because of what happened to me over there back then. I was not legally assigned to the 30th and they illegally and immorally put my photo lab in a that nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber. I have no idea how much you remember or what you knew but you did sure as flyin' fuck know that we could not order supplies or equipment for me to do my photo assignments. I went to Okinawa as an eager young soldier and dedicated photographer. I came back out of my 30Th Arty experiences completely disillusioned in life. How could such an immoral thing happen?

I am very fair in my writings about this. As you know they are published in several places on the Internet and have been read by thousands of people by now.

You are going to help me prove what I have in my writings to the Veterans Administration and the US Army. If the only thing that you can contribute is
that you had to finagle US Marine Corp supplies for me because you could not get them through the supply Sargent then that is enough.

What did you know about the illegality and immorality of the photo lab and my assignment to work there?

This shit has kept me in a nearly ruined state of living and is literally killing right now as I write.

I am at the end of my rope. It has gone too far for too long. You are going to tell about what you know.

If you lie or withhold anything I will do all I can to make you wish that you hadn't. I gave you plenty of time to communicate with me and admit what you know but you haven't. Your life circumstances are now of no consequence to me, how much you suffer from this is now up to you. I have nearly nothing to loose anymore.

I am doing this to save my life and live the rest of it as the guy whom I was when I reported to the 30th Arty Bgde for duty. Everything is explained quite
sufficiently in my blog/poor man's web site.

Now get your gahdamned ass over there and read everything on it, then respond to me by email.

More Guest Book Postings on the Unit 30th Arty Bgde HHB Site:

From:Dundalk maryland

Web Site:An American GI On Okianwa 1970-71

Email:ursusdave@yahoo.com

Unit 30th Arty Bgde HHB

David Robert Crews

Sunday, 1/28/07, 1:30 PM

Due to the length restrictions on guest book entries this was left off my entry that appears two entries down. This is a sad set of facts to have to expose as a potential black mark on your father's record. I have never thought that Col. Hergert should be held responsible for what happened to me under his command. But in the military world he was in fact responsible to some minute degree. It may not mean much at this stage of his life, but I will be further emotionally injured by my 30th Arty experiences if I have to cause Col. Hergert any serious stress or other problems that are unhealthy to him. You have maybe till the end of the month to go over my 30th Arty web site and talk to you dad. I am at the end of my rope.

From:Dundalk Maryland

Web Site:30th Artillery Brigade Okinawa 1970-71

Email:ursusdave@yahoo.com

Unit HHB 30th Arty Bgde

David Robert Crews

Sunday, 1/28/07, 1:21 PM

Yesterday I sent an email to former 30th Arty soldier Jim Whitcomb. Jim set up the illegal, militarily immoral photo lab at the 30th Arty HHB in the Mole Hole. I forgot to save it to sent mail. It basically states that he is going to help me prove all that I say on my blog 30th Artillery Brigade Okinawa 1970-71 (www.ursusdave3.blogspot.com)whether he wants to or not. It goes along with the email I sent to Col. Hergert's son which is in the next message below this one. I am putting this info on here so that 1)You have the opportunity to refute anything I say. 2) Any witnesses who agree with what I say can come forward. Here is the link to the place where I found Jim Whitcomb through an Internet search for other former 30th Arty photographers http://www.asmphouston.org/webletter/002/newmember.ht m Jim was featured in a news letter as a new member to the American Society of Media Photogaphers. You can contact Jim at: Studio Houston Digital Photography 5401 Mitchelldale Suite B2 Houston, Texas Phone 713 682 0067 Fax 713 682 0067 Email sales@studiohouston.com All I am after are the hard cold facts.

