VIETNAM

Although I never went to Vietnam, the war there had a huge impact on our lives. When Lylabeth and I married, I was in school at Texas A&M. The war was going on, and in those days we still had a military draft. What that meant was, if your local draft board called you, you had to go into the military for a minimum of two years. There were some things that made you exempt from the draft. Too old, married with children, in college, physical problems, etc. kept the draft board from calling you. I was in college, so I was exempt. After I got my Bachelor’s Degree, I enrolled in  graduate school to get my Master’s Degree. 

I started my Master’s in January of 1968. Shortly thereafter, I picked up the paper one morning and the headline said that people in graduate school were no longer exempt from the draft.  Within two weeks, I got my draft notice from my draft board in Wharton County. I had already paid for my semester in school and if I did what the draft board wanted, I would have to leave school and go into the Army before the semester was over and that money would be wasted. I called my Dad and he contacted our U.S. Representative and the head of the local draft board. They agreed to let me finish the semester before they called me and that was a real blessing.

I had been in the Corps at A&M before Lylabeth and I got married. The Corps company that I was assigned to was an Air Force ROTC company, so I knew a bit about the U.S. Air Force. If I joined the Air Force before I actually received another draft notice it would stop the draft and would give me a little more control over my military experience. I went to the Air Force recruiting office and found that the only people they were taking had to go to Officer Training School and then go on to flight school to become a pilot. In order to join I had to go to San Antonio and take a flight physical. I did that and passed the physical.  To get past the draft, the Air Force had to issue me orders to go to San Antonio and begin my training.  As the end of the semester got closer and the orders didn’t come, I began to get nervous. I went to the Army recruiting office to see what they had to offer. I found I could pick my MOS (military occupational specialty) and again have some control over my destiny. If I was drafted, the Army would decide what my MOS would be and most of the draftees were being sent to Army Infantry Training and then straight to Vietnam and the front lines and getting killed or wounded. I wanted to avoid that if possible.

I waited as long as I could and still no Air Force orders. I joined the Army and picked Quartermaster Corps as my MOS.  The Quartermaster folks are the supply side of the Army. It didn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t get shot at, but it lessened my chances.

I’ve been putting this part off, because it is still hard to talk about. Let me start off by saying that what Lylabeth and I went through during this time was small in comparison to what Mom and Dad went through during World War II.  My first blog spoke to that a bit. That really didn’t register with me until after I got out of the Army. When you are going through it, it is about you. We didn’t know where I was going, how long I would be gone, whether I was going to be relatively safe and on top of that, we had just found out that Lylabeth was pregnant with Ken.

The night before I left for basic training at Fort Bliss in El Paso was a tough time for us. We spent that night at Lylabeth’s Mom’s home in Iago (I don’t think either of us slept a wink) and early the next morning my Dad, and I think Roger, picked me up to go to Houston to be inducted into the U.S. Army. After the induction ceremony me, and a bunch of others were loaded on a plane to fly to El Paso and Fort Bliss.

Basic Training wasn’t too bad for me. If I had been able to go home to my wife every night, I wouldn’t have minded it too much.  My freshman year in the Corps at A&M was harder in a lot of ways. I was older by several years than most the guys I was with and I did a lot of counseling and handholding. I came in one night and my roommate had tried to cut his wrists. He was an 18-year-old draftee from Beaumont that had never been away from home. I don’t know what ever happened to him.

For part of our course, we got on buses and went over into New Mexico for weapons training.  The firing range was in the White Sands desert and in July and August it is hot. I was going through the chow line at lunch one day and as I got to the bread, the cook had just torn open a new loaf. I got a slice and walked about 50 feet to sit down and eat. I picked up the fresh slice of bread and it was toast.

White Sands was also where we went for long marches and to bivouac (kind of like camping out, but not as much fun). For a while I got a bad case of tendonitis in my right Achilles tendon. That caused me to miss one march and that turned out to not be a good thing (more about that later).  We spent several nights in the desert. We each had a pack that the carried that had the things we needed for the overnight stay. The pack weighed about 60 pounds and was like a big backpack. It had a plate that folded in the middle and folded it held my silverware, It held extra clothes including raingear, one half of a pup tent, a short shovel called an entrenching tool,

extra ammunition for my rifle, canned food (called c-rations, a sleeping bag and other things. When we stopped for the night, we would eat and then set up our tents. I said my pack held one-half of a pup tent. You had a tent mate and he had the other half of the tent. We put the halves together, put tent poles under them and staked it down. It was just big enough for two people to lie down in.  After it was up you dug a trench all the way around it so that if it rained, water wouldn’t run into the tent. One night it did rain and we found out that the tents weren’t totally waterproof.  Understand, these tents were very small. You had to crawl into them and stay low. If you were right in the middle of the tent there was just enough room to sit up straight. You would then lie down and scoot sideways onto your sleeping bag. If in your sleep you rolled over away from the middle of the tent, you would be lying against the side of the tent. The night it rained, we found out that everywhere you touched the tent on the inside, it would leak at the place you touched.  We got very little sleep that night. It is hot in the desert in the daytime, but it gets cold at night and when your sleeping bag gets soaked, you can get really cold. We were really glad when the sun came up that morning.

I was not in very good shape when I started the Basic program, but they cured that. The following describes how much they cured it. Lylabeth flew out to see me one weekend. When she got out of her cab, at our meeting place on post, there were several people standing around. I had my back to her and did not see her when she first got out of the car. She saw me before I saw her and was walking up to me to ask me about locating her husband. I had lost so much weight and was so brown from the desert sun that she didn’t recognize me.  Anyway, we got past that and had a nice reunion. She was only there about 36 hours but we had a good time.  

When the 8 weeks of Basic Training was over, I got promoted to Private !st Class and got my orders to report to Quartermaster School at Ft. Lee, Virginia. When I got to Ft. Lee, I found out that I could live off the post with Lylabeth, so here Mom drove up to Virginia with her and we found a place to live and moved in. Our experience in that place is a whole other story. Maybe I can get Lylabeth to tell that one on her blog. Toward the end of my Quartermaster schooling a civilian came to our class one day and asked me and 3 or 4 other guys to step out into the hall. He asked us if we would like to volunteer to stay at the Quartermaster School and become instructors. That was easy to answer. Everyone else was going straight to Vietnam after graduation, so we all volunteered to stay. When I graduated I got promoted to Specialist 4^th class. I reported to the Quartermaster School Headquarters and was told I was being assigned to the Automatic Data Processing Section to teach. Computers were a relatively new thing in 1968. I knew there was an ADP building at Texas A&M. I had seen it, but never been in it. I told the guy I didn’t know the first thing about computers, but he said not to worry about it and that he knew I could pick it up quickly. Luckily, I did pick it up quickly and mostly enjoyed my job there.

For any younger folks reading this, let me tell you a few things about computers in those days. One of the computers the Army was using at that time was called the UNIVAC 500. It wouldn’t perform nearly as many operations as your cell phone today and it took up most of the inside of an 18-wheeler trailer. There were no computer chips in those days and most of the data was stored on tape. I ended up teaching at the school for about 2 years. During that time Ken was born and I thought I would end up staying at Ft. Lee for my entire Army enlistment. That was wrong.

When I had a bit more than a year left to serve, I got orders to go to South Korea. A civilian guy who had been my boss at the school had gone on to another job with an outfit called Computer Systems Command. They needed a team of guys to go to Korea to install computer systems for supply battalions.  I guess he thought I had done a good job at the school, so he requested me for the Korea team. Korea was a lot better than Vietnam, but it meant leaving Lylabeth and Ken for a year. I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice.

I got a two week leave before I had to go, so we packed up and drove back to Texas. We decided that because I was going to come back to A&M to finish my Masters when my Army time was up, that Lylabeth and Ken would live in Bryan/College Station while I was overseas. We found a 2 bedroom duplex close to campus and moved them in. The night before I left was much worse than the night before I went into the Army. It was probably one of the saddest nights of our lives but we made it through it and the next morning I kissed my family goodbye and left to spend a year on the other side of the world.

I could write another long blog about my time in Korea and I might do that sometime in the future. Like Basic Training, it would have been fairly enjoyable there if Lylabeth and Ken had been with me, but they weren’t. My job kept me occupied during the day, but nights and weekends, especially Sundays were mostly tough. We wrote letters and sent cassette tapes back and forth. When I would get a tape from home, I would always go off somewhere by myself to listen to it so my buds wouldn’t see me cry.  I didn’t always cry, but I never knew when a tape would get to me, so I had to be prepared. 

One of the guys that lived across the hall from me worked in personnel. One of the things they did was write the orders for soldiers. He left the country to come home about a month before I did and before he left he cut an order for me that allowed me to come home about a month before I was actually supposed to.  I didn’t tell Lylabeth, because I wanted to surprise her and Ken. I flew back to the states at the end of March in 1971. I mustered out of the Army at Ft. Lewis, Washington and then boarded the first of three flights that would eventually get me to Easterwood Airport in College Station,  When I got to the airport, I called Lylabeth  and asked her to come pick me up. She was surprised, but overcame her emotions and came and got me. As you might imagine, the reunion was memorable and, well, just fun. I was home safe and a free man again. I was very thankful and blessed.

I titled this piece VIETNAM. Even though I didn’t say much about the War in Vietnam, everything that I recorded in this blog was because of that war. I was Class of 1966 at A&M. My class lost more people in the war than any other A&M class. I was very lucky not to have to go, but I have a bit of guilt that all those other classmates had to go and so many of them are named on that black granite wall in Washington D.C.  I have been to “The Wall” a couple of times and it is a hard place to visit for me and lots of other folks.  One of my fish buddies was a guy named Clint Ward. He was shot down somewhere over North Vietnam and is still listed as MIA.

