AT&T Chapter 2(pt) Max Honorable Discharge

After muster, everyone is assigned light duties and so on but no one said anything to me about my uniform or lack of one until the Bos’n called me to the side as everyone was breaking muster, “McGee. Put on your dungarees and report to the work detail at the Supply Depot. You can do that much for me, okay?”

What the heck. It was strange enough that he’d asked politely and I had nothing to do. A half-dozen of us were taken in the back of a pick-up to the supply depot where a couple of Private First Class Marines met us with scowls. It was as though we were on an extra duty detail. I noticed the Private in charge of the detail had only a few ribbons; the regular National Defense and stuff you get out of boot camp.

He called out our names from his clip board. Some he sent to the warehouse and others to light duty elsewhere. He came to my name, seeing that my dungaree shirt had the deep blue shadow of a petty officer patch that had been removed, and barked an order, “McGee, grab a broom and start sweeping the grid.”

I’m not one to disobey an order but, hell, a couple of pushes on the broom woke up the pain in my back.

I complained, “Say, there must be a mistake. I just got out of Tripler and am in the Medical Holding Company.”

“Oh, poor baby. You will start sweeping or get written up,” he spat out his contempt for me and everything Navy.

A porta-potty was nearby. I dropped the broom and went there... shut the door and sat to figure out what I was going to do next.

After about ten minutes the Marine yanked the door open.

“What the fuck do you think you are doing...”

He pointed to a cheap gold-plated peace symbol I’d bought the day before while tripping. “Say, is that a peace symbol?”

I decided to return some of his contempt, “Yah, it is. Now you listen to me Private, I’m three months past my enlistment and I don’t need to take any crap from a boot-camp Jar-Head.”

He was stunned as I pushed past him. They hadn’t taught him how to handle brazen disobedience in boot camp.

“McGee, grab your broom or I’m writing you up!”

I just walked away and, from that day on, only showed up on payday at disbursing to collect my check and to see if my transfer orders had come. The disbursing Yeoman was curious because I always showed up in civvies.

“Where’s your unit, McGee?”

“Oh, I’m just waiting for orders,” I’d answer and he never asked again.

I spent another month on the beach doing exactly as I wished and when I wished to. I slept on the beach, showered at Fort De Russy, and tripped around with a young college student, Mandy, I’d met while snorkeling

I was in heaven. I’d been in the Navy, stationed out of Pearl Harbor for four friggen’ years and had not ever spent any extended time on the beach with a cute Wahini. Mandy was more than cute too. She made the bikini wrapped around her curves look better than any nudie show on Hotel Street.

A couple of months later I finally got my transfer orders to Treasure Island. We went to see Alice’s Restaurant where my mind was distracted by a sense of attachment and liberation. I was about to be free of a four-year commitment. I didn’t want to leave her or Hawaii but I also wanted to catch up on the scene in San Francisco and everything hippy that Arlo was singing about. I sadly bid Mandy, adieu.

“I’ll write and we can catch up on each other when you leave Hawaii,” I promised knowing I most probably wouldn’t follow through.

“Max, I don’t think so. It’s been nice but... well maybe.”

“Yah, you’re right. It sure has been nice.” and that was the last we heard of each other.

Treasure Island sits in the middle of San Francisco Bay between the links of the Oakland Bay Bridge. I was there to get my separation papers… my DD-214. They read:Separated from Active Duty under Honorable conditions, and that was all I wanted. I’d held up my end of the bargain I’d made so long ago and I swore a solemn oath to myself that I would never sell my freedom so cheaply and for so long ever again.

I got on the bus going into The City taking the rear seat. Sitting there I felt something called freedom for the first time in four years and three months. A grin fixed itself on my face like the Cheshire Cat. I breathed in the cool, autumn, San Francisco Bay air blasting through an open window. In the seats head of me were two sailors who turned to look.

“Are you high?” one of them asked.

“Yah, I’m high.” There was no hesitation in my reply.

“Do you have any for us?”

I held up the manila envelope, “I had to wait four years and three months for these… I guess you’ll have to wait to get yours if you wanna get this high.”

The two realized that I had no dope for them, agreeing that it was a high they would have to wait for; and turned back to leave me in my revelry.

I got off the bus below Market Street, stored my light bag in a locker, and took a sports bag with me over to Grant Ave. Market Street had changed since I went in the Navy in 1965. Back then it was a vital, buzzing hive of businessmen, street preachers, musicians and every kind of mom and pop shops selling anything from transistor radios to switchblade knives. But in the fall of 1969 the Bay Area Transit subway was under construction and the place looked like a ghost of its former self.

I walked down to Grant and on up to Bush, the entrance to China Town. There was no tiled Gateway for the tourists back then. It was a somewhat shabbier affair and low-rent. There, at the corner on my left, was the Saint Charles Hotel and across the street was another hotel, the Plaza. It was nothing like the Plaza Hotel of NY City fame but it might as well have been because, to me, sitting alone in the dark of my old room in the Saint Charles over four years ago; watching folks going in from cabs with the doorman handing their luggage over to bellhops, the Plaza was a symbol. I needed to stay there at least one night; my first night of freedom.