ESKIMO CAT 4

Eskimo Cat Four

               When I was in the Army in '67, I was stationed at Ft. Ord in Monterey, California. It was breathtakingly beautiful and the right place at the right time. I had just completed Advanced Light Weapons Infantry Training, and I had orders for Ordinance Officers Candidate School at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Top secret. I've still never met another veteran in the Army, or out, that's ever been there. I had to wait three or four months for the FBI to investigate me for a Top Secret security clearance. Since it wasn't known when I would be leaving, I was put on "casual duty". Very casual. I was assigned to a detachment of Roster Guides at the fort's reception station, the area of barracks housing new arrivals, almost all draftees. We called our charges "humpties". (If there's an explanation for that I never heard one.) The humpties would arrive on buses in civilian clothes. Green and stupid. So we would literally "guide" them through their process of transformation from Elvis impersonators to dead meat. There was a war on, and they weren't in Kansas anymore,Toto. We'd take them for uniforms, help them with paperwork, get them tested, and a quick once over by Medical, and shots. We taught them the rudimentaries of military life, such as commands, marching, bed making, etc. We prepared them for Basic Training in about a week.Two roster guides per bus. But there was too many of us, so we were usually assigned a bus every two or three weeks. Casual duty. We rarely had to show up for morning roll call, and if we weren't working we were free to go. We were only about 125 miles south of San Francisco. It was the 1967 "Summer of Love". Perfect. So, naturally, we spent most of our off time hanging out in San Francisco in the Hippie enclave of the Haight/Ashbury district and in Golden Gate Park. It was pretty wild days and nights. One night I got a tattoo with Janis Joplin from the great tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle. I was in the Grateful Dead's house a couple of times. But the energy was all driven by the music. I saw all the famous bands and some that would soon become famous.

               The Humpties came in already classified in categories, one through four. Cat Ones were the smartest. We hardly ever got a Cat Four. Few Cat Fours can intellectually qualify for the Army, (as strange as that sounds,) but this was wartime, and the Army was seining the bottom, gathering up anything they could catch. One day a roster guide rushed into our barracks and declared we were all needed down at the station. Four buses arriving with about 200 Cat Fours. All fours. Every swingin' dick. Wait, what? How could this be? Where did a draft board find all those Cat Fours in one place? We immediately began speculating. Illiterate hillbillies? Hippie burnouts? Republicans? But I was pretty sure they played a funny joke on the whole psych ward, and told them they were going on a field trip. We hustled down to the station, baffled. Guess what? It was ESKIMOS ! Nobody guessed that one. Smiling Alaskan Eskimos.These hapless guys were old fashion Eskimos, before the affluence of the oil money. Authentic National  Geographic Eskimos who had just stabbed a walrus last Tuesday. Some spoke broken English, others not even that. Most never heard of Vietnam. Or "THE WAR". Some were not even aware Alaska was a new state. They were brand spankin' new Americans. Confused, reluctant Americans. Welcome to the good ole USA, mutherfuckers ! But we soon learned to love our Eskimo humpties. They may have been, technically, Cat Fours, but they weren't stupid. They were very smart. They learned quickly, always tried hard and never bitched. At least it didnt sound like bitching in their gibberish.They were pleasant and always smiling, even when you were trying to be a hardass, screaming obscenities in their face like they'd get in Basic.They were beautiful people and the most innocent souls I ever met. In a way, they were like children, our children, who we feared for. We knew they could only qualify for the Infantry, and they would be fodder, tossed into a hungry war they knew nothing about.The irony was sickening. But I know one thing for sure, the first little Vietnamese rice farmer to shoot an Eskimo in the jungle, gets the Cupie Doll and everything on the top shelf, and the Olympic gold metal for the bizarre sharpshooting world record. Born on an iceberg at the North Pole fated to die thousands of miles away in a steamy jungle, at the hands of strange little people, as strange to him as he was to them. It was Carrollian and Swiftian crazy and perverse. They had names that were unpronounceable, spoken in grunts and clicks and every hard consonant at once. We gave them nicknames. Smiley, Jake, Fuckface etc.