FF-2-101A
TIM CARTER
b. 1948
Up until the time I was fifteen, I went to a Catholic school, got brought up Irish Catholic. My dad made it clear to me that I would not be a success in his eyes unless I was very good in sports – and I was very good, I was no success at all [illegible inserted word] I was very religious even as a teenager. I can remember I lived in a lot of fear. Masturbation was a mortal sin. I started masturbating in the fourth grade so I thought I was going to go to hell. I couldn’t resolve the conflict in me that if God was so loving, why was I destined to go to hell. I told the priest about this. He told me to say three Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers and I would be absolved until the next night.
My mother protected me from my dad’s sickness: alcoholism. For 10 years around the time I was born – five years before I was born and for five years after – my dad was not drinking. Then he started again. I remember as a child that he would have periods when he was very loving and also he would be very angry. When I was six years old, he tried to kill me. We were taking a shower together and I reached up and touched his penis. I. was very curious and wanted to know what it was. He flipped out and he started beating my head against the bathroom sink. I screamed for my mom and she came in and stopped him.
In 1957, we moved to Burlingame, which was a completely white community. The beatings stopped and instead he began a program of verbal assault which he was very good with. Those beatings were much worse than any physical beatings I took. I hated my dad because nothing I did was right. I resented my mother up until the time she died because she mothered me too much. My strongest recollection in childhood was that of wanting to be away from home.
I didn’t know how to channel or even how to recognize my hatred at the time So, I would go back to the yard and pick oranges off the tree and smash them against the wall. I would smash glasses against the wall when I got really pissed. My dad started pitting my brother and sister against me even before my mom died. I was the ogre and they were the family. The only person I ever communicated with was my mom.
My mom died of mental and emotional exhaustion due to my dad’s alcoholism. I was fifteen and that’s when my life really took shape. When my mom died my life changed dramatically. Overnight I went from childhood to manhood with no in-between. She went into the hospital. She had had rheumatic fever as a child and at the time she was not treated properly. My mother was Jewish but the Jewish side of my family was never ever emphasized. My mother had become Catholic when she married my father.
Anyway, she had a rheumatic heart although she pushed herself hard all the time, she was physically weak and a thin person. Finally, she got to the point where she was totally exhausted. My dad was screaming in the living room that there was a bird in there that was chasing him that had the wingspan the width of Market Street. This was three weeks before my mom went into the hospital. He was having DTs. This was the first time I as a conscious person recognized this and I asked her what was happening. He physically would go through delirium tremens which are a very scary thing to watch. It was that point that made me realize that my mom’s life was very miserable. There were only three people that she ever communicated to about my dad’s alcoholism because at that time he had a very high position and she was worried that he would lose his job.
At that time, she was under a tremendous amount of pressure. She talked to the doctor, my best friend’s mom, and she talked to my aunt. Strangely enough, although she was very religious, she never mentioned it to the priest. She couldn’t have had that much confidence in the church. It took its toll on her. At that point in time, I had a whole new cognizance of her as an individual because it’s the first time I had an image of her as an adult. Unfortunately, three weeks later, she died.
How did her death affect me? I will go through the whole thing. I worked at a place called Coyote Point at a concession stand. I came home and she went into the hospital for what the doctor termed emotional exhaustion. He insisted that she stay. I came home and my dad was totally blasted sitting on the doorstep. Terri was nine years old, Michael was five years old and they were all crying. They said, “Mommy was very sick, mommy was very sick”. He gave me $20 to take them to a restaurant. He told me she would be home tomorrow. But when we got into the restaurant, Terri started crying again.
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FF-2-101B
She told me mom was in an oxygen tent and was never coming home. I immediately freaked because dad had told me something different. At this point, my dad put his head in my lap and started crying, Terri put her head in my lap and started crying and Michael was standing up and he was only about knee high anyway and he put his head in my lap and started crying. I was very bitter. I wanted to start crying too but I couldn’t because of my dad – he was a fucking child. I didn’t know what to do. So we went out and said a rosary and my dad sobbed through the whole thing.
We went to the hospital. My father went in first. He came out – he couldn’t even talk he was outrageously drunk. He barely made it. I went in and my mom was literally in delirium because she was so worried. She was in the oxygen tent. She was extremely pale. She was saying, “My children, my children, my children, I can’t die. My children. I have to get home.” It really tore me up because she was reacting to his god damn drinking. He had chosen the bottle over his family and his god damn life. Anyway, on the way home, I laid it down to him. I said, “You are going to stop drinking, you are going to take your Librium. If she dies tonight, I hold you personally responsible”.
