by Alex Caine
After the meal that particular Sunday was over, my father, following tradition, pulled back from the table, reached for a cigarette and lit it up. Then he offered me one. It was the signal that from then on I could smoke in the house, in public, wherever. Needless to say, we were all smoking on the sly by the time the big day came, so we can’t really blame this ritual for creating generations of smokers, but it certainly helped.
In this regard, adults were our role models. But their influence didn’t extend much beyond that. The people we really looked up to were the older gangs of teenagers—more often than not our older brothers—and the most rigid and unforgiving rules in our lives were the rules of the street. These dictated where you could safely venture, what you could say, what you wore, whom you consorted with, and any number of other small and large questions of our lives.
Transgressions of these rules were usually met with swift and painful punishments. Sometimes they were worse than painful. When I was no more than fourteen, my good friend who had done a stint at the Mont reform school was murdered for ripping off some Montreal guys. He had unwisely helped himself to a set of lock picks that weren’t his, so he was taken to a warehouse, tied to a chair and beaten to death with shovels. The Montrealers were making a bid to take over Hull’s organized crime scene and this was their way of saying they weren’t to be messed with.
Happily, the rest of us generally got—or gave—nothing worse than a good beating from time to time. Most of our conflicts were with other French gangs on the Quebec side of the river, and over the usual adolescent stuff: turf and girls. Occasionally, and almost invariably in summertime, we’d get adventurous and cross the river. Then we’d run into English or Italian gangs, with whom any conflicts tended to revolve around the same subjects.
One hot, humid evening in July or August, a friend and I were faced with a problem. We had been to a party in Ottawa and now the guy who had brought us there was dead. He had been playing Russian roulette with a real gun. We were in the apartment’s kitchen getting some pop. Just as we re-entered the living room, he pulled the trigger for a second time. We looked on with amazement as blood and brain spattered the couch and wall behind him. The girl sitting next to him started to scream and just wouldn’t stop. The guy who lived there told everyone to leave and called the cops.
We were out of there and standing in the street before we could think. We didn’t want to be there when the cops arrived. What if they took us to jail? It was a notoriously bad place to find yourself if you were French. It was not much of a hike to Hull, but the Italians ran the area between us and the bridge.
Approaching Somerset, our last major hurdle, we saw them: half a dozen teenagers hanging out in front of the grocery store. They saw us at the same time and quit horsing around and just stood in place. We might have wanted to run or slip into a shadow, but it was too late. As we got closer, my knees began to give on me.
Then one of the teens turned out to be a friend of my older brother. He stepped forward and asked, “What are you two punks up to?”
We told him the story of the dead guy and that cops might be looking for us. Dead guy. Gun. Cops. All of a sudden we were cool. My brother’s friend and one of his friends offered to walk with us to the bridge. We accepted.
We were, like so many others in every town and city across North America, perfectly typical young hoodlums and punks, breaking the law regularly but rarely in a serious way, more for the thrill of it than out of any real necessity. Some of us died through one mishap or another; almost all of the rest ended up going straight and leading pretty conventional lives. None went anywhere in school—that was something that just wasn’t expected and wasn’t done.
Pete was the first of my siblings to leave home permanently. He had a big fight with Aunt Cécile and was gone. If he hadn’t dropped out by then, he did shortly thereafter. He certainly wasn’t in school long beyond his sixteenth birthday.
Like my father, Pete had the music gene, and as soon as he left home that’s how he earned his keep. He lived with a bunch of guys his age or a bit older, played any gig he and his band could get, stayed out until all hours and had his pick of all the pretty girls. Of course, I spent as much time as possible in Pete’s company—and within a year or so followed his example and moved out, and in with him.
I was fifteen and still in school. I stuck it out for a term or two and then, having turned sixteen, just never went back after the Christmas holidays. It was the beginning of 1965.
There were classes I kept attending, however. I had developed an interest in karate, and I started studying it in earnest with André Langelier, the only instructor in Hull and the grown-up brother of a friend of Pete’s. Because of the family connection—and the fact that I had no money—he let me join his courses for free. I took full advantage of his generosity, often doing four or more group classes a week. Occasionally I would help him out with odd jobs such as cleaning up the dojo, and I recruited a few paying students, but not nearly enough to pay for all the lessons I took.
Even if I didn’t need to pay for my karate classes, I needed a source of income after moving out. My first stable revenue stream came thanks to a bunch of friends who broke into a local department store. They pretty much emptied the clothes department, lugging out boxes and boxes, carting them blocks away to a safe basement. My job was to find a buyer for all the merchandise.
For as long as I’d lived at home, a door-to-door salesman specializing in kid’s clothes had come by several times a year. He endeared himself to customers by providing credit, as well as reasonable prices. He could do this because he turned a blind eye to the source of his stock. For months I sold him the clothes, making a tidy little profit on every shirt or pair of pants.
Over the next few years I occasionally took part in the illegal acquisition end of the operation, doing break-and-enters of stores, but, largely thanks to my imagination, what I excelled in was the middling: selling whatever needed to be sold and taking a good cut for my services.
