Chapter 21. Fort Holabird, 1965

The Sphinx at Fort Holabird 

Acid interrogation wasn’t something I improvised on the Dinky Dau.

My introduction into the peripheries of the shadow world was brought about by two men in Da Nang on a day that changed my life forever.

Army Counter Intelligence training began at Fort Holabird, Maryland, but, I learned to walk the tightrope of drug induced empathy from a crash-course in it at Camp Peary, Virginia. This interrogation technique wasn’t “officially” taught anywhere. LSD was a CIA secret until it’s uses expanded beyond torture rooms into civilian applications for alcohol rehabilitation and clinical psychology by the early-sixties. But the Company saw it could be utilized most efficiently as a powerful tool for mass-manipulation and crowd control. For example, by the late sixties, every anti-war protest demonstration could count on LSD appearing everywhere on the streets and for free. That wasn’t a coincidence. It worked as well as a baton or tear gas. I was trained by the CIA at The Farm but, as an enlisted man, I wasn’t inducted into the activities of The Company’s gentlemen’s club beyond my specific area of expertise.

The cool air of the air-conditioned office contrasted sharply with the thick-humid air outside. The chill of it set the memory of that hour in concrete.  When old Judge Hard-ass gave me the choice of prison or the Army, I joined up… volunteered… the Army became my family and I thrived… became a Lifer. That’s what the draftees called us. A lifer was considered a loser… a man with no consequence by draftees. We couldn’t make it in The Real World and that reality proved to be damned near true in my case.

A month before President Johnson landed the Marines at Da Nang, I had been nothing more than a driver/courier, for MACV (Military Advisory Command, Vietnam) and running errands between Da Nang and Camp Holloway out of Pleiku. It was February 7^th that the camp was attacked at 01:30 while I was sleeping in the Advisor Compound barracks. Besides destroying as many aircraft as possible, Charlie needed to hit some Green Beret Advisers, in order to get President Johnson to commit to the stranglehold of an unwinnable war. It turned out to be a good call by General Giap. I was out of my cot and running to the sandbags in the open without thinking. An AK-47 round took a four-inch-wide crater out of my left butt-cheek. The whole attack lasted but five minutes before the VC were chased back into the bush but it seemed like a couple of lifetimes. It can be said I got lucky. There were 130 along with me that received purple hearts. There were eight others who weren’t so lucky.

I had recovered at the medical holding company of the Meat Factory in Danang from that wound for a couple months awaiting orders while the familiar pictures of Marines hitting the beach from landing crafts like D-Day filled the front pages and newscasts back home. The base was packed with young kids in fresh greens and I had to get away once in a while to where they weren’t allowed to go. I slipped through the wire to the off-limits stretch outside the gate called Dog Patch. At that time the Marine Corps Brass frowned on prostitution but allowed battalion sized groups to be escorted by MPs off base into Dog Patch to be serviced. Otherwise, if one had the need for more intimate trysts it was a matter of busting through the wire like I did. This too was a practice overlooked by the brass knowing that most red-blooded young Marines had to have at least one taste of a skivvy house before ending up on a casualty list.

I was Army so I always went under the wire alone. On my last excursion, I overheard one of our Grunts at the bar pumping gedunk with one of the Gums and responding to her not so innocent probes. After the usual bar-girl chatter like, “You have girl-friend back home, GI?” I overheard him saying, “It was a routine patrol just south of the base… you know, a few miles away from... near Marble Mountain? It was a classic ambush. Two of us were hit. We got three and nabbed two Zips.”

There were two civilians at a table across the room occasionally looking our way and talking quietly. It wasn’t unusual to see civvies, contractors of one ilk or another, on a skivvie run about Dog Patch and Four Corners. They appeared to be very interested in that couple. The one in an Aloha shirt nodded my way when he noticed I’d also been eying them. I nodded back and turned my gaze to my half-empty bottle and listened.

The girl kept asking the Grunt questions… probing, “You must be tired… where are the two, you know?”