From:Dundalk Maryland

Web Site:30th Artillery Brigade Okinawa 1970-71

Email:ursusdave@yahoo.com

Unit HHB 30th Arty Bgde

David Robert Crews

Sunday, 1/28/07, 12:57 PM

Today I sent this email to Gus Hergert, the son of my former commander, Col. Hergert, at the 30th Arty Bgde.=== Following this first part of my email to you is an email that I sent to the former 30th Arty Bgde officer T. Gordon Barber. Then there is an email he sent to me. I am not angry at your father as I am at Mr. Barber. Barber absolutely positively knew what was up with my situation at the 30th Arty, but I never knew whether your dad knew anything or not. I did not particularly, personally care for Lt. Barber, but maybe it would have been different had my assignment under him been legal. I admired, respected, and enjoyed the company of to no end, and would have willingly fought and died for, in a combat area, your father, my Col. Hergert. Prior to my entry in the Army I was a bear hunting guide in Maine (www.ursusdave.blogspot.com Northern Maine Adventures). During those experiences I had the great pleasure, and at very rare times the displeasure (http://magic-city- news.com/D_R_Crews_84/The_Rocket_Scientist_4547.shtml ) of guiding many types of individuals on bear hunts-- doctors, lawyers, millionaire businessmen--and as their hunting guide I had control of the situation and their safety and lives and chances of having a good, safe, fun time in Maine were in my fully capable hands. That allowed me to know that as long as person does their job well and to the best of their abilities as I did while guiding them that they are no better than me in any way. Consequently when I say that I liked Col. Hergert and his family immensely I had the life experiences to be a good judge of character. I do not wish to cause your family any stress or discomfort. I have told the bulk of my 30th Arty story with embarrassing candor (www.ursusdave3.blogspot.com), I know that your father's memories of me will be different at times from what the facts were. I have no choice but to involve you father in this to some degree. It is a matter of my survival. Read my 30th Arty blog site and it can be apparent to you that I have no other choice than to ask that Col. Hergert have his say in this. What happened to me was not something that I have ever believed or even fully suspected that Col. Hergert knew and approved of. I had to suspect that he may have known, but it just did not seem to me that it fit his personality or professional standards for him to have known the true military facts of my assignment to the 30th Arty as a photographer. My life has been, since I was assigned to the 30th, and will always be quite a dismal mess unless I finally set the record straight. What I have endured during my adult life and what I now endure everyday is too much for me to take any longer. The stress is horrible. The embarrassment and humiliation of being seen as a different person than who I am because of the lies in my military records has all but killed me. It has now just about finished me. I put it all out there on the world wide web for everyone to see but it made no difference. I am going to set this situation straight in very short time. I am giving you one last chance to allow me to do this in a kind gentle manner towards your father and family. If you do not now realize that you and your father are unfortunately stuck with helping me, than I can't help you. It has now come down to you and yours, and T. Gordon Barber and his, or me and mine. I know that this is difficult for you to understand and I am willing to be very reasonable with you. But I am going to prove these facts about my time in the US Army no matter what happens to anyone else. It is now a matter of my survival and the well being of my family, particularly my heirs. Please cooperate with me so that no one in your family is hurt in any way. This is a sad set of facts to have to expose as a potential bl

From:Dundalk Maryland

Web Site:30th Artillery Brigade okinawa 1970-71

Email:ursusdave@yahoo.com

Unit HHB 30th Arty Bgde

The link to this guest book posting is:

http://www.30thbrigade.org/~site/Scripts_NewGuest/NewGuest.dll?CMD=CMDGetViewEntriesPage&STYLE=classic/&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;RETURN=&GBID=14306162&ENTRYID=&FORWARDFLAG=true&DISPLAY=31&EM=true&EMAILADDRESS=ENC__1818e71fb832e6506e2e636f6d&CUSTOMVALUE=Unit&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;TARGETURL=&H_H=1751071252&H_P=&H_A=&H_V

Email to All Three Witnesses and Many Others

2006-12-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

(May 28, 2010) Though I have have steadily been aware that I sent the following email, I was shocked yesterday to see how long ago I sent it out. I suffer from such severe depression that I have not been able to follow up on what this email is all about. It is all about getting my three witnesses to the trauma I endured while assigned to the 30th Arty Bgde to understand what that illegal and immoral duty assignment did to me and for them to testify to the Veterans Administration on what they know as the facts of this matter.

