MILITARY duties were:
After leaving OCS with no regrets, spent six weeks waiting for orders. While waiting, I had to form up every morning for roll call. The first sergeant would call your name, you'd answer. Then he would call out those who had orders. Simple enough. I started going into the sergeants office and helping clean up. He asked and I replied, the sergeant told me that was my duty every morning. He liked it, I liked it. I that time point in the army, if you had less than three months left on your service, and were returning from Viet Nam, you were sent home to a inactive reserve unit. The attitude of retuning vets was "What are you going to do, send me to VN." With basic, AIT, OCS and my time waiting, I was one week short of getting out if they sent me to VN. So every morning before roll call, I cleaned up the sergeants desk while he went to coffee. One day, Hooray, my orders came in for Viet Nam. I torn them up and took them to the nearest dumpster. One week after that I asked the sergeant why I hadn't received orders, everyone else that had been with me had, and that I was "reassigned" and wouldn't be cleaning his office anymore. Two weeks later, I got more orders, and I was going to Viet Nam, but I would be getting out of the Army when I left VN. All I had to do was survive 12 months of hot, humid and scary VN. The sad thing is after being in VN or several months, they changed the early out to six months. I didn't have to do all that office cleaning and I would have been out earlier. I was a light infantry soldier (11B), I carried an M-16 most of the time, a M-79 for a couple of missions and I was the demolitions specialist for the first couple of months and the radio operator for the last four months. That was the best, except that it was the second most dangerous job, after the lieutenant, the snipers went for the radio operator.
