By May, 1962, I had landed a job as a stringer for the El Paso Times. My editor gave me lots of latitude, and I decided to do a story on the exciting annual assault by the U.S. Forest Service against fires in the Gila National forest. I talked the fire boss into letting me take a ride in a Beech T-34 Mentor bird-dog plane, used as a "forward observation post" to guide WWII TMB slurry planes to their targets. We had just guided a TBM over a small fire when wind shear threw the T-34 into the ponderosa pines growing on the side of a steep canyon. The aircraft was demolished; the pilot and I survived with relatively minor injuries.
Smoke jumpers who jumped into the wreck site near dark gave us first aid; the next morning, they felled trees to make room room for an evacuation by helicopter. For more details, read "I survived a plane crash in New Mexico's Black Range".
I was in hospital for a week, suffering mainly from extreme bruising and torn muscles, but my trauma was apparently more than physical. During the summer, I sank into a long and difficult depression. Today, a psychologist would probably diagnose Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a debilitating condition which results from near-death experiences, and was not well understood until the 1980s. My brother-in-law, Charlie Francis, told me I needed to "snap out of it," and I managed to finish the article I had started. But my attempt to go back to school in the fall was doomed.
On a miserably wet night, while my pep band played soggy fight songs for our university football team (I didn't really care if they lost or won), and my girlfriend was home with a cold, and I already knew that I woud probably flunk American History for a second time, and I hated botany, and I was still living with my parents, not very happily, I complained to another band member. I don't remember her name, but I remember her words: "Bob, you should join the Navy." And I did. Why the Navy? I had never seen an ocean or a ship, and longed to go to sea. (I understand that the Navy gets more recruits from the Midwest than from either the east or the west coasts.) My recruiter promised me that I could be Navy journalist. On 15 October 1962, I duly signed my enlistment papers.
I completed boot camp in San Diego, enjoying a few privileges as "Education Petty Officer" (my main job was to drill my fellow recruits on the 11 General Orders for Sentries) and in general making the transition from boyhood to a form of manhood, and from the soft life of a civilian to the somewhat tougher life of a sailor. In fact, I gained a lot of confidence in boot camp, and a lot of muscle. On the first day of boot camp, I weighed 127 pounds and could scarcely get my seabag off the deck; on the last day, I weighed 154 pounds and carried two seabags down a flight of stairs—on my shoulders. OK, so my picture doesn't show those muscles, but they were there! Really!
My recruiter's promise that I could be a Navy journalist vanished somewhere between Silver City and San Diego, and toward the end of boot camp I was informed that I would make a good hospital corpsman because I had taken an ecology course in college. That was OK with me—being a corpsman seemed like a good opportunity to expand my education.
I attended Hospital Corps School at the Naval Hospital at Balboa, also in San Diego, where we studied first aid and CPR, basic anatomy, pharmacology, nursing care, hygiene, minor surgery, and even administration of barbiturates. (Because corpsmen must often work on their own, we also learned to perform medical procedures that even nurses weren't allowed to do.)
My corps school company did well, according to a base newspaper photo. We graduated in the summer in 1963, and I was one of the few corpsmen in the class who got the posting I requested: the U.S. Naval Hospital at Yokosuka, Japan, south of Tokyo.
I spent two great years in Japan, wooing three different Japanese university girls, learning a lot about life and death as they occur in any large hospital, going to concerts in Tokyo, buying cameras and stereos, studying Japanese archery, and even teaching an English class to Japanese civilians.
By the time my tour in Japan came to an end, the Tonkin Gulf incident had written my military future in stone: I immediately reported reported for duty at the Field Medical Service School at Camp Pendleton, California where I would receive training as a Fleet Marine Force (FMF) corpsman.
The war in Vietnam was heating up quickly—a Marine battalion had already landed at Da Nang—and my class was graduated a week early. My orders sent me to the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Division, which assigned me to Mike Company. Within only a few weeks, we embarked for an "unknown" destination in August, 1965, aboard the U.S.S. Magoffin (APA-199); at last I was on a real ship. Although the accomodations were below waterline (bunks stacked five or six high) and there was insufficient water for showers, the voyage across the Pacific (to Okinawa, it turned out) became one of the highlights of my military career.
We spent several months on Okinawa, based at Camp Schwab and training for jungle warfare. It was a disquieting period, and when time came for departure, I felt ill-prepared for combat. I would be armed with a .45 automatic pistol, but I had had only one opportunity to fire one clip with it, and I hadn't even come close to hitting the target. During a battalion inspection, a colonel asked me if I was ready for Vietnam. "No, Sir!" I responded, but he didn't even seem to hear me. I was a very pessimistic corpsman by that time.
In mid-January, we embarked for Vietnam on the U.S.S. Paul Revere (APA-248). After a practice amphibious landing on the Philippine Island of Mindoro and some gunnery practice for the ship's gunners, we arrived off the coast of South Vietnam on the night of January 27, 1966. The next morning, we made an unopposed amphibious landing on a broad, white beach near Duc Pho in Quang Ngai Province. The 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines was once again at war.
