Late during my second night in the cot, some of the African-American men in my unit were viciously fucking around with some of the white guys, deliberately choking out people who were sleeping—or feigning sleep—in their cots. We were in a darkened, open dormitory-style area housing some 70 men. I could hear what sounded like five or six men in the distance, clearly drunk and up to no good. It sounded like Big T, Brown, Kane and a couple of their buddies. As they moved around the space, I heard muffled screams and commotions as items went flying. I knew PFC Woodson had already taken a beating from the group, and it sounded like they were moving on to their next intended victim.
Months earlier, I’d decided to carry a switchblade with me when I was on base, and I had it with me that night in my sleeping bag. I held the weapon in my left hand, with the blade pointed down. I could feel the cool steel against the inside of my wrist. I was weak, but I had all the strength and determination I needed to stab someone in the face. I wasn’t scared to act. In fact, I wanted blood on my knife that night. Deep down, I was angry. Maybe I was angry with the U.S. Army for turning a blind eye to the violence in its ranks. Maybe I was done with watching some of my buddies getting beaten up. Maybe I was just done with all the shit in Cooke Barracks.
I remember that I was determined to brutally punish my attacker—even though I assumed that would be the end of my army “career.” I didn’t care. Fuck them. If I was on my own, so be it. I heard the guys move closer and slightly shifted the grip on my knife.
For reasons that I will never know, the group passed me by that night, and my carefully sharpened steel blade wasn’t dirtied. Maybe it was better that way. Sometime later, the barracks quieted down and I fell asleep. The next morning, I awoke in my sleeping bag, which was drenched with my sweat. My switchblade was still laced in my fingers. The choked and beaten soldiers sported only minor battle scars and were seemingly possessed of a collective amnesia. It was the same sort of amnesia that was suffered by the NCOs who had heard, or perhaps even witnessed, the violence that night and done nothing to stop it. I had a feeling that I would soon see still more violence in my unit.
CHAPTER TEN
A VIEW FROM THE ABYSS
One evening during the winter of 1974, before turning in to my bunk in Cooke Barracks, I noticed that Sergeant Bill Collins was assigned as CQ, or Charge of Quarters, tasked with guarding the entryway to our three-story barracks, which held about a hundred men. The CQ sat in a chair in the entryway, next to the stairs that led up to the second and third floors. There was no back door, so everyone had to pass by him.
I’d always been impressed with Collins because he had a large row of service ribbons, as well as a torso severely scarred by shrapnel. Collins was a battle-hardened tough guy, and we’d often gone drinking together when we were off duty. With Collins on duty as CQ tonight, I was pretty confident that I’d get a good night’s sleep. It was midweek, and we all had to be up at 5:30 a.m. for our daily physical training and four-mile run. Collins had the balls to deal with anyone daring to come in drunk and loud.
Two identical buildings held the men of B Company. There were another two that held C Company. All four fronted on an open field used for training, and they were about 30 yards apart from each other. Inside, all of the rooms in the barracks had the same layout, with oversized casement windows on the wall directly opposite the door and bunk beds placed on either the left or right side of the room. The bunks were all covered in the same white sheets and thick green wool blankets.
Shouting from a bunch of very drunk men awoke me from a sound sleep around 1:30 a.m. I recognized Kane’s voice and some of the other guys’, too. The group was crashing around and literally shaking the walls. It was as if a battle was taking place in the hallway. So much for my faith in Collins. I wondered where the fuck he was.
Kane, Big T and a couple of other guys were trying to kick in the door to a room occupied by two black guys—my friend Bo Peters from South Carolina, and Sean Smith, a soft-spoken guy from Dallas. Their room was on the first floor, just a few doors down from mine. Peters was a ferocious dude, and at one point the two of us had roomed together. We got along well. Smith generally kept to himself and rarely if ever made trouble. He had befriended a German woman in her 20s who lived near the base, and there were rumors that he’d sometimes smuggle her onto the base late at night, though I’d never seen her.
“Come on, man. You gotta share with a brother, don’t you think,” Kane shouted amid kicks and punches to the steel door. “A brother gotta share. You gotta share that pussy.”
Kane and the others wanted to share Smith’s girl—no matter whether he and his girlfriend were willing or not. Gang rape was what they had in mind, and the only thing between them and their “prize” was the heavy metal door to Smith’s room. The girl had taken a big risk even coming onto the base, but there was probably no way that she could have anticipated this kind of trouble.
As the shouting and the pounding on the door continued, I put on my fatigue pants and boots and went out into the corridor. I was terrified of being attacked by the men but even more troubled by the idea of ignoring what was going on. I figured I could find Sergeant Collins, who had to be close. Maybe he’d just wandered away from the barracks to break the monotony of sitting all night. Still, it was the middle of the night, and noise like this carried—though probably not as far as the officers’ quarters. What the fuck was going on, and why wasn’t someone stopping it?
Kane had managed to break through the door to Smith’s room, and he and the others were headed inside. Big T brought up the rear, holding a .45 pistol in his right hand. All eyes were on the girl, and I quietly walked past the door, hoping they wouldn’t spot me. There was no way that I dared intervene, especially with Big T carrying a gun.
The girl was sitting on the bed, with one of the green blankets wrapped around her like a shawl. She was white, with long dark-brown hair. Smith and Peters were sitting on each side of her, looking glum. For a split second, the girl stared at me, silently screaming for help. Her look telegraphed both panic and fear. Peters saw me, too, and subtly shook his head no. His message was clear: move along, and don’t intervene.
I kept walking, going through the foyer and past the CQ’s empty chair. Kane and the others hadn’t seen me walk by. Where the hell was Sergeant Collins? I went outside and ran down to the adjacent barracks looking for him. But he was nowhere to be found.
I stood alone in front of my barracks, the cold German air filling my lungs. It was pitch black, and no one was around. The noise and shouting inside the barracks had stopped.
Intervening in any way, be it by a phone call to the MPs, or by busting in there myself, seemed out of the question because of the risk to my own life. It didn’t take a Ph.D. to imagine what was going on inside that room, or what the aftermath would be for the victim.
I went back to my bunk and fell asleep. There was nothing I could do that night—or at least that’s what I thought at the time. Little did I know that the image of that woman would stay with me forever.
The next morning, I wondered what my next steps should be, if any. The safest thing for me to do, by far, was to shut up. That much was clear. I wondered if Collins had deliberately deserted his post at the barracks, or if—perhaps—there was some good explanation for why he wasn’t there. That was unlikely, for sure. Should I report the incident and expose Collins’s desertion from his post, knowing full well that that would be the end of my “career” in the army, and perhaps of my life? Where did my sense of morality begin or end?
Reporting the incident would certainly have destroyed Sergeant Collins’s career, and it would have sent the most dangerous men on the post, including one with a handgun, looking for vengeance or determined to neutralize the threat—me. I was also fairly certain that the case (if any) was certain to come down to a “he said/she said” scenario, with the men who assaulted the woman insisting that the sex was con
sensual. I very much doubted that she would have the nerve to stand up to the men and tell the truth about what happened that night. There was no way that Smith would be able to protect her, and I was positive that he wasn’t going to be reporting the rape to anyone, no matter if it was his girlfriend or not. Ultimately, he valued his life more than hers. If it went down as consensual sex, that would still be a serious violation, because soldiