At Home–1968

January is a month when Khe Sanh veterans sleep less, wrestle monsters in their dreams, and battle with recollections of death, maiming, and savage fright that slashes like a wolf’s bite. Combat’s aftermath.

One of today’s memories: Arizona in 1968, me home from Vietnam, stunned and weak, yet elated to be out of Khe Sanh.

At night on my 21-day respite from the USMC, I hung with my old hometown buddies and struggled to understand what had come between us. During those thirteen months of being gone, I’d wanted as much as anything to be with my friends, but now they weren’t like they were before and it wasn’t their fault.

And besides raising hell with my old mates, I wanted to do something wild. I’d learned some things over in Nam—wild and inane things that warriors trapped in a world between being boys and men discover.

I recall one of the nights on leave, with a friend’s girlfriend.

She wanted to be tough and to let her prove it, I lit an unfiltered Camel and we put our arms together, her hand at my elbow and my hand at hers so that the lower biceps were in tandem, and then I placed the Camel where our flesh met, and we let it burn. First one to say “ouch” lost.

For years the burn scars crawled across my skin like centipede tracks. I’d done it more than once, although not with her.

I’d done it in Nam with Marines I do not remember and I’d done it on Okinawa waiting to go home, with Marines I do not remember and here I was, doing it at home. And why did I do it? Why did other Marines do it with me?

Betty told me it was like “cutting,” self mutilation. Was it a cry for help? Was I trying to feel something real, sensual beyond the numbing fear that had, over a two-and-one-half month period of time at Khe Sanh, rendered me incapable of feeling? I think I still exhibit some elements of that—not feeling—and I don’t mean in my fingers and toes, but in the den of the soul where the important things we learn and know hide.

And that wasn’t the only wild behavior I exhibited.

After those riotous nights on my 21-day leave I’d surrender and crawl beneath sheets after my parents were abed. I didn’t want them to witness me drunk on my butt. Then, long before they got up, I arose and drank bad black coffee and took my mother’s blue Buick and drove, seeking beer and morning-long sojourns across the country looking for…I don’t know what I was looking for.

Blogger Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh, January 1968. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

When I left the house the liquor stores were closed so I worked out a solution: buy a case of Coors the night before and leave it with one of my buddies, RA, who lived in a cinder-block-walled apartment behind the old mortuary.

I’d show up there at 5:30 or 6 AM, wake him, and if he refused to ride along, I’d corral a six-pack or maybe two out of the fridge and start driving the back roads between the alfalfa and cotton fields.

Hitting seventy or eighty miles an hour, I’d crash through the muddy puddles where the irrigation ditch banks had busted and water surged across the road. I’d whiz past farm worker hovels, scaring the hell out of the jackrabbits and the cottontails. And woe be to any errant hound that sauntered into the road to contest my passing.

If RA rode with me, he leaned back in the seat like that might help if I rolled the car or smashed into one of the gigantic cottonwood trees that grew along the sides of the roads.

Once he said, “What’s the matter with you; are you crazy?”

I remember that really well, but not my answer. Maybe I didn’t have one. And why did I do it? Was I trying to emulate that endorphin high I’d become addicted to in the death and chaos of Khe Sanh?

One morning I came upon a band of sheep crossing from one alfalfa field to another. One of my old herding buddies with whom I’d worked back in ‘64-‘65-‘66 stood in the middle of the road waving a red jacket to make me halt until the sheep finished their short journey.

Music blared from the Buick’s radio—Jim Morrison and Van Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Linda Ronstadt and the Spencer Davis Group. I sipped a cold Coors and praised its saintly buzz.

I watched the hooves of the sheep leave imprints in the dust, blue and black and white Australian shepherds circling them, circling.

After the sheep crossed the road, bleating and skipping, I pulled up to my old mate, JR, and rolled down the window. The smell of sheep, lanolin, and their droppings invaded my nose.

I said, “Hey, man, how you doing?”

He stared at me for a long time. Then he mumbled, “Shit, man, I thought you were dead.”

Blogger Ken Rodgers. Photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers.

He turned and walked behind the sheep, his jacket slung over his right shoulder.

As I watched him, I wanted to jump out of the car and shout, “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive. I ain’t the same kid you knew back then, but I’m alive.”

But I didn’t. I drove on, caroming from mudpuddle to mudpuddle, watching the trees fly by, the tractors cultivating the cotton fields.

I spent nearly every morning putting miles and miles on my mother’s car, and at night I drank more, often finding someone to put a forearm next to mine so I could light a Camel and lay it on the juncture of skin on skin and watch the red glow of the end as it sizzled—the scent of burnt flesh.

Waiting to go back to the Marines, back to war and the unknown, to my fright.

On the Oil Patch

I have now or never had any intention of having anything to do with mineral exploitation, so I chose other avenues of earning a living, but in 1983 my boss sent me to the Texas Panhandle to learn about the oil business. He owned some shares in several gas and oil drilling partnerships that were formed as tax avoidance schemes for people who made a lot of money. He wanted me to find out if the wells really existed and if I thought the operators were legitimate.