One of the witnesses, my former 30th Arty Bgde commander, Col. Louis G. Hergert, has since passed away. The email was sent to his son, Gus, whom I had exchanged several emails with. I am glad the Col. Hergert never had to deal with this, but he may have been partly responsible for what happened. I do not know though, because he may never have been briefed or told in any way that the 30th Arty photo lab in the Mole Hole underground communications bunker was actually in a nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber. As a soldier photographer, had I served with Col. Hergert in a war zone, my first duty would have always been to protect the commander. I would have willingly given my life to defend him from any enemies. And I flat-out really liked the man. He was a very nice, intelligent, easy to get along with, gentle person.

But, it really fries-my-gizzards seeing how long that Jim Whitcomb and Gordan Barber have had to come forward with what they know about me not being able to order photo equipment or supplies, nor ever advance in rank as there was no slot for a photographer at the 30th, and they sure-as-hell remember that the photo lab Jim and I worked in was completely against Army Rules and Regulations AND it would have negated the intended use of the decon chamber - quite possibly allowing millions of Americans to do in a nuclear war.

Here is the email:

To my how the 30th Artillery Brigade f#*&ed up my life witnesses

Monday, January 29, 2007 2:43 PM

From: "David Crews"

To: sales@studiohouston.com, gushergert3@bellsouth.net, eddiebar@bellsouth.net

Cc:
editor@magic-city-news.com, contactus@sjvnews.com, BVAOmbudsman@mail.va.gov, editor@usatoday.com, letters@nytimes.com, letters@washpost.com, news@baltimoresun.com, VAOIGWebmasters@va.gov, webmaster@sec.senate.gov, EagleTrailers@aol.com, webmaster@dundalkeagle.net, lhintz@hotmail.com, dri-ki@ainop.com, walcottd@saic.com, ursusdave@yahoo.com... more

To the Senate webmaster, please forward this to Cardin and Mikulski)

To Jim Whitcomb, T. Gordon Barber, and Gus Hergert,

I realize that it is time to tell each of the three of you that I have been in contact with two other former 30th Arty soldiers, one directly and then my former commanding officer through his son.

You three are:

T. G. Barber: eddiebar@bellsouth.net

Gus Hergert: mailto:gushergert3@bellsouth.net (son of Col. Louis G. Hergert)

Jim Whitcomb's contact info:

Studio Houston Digital Photography
5401 Mitchelldale Suite B2
Houston, Texas
Phone 713 682 0067
Fax 713 682 0067
sales@studiohouston.com

I have a case pending with the Veterans Administration for a fair service connected disability rating. The VA does not believe me when I tell them the facts about my assignment to the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa. The last VA doctor whom I talked to looked me straight in my face and told me so, then he put it in my records that I am more or less making it all up. Jim Whitcomb is in my VA files as a witness, but the VA refuses to contact him. The best thing for us all is for you two other veterans and Col. Hergert to contact each other, and then contact the VA to set them straight on the facts. The VA already knows that I became a depressed and angry man in the 30th Arty, and still am in my adult life, they know that I abused alcohol and other drugs, I went through substance abuse rehab in the VA, the only thing that you now need to add to my records is that I am not lying about the illegality and immorality of my assignment to the 30th as brigade photographer (http://magic-city-news.com/D_R_Crews_84/The_Illegality_And_Immorality_Of_My_Assignment_As__5891.shtml).

To Gus and T. G. Barber, one day about two years ago I had long phone conversation with Jim. We discussed many things that are in my written works. He can verify things that either you or Col. Hergert may not be aware of.

To Jim, you have no reasonable choice left but to tell the truth to T. Gordon Barber and Col. L. G. Hergert.