We dropped off my little brother and sister at a friend’s house. About an hour and a half later, the phone rang; It was the hospital. I had to try to wake my dad up and the mother-fucker – not only was he drunk – but instead of taking two Librium like he was supposed to, he took about eight. He tried to summarily kill himself, I guess. He was totally and completely incoherent and unable to do a damn thing on his own. I had to lift him up, almost carry him to the telephone. They said you better get here right away.
I remember the utter frustration of having to dress him because he was too fucking drunk. I was so hostile, I wanted to kill him. At that time, I had total responsibility for the family including him which was a very rude awakening.
On the way to the hospital, he slept. Then, I had to help him up the flight of stairs. We got to her room and they said, “I’m sorry, she’s dead”. I remember I didn’t feel fifteen but I was more numb than anything. O.K. They said do you want to see the body. I went in. The mother-fuckers in the hospital didn’t even have the sensitivity to close her eyes. I will never forget her face then at that moment. It was exactly the same – she had exactly, exactly the same expression on her face dead as the last time I saw her alive. I know for a fact that she died in total agony worrying about her kids. Her eyes were open; her mouth was open; her arms were still outstretched. They hadn’t done anything to her body whatsoever. She was murdered by my fucking selfish dad…
My father slept on the way home from the hospital. I resented that. When we got home, he went to bed. I was the one, at fifteen, who had to call all the relatives and tell them that my mother was dead. I also had the responsibility of telling Terri and Michael the next morning. It was particularly painful because Michael who was five, didn’t understand. So, I had to explain it many different ways for him to get it.
We took Michael to the mass. When we got to the casket, he asked what was in it. We said mommy’s in it. He thought and then said, “But you told me mommy was in heaven.” He was five years old and I remember just looking at him. I had no answer… I think that was the hardest part of the whole thing – looking at Terri and Michael and thinking about what they would have to go through.
Throughout my life, my dad tried to put the responsibility of my mother’s death on me. Because I represented his failure as a father, I immediately became the villain and the antagonist as far as his life was concerned.
My dad’s condition degenerated rapidly after my mother’s death. He told my brother and sister that I wanted to send them away although it was my mother’s relatives who thought life in a foster home would be better.
I had no social consciousness yet. When I was working with a college student who got drafted in 1966, I realized I might as well enlist because I would end up going anyway. I was so brainwashed that I decided to join the Marines. When they tested me and found put that I was functionally blind in one eye, they rejected me. I had to get a special clearance from some captain somewhere in Calif.
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FF-2-101C
to let me be in the Marine Corps.
The San Diego training place they had for Marines was absolutely inhuman. There were several jolts I had in my life. One was when my mom died – that was the first big one. Boot camp was like a jolt but it was like a pre-jolt before Vietnam. Vietnam was a total metamorphosis. My first impression of boot camp I remember was of blood, yelling, screaming.
I will tell you some of the brutality. When we got on the bus, you know we all thought we were hot shit, we were Marines. The first thing I heard was “Keep your eyes in front of you, you mother-fucking puke faces or I’m going to mother-fucking poke them out, you god damn motherfuking pukes. You’re in the Marine Corps now, you sissified girls.” From the time you get there until a week later, you hardly slept. The whole process of brainwashing, of deprograming and reprogramming – when I look back on it – is incredible.
The first thing they do is put absolute and complete, total terror into you – you don’t know what, the fuck is going to happen. They shave your head so you completely lose your identity and give you over-sized clothes so you’ll have no image. There were 300 of us in the room and the officer in charge shouted, “Alright, the last five out of this room are going to have a foot-locker thrown at them”. Some ended up rolling down the steps with a god damn foot locker after them.
Some of the instances of brutality I personally witnessed wereterrible. You could never pass a drill sergeant without without coming up three steps behind him and saying, “By your leave, sir”. One time, I heard this man screaming and crying, “By your leave, sir”. He was crawling on the ground the whole time he was in line screaming and crying, “By your leave, sir; by your leave, sir; by your leave, sir”. He got to the front of the line and filled his plate with food. Then, they made him crawl all the way back while eating,screaming, “By your leave, sir”. He was totally and completely humiliated. It was one of the most humiliating things I’ve ever seen.
