DODCOCS was supposed to be a plum joint-command assignment, but I was just as miserable as when I left Rhode Island. All I had accomplished was trading bedlam for solitary confinement, and I was still three thousand miles from California. Major Elton Toliver III, our Marine personnel officer, sported a throw-back old-school flat-top haircut like my dad used to wear. It reminded me so much of a miniature aircraft carrier that I half-expected to see little fighter-bombers taking off whenever I ran into him, which was often. He seemed to enjoy calling me into his office and telling me with a smirk how poorly I was fitting in, never missing a chance to point out infractions only visible to a gung-ho career military man—a mustache hair that had grown an eighth of an inch too long or a runaway sideburn that decided to graze my ear. My freshly shined shoes never seemed to make it to work without getting scuffed, and my belt buckle was forever wanting to slip out of alignment. Colonel Manketude, the Air Force liaison officer, started checking up on me too and was soon harrumphing at the pictures of Woodstock hanging on my broom-closet bulletin board and harrumphing again when he found a GI underground newspaper lying on my desk. A few weeks later he went positively apoplectic when I turned down a slot as a navigator/bombardier at OTS (Air Force shorthand for Officer Training School), pretty much echoing my father’s sentiments about wasting a good education when I could be earning my wings.
What Manketude, Toliver and my father failed to understand was that freshly minted navigator/bombardiers were not being assigned to the Aerospace Audio Visual Service. Toliver, a third-generation Yale graduate, seemed to take it personally that a fellow Ivy Leaguer would turn down a commission, which in turn seemed to deepen his irritation at my wispy mustache and the Air Force regulation that permitted me to raise one without his permission. A couple of mellower lifers down in the print shop took me under their wing and clued me in that the real Air Force wasn’t all spit-and-polish and square-your-corners like Headquarters Command. I should go for it, they said, if what I really wanted was to be assigned to a photo outfit. And if it meant risking deployment to Southeast Asia, so be it, I figured, so great was my fear of going brain dead at DODCOCS. The only catch was that I had no idea how to “go for it.” I was depressed as hell until it dawned on me that I was just a stone’s throw from the office of Ted Kennedy’s Air Force caseworker. I was thrilled to hear back from Mrs. Riley that they were looking into my situation, but that didn’t keep things from getting dicey.
It was in mid-November, on the Monday morning following the Second Vietnam Moratorium, that Toliver totally blew his stack, stopping in his tracks when he saw me in the hall. “Airman Leary—what the fuck are you doing wearing a black armband?”
“It’s in memory of American soldiers killed in Vietnam, sir. Forty thousand so far. Ten thousand this year alone.”
“Report to my office in one hour.”
And when I did, he and Manketude were waiting for me. “I’ve done two fucking tours over there in case you forgot. And I’d rather be killing an eight-year-old gook kid in Vietnam than having to protect my own son from a bunch of Commies landing on the shores of California or Connecticut.”
I wondered what Vietnamese naval genius Toliver knew about who could lead a fleet of sampans across the Pacific. Before I could ask, however, Manketude stepped in. “You’ve made another big mistake, Leary. You’re finished here.”
And with that he handed me a set of orders that bounced me out the front door of DODCOCS and on across the Potomac to the Pentagon itself for a temporary duty assignment (how did the Air Force come up with the acronym TDY?) at Headquarters Squadron, USAF. While the brass figured out what to do with me, Lieutenant Colonel Wippazetti put me to work painting nail heads visible only to him in the veneer paneling of his temporary office. “The reflections hurt my eyes,” he said. And then, miraculously, Senator Kennedy’s office got word that AAVS was shorthanded. Mrs. Riley made a couple of phone calls and suddenly my life jumped back on track, kind of like the movie Easy Rider—only in reverse, with a happy ending—as I headed off across the country, taking the southern route by way of New Orleans and Mardi Gras. Chuck Berry danced in my head singing “Route 66” as I headed out of Austin towards Amarillo, Texas; Gallup, New Mexico; and—on the home stretch for California—Flagstaff, Arizona. Driving my red ’64 VW down Interstate 15, winding my way through the Cajon Pass and on into San Bernardino, I felt sane and brilliant. I had crept out of D.C. in an ice storm—and now it was palm trees in February.
At Norton Air Force Base I remained hallucination-free even when we smoked the very fine Laotian dope Woody Shahbazian had brought back from Danang Air Base, Republic of Vietnam. It was early in 1970, and we were certain it was the world that was coming unglued, not our minds. The U.S. had metastasized into a giant dysfunctional family, full of barely controlled chaos, ruled with as much terror and amnesia and charm as Dad and Grandpa Leary had employed to mold our own clan into their image of what a proper Irish-American family should look like. I wasn’t crazy, just inquisitive. With a bad habit of trying to ferret out the truth from only the flimsiest of evidence—about Grandpa Leary’s drinking and Grandma Shepler’s “nervous breakdowns” and about why the U.S. government was really sending us to Vietnam. Wanting to be seen and heard was a bad habit when you were a Leary child or an Air Force enlisted man.
No question about it, I was still a bit touchy when I landed in California. Five years going on ten of bad mood. The Revolution was coming, and I hadn’t wanted to be caught dead with the squares in D.C. who were going to be standing trial in front of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Deep down inside, though, under my olive-drab fatigues, I was more a Flower Child than a revolutionary. A rock drummer since high school, I wanted to take my band, Stonehenge Circus, to India to find a guru of our own and a good electric-sitar player. With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, I no longer had to be embarrassed by my secret passion to save the world nor tortured by my aching dream of being made love to by a harem of California poster girls. I no longer had to be trapped by the battle that had raged for years deep in my soul between the nuns at Holy Family and the centerfolds in Playboy magazine. In the Age of Peace and Love, I no longer feared Grandpa Leary’s drunken tirades. Our main fear as GIs was that the Age of Aquarius would be over by the time we were given our discharge papers.
In the meantime, we tried to be as hip as possible while sporting GI buzz cuts, searching out other hipsters in the ranks who were testing the regs by wearing John Lennon-style granny glasses, prescription sunglasses, wristbands, mustaches, long sideburns, or long hair slicked down with Groom and Clean. At Norton, I soon discovered that mixed in with the GI hipsters were musicians like Sonny Stevens and Woody Shahbazian. Stevens sported long sideburns and hid his long slick hair under his fatigue cap, day and night, indoors and out. Shahbazian, with the nonchalance of a soldier of fortune, did a full-court press on the regs with sideburns bordering on muttonchops, a bushy mustache, and long, styled hair that he hated to mess up wearing regulation headgear. He did wear regulation aviator sunglasses—despite not being an aviator—and got by on a single contact lens, always managing to misplace the other. His leather wristband commanded a lot of respect from his fellow enlisted men, wearing it as he did in honor of his hootch-mates at Danang who had died from a lucky shot with a shoulder-mounted rocket that had hit his quarters while he was off shaving or shitting, the details changing to fit his audience.
We pursued the hippie lifestyle as best we could by jamming in our barracks and later at the base theater, which finally led to a paying gig at Sarge’s, the biker bar across the street from the east gate. At Sarge’s, from my perspective behind the drums on the bandstand,