I began my blog, Paranoia Strikes Deep in April, 2006 with this story of a random drug test. Today I took another; my third random drug test since testing by my employer began over 13 years ago. I don't care that I don't take drugs; I'm always suspicious of this sort of official invasion of privacy. Since I don't take illegal drugs, since I don't do my job impaired I resent having this sort of action perpetrated on me. But, in the world today, with the prevalence of illegal drugs, as much as I hate it, I guess I can see why…
I've been talking lately about my time in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany during the years 1967-68. This is the story that got jogged back into memory with the call summoning me to the test. One of our three mess sergeants was Sgt. Willie. Willie was a carefree, imperturbable, aw shucks kind of guy. I never minded having KP when it was Willie's shift, because he kept things low-key, no yelling and screaming at the KP guys.
My first sergeant, Coke Bottles, whose story is told here, hated Sgt. Willie. Coke Bottles was a white man from Arkansas, and Sgt. Willie was a black man from Alabama. One day Willie had to come into our orderly room to bring a requisition and he was staggering. His eyes were unfocused and his speech was slurred. "Mess sergeant!" yelled Coke Bottles. "Are you drunk?"
"Nawsuh," replied Sgt. Willie. He reached down and took a cigarette out of the Winston pack Coke Bottles kept on his desk, lighting it with the Zippo by the pack. He saluted and staggered out. Coke Bottles got on the phone. I heard him saying something about taking Willie to the dispensary, and within minutes the First Sergeant left his office.
He came back an hour or so later, shaking his head. He was talking to the battery commander. "Sir, I took Sgt. Willie to the dispensary and told them to test him for alcohol. They gave him the test and said he wasn't drunk! I can't figure it out!" The irony is that First Sergeant Lloyd was himself an alcoholic, usually downing two or three drinks in the morning to cure his hangover from the night before. Both Coke Bottles and the Captain shook their heads, baffled.
Well, I wasn't baffled. This was 1967, the year of the Summer of Love; the year of hippies, flower power, peace, freedom, and psychedelics. I knew what Sergeant Willie had been doing, and it was smoking weed! Pot! Grass, marijuana! Our leaders were still in a state of innocence at the time. It was just coming into the Army. Germany had all kinds of drugs floating around; it was nothing to go downtown and find marijuana or hashish, even LSD or hard narcotics. They were all over the place. But men like our captain and first sergeant were still clueless.
Willie got away with it that time. So did I. A couple of months later a guy asked if I wanted to smoke a pipe. I was curious. We went into his room and locked the door from the inside. He sparked up the bowl. It was Turkish hash, and it put a buzz on me like I'd never had in my life. I was so disoriented I tried to go out the window because I thought it was the door. I went back to the orderly room and sat at the typewriter, but nothing made any sense to me. I remember Coke Bottles looking at me, puzzled, and then I stood up and said, "I'm feeling really, really sick." I didn't ask for permission, I just left the orderly room, stumbled to my room, laid down and felt the bed start doing 360s, faster and faster until I was hanging on for dear life. I managed to go to sleep, but when I woke up several hours later it was dark and I was still stoned. It lasted until morning, when I went back to work.
When I left the Army in late 1968 drug use was rampant, and the powers that be were catching on, but it would be quite a while before they realized they had a problem on their hands. As a civilian the stories I read about drug use in the armed forces were mostly about Vietnam, as if it didn't exist in the United States or other countries where we had troops stationed. How wrong they were.
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