It was not uncommon for recruits to have to eat their own vomit which I witnessed. You try to think of ways to get out. But there’s no way out of boot camp except to graduate. If you do write and expose what’s going on, it’s not uncommon to get the shit beat out of you. I saw many go to the hospital. If you’re called to the drill instructor’s office, you go to the hospital. I personally had a rifle butt smashed against my head. The whole orientation is kill, kill, kill. “This is your rifle, this is your gun, oneis for shooting, one is for fun.” They teach you to kill VC (Viet Cong). They tell you, you are a professional murderer. They teach you that all fighting is fighting is to the death – there is no nice fighting.
In the Marine Corps, qualifying for the Rifle Range is like being able to get a hard-on in machismo society. If you don’t qualify, you’re less than scum, less than dirt. I know guys who didn’t qualify who had to live – I mean live in a fucking garbage can. They had theif food thrown in there. They had their garbage thrown in there. They had to do calisthenics in there.
You are totally cut off from communication. I get a telegram from this girlfriend and I have to eat it. Because it came late at night, the drill sergeant had to be awaken for me to receive it. He was pissed so I had to eat the telegram arid do calisthenics for at least an hour.
The psychology is this. If they fuck you over enough and if they repress you enough, you will get filled with so much hatred, that when you get a chance to strike back (at the VC) and let it out, you’ll be that much more of an animal. And it’s the truth – it works. You are filled with the most hatred you can imagine – the honeymoon was over when you first got there.
In Camp Pendleton, I saw a man what I consider murdered. This man had a cold – he was sick. He kept on asking to go to the doctor. They refused. They forced him to go on a five-mile run. Well, the guy collapsed in the middle of the five-mile run and died. And the reason he died according to the medical reports was appendicitis. Everybody knew he never had appendicitis. He was run to death.
The Marine Corps was a microcosm of America in general – but especially of the U.S. government. I realized this when I was in Vietnam
I left for Vietnam on Sept 7, 1967. When I went there, my whole concept of life was reactionary. I used to call long-hairs faggots. My only concept of communism was J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit.
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FF-2-101D
In Vietnam I thought I was killing communists. I had been totally indoctrinated at boot camp. We had been brainwashed against communism and we’d been programmed to kill VC.
There was a study done once which detailed the amount of time it took to recuperate from service in the military. It took 2 years on the average to recuperate from the Air Force, the Navy was on the average of four years, the Army was on the average of four to six years, the Marine Corps was on the average of eight years to never. This was in terms of actually getting back to some kind of normal or quasi-normal life.
So, I was with the Fifth Communications Battalion which was stationed in northern South Vietnam where most of the fighting was going on. I was stationed in Da Nang from September to December of 1967 and I had a chance to set up communications between small command posts and headquarters. So, for four months, I lived the life of what 90% of Americans in Vietnam did: drinking, smoking dope, etc.
After I’d been there for about eight months, my head started going through a lot of changes from things I was seeing. I realized that I had been totally programmed not just by the Marine Corps but from the time I was a child. With every aspect and phase of American society, our minds are controlled by T.V, radio, newspapers. The process of analysis started when I took dope. We would get high and go to these joints where there would be bands singing about America – “God Bless America” and all that shit. So we would start putting America on a pedestal. This was important because at this point I already despised the US government. But I still glorified America as my homeland. You have to look forward to something to keep your own head together.
In December, I had the chance to go out into what they called “Indian Country” – that shows the subtle racism. They called where the VC were “Indian Country”. We got sent to Hoi An which had the highest concentration of VC in all of South Vietnam. I was stationed in the forest with a South Korean battalion which was fighting for the Americans. We were stretched out in the forest which we did not know, we were surrounded by VC, and the people I was with were speaking Korean. The day before I arrived, they had sent out two patrols. Their bodies got thrown back into the camp tied together. News of that spread all through the camp.
We started dealing with fear. When you’re in a situation that every minute of every hour of every day, you could die – when you are around death – nothing but death, you begin to really mentally go through some fucking changes. You learn to accept life for what it is – that it is now – not ten minutes from now. Because in ten minutes, your life could be blown away. Death happens that fast – now you see him, now you don’t. You begin to smoke dope, you become an addict or an alcoholic – you had to. But you never get so high that reality of imminent death [two illegible inserted words]. ‘’Death becomes the center of your life. You have to face it ‘cause where you going to run in South Vietnam???
