In chronological order. Because of censorship or fear of getting someone in trouble, I normally could not relate them in letters to Barbara.
No more KP. Jan. 7: Diaz, a short, happy-go-lucky kid from Chicago, looked about 17 or 18. I had talked to him in the yard and found his people were from Puerto Rico. He got locked up because he had refused a sergeant’s order to go on what would have been his third KP duty in a week. That’s just too much, he thought, so he said he wasn’t going to do it, he just wasn’t.
So they gave him a Summary Court-Martial and its maximum, 30 days, meaning he’d get out in 25. Three days ago, with just a few days left until his release, he was being marched along with four others to his job for the day. The guard had a shotgun. On the way, the group passed a civilian employee who shouted, “Hey, one-a you guys, get that rock outta the road!” Diaz ran out toward the rock. A white prisoner with a pointy chin and a heavy Georgia accent yelled, “Hey, Sarge, he’s tryin’ to ‘scape!” The guard, tall, black, new and scared, wheeled and shot. At twelve to fifteen feet from the muzzle, Diaz was hit by all nine steel slivers. Most went clean through. He arrived at the hospital a bloody mess and died the next day.
Today, we all were herded into a large, rarely used auditorium. Scratchy recorded church-type music was stumbling out of the low-fi speakers. After we were settled, Chaplain Chipmunk told us to bow our heads. He then recited a prayer about how the Lord loves every one of us. Every one. Then he gave a short sermon about how important it was to do our duty. He ended with, “See, men, this is what happens when you don’t live by the rules.”
Rumor was the guard was given a carton of cigarettes and a day off.
* * * * *
There were few escapes directly from the prison, mainly because it was physically difficult. But they did happen. There was, for instance, Keenan, a skinny blonde with poor skin, poor posture, and nervous eyes. He had gotten out once merely by scaling over a stockade wall and heading through the woods to the highway. After he was captured a few days later and brought back, Minton took him around the inside perimeter and had him point out all the places someone could climb over the wall. Then Minton forced prisoners to put barbed wire on top of those places. Problem solved! Except Keenan was gone the next day: he had kept one vulnerable spot to himself. He later sent Minton a postcard from a town he was passing through, or so they said.
* * * * *
Which brings me to something a bit more amusing: When people here have a bit of spare time, they can hardly cutachoagie [GI slang from Korean War] down to the nearest bar or go drag racing in their new 426 GTOs (which they all claim to have), so they read the Bible, often for the first time. Frequently they become authorities on the end of the world and sin. The other morning I heard a conversation that ran pretty close to this:
“It’s a sin to be with a woman before you’re married.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Oh, yes, it is. It says so in the Bible that fortification is a sin.”
“No, that’s only if it’s somebody else’s wife.”
“Oh, yeah? I got fined ten bucks for it in Louisville.”
* * * * *
Prisoners like to talk about how they were caught, often with undertones of how unfair it was. Today I overheard this conversation:
First kid: Man, I was in a bar in Lou’ville and this girl come up to me and we started talking and stuff and she asked me to buy her a drink and so I did and we were talking and she wanted another drink and she was acting like she liked me and all. Then she said, “You have short hair. I hope you’re not a soldier. My ex was a soldier, what a jerk.” I told her, “Nah! my sergeant was a stupid sucker, so I just walked out of there, just walked out. Bam! I was gone! The hell with them.” She said she had to go to the ladies room. She was away for a long time, and then before she come back, these two MPs come in and grab me.”
Second: This girl, what did she look like?
First: She had long, straight hair, sorta brown, I think. Sharon. Name was Sharon.
Second: Kinda skinny?
First: Yeah.
Second: Damn! Same thing happened to me. Damn! Sharon!
Word was that civilians could get $25 for turning an AWOL. Might not have been true but half the world runs on rumors.
* * * * *
Groups of newly processed prisoners would mill around about ten feet from my studio space after they had been interviewed by Evans if the doors to the small auditorium had not yet been opened for Minton’s Rabbit speech. This gave me a chance to talk to some of them. The youngest ones rarely said anything, but those with more Army experience would notice that I had a white band on my sleeve, and ask me what I was in for.
I was always forthright, saying I had refused to obey orders because I had turned against war. One guy, about 24 years old, replied that he was a birthright Quaker and sympathized with my position but wasn’t a CO himself. He was in fact, he said, on his second enlistment, having re-upped, he readily admitted, for the drugs in ‘Nam. He had done well as a soldier, he bragged. “If you ever see a picture of [General William] Westmoreland [commander of US forces in Vietnam, 1964-68] being trailed by his aides, there I am. That’s me, four guys down, with the clipboard.” He probably wouldn’t stay locked up for long because he planned to tell Minton he wanted to go back to ‘Nam (the real reason). I never saw him again.