I didn’t mean to end this on a downer. I am proud that I served my country and I learned a lot and found out a lot about myself. God is always in control and I know it was his plan for me to go.  I am thankful that none of my children had to go into harm’s way and I hope and pray the same thing for my grandchildren. If they do go, I will be proud of them as I am always proud to be their Paw-Paw

King Fling

I think it is time I started my blog. Lylabeth and I attended a King Family reunion in New Braunfels this past weekend. We almost didn’t go because none of our kids and grandkids were able to attend.  Abby, my brother Dwight’s daughter, got on my case and so we went. One of the things we did on Saturday night involved me and my brothers, Dwight, Dwain and Roger. Mom asked us to tell stories about growing up on The D-K Farm because most of the grandchildren and their wives and children came along after Dad had sold out and moved across the road from the old farm. Anyway, Mama thought it would be good for them to get a sense of how it was. We all told stories of things we did and some things about how we lived.  After we finished, Lylabeth challenged all of us to write these things down so others in the family who come along later can know them too. This will be my attempt to get with the program.

One of the things I told about on Saturday night was our Grandpa Alvie Barnhill.  He was a Godly man. One of the most Godly men I have ever known.  We were blessed to have him as a grandparent.  He taught me lots of things: how to fish, how to hunt squirrels, the joys of reading, lots about farming, and what living a life that reflected Christ was all about. I am attempting to be the kind of grandparent he was to me to my grandkids. 

I told this about him on Saturday night at the reunion. My family along with both sets of grandparents and lots of aunts, uncles and cousins, all went to the Iago Federated Church. (for more on the church read Lylabeth’s blog) When Grandpa B was called on to lead the church in prayer, he always knelt in front of his seat to pray. I never knew anyone else who did that. Somewhere in the prayer he always included a request that we all worship in spirit and in truth.  

Grandpa B was a big tease and he loved a good joke or prank. He smoked a pipe and one Christmas one of my cousins got him a really long stemmed corncob pipe. We asked him if he was going to smoke it and he said he was just going to save it and not smoke it. Awhile later, I walked out of the dining room into the living room. From the living room you could see into Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom. Grandpa B was standing in front of a dresser in his bedroom with the new pipe in his hand. When he saw me he blew out pipe smoke and I hollered, “Grandpa is smoking his new pipe”.  Just then he raised his other hand holding his regular pipe, which had been hidden behind his leg, and puffed on it. He had tricked me into thinking he had the new pipe lit when he was just holding the new pipe and blowing smoke from the other one. He got a big kick out of doing things like that.

Mama and I lived with Grandma and Grandpa Barnhill for the first two years of my life. I was born in 1944 when World War II was going on. My Dad was in the U. S. Army and he went overseas just a few days after I was born and didn’t come back home until I was two years old.  I think because I lived with them for the first two years of my life, I had a special bond with them. I know that their home was always special to me. In my teen years, I was kind of a problem child and my Dad and I had lots of conflict. It was mostly my fault but I made it through with Mama running interference for me. Anyway I spent a lot of time during those years angry and upset. I could always go to Grandma and Grandpa B’s house and the minute I stepped in the door, a peace would come over me and I would settle down. There was just something about their Godly spirits that became part of their home for me and helped me in times of distress. When they went to be with Jesus, I went back to the house a few times and it was just a house. A house with lots of good memories, but that feeling was gone because they weren’t there anymore.

Grandma B was special to me too.  She was not a great cook like my Grandma King, but she had lots of other talents. She was a great seamstress and made me lots of clothes over the years. When we stayed at their home, she always had things for us to do. One of the things I remember most is doing leather craft. She had all the tools and we made billfolds, belts and other things. She helped me make a leather covered two ring notebook with my name on the front that I carried most of my jr. high and high school years. We also did a lot of paint by number. She would buy the paints and the templates that had hundreds of little circles, squares and all kinds of little shapes. Each space had a number in it that corresponded to a paint color. You would paint in the shapes with the right paint and when you finished, you would have a painting of something. All kinds of pictures would materialize in front of you. Grandma B didn’t believe in idle hands. She always had something for us to do.

We alternated Friday nights and Saturdays with the two sets of grandparents. One or the other would come to our house and pick us up on Friday afternoons. We would go to their homes to spend Friday night. Grandma and Grandpa B were one of the first people in our families to have a television set. They got the set when I was about 12 years old. The first TVs were had a black and white picture. Color didn’t come along until much later. It was always a treat to get to watch TV at their house.

Breakfast at their house always included Grandpa B reading a chapter from the Bible right before we ate. I remember hoping that it was a short chapter because I was always hungry.

I was blessed to have great grandparents who loved me unconditionally. Now that I am a grandparent, I know that I am a better one than I would have been without the role models I had to show me the way. I hope my grandchildren will remember me as fondly and thankfully as I remember my grandparents.

I will write another blog later about my King grandparents.