He nuzzled up to her ear but I could hear him, “I don’t know. I mean, I can’t tell you that.” He paused, looked around the room and at me, but, after my gaze returned to the Tiger Piss bottle, he continued, “I can tell you, they aren’t in detention yet… in the hole.” He kept piling on with more information without her trying very hard, “Yeah, we’re all wasted, burnt out and the newbie fucking LT has us going back to Marble Mountain this morning… must be suckin’ ass fer a promotion…”

The boy could have sealed his platoon’s fate by sharing that information. Besides, I figured he’d be going out on patrol still drunk in a few hours. Normally, I wouldn’t give a shit but I knew that after a few drinks the blow job she promised him took first priority over the lives of the men in his platoon.

That was enough. I’m not sure if it was the Tiger Piss or that crater in my ass, but I couldn’t sit on it long. I knew that kid wasn’t conscious of committing a crime that could get him shot. The poor guy wasn’t a traitor or anything like a spy. He was just one of those people like Casey who, when they get a little tid-bit of information, they have to tell it to anyone willing to listen. It can be harmless stuff that’s usually just rumors or disinformation. But she was more than willing to listen and I could tell she was also very good at getting him to tell her more than he ought to say. Uncle Charlie had trained platoons of bar girls to seek out and lubricate lonely hearts with booze. She might or might not be one of them but most GI’s couldn’t tell if they tried. It appears that I could tell… had a talent for it from the get-go in accordance to the old axiom that goes, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.

I walked over and slammed my fist on his table before he blabbed anything more about next day’s operation. I tried to tell him a thing or two about how to keep his mouth shut about operations around Gums. He was pissed I offended her honor. Fists flew and I had him jacked up against the wall when she pulled a butterfly knife and came at my back. The grunt threw me aside and took the knife from her. He wasn’t so brazen drunk as to let a Zip shank a fellow GI, even if I was Army.

MP’s burst through the door like they’d been waiting outside and broke us up before we could do much to her. She was hauled off by the two civilians while the grunt and I cooled off overnight in the stockade.

I was called to the carpet for that action the next day to stand before the MACV Commander. The men in civvies from the café were there too. One was in uniform. His Khaki shirt collar had the bar of a Chief Warrant Officer and the other collar had some sort of brass feather crossed with what looked like a spy glass that turned out to be a Navy Counter Intelligence insignia. His name tag read CWO Ryan. The other, in his Aloha Shirt with white linen slacks, was a large man in stature as well as attitude. The otherwise bare desk top had the usual pen-set with the American and Vietnamese flags and a file opened to show military records that had to be mine.

The Commanding Officer passed my file to the civilian first who relayed it to the Warrant Officer without looking at it. He either already knew what was in the folder. He didn’t give a monkey’s ass about my record. I also had a talent for sensing the hierarchy of pecking orders that aren’t always apparent in what kind of brass is pinned on a collar. Despite the deference to rank, the C.O. acted as though the Aloha shirt outranked him and the W.O. leaning, with one arm draped over the file cabinet and a cigar in hand, flicking a Zippo in the other, was at the least his equal even though the C.O. was a full-bird colonel.

The Colonel growled, “Corporal Kraszhinski, your record’s spotless. You mind telling us why you’re running rogue and going about damaging Government Property?”

The Zippo clicked.

“Sir, I can’t say Sir, but you should hold that girl, Sir.” I answered as best I could but didn’t want to snitch-out the kid. That girl had to be investigated and I wondered when, if ever, that W.O. was going to light that cigar.

The Colonel’s stern demeanor was softened by the hint of a smirk that could have been either contempt or respect, “So, Corporal, you going to take affront at every grunt making a pass at a Tea-girl. She ain’t your sister, is she Corporal?”

The Zippo click-clopped again and I answered, wondering what he was getting at, “No Sir, she is not, Sir.”