I hated the government that sent me to Vietnam. I felt resentment not only to the government that sent me but also to the people who were protesting the war. I only learned about Vietnam after I left it – in terms of why the US was there. I learned about the dynamics of war when I was there. I felt an enormous amount of resentment against college students because they were smarter than I was, but also because I was nineteen and I had lost all innocence – I could never really smile again. I was very bitter. I could never live in this naive, protected world that Americans live in.
At one point, during the month of May, we had received an intelligence report that we were surrounded by North Vietnamese. We badly needed generators to keep our radios going. The generators we had were no good so there was no radio contact and we were totally cut off from communication. We had to drive to Da Nang to get a generator because the South Koreans would not share their supplies with us. When we got there, the U.S. supply house would not give us the two good generators they had. They were not in use but they refused to let us have them because the general was coming through on inspection!!! It was more important to have the generators on display than for us to use them for life-saving communications. That was perfectly typical. When that kind of thing happens to you day after
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FF-2-101E
day after day, your resentment and your bitterness, and your hatred not only for the Marine Corps but for the US government gets to be overwhelming. The US government was aware of our disillusionment. As soon as you’re let out of the service, the government classifies all Vietnam veterans as potentially subversive. This is automatic. They know that they trained them to hate, they know they’ve trained them to shoot, and they know they’ve fucked them over. And so, they know they have an enemy on their hands. And they’re god damn right – they do have an enemy on their hands for life.
On the average we had somebody die every day. On this day, we came out in a pick-up truck and we had just gotten to a little past this bridge and I’d forgotten something. So we turned around and went back in. There were very few trucks going out as it had to be a high priority matter for a truck to venture down this road filled with mines. There was a wrecker coming out with eight guys hanging off the back of it. We turned around and the truck had not gone more than twenty five yards when the truck itself was blown to smithereens. Out of the nine guys who were in the truck, eight died. Five bodies were put in green bags. I’d seen dead bodies before but this was the first time I had seen one that had been caught in a cab. It wasn’t flesh – it was just a black bubbling hulk. This guy’s leg had been blown off – it didn’t look like a leg – it had been blown off below the kneecap and looked like a piece of wood. And rigor mortis had set in and the body itself was like this. The hands were wrapped around. I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled the odor of burning flesh but it’s a smell I will never, ever, ever forget. And they came up and poured water on the body because it was smoldering and it didn’t disintegrate but parts of it just fell away. I couldn’t believe this was a human being – that at one time it was a body like mine. I knew that if I had gone twenty five feet more, that that body would’ve been my own. When I saw all these green bags some of them containing no more than a hand or a foot of the original person, it made me stop and ask, ’What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck is this all about?’
Another time, they brought in some North Vietnamese Army bodies. They always do that when they have some kills – they bring ’em in and put them on display. We found the wallet of this one North Vietnamese soldier and it had a picture of his wife and his kids and a letter from them. I remember at that point something clicked in my head, something… I don’t know. That’s when I stopped and I thought. The whole insanity of war became so clear and struck me so deeply because here was this man who no more wanted to fight me than I wanted to fight him. In reality I knew that he had the same fears I did, that he had the same longings I had.
At that point icy hatred of the US government became deeply embedded. We had one captain who walked in on us when we were smoking dope. He knew that if he told on us he’d die. It happened all the time. Fragging might have been big news in ’71, but shit, it was going on all the fucking time – it was a fact of life. (Fragging – killing superior officers) In the jungle, everybody has a gun, everybody has a bullet. When everybody has a gun, and everybody has a bullet, you quickly learn the politics of life. In the jungle, you learn to walk softly & carry a heavy stick. You have to fucking learn how to maneuver ’cause your ass could get shot any time – not just by the so-called enemy but by anybody.
They had frequent shoot-outs in Vietnam between Black and white. They had actual god damn fucking shoot-outs between Black Marines and white ones.
Getting back to indoctrination and propaganda, the first time that I actually saw someone getting shot, it was during TET in February, 1968. I was out with these Koreans in the middle of VC-land. For the next week it was hell. We got hit every day with rockets, with fire, with everything else. The people say when you see combat – well, the typical combat is propagandized. But guerrilla warfare is not like the Guadal Canal. The guerrilla thing – you don’t see your enemy – very rarely. You hear his mortars coming down on top of you, his [illegible word] bullets whiz by you, but you rarely see the enemy.
90% of American men never saw combat in Vietnam. They sat in their air-conditioned offices, getting drunk at night, having young girls brought to then. That’s where the fast money was. That’s where they have steak and potatoes; they had mamasons coming in and polishing their boots making up beds and shit – that’s how they actually lived.