I got by middling and doing other jobs that came my way thanks to membership in Hull’s criminal community. There was no violent crime involved, and it was always pretty hand-to-mouth, but no one went hungry. There was usually a dollar or two to be made somehow. If someone didn’t make their buck one day, someone else in the gang who might have made ten bucks, say by turning a trick, shoplifting or what have you, would cover them. The solidarity that has always been a strong characteristic of Québécois society manifested itself among the girls and guys in our gang, however lowlife we might have been considered.
As we got older, however, things began to change. The sense of family that had been second nature for us all began to dissipate as relationships got more serious and conflicts arose over girls, as people got greedier, more ambitious and less generous, as misdemeanors turned into more serious crimes and the police came down harder on us and turned one against the other. Things just slowly became less fun. At the same time, Hull itself began to feel ever smaller and more suffocating. Some people headed across the bridge for the moderately brighter lights of Ottawa. Others had bigger plans and went to Montreal.
As 1967 drew to an end, my friend Andy and I were increasingly intrigued by the reports that had been coming out of the West for a year or so. We might have missed the Summer of Love, but the other side of the continent still seemed like the place to be. So, on December 5, Andy and I hit the road with barely twenty dollars between us, headed for Vancouver.
By then everyone had abandoned the greaser look. We didn’t become hippies—that was more of a middle-class thing; instead, we were happy to be called heads, decked out in ripped jeans and army jackets. The term today suggests a regular drug user, but for us at the time it really just referred to a long-haired, open-minded person. True, hash had arrived in Hull in the preceding year or so and almost everyone had tried it, but I was at best an occasional smoker, rarely more than a couple of times a week.
Still, it was a lot more often than my
drinking of coffee or booze, both of which I’ve never touched. The mere smell of coffee put me off; never has a drop crossed my lips. Meanwhile, it was a film that had convinced me to swear off alcohol. After seeing Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick when I was thirteen or fourteen, I was convinced never to go near the stuff. It wasn’t that I was sure it would ruin me; I just knew it could, and that was enough.
As time went by, my abstemiousness became a defining characteristic, and it probably saved my life over and over again. It kept me in control of my faculties in risky situations. Many a loose word has been traded for a cold piece of ground beside a railway track or in a ditch. It also probably worked in my favor when bad guys were trying to evaluate whether I was really one of them or perhaps working for the police. Going into a biker bar and ordering a Pepsi tends to make a person stand out. And the police, the bad guys might have reasoned, would never send someone as conspicuous as a 130-pound teetotaler to infiltrate their organization.
But that was all later. Back in the late 1960s it was the sweet smell of hash and pot smoke that were in the air, not the reek of stale beer.
Andy and I hung around a couple of months in Vancouver. We both did a lot of work—unpaid—for Cool Aid, a non-profit support network for young travelers and homeless people. I organized sleeping arrangements for them at the various “digger” houses—free flophouses, generally subsidized by pot dealers.
Andy helped the travelers make a little money, since they were almost all broke. He also worked on increasing his own revenue by beginning to sell drugs. It wasn’t beyond me to steer customers in Andy’s direction in return for a kickback—my middling reflex—but I never sold directly myself. It was the beginning of a lucrative career for Andy; his dealing grew in scope steadily, and the last I heard he was one of Quebec’s cocaine kingpins.
After a couple of months under the gray and rainy Vancouver skies, Andy and I headed south to San Francisco for several weeks to visit the ground zero of the peace and love movement. After that it was back to Vancouver for a while before venturing farther south in California and elsewhere in the U.S. for some of the summer festivals and concerts. We caught Jimi Hendrix in Phoenix, Canned Heat in Tempe, Janis Joplin at the Shrine in L.A., the Grateful Dead, also at the Shrine, and many others I’ve forgotten. There was a lot of just wandering.
I came back to Hull in March or April 1969, with no particular plans. One of the few things I was sure of was that I didn’t want to go back out west or stay in Quebec. I kicked around for the summer, but I was just killing time and I knew it. I also knew I needed something totally different. So, in October, once any trace of summer had disappeared and winter was beginning to whisper, I cut off all my hair, hitchhiked to Montreal and then south to the U.S. border, and signed up to fight in Vietnam.
There are several reasons why I willingly did what so many Americans desperately avoided doing.
The first was the shallowest: pure, simple adventure.
The second developed out of my year or so hanging out with hippies. They were overwhelmingly and reflexively antiwar, often without any understanding of geopolitics, human nature or history. They seemed to be demonstrating everywhere, all the time, and I quickly realized that most of them really didn’t have convictions—at least not informed convictions—and that their demonstrations were often just mob action and trying to be cool. I was especially bothered by the way they treated the soldiers, both those who had returned from Vietnam and those who had yet to go—the spitting, the heckling, the chants of “Baby killer! Baby killer!” The worst, however, were the phone calls made to the families of soldiers who had been killed in Vietnam, saying their sons, brothers and husbands had got what they’d deserved.
