FORT MACARTHUR, CALIFORNIA
Home again in Southern
California. We stayed with Janet's parents (Phyllis
& Earl Turner) in their house on Bevon Place in Tujunga. We had leased out our own house on Vanowen
St. in Canoga Park to make the house payments. A Sgt's pay wasn’t all
that much in 1968. Janet was
approaching her ninth month of pregnancy with our second child as we spent
Christmas with the Turners. The new
baby was due in January and I wanted to stay and see it born rather than read
about it in Vietnam. Janet must have
grunted real hard or something because the baby was born on December 28th,
just four days
before I was to report to
Oakland Army Depot for transport to Vietnam.
The baby, who we named Nikki Lynne, was born with "Hyaline Membrane"
and was on the critical list from the start.
Her lungs had not fully developed and there was a membrane restricting
the oxygen passage into the lungs that proved to be fatal in most cases of its
kind. I phoned the Red Cross and was
granted a weeks extension so I could be with Janet and look after the new baby,
who was expected to die soon.
I never prayed so hard in my
life as I did that night alone in bed.
Janet was still in the hospital and Nikki was expected to die and I was
on my way to war. It seemed the whole
world was crashing in on me. I
fortunately had Jonette to comfort me and I rocked her for hours in our old
yellow rocking chair. Janet came home
in a few days and Nikki was placed in an incubator/respirator with a fleet of
specialists looking in on her every minute.
For some reason she clung to life with a tenacity and got stronger
daily. Meanwhile, I contacted the Red
Cross again and through them was reassigned to Fort MacArthur in San Pedro for
three months while my new baby was still in peril.
Upon reporting to Fort
MacArthur I was assigned to the Honor
Guard detail and worked an 8 to 5 job.
We were the flag bearers and riflemen for funerals in Los Angeles and
San Diego and went to one or two funerals daily. Those we were burying were coming home from Vietnam in plastic
bags and it seemed sort of macabre the longer I did it. My first funeral was in Burbank and the
drivers of the station wagons we rode in were drag racing around the cemetery
before the service began. I was really
upset at their lack of respect but as time wore on and the number of funerals
we attended grew, I found myself less and less interested in what was going
on. I just wanted it over with so I
could go home to my family and forget the Army. One funeral we did at Pt. Loma in San Diego was for a black Sgt
and as we were carrying the casket to the graveside his enormous mother (300+)
was screaming hysterically behind us and suddenly took a flying leap onto the
casket. It almost buckled our knees and
we struggled to keep from dropping the guy. (a court martial offense) When it was all over we laughed, but at the time it
was serious.
Another funeral was a
Buddhist ceremony at Rose Hills in Pico Rivera. There were Shinto priests gonging bells and chanting and it was
quite a show. Afterward the father
handed me an envelope with $30 in it to go and have a drink in honor of his
son. We split the money between the six
guys and went home in the rain. We did
over a hundred burials in the three months I was there and they comprised
almost every faith and economic strata.
It was during this time that I grew to hate the Army Chaplains for their
outward spirituality and behind the back callousness. I promised Janet that if she allowed any representative from the
Army to be at my funeral I would come back and haunt her forever, and I meant
it
My new orders were cut and I
was to ship to Oakland the first week
in March. Nikki had come home after
eight weeks in
intensive care and Janet seemed okay with the two babies and had her mother to
help her. I still didn't want to go but
things were looking better on the home front than they did in December.