To Barber and Gus, you have no other reasonable choice left but to listen to Jim when he tells you the full facts of how the 30 Arty's photo lab was set up and how he got his photo equipment and supplies and that the lab was in a place that was there for a very different reason. A reason that I believed in so much that the knowledge of how my photo lab compromised the stated military mission of the 30th Arty Bgde drove me to the brink of complete insanity. Hopeless, debilitating, depression and anxiety nearly destroyed me. I still suffer from it. The guilt that I felt as a result of being a part of endangering millions of lives, whom I was there to protect, crushed my soul. The fact that those soldiers at the 30th who had arranged to virtually kidnap and enslave me were going to get away with it turned me against the entire US Army. I lost most of my lifelong love for my country, a land which I had been willing to fight and die for ever since I was child growing up in a good, patriotic family and living in nice community going to schools that had taught me patriotism from the beginning of my formal education (http://magic-city-news.com/D_R_Crews_84/Nuclear_War_Fears_5797.shtml). After that it was impossible for me to give my full, natural born love to my family. As a very young man this left me with nothing to believe in or want to live for. The result of all this was that I have had an extremely empty hearted and impoverished adult life. It was the wrong way to react, but there never should have been such a f#*+ed up situation for me to react to. I was a fine young man when I joined the Army (http://ursusdave.blogspot.com). I did well in basic training and Army photography school, and on up till I went to Okinawa and was assigned to the 30th long enough to learn just what my assignment there actually meant (http://magic-city-news.com/D_R_Crews_84/My_VW_Bug_Trip_to_Maine_4762.shtml). And it says exactly that in my Army records. There was no way that my family or schooling could have prepared me on how to react to what happened to me at the 30th Arty. It was a personal disgrace for me to be part of such an organization that would set up a photo lab which negated the use of an important safeguard in the chain of defense that was supposed to be protecting my beloved country and family. It may be that the only course of action which will resolve this is if you three come forward to help me to set this right.

I have a copy of the Table Of Organization and Equipment dated 31 July 1967 for Headquarters and Headquarters Battery Air Defense Artillery Brigade and there is no slot for a photographer on it. I have one Morning Report for the 30th HHB but there is no info on it filled out about anyone's MOS. I have tried for years to get the paperwork, which I know is out there somewhere, to prove my case, but I would need to go to the Military Records Center in St. Louis to research for it or pay for research, which I can not afford. I believe that the written evidence is either in a Morning Report or Unit Roster. I asked St. Louis for one Unit Roster but they want research money. Their web site suggests asking for research help from several local universities’ history departments, it says that students will do the research for free. So I sent numerous emails to those schools’ administrators and to faculty members of the departments which the Records Center said would help, but I never heard back from any of them.

I have sent letters and emails to numerous elected officials, but all they ever come back with is info stating that yes I was assigned to the 30th Arty as a photographer. I sent those same letters and emails to many members of the media, but most of them do not understand or believe me. I finally found one individual in Maine who was willing to publish my 30th Arty stories on his web publication (http://magic-city-news.com/D_R_Crews_84/index.shtml). Then I found out about blogging on the Internet, and I have the facts of my 30th Arty situation well documented on those sites (http://ursusdave3.blogspot.com/ + http://okinawa1970-71.blogspot.com). I sent emails to any 30th Arty veterans I could locate on the Internet. I placed guest book entries on Okinawa and 30th Arty web sites informing people that I was looking for witnesses to what happened to me and then where my 30th Arty stories could be found. Several thousand people have read those stories. Some of my readers believe that I was screwed over by the 30th Arty, some don’t. Do a web search for my full name, “David Robert Crews”, in quotes to get just the exact phrase, and also search for ursusdave, my Internet nickname. Use both Google and Yahoo and you will find most of what I have placed on the Internet.

I have also told my family, friends, and many acquaintances all about this. Again, some believed me, others didn’t.