Almost all the demonstrators and hippies were middle-class, and I wasn’t one of them. I had a lot more in common with the poor grunts who’d been drafted, had been given the choice of prison or Nam after being convicted of something or other, or who simply saw the army as their one chance of escaping the ghetto, the backwoods or the farm. After all, if they survived a single tour of duty, the GI bill and other benefits from Veterans’ Affairs would open up the world to them, with their opportunities for education and housing.
I had met any number of draft dodgers back in Canada, and even if some of them were cool, they invariably pissed me off. I admired people like Muhammad Ali. He refused to join up and went to jail for it. He didn’t run. The draft dodgers just struck me as cowards, usually spoiled, bourgeois cowards.
The final reason I signed up had to do with my father and the war stories he had filled my head with as I was growing up. How he and my uncle had had not one but three ships blown out from under them as they patrolled the North Atlantic, protecting the convoys. The D-Day landing, during which my father piloted a landing craft attached to the HMCS Prince Henry at Juno Beach and watched the water turn pink around him. The camaraderie, the thrill and sometimes the sheer pleasure of life at sea during a war. In retrospect, I understood that many of my father’s anecdotes were shined up by nostalgia, and edited so as not to give me nightmares. But at the time and for years afterward the stories inspired me.
My dad also never let us forget that World War II was the good war, and he was a strong believer in the adage that the best way for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing. And just as my father taught me about the horrors of fascism, I’d become a strong anti-Communist. I learned enough about Stalin’s purges and the Cultural Revolution in China to feel that, as in World War II, the U.S. was again doing the right thing by lining up beside the South Vietnamese government. Fighting the good fight.
That’s why I signed up.
Where I signed up was Plattsburgh, New York.
“You here on business?” the customs officer at the U.S. border asked.
“Kinda,” I replied before giving him the details. Up to that point I hadn’t told anyone of my plans. As far as my friends and family were concerned, I’d just taken off to bum around the continent some more. The customs man happily let me in and pointed me in the direction of a recruitment center about a mile down the road in Champlain. After I filled out a form there, an army car took me to Plattsburgh, where I filled in a raft of other forms, underwent a preliminary medical assessment and got put up in a motel. There were about twenty other Canadian boys there, two to a room, with the same plan as I had.
The next day we did another physical and more paperwork, including writing out our wills and doing the MMPI test. The test—requiring yes or no answers to such questions as “Do you still have sexual desires for your mother?” and “Have you found the person responsible for all your problems?”—had us all cracking up. By the time we finished up, the bus was waiting to take us south to Parris Island, South Carolina.
For eight weeks we were drilled and indoctrinated, all the while being scrutinized and assessed some more. Thanks to my martial arts background (I’d got my black belt in both karate and tae kwon do) the physical side of basic training wasn’t much of a challenge. Fairly early on the SFSA (Special Forces Selection and Assessment) team took notice of me and certain other recent arrivals and began streaming us toward something other than regular grunt duty. They never told us what we were being groomed for and of course we never asked—lesson number one in the Marines is keep your questions to yourself.
We got special instruction in interrogation (both withstanding and administering), escape and evasion, and radio, as well as a lot of hand-to-hand combat training. We didn’t have to do the extended runs with heavy packs, the latrines and all the menial tasks; those were for the guys going through regular boot camp, the ones the Marines had decided needed to be utterly exhausted physically and mentally to mold to the Corps’s specifications. Those of us who had caught the eye of the SFSA seemed to have something worth cultivating.
The regular recruits were allowed letters and phone calls, but we weren’t. And when basic was done, the rank and file were given a plane ticket from Jacksonville to San F
rancisco and ten days before they had to report to the transport terminal there. We, on the other hand, were put on a special chartered plane (a bright pink Braniff Airlines 707) and flown direct to Fort Lewis, Washington, our transport terminal and the last bit of North America we’d see for a while, perhaps ever. There was no leave for us.
Along with a bunch of SFSA selections from other boots, I was in-country ten days or so before Christmas 1969. First stop in Vietnam, as it was for all U.S. soldiers, captain on down, was KP duty in a camp. Serving food, doing dishes, cleaning latrines, what have you. It was a way to acclimatize new arrivals—to the heat, the smells, the rhythm, the long periods of inactivity—at a safe distance from enemy shells or bullets.
For most people this gradual integration period lasted five days, but we were pulled out after two and a half and driven to Camp Bearcat, a sprawling base set up on a rubber plantation not far from Saigon. There we spent about two weeks undergoing more training and more assessment to determine our MOS, our “military occupational specialty.”
I was classified 18A—my specialty having been boiled down essentially to extracting information from and killing people. After five days or so I was assigned to shadow another 18A. He was supposed to be my mentor, the experienced soldier helping me do the job and stay alive, but for the week or so we were at Bearcat together I could hardly find him—it was R & R as far as he and his buddies were concerned. Shadows tended to be hated by those they were shadowing. We were know-nothing newbies and, worse, liabilities. We were the ones who might walk around with a half-empty canteen, sloshing away for the enemy to hear. The ones who might fall asleep or light up a cigarette while on watch. The ones who might plant the Claymore mines facing the wrong direction, actually activate the safety on our M-16s or bother to peel the leeches off our bodies, thereby concentrating on something other than killing the enemy.