Cold World War. Marie Bravo

      Chapter 1

      The World

      San Benito

      As I stared in the mirror of the San Benito Hardware Store bathroom, I saw myself in my white dressy shirt with a black bow tie. I started to recall being back in the Vietnam jungle wearing my jungle fatigues, with the smell of gunpowder in the air. Oh man, how I missed that. I could sit on the jungle floor without worrying about my pants getting dirty. I especially missed firing my M16. I missed feeling the recoil as a gook went down. I missed the smell of napalm when it fell on the jungle.

      After I got out of the military in the fall of 1970, I was hired right away at a hardware store. The owner wanted to have the prestige of having a Vietnam veteran working at the store and hung my accolades on the wall. He also needed to have a Mexican American to work at the store to handle the Spanish-speaking customers because the hardware store clientele was 80 percent Hispanic and was four blocks away from the Mexican bridge. It was the same boring job every day. I was hired to sell paint and appliances, but after a week I hadn’t sold a drop of paint or a single toaster. It’s not like I was a model salesman or anything. So the owner hired a Mexican American woman to help sell the appliances, and a Cuban who spoke broken English to sell the paint. With the extra help, it became even more monotonous. That’s why after two months, I missed being outside and being challenged by the environment and the excitement of chasing the enemy.

      One afternoon I was invited out to coffee with my father and Sergeant First Class (SFC) Gonzalez. SFC Gonzalez was the recruiter who helped me join the army a few years back. I volunteered because two of my friends, a soldier and a marine, were killed in Vietnam.

      He and my father were having a conversation about the old times when I arrived at the diner. Gonzales was originally from my hometown, so he’s considered a family friend. I sat down and greeted my father when Gonzales turned to me and asked me how I was doing at work.

      “Man, I’m bored as hell,” I replied.

      My father’s expression seemed concerned when I said that I was bored.

      Gonzales then asked me, “How would you like to come back into the army?”

      Out of respect to my father’s concerns, I told him, “Not really.”

      “You can still keep your sergeant E5, and you got a two thousand-dollar bonus coming to you.”

      I looked at my father, then back to Gonzalez, and said, “I could use that to pay some bills! Is there any way I could go to Europe?”

      “Sure! I could send you to Germany. It’s wide open.”

      I knew my father would be worried, but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

      I could hardly wait to get home and tell my wife that we were going to Germany. I knew she was going to be excited to have a European adventure. However, I had to tell her that she would be meeting me there a little later because I could not bring her right away without a command sponsor. Taking care of tickets and housing on our own would be far too expensive. I felt horrible asking my wife to help me pack my bags, but she eventually understood, and by the end of the week I was on a jet to New Jersey.

      Fort Dix

      The transition went smooth and soon enough I found myself reporting to Fort Dix, New Jersey, the location of a replacement center for minutemen training. The name was inspired by the swift and well-formed training given to the colonial militias while under pressured attacks from the British during the American Revolution. What really made the name was that the men were ready to go at a minute’s notice. Since the personnel present were made up primarily of sergeants who didn’t need the training, it ended up being more like a two-week break while you were waiting for your next station assignment. The incoming orders came daily to let soldiers know of their next overseas location before they were shipped out.

      It may have been more like spring break than it was training, but the lack of freedom still made us feel like we were cooped up in a cell. I met a young Puerto Rican specialist named Lopez from New York City who was an extremely disrespectful over-glorified paper shuffler. One day he sent me to the mess hall for duty. A job that was supposed to be for low-rank soldiers, not sergeants. But I was hungry, so I went ahead and walked over to the mess hall anyways.

      I walked right up to a staff sergeant and told him I was there for kitchen duty.

      “Since when do sergeants have to pull kitchen police?” he asked amusingly. “I don’t know what you’re doing here. I apologize, I wouldn’t even put you on head count. Just grab a cup of coffee and sit around until it’s chow time.”

      Later that Monday evening I was hanging around the barracks when Specialist Lopez slithered in.

      “Huddle up,” he shouted, making sure he got all the men’s attention. “I got some good news for you guys. I can tell you how you can get shipped out of here earlier than next week, maybe even tomorrow! I can start working on your orders tonight for fifty dollars!”

      This was all just carny talk. But the soldiers started to line up to give him the fifty dollars so they could get on the list. He knew that we had visited the finance office for partial pay that day, so we had money. I felt bad for the soldiers because most of them made less than three hundred a month.

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