I ended up in Borger, Texas, with a jelly-muscled, slick-talking Panhandle lawyer and a couple of partnership operators who appeared to be kids (they looked younger than me) who offered me evenings with their two secretaries and veiled promises about wild nights of drinking, drugs and after-hour sexual activities. Those secretaries played along by acting sexually attracted to me but I suspected they had no interest in me other than as a diversion to keep me from bothering my oilfield hosts.

When we went to see the wells in my boss’ partnership, we rode around in a big black, fully tricked out Chevy Suburban. Since I was deemed important, I got to sit shot gun next to the operator’s mouthpiece. The way he spilled out gas and oil well data made me nervous about all my boss’s money. All that oil field info arrived rat-a-tat-tat, way too fast.

Old time oil derricks © Ken Rodgers 2014
Old time oil derricks
© Ken Rodgers 2014

As he went on about the “Booger Town” oil field and rock formations, output per barrel and thousand cubic feet, well maintenance, the best bars in town, which of the secretaries he thought I’d like, I couldn’t keep from wondering how he could afford that Suburban and those $700.00 Lucchese ostrich skin riding boots and those heavy gold chains dangling around his neck and his right wrist.

We drove around the northern Panhandle and looked at geological maps and inspected pump jacks and drank Coors pulled from a big green Coleman ice chest. I think they thought if they kept me tightened up on beer and the promise of wild sex with one of those secretaries I’d tell my boss it was all okay.

To tell you the truth, I couldn’t have told you it was okay or not okay. I had no interest in pump jacks and drill strings and moon pools and ginzels and no interest in being where I was. I told my boss I didn’t trust the jelly-muscled lawyer or the partnership operators and that his investments in the partnerships were bad deals. I wanted no part of the oil and gas business.

I still feel the same way about oil. So it was with some surprise to be traveling on California Highway 33 up toward the Salinas Valley from Southern California when Betty and I happened upon the oil patch town of Taft.

The oil field at Taft. © Ken Rodgers 2014
The oil field at Taft.
© Ken Rodgers 2014

What a shock to see all those drill rigs and pump jacks and pipe lines and old derricks etching a fetching skyline in the drab landscape. Something about that drew me. It’s ugly and it’s polluting and it’s poisonous, and I liked the way the detritus of exploitation created a scene that was…dare I say, beautiful?

You need to understand that for the last twenty years or so I have been fascinated by the junction of the ugly and the beautiful. In my mind, so much of what we have on earth exists in the space where the hideous, the repulsive, the horrid meet the gorgeous. I am not interested in oil or the petroleum business, but the visual scene and the irony of the fetching images grabbed me.

black and white image of Taft oil field. © Ken Rodgers 2014
black and white image of Taft oil field.
© Ken Rodgers 2014

So we stopped and took photos of derricks and pump jacks and the gray hills behind. We were so damned fascinated by the place that we went back two weeks later and took more photos.

When we took photos of the remnants of the world’s largest oil spill that occurred back around 1910, we were warned by an oil field worker about inhaling the oil field’s rotten egg gas—the H2S—like we used to create in high school chemistry class. He also told us that if we came in contact with some miniscule number of H2S particles we’d be “done for.” I didn’t believe him when he told us it would kill us. I looked it up and yes, it can kill you and we breathed some of it. While there we found out that the oilfield workers wear H2S warning devices on their caps and hard hats. Obviously, we weren’t exposed to enough gas to damage us. Nevertheless, both days we were in Taft, there was bad stuff floating around that oil patch, not just H2S, but other junk emitted from the wells and the entire oil patch industrial hubbub that gets trapped in the Central Valley’s endemic, low hanging fog.

All my life I’ve lived in a world that is petroleum fueled and not just in the transportation area. Look at plastic. We get plastic, and a lot of other things, from gas and oil. For centuries the world ran on foot power and animal power and water power and wind power. But now we are in love with petroleum.

And I suspect it is not doing the world we live in any good. I’m in favor of hydropower and wind power and solar power and anything else we can use to reduce petroleum use. But then I think, yeah, I am against a petroleum-powered world, but hey, I drive a car. I drive our car thirty thousand miles a year. It gets pretty good mileage, but still, I’m guilty as hell.

I might go for an all-electric car, but every time I plugged it in, I’d be consuming energy that came from where? Petroleum? We humans are now consumers, not savers. Every bit of petroleum not consumed will be replaced by some other kind of energy. When we conserve, we don’t cut back on demand, we just find more things to do with what was saved. Whatever replaces petroleum will not be as clean as we think. There will be unexpected, negative ramifications. Like I said, we are consumers and as time marches on we will consume more and more to fuel our technology and our demand.

Remnants of the 1910 oil spill at Taft © Ken Rodgers
Remnants of the 1910 oil spill at Taft
© Ken Rodgers

Anyway, as Betty and I were taking all those photos, I was thinking about drilling rigs and moon pools and the slick-voiced peddlers from the Panhandle. I was also thinking about how much we drive our Honda CRV and how we keep our house warm and the gas we use to cook our tacos. My environmentalist side was chiding me for being a petroleum hypocrite. Yep, I’m a petroleum hypocrite, that’s what I am.

But, like I say, those black pump jacks against those drab gray hills, and the sand in the ravines, and the white clouds in the blue sky make mighty fine photos in my estimation.

Besides, we need to get somewhere.