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take us to Japan got there the next morning. And it picked up two rounds as we were leaving. And this white guy got hit. Killed. And he was rotating home, too. And his body, it stayed on the plane until we got to Japan.
    From Japan, they flew us to Oakland. Then they gave us uniforms, ’cause when I left ’Nam I was still in jungle fatigues. And I took a shower, put on my Class A’s, got my records. Finally they let us go, and I caught a bus over to the San Francisco airport and got home about three o’clock that morning.
    My mother didn’t keep up with my days left either, so she was surprised when I called from San Francisco. She met the plane. I said, “Mom, I’m happy to be home.” And she said, “I’m happy to see you here with everything. It’s God’s blessing that you didn’t get hurt.” My father wasn’t there ’cause he worked at night, driving eighteen-wheelers.
    I went right out into the streets in my uniform and partied. Matter fact, got drunk.
    I wasn’t sleepy. I was still hyped up. And East St. Louis is a city that never closes. So I went to a place called Mother’s, which was the latest jazz joint in town.
    A lot of people knew me, so everybody was buying me drinks. Nobody was asking me how Vietnam was, what Vietnam was all about. They just was saying, “Hey, happy to see you back. Get you a drink?” They were happy I made it back, because a lot of my friends who had been over there from my city had came home dead in boxes, or disabled.
    Finally, I got guys that asked me what it was really like. And when I was trying to explain it, after a while, I saw that they got disinterested. So I just didn’t talk about it anymore. I was just saying, “I’m happy to be home. I hope I’ll never have to go back.”
    I had six more months to go, so they sent me to Fort Carson in Colorado. There weren’t any more airborne soldiers on post but me and maybe five or six. We eitherhad come back from Vietnam or were getting ready to go.
    Well, I ran into this officer. Second lieutenant. Just got out of OCS. He asked me if I was authorized to wear a combat infantryman’s badge and jump wings. I told him, “You damn right. I earned them.” He didn’t like that answer. So I said, “You can harass me now, sir, but you can’t go over in Vietnam and do that shit.” So he ended up giving me a Article 15 for disrespect. And I got busted one rank and fined $25.
    That was just another nail in the coffin to keep me from reuping. I didn’t want career military nohow.
    I told him taking my stripe away from me wasn’t shit. And he couldn’t do nothing to me, ’cause they couldn’t send me back to Vietnam. He didn’t enjoy that, so he tried to make it hard for me until
he
got shipped out. And when I heard he had orders for ’Nam, I went and found him and laughed at him and told him that he wasn’t gon’ make it back.
    “Somebody’s gon’ kill you,” I said. “One of your own men is gon’ kill you.”
    I enlisted in the Army to stay out of the Marines. I had went to college for a semester at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. But the expenses had gotten too much for my family, so I went and got me a job at McDonnell Aircraft as a sheet-metal assembler. About eight months later, two guys I went to high school with got drafted by the Marines. So I joined the Army so I could get a choice.
    It was August of ’65. I was twenty.
    My father was not too hot about it. He was in World War II, in France and Germany. He was a truck driver on the Red Ball Express, gettin’ gas to Patton’s tanks. He resented the Army because of how they treated black soldiers over there, segregated and not with the same support for white soldiers.
    My left ear was pierced when I was nine just like my father’s left ear was pierced when he was nine. Grandmother said all the male warriors in her mother’s tribe in Africa had their ears pierced. Her mother was born in Africa. You can imagine the teasing I got in high