I was already on the Helicopter Recovery Team when I became addicted to herion. That would put it around May of 1971. I didn't even know I was addicted until withdrawals set in one day. Hell, I didn't even know it was herion. The pusher and his clients that gave me the free drugs called it Coke or Cocaine mostly. Some called it Smack or Junk, but that didn't mean anything to me at the time. I was a military brat and didn't associate with the hippies or druggies. My friends and I were taught duty, honor, and country by our 'lifer' dads. The first time I got drunk was when I signed up for the Army.
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I had never even smoked pot until my Advanced Training for Flight Engineer on Hueys at Fort Rucker. I wouldn't have smoked it then if the car load of classmates I was riding to Panama City with for weekend liberty hadn't rolled up the windows and filled the car with smoke. I got a contact high and it was nice, so I started smoking it when they passed it to me.
At the time I couldn't figure out why they were putting the cigarettes (joints) backwards in their mouths and blowing the smoke into the air. I know now that it was intentional on their part. They had told me that if I thought the pot was good I should try Cocaine if I got the chance. It was better than marijuana they said. The rich man's high.
18 of 20 of my class was National Guard or Army Reserve guys that had gotten exemptions through family connections. Zwoboda and I were both active duty and knew our next assignment was Vietnam, they were being reassigned to bases in the states. A lot of them were already Spec.4s and 5s so they didn't care about getting rank out of the school.
They wanted to skate through the training and wanted us to lighten up so their scores didn't look so bad. We took it serious though because we knew our lives and others' may depend on what we were learning. I guess they were getting even. Zwoboda was smarter than I was. He refused to go when they invited us to go to the beach for the weekend.
It was our last weekend before graduation. They got me stoned and left me in Panama City Sunday with very little money. I'd been very generous Saturday and Sunday morning so I was broke and had to hitch-hike back to Dothan Alabama all night. I was 2 hours late for formation Monday morning.
The Commanding Officer didn't give me an article 15 for being late. He did show me my orders for Spec.4 he had waiting for his signature, then tore them up. They cost me a stripe and set me up for Maroney and his Coke/Heroin. I often wish I would have finked on them to try and save my own ass! It wasn't my style though. I'd been taught to take my lumps and keep my mouth shut.
Opium History, 1940 To 1979: "In 1968-1969, Hong Kong syndicate chemists opened a cluster of heroin laboratories at the epicenter of the Golden Triangle. Controlled by the Nationalist Chinese generals in Thailand and the Commander of the Royal Lao Army, these laboratories produced substantial quantities of 90 percent pure heroin.
Fueled by these nearly limitless supplies, heroin use among US troops in South Vietnam reached epidemic proportions. In September 1970, Army medical officers questioned 3,103 soldiers of the American Division and found that 11.9 percent had used heroin since their arrival in Vietnam.
In November, an Army Engineers battalion in the Mekong Delta reported that 14 percent of its troops were regular heroin users. In 1972, the White House Office for Drug Abuse Prevention interviewed 900 enlisted men who had returned from Vietnam in September 1971, the peak of the epidemic, and found that 44 percent had tried opiates while in Vietnam and 20 percent regarded themselves as having been addicted. The full extent of the problem was not revealed until 1974 when the Office for Drug Abuse Prevention published later surveys showing that 34 percent of US troops in Vietnam had commonly used heroin. Assuming this figure to be correct, then by mid 1971 there were more American heroin users in South Vietnam (81,300) than there were in the entire United States (68,000).
The causes underlying the GI drug epidemic were complex. In retrospect, however, boredom and bad morale provided much of the motivation. Under President Nixon's Vietnamization program launched in 1969, US troops were confined to cantonments as a strategic reserve for ARVN, and most units, without a clear mission, suffered a sharp decline in morale.
With days stretching into months without event or ending, soldiers apparently took heroin to dull the psychological pain and accelerate the 365-day clock that marked the maximum tour of each soldier. Not surprisingly, the accelerated withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in 1971-1972 forced Southeast Asian syndicates to seek new markets for their heroin production.
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