Name: DJC E-mail: (Not Available) Subject: New Troop
Hey guys we got us a new troop coming to the reunion, signed in and paid. Feel free to send him a welcome, I will pass along a story that he sent me.
Tom Streeter; Kristine Calitri; 204 Monte Vista, San Clemente CA 92672; 3rd platoon (Brownsberger); mail@tomstreeter.com; February - July, 1970 (yep, only 5 months; see below).
Regards, and GERONIMO! PFC Tom (Ret.)
Debbie Not all of our artillery bases were named after women. Some were named after places where our division had been during World War II: Birmingham, our staging area in England before D-Day; Veghel, where we had landed three months after D-Day to liberate Holland; and Bastogne, where we had fought the Battle of the Bulge. It was near fire base Veghel (about fifteen hundred meters southwest of it) that my sergeant ordered his squad to jump off a cliff.
This wasn`t as foolish as it sounds. We had to link up with the rest of the platoon, and the cliff was only about eight feet high. Besides, we were the 101st Airborne Division -- the Screaming Eagles -- and were supposed to know how to jump and land safely. Moreover, my sergeant jumped before I did. Both of his legs made it fine. Only one of mine did.
The next day, when it became clear that I was an infantryman unable to walk, they pulled me out of the jungle and put me in an evacuation hospital. This is where they evacuate you to when you need medical attention, not where they evacuate you from. Four days later the doc came up to me. `Streeter, the dinks just overran fire base Veghel. We have orders to move all our ambulatory patients to make room for casualties. You`re not ambulatory in the sense that you can walk, but you are ambulatory in the sense that we can move you by stretcher without hurting you. We`re sending you to a hospital ship.`
The salt air was a delight. Four days later the doc came up to me. `Streeter, the dinks just overran fire base Birmingham. We have orders to move all our ambulatory patients to make room for casualties. We`re sending you to Japan.`
I watched Japanese soap operas and called my Mom and Dad with the good news. Four days later the doc came up to me. `Streeter, the dinks just overran fire base Bastogne.` That was a big one. `We have orders to move all our ambulatory patients to make room for casualties. We`re sending you to the world (the United States). Do you have any preferences?` I had a girlfriend, now an ex-wife, in Houston. `What do you have in Texas?` `Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio.` `I`ll take it.`
I checked into BAMC the same day as my former fire team leader was checking out. They had fixed his lung, and were sending him back to COMPLETE HIS TOUR! Either they were heartless, or he was crazy, or both. Four days later the doc came up to me. `Streeter, a hurricane just wiped out Corpus Christi. We have orders to move all our ambulatory patients to make room for casualties. We`re giving you a thirty-day recuperation leave. Here are your papers and some money. We want you off post by nightfall.`
It took me seventeen days to go from a cliff about fifteen hundred meters southwest of fire base Veghel to a motel room in Houston, Texas.
I flew by Trans-Texas Airlines, before it became Texas International. These were the days when airlines had stewardesses, not fight attendants. The stewardess on the flight was a real Debbie Does Dallas bimbette. Debbie was struggling to open a screw-top bottle of wine for the first class passengers.
This was three months after the Kent State massacre. At that time, many servicemen coming into contact with civilians for the first time in a long time were treated with contempt and contracted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Not me!
For the last five months, everything I had eaten had come out of single-portion aluminum cans, opened with a Government-issue piece of sharpened metal no more than an inch long. The fingers on my right hand were, consequently, like steel. Also for the last five months, I had not had an erection. When one twenty-six inch steel phallus called an automatic rifle has grown from your right forearm, you don`t need -- or want -- a second phallus growing from anywhere else. There I was, a twenty-two year old virgin in a dress green Army uniform in the right front row of coach, and there was my twenty-five-year-old damsel in distress. Things were starting to look up, so to speak.
Silently, I motioned her to me, holding out my left hand to seize her bottle. She handed it to me. I touched my steel fingers to its aluminum cap, squeezed, twisted, and -- ripping the paper seal -- rent the metal from the glass. With spread arms, I returned the sundered pieces, and with spread arms she accepted. Just as silently, thirty seconds later, twenty-thousand feet over Gonzales, Texas, a glass of red wine appeared at my left elbow. Its color was matched only by the red tongue of the Screaming Eagle on the patch on my right shoulder.
I`ve been attracted to older women and redheads ever since.
December, 1992
-- Tom Streeter ` (949) 485-4478 ` mail@tomstreeter.com