I was ready to accept an article 15 for a bar fight and whatever crashing the wire would be. They would be misdemeanor offences, and not likely to go to a court-martial, but I could get busted down to PFC. That would hurt my pocket and set me back for advancement. I cared about my record some but figured it was worth it to save a few lives.

This Ryan character finally lit the cigar.  After puffing on it a few times, he spoke, “The Corporal might have some sense. We’ve been watching that bar-girl.”

Waving away the smoke, the Colonel pulled a sawed-off 105 mm brass artillery shell recycled into an ashtray out of his near empty lower desk drawer, slammed it on top of the file cabinet for Ryan, and snarled, “Did you know that, Corporal?”

“No sir, I did not Sir.”

The Aloha Shirt’s eyes were glued on mine… like they would bore a hole through my skull. He had a face that was cast in steel under a grey crew cut. He finally asked, “If it wasn’t the booze and she’s not your sister, why’s the girl your business?”

“Sir, I was out of hand, but she…” I called him sir but I had no idea whether he was an officer.

“Do you consider yourself to be hot headed, Corporal?” the man grilled.

“Sir?”

“You heard him, Corporal. Do you consider yourself to be hot headed or not?” the CWO demanded.

“No sir.”

The man nodded approval towards the Colonel who then slid a manila envelope across his pristine desk top, “Well, the Bird Dog here has had an eye on you. He doesn’t think you’re a hot-head either. You put the interests of the US Army above that of your own career without proper CYA. For that, take these… your orders, son.”

I took the envelope, ready to be dismissed, “Yes, Sir.”

“Open the damned thing Corporal,” the Colonel barked.

I opened the envelope and inside were the familiar forms for a transfer orders to Fort Holabird, Maryland with the initials in the command unit’s box: HUMINT.

 “Yes, sir.” I addressed the Colonel. My heart sank and I waited to be dismissed. I knew nothing of Fort Holabird but I knew a punishment transfer when I saw it. I would have preferred KP at the scullery. Maryland was far from the real action in a place I’d never heard of… the East Coast might as well had been Bum-Fuck Egypt to me.

Ryan puffed once and broke my anticipation for the other shoe to drop, “That’s Military Intelligence School, Corporal.”

“Sir?”

“Corporal Kraszhinski, you would come out of there as a Counter Intelligence agent for the US fucking Army. What do you think of that, Mr. poker face?”

“Sir, excuse me, Sir, but don’t agents have to be officers?”

The Colonel said, “No, Corporal, Human Intelligence takes Non- Coms. This is your reward for kickin’ the shit out of that boy who is now, as we speak, sitting in the stockade wondering what the fuck he did. Do you know what UCMJ nine-o-four Article one-o-four is?”

“Aiding and abetting the enemy, Sir.”

“You know your shit, Corporal.” The Colonel smiled like he was enjoying the thought of a firing squad, “The boy was passing information to the enemy for a piece of pussy. We think he deserves more than an ass-kickin’ as punishment.”

“Sir, if I may, the private did step-up when she pulled the knife on me…” I knew I was out-of-line to add anything but I felt obliged to defend the boy.

The Colonel ignored my plea on the grunts behalf and waved Ryan’s smoke from his face, “These guys think it was no big deal, Sarge,” the Commander growled. He passed Sergeant chevrons across his desk. Have ‘em sewn on and be on the 1700 out of Dodge.”

Sarge? I thought he was talking to someone else, “Today, Sir? Sergeant?”

“Don’t miss that flight Sergeant Kraszhinski or I’ll have you busted down to Private Fuckin’ Kraszhinski.”

I saluted, “Yes, Sir!”

Ryan offered a hand, “I’m Warrant Officer Ryan, welcome to the club, Sarge.”

The Aloha shirt stood silent, eyes never leaving me, as I saluted and left the office. I’d been around long enough to know the real pros in Nam were with the CIA. The Aloha shirt was Harry Baker, known as the Bird Dog, and he would mentor me on the more intricate uses of psychedelics at a place called The Farm in Camp Peary, Virginia.