I was thinking about Plummer today, a lanky, dark-haired, dark-eyed inmate about 23, calmer than most of us. He had been a long-distance truck driver, stopping at his mother’s house every six months or so.
On one of those stops, he found a draft notice among the mail addressed to him. He decided to ignore it. “Don’t worry, Mom, doesn’t mean anything.” His position, he told me one evening in the cell, was: “Why should I go in the Army? I’m already supporting the country with taxes.”
The next time he stopped at his mother’s she was distraught, nearly in tears. She said the FBI had been there. They had told her there was an all points bulletin out on him and they were going to get him unless he came down to their office and talked to them.
So he did. They said he would get an automatic five years in jail and a $10,000 fine. But they could make it all go away if he accepted induction. So he went to the induction center and was sworn in. They put him on the train headed to Ft. Knox for Basic Training. He was one of the first ones aboard. As it was filling with other inductees, Plummer strode down a few cars, slid open a door on the opposite side, and jumped off.
He traveled around the country for several months until a friend convinced him that if he turned himself in, he would get an automatic unsuitability discharge. So he turned himself in—and got court-martialed and sentenced to six months. While in here, he rapidly became a model prisoner and convinced the confinement officer he was sorry for his mistake and wanted to be a soldier after all. Within two weeks of his trial, he was promoted to minimum security and a few days later sent to the parolee barracks, from which he walked away the very same day.
* * * * *
I mentioned earlier that some inmates had gone AWOL without meaning to leave for good. Alcohol might be involved, and sometimes a man had a pretty good reason for drinking too much for too long. This evening, I got to talking with a prisoner about 23 and who looked like a civilian’s idea of a soldier, with his dark blond hair and good physique. He told me he had been sent to Guatemala with a group of advisers who sometimes were ordered to shoot or had to return fire. He had, he said, holding back tears, shot a kid who “looked just like my little brother, looked just like my little brother.” He had nightmares afterward and started drinking while on leave, he said, and didn’t go back when he was supposed to. The MPs grabbed him one night outside a bar. He told me he wasn’t trying to get out of the Army. “The kid looked just like my little brother, I mean.”
There continues to be a lot of turnover. A tall, thin, light-brown-skinned, hyper-ish, curly-haired kid showed up in the cell about three days ago. He liked to be the center of attention, often dancing around in the evenings, flinging his arms this way and that, sometimes doing a near split and then pretending to pull himself up by the back of his shirt then dancing some more. He would say to the group in general but no one in particular: “My uncle will get me out of here. My uncle is the governor of Puerto Rico. He will get me out.” Yeah, right, we thought! But today he was gone. Thanks, Uncle!
* * * * *
I remember one kid brought in who claimed from the git-go he was innocent. He was innocent, he said, because he had never been AWOL. That was his twin brother.
Minton didn’t like that sort of talk, twin or no twin. He didn’t believe the kid. He didn’t believe anyone, actually, so he had the kid down on the floor scrubbing away.
Turns out that prisoner was telling the truth, sort of. He hadn’t gone AWOL, his brother had. But he played along with his arrest at first, thinking it would get his brother off the hook, and maybe win him some money for false arrest, then both of them would be let go, having beaten the system.
Army cops and civilian cops exchanged some information via Teletype and telephone, so within three days, the first twin was charged with making a false statement to an officer, and the second one was brought in. Soon they were both down on the floor scrubbing away side by side.
* * * * *
How The System Works. As I’ve mentioned, a lot of guys in the Army are just bursting to let you what’s eating them. They are away from their wives, buddies, and girlfriends. Who better to tell than the complete stranger . After dinner this evening, I was in the barracks writing a letter. The dark-haired, ordinary-looking soldier on the next bunk turned was someone I had never seen before. He must have just moved in. He toward me, and without further ado said, “Man, I’m in the MPs, and I’m on my way to the Traffic Division, and I can’t wait.
“They had me down there at the stockade guarding prisoners. We were constantly told we were supposed to shoot at any prisoner who tried to escape—and not in the air but shoot them dead.
“One day I went to the commanding officer of the PGs and asked to be transferred. He said no dice and gave me a lecture and reminded me a prisoner would try to grab my gun and shoot me, and if I wasn’t killed that I would be court-martialed. So I acted real tough. So they wouldn’t try anything. I’m a good Catholic boy,” he continued with a catch in his voice. “Man, I didn’t want to kill anybody.” He shook his head as to free it from the thought. I looked at his name tag. It read “Petrocelli.” I had heard a lot about him. He was the PG that so many prisoners hated. They said he was a rotten goddamn fucking son of a bitch asshole motherfucker bastard. They said this because he was always yelling at them and ordering them around. They said they would stomp the shit out of him if they ever ran into him when they got back on the block. Some said they would hunt him down and do that. What they didn’t know about him is he was just scared to death.