As you can now see, I have been struggling and working to prove the facts for a long time. If I am not telling the truth then I am one severely psychotic veteran who needs serious treatment for psychosis. Or I’m a damn good fiction writer who should be using his talents to be a successful, professional fiction writer.

I have had a lot of treatment for my real mental health disorders of depression and anxiety since I left the Army. VA and civilian doctors and mental health care workers have treated me for these problems all throughout my adult life. This is all well documented in my VA files. Some civilian mental health workers have believed me when I talked about what my 30th Arty experiences did to me, but only one VA doctor ever told me that he believed me, but unfortunately he did not right that down in my files. One VA doctor thought that it was an “organic problem”, like a maybe a brain tumor, that was causing me to think up these things, and I was given a Cat Scan of my brain, which was negative for anything that would make me think up and believe crazy bullcrap. It is not crazy bullcrap, as Jim you know, Barber you probably know, and Col. Hergert you may very well possibly know (but I am hoping that Col. Hergert never knew).

I have done all that I can to resolve this serious issue. Now I must insist that you three help me.

I guess that it was because of the way that my depression keeps me from being able to totally concentrate or think 100% clearly that I did not email all three of you at the same time and tell you about each other, instead I emailed T. Barber and Gus without telling them that I had emailed Jim the day before. Then I realized that you all three need to communicate with each other so that Jim can tell Gus and Barber what the real deal was. And Barber should at least remember that he could not order me photo supplies.

You are pretty well stuck with this. Don’t blame me, I was the honest, young soldier who only wanted to work hard at being a good photographer, be issued what I needed to do the job, not pay for my own cameras, lenses, film, and then photo paper too to do Army assignments. Then to realize what it meant to have my photo lab in that nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber was more than my young psyche could handle.

I forgot to put my last email to Jim in the sent file, but here is a copy of the email I sent to Col. Hergert's son today:

Following this first part of my email to you is an email that I sent to the former 30th Arty Bgde officer T. Gordon Barber. Then there is a set of emails that Barber and I exchanged.

I am not angry at your father as I am at Mr. Barber. Barber absolutely positively knew what was up with my situation at the 30th Arty, but I never knew whether your dad knew anything or not.

I did not particularly, personally care for Lt. Barber, but maybe it would have been different had my assignment under him been legal.

I admired, respected, and enjoyed the company of to no end, and would have willingly fought and died for, in a combat area, your father, my Col. Hergert.

Prior to my entry in the Army I was a bear hunting guide in Maine (www.ursusdave.blogspot.com Northern Maine Adventures). During those experiences I had the great pleasure, and at very rare times the displeasure
(http://magic-city-news.com/D_R_Crews_84/The_Rocket_Scientist_4547.shtml)
of guiding many types of individuals on bear hunts--doctors, lawyers, millionaire businessmen--and as their hunting guide I had control of the situation and their safety and lives and chances of having a good, safe, fun time in Maine were in my fully capable hands. That allowed me to know that as long as person does their job well and to the best of their abilities as I did while guiding them that they are no better than me in any way. Consequently when I say that I liked Col. Hergert and his family immensely I had the life experiences to be a good judge of character.

I do not wish to cause your family any stress or discomfort. I have told the bulk of my 30th Arty story with embarrassing candor (www.ursusdave3.blogspot.com), I know that your father's memories of me will be different at times from what the facts were.

I have no choice but to involve your father in this to some degree. It is a matter of my survival. Read my 30th Arty blog site and it can be apparent to you that I have no other choice than to ask that Col. Hergert have his say in this. What happened to me was not something that I have ever believed or even fully suspected that Col. Hergert knew and approved of. I had to suspect that he may have known, but it just did not seem to me that it fit his personality or professional standards for him to have known the true military facts of my assignment to the 30th Arty as a photographer.

My life has been, since I was assigned to the 30th, and will always be quite a dismal mess unless I finally set the record straight.

What I have endured during my adult life and what I now endure everyday is too much for me to take any longer. The stress is horrible. The embarrassment and humiliation of being seen as a different person than who I am because of the lies in my military records has all but killed me. It has now just about finished me. I put it all out there on the world wide web for everyone to see but it made no difference.

I am going to set this situation straight in very short time. I am giving you one last chance to allow me to do this in a kind gentle manner towards your father and family. If you do not now realize that you and your father are unfortunately stuck with helping me, than I can't help you. It has now come down to you and yours, and T. Gordon Barber and his, or me and mine.

I know that this is difficult for you to understand and I am willing to be very reasonable with you. But I am going to prove these facts about my time in the US Army no matter what happens to anyone else. It is now a matter of my survival and the well being of my family, particularly my heirs.

Please cooperate with me so that no one in your family is hurt in any way. This is a sad set of facts to have to expose as a potential black mark on your father's record. I have never thought that Col. Hergert should be held responsible for what happened to me under his command. But in the military world he was in fact responsible to some minute degree. It may not mean much at this stage of his life, but I will be further emotionally injured by my 30th Arty experiences if I have to cause Col. Hergert any serious stress or other problems that are unhealthy to him.

You have maybe till the end of the month to go over my 30th Arty web site and talk to your dad. I am at the end of my rope.

Today, as I was reading through this email to look for mistakes, before I emailed it, I had a brief, disturbing, anxiety attack when I thought that I may go to check my email and find that Col. Hergert or one of the other three of you has died. These anxiety incidents have been hitting me too many times. I can not wait any longer. Let’s get this done and over with so that we can move on in our lives.

(End of the email)

I have been suffering from varying degrees of depression for nearly 40 damned years. It is definitely a service connected disability. The Veterans Administration has refused to believe a word I tell them about this. Time and time and time and time again, they declare it is all in my head and I made it up to cover up my own natural personality problems. I have tried to get them to look at what I have here on this web site about it, but was told, "We don't look on the Internet to help treat our patients." I bet they sure would look it over real closely if I had placed threatening statements on here about them and they 'got wind of it'. The last VA psychiatrist or physiologist whom I met with also told me they "can't help" me with my service connected "disability rating." They cannot help me receive a fair one, but they have made sure that I do not have one.

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

I Am Determined to Prove the Facts

2006-12-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

I am determined to prove the facts that are in my story, and to work my way back into a real life again.

Until about nine years ago, I never made very much use of the writing skills that I have employed here to put forth this narrative. My serious writing began in the year 2000, when I was taking an English class at Dundalk Community College. I was also taking photography classes there, and, up until that time, ever since my discharge from the Army, I had not been able to do very much in life at all. It was decidedly dismal and deeply painful. I had some wild times, good times, but was never actually happy. Most of my post-military days were empty and dreary.

I have always known that I am a writer or at least that I wanted to be a writer, for my entire adult life, from all of the way back to when I was an eighteen-year-old Baltimore boy who became a bear hunting guide in Maine, up until now. Ever since I was experiencing them, I have known that my Maine adventures are a good story to write; and then when I was on Okinawa I knew that those times too would make a good written story some day. I have told my stories verbally to many people along the way in my life, now finally some of the stories are put down in writing. It has taken me nearly forty years of slow, painful healing time just to get myself back together enough to write this manuscript.

If it wasn’t for the depression, caused by my 30th Artillery Brigade experience, I know that I’d have had a lot of my writings and photography published during the past four decades.

I have rarely worked at my photography along the way from the springtime of 1971, when I ran out of supplies on Okinawa, up to today. I did get back into it seriously between 1999 and about 2003, when I was going to the community college, and I do some photo work now and then, but not often enough. I have a lot of other great photographs, which are not yet on the Internet anywhere, including more than a thousand unprinted/unscanned negatives sitting around waiting for me to get full-steam back into it again and really, finally pull it all together - just like it was when I arrived on Okinawa.

If it wasn’t for the depression, caused by my 30th Artillery Brigade experience, I know that I’d have been a successful, world traveling photographer and writer - during my entire adult life.

I don’t really know who the guy is who is writing this and who wrote the other stories about Okinawa and Maine that are on the Internet and the other written and photographic I've done. That man is real good at what he does, I wish I was closer to him. I do not feel like that person. I am hardly in touch with him at all.

I need to overcome this depression I am saddled with and do all that I can do in life. This writing takes me far too long and through too many rewrites to get it the best I can, but it still isn’t the best it can be. I need to write about a lot of things. I need to do as much photography as I can. I need to get out of my house and back into the outside world more. This depression must be relieved.

I am 59 years old, my health is failing at an increasingly faster pace, I live below the poverty line, in America, I am nearly completely withdrawn from all family and social contacts, so I don’t have very much longer to get this done nor very much money to do it with.

I am going to do everything that I can conceive of to make the Veterans Administration and the U.S. Army face these facts and to acknowledge them in my records.

It has hurt my family, and all of the other people who have ever been close to me and who were disappointed that this man whom they saw as good human being, an interesting conversationalist, a competent and accomplished outdoorsman, a fine photographer, an entertaining and informative writer would always fall into deep depressions and not continue to do the things that they loved me for and knew I could do and then be my full, wholesome self and to be part of their welcoming social world.

For the bulk of my adult life, my depression made me feel unworthy of the love and companionship of a good woman or any children. I have never been married; I would not allow any of the few fine women who had shared their love with me over the years to be permanently saddled with the weight of my problems. I certainly didn’t want any beautiful, innocent children to suffer along with me.

I did my best to make sure that no sweet lady who had been physically intimate with me got pregnant. I am one of those men who will never know though, because I lived all up and down the east coast during some traveling days back in the years between 1976 and the early 1980s, when I went hitchhiking around, or had moved to different states while looking for a real life. Let’s hope that no child of mine had to grow up not knowing their father, even though it may have been worse if they had known me but had suffered because I could not provide for them. I pray that no child of mine was born to live not ever knowing me.

There is one, new driving force in my life now that precludes me from allowing the lack of respect from the VA to continue driving me towards a sad ending to my life.

I don’t know what is going to happen next, but this written document establishes that I have tried and tried for over three devastating decades to establish the truth and to work with the Veterans Administration to heal my emotional wounds. I have never been treated for the cause of my problems.

About twelve years ago, I called the Gunner’s Gym on Okinawa, which is across the street from the underground bunker that he 30th Arty Bgde photo lab was located in, and I talked to the Marine on duty there (it is no longer an Army post). The underground bunker is not in use anymore and is closed up with a few strips of steel welded across its entrance door. If I could get some photos of the place, or a video, it may help my case. At least I have been examining every avenue to the truth that I can conceive of.

Hopefully, publishing this narrative will help me to finally establish the truth about my experience in the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa, and to force the Veterans Administration to finally acknowledge this truth and to treat the cause of my depression, and give me some closure.

Then I want to work as hard as I can at my writing, at doing my photographic works, and at anything else that I’ve been wanting to do that I still can do for the rest of my life. I may never be able to do enough to be a great, world renowned success, but at least I’ll be busy, productive, socially active, responsible and happy.

David Robert Crews
2727 Liberty Pkwy
Dundalk, Md.
21222

ursusdave@yahoo.com

You can't completely judge this case until you know what I was like prior to becoming a US Army soldier. Fortunately, I have created a really neat web site about what my life was like before I enlisted into the Army. It compares my teenage days in the Dundalk suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland to the time in 1968 when I moved to Northern Maine, at age eighteen, and fit right in up in the woodland country; I became a Registered Maine Hunting Guide specializing in guiding bear hunters, and I was quite the country ladies' delight and had a lotta wild and woolly times with fun loving Mainer men. That web site is:

Northern Maine Adventures Photo Album