That whole war had been calculated for years. They started de-escalating in 1968 after TET – they got their asses kicked. All of a sudden from one end of South Vietnam to another, there was VC everywhere. Everywhere we got hit; every city was hit – it was overwhelming – the psychological impact was terrible. All of a sudden one morning BOOM there was VC in broad daylight.
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FF-2-101F
I began to identify with the Vietnamese people. I hated being an American. I wanted to be Vietnamese. I went into the villages and I really liked being with then. I felt sick being an American. Americans are ugly, brutal, crude, they’re rude, over-bearing, they’re arrogant, they’re ignorant, they’re absolute barbarians. I was one of them but at that point in time, I didn’t want to be.
I had gone through my transformation. I went to Vietnam hating the marines – but still I had this ‘Wow, America’ feeling. By my tenth month there I hated everything about the U.S. including the fact that I was an American. I was an enemy of the government because I had been fucked over, my friends had been fucked over. My friends had been killed. One captain – one fucking puke-ass captain – I can’t think of the words to describe how I feel – sent two platoons up the hill to knock out one mother-fucking machine gun. He could’ve sent two people but he sent two platoons. He sent eighty people to their death – they were fucking machine-gunned down – every last one of them. The machine-gunner was dug into a hill and there was no wooded area for the men to hide in. The point is all of these people died because of one sadistic ass-hole.
People like that used to get prices on their head. I know a major who had $7000 on his head. The troops would get the money together and whoever offed him got the bread – no questions asked.
You realize there’s no love, no warmth, no affection, no gentleness, no kindness because all those things are lacking in Vietnam. There’s a camaraderie. You might come in contact with a Vietnamese family. They lived on a garbage heap. When the Americans would dump their garbage, you would be mobbed by the Vietnamese waiting at the garbage pits to go through what you were throwing. I learned that poverty meant humaneness – I met more humane people who were living in abject poverty in Vietnam than I ever met in affluent America.
The reaction when I came back to the US were overwhelming alienation and bitterness. Plus your mind was so fucked up anyway. You hear a loud BOOM and you fucking duck or you crawl on the ground. At one time in my life I used to worry if behind that bush there was a gun. That’s still with me – it’ll be with me the rest of my life. The main thing after I got back was alienation, hostility. I still didn’t have the political consciousness at that time – I knew, though, who the enemy was. I was into drugs – I got very much into marijuana, hashish. We were so desperate for a god damn high that we used to buy god damn nose inhaler, cut up the stick inside and sniff it to get speed. Or we used to take Karazine – motion sickness pills which would make you hallucinate.
When I was there, one of the things I saw, I thought of society in general just like I saw football – that’s a war. It’s not as literal as the war I was going through but you had the same sort of ’Kill ’em, get ’em’ trip – it runs through the entire society. The end result was that whole competitive syndrome is war. It was the end result of what was always being acted out in front of my eyes. But it’s very cleverly cushioned – it’s cloaked with nice things – with stereos, with rugs, with pretty clothes, it’s cushioned with booze. All these things to completely remove reality of what the society is: a competitive nightmare.
After Vietnam my life changed. When I left, I swore that I would get even some way. [two lines erased] From the time I got back from Nam until the time I met Jim, my life was an exercise in frustration and wandering. I was a dope addict – I was a hippy – I wandered the streets. I didn’t know where I was going, I just knew that somewhere there was something for me. I knew it inside. I knew that I was going to meet somebody; I was going to meet something. Something was going to happen where I would know that was my life.
The one thing that you craved over there was some type of affection. And men don’t show it to each other – they can’t show it to each other. So, that’s embodied as a woman, as a female. I used prostitutes when I was there but finally I stopped because there was more alienation after it was done than even before. So, I’d rather jack off and leave it like that.
Everybody on that plane home wore their uniform except for me. When I got off the plane the first thing I did when I went through customs – I mean the very first thing, I did before I called or anything – I went into the bathroom and I changed my uniform. That’s how much – how little I wanted to be identified with Vietnam. I went home and I got the sane old bullshit story from my dad. You’re irresponsible, you’ll never make it, blah, blah.
I remember how painful that was after thirteen months, after all that misery. I thought, “Jesus fucking Christ, if I haven’t proven myself by now…”. And I thought at that point, I had proved myself to me – I know what I’m made of. I know what I’ve actually been through. I know that I can withstand a certain amount of emotional stress. I have a lot of confidence in myself because of what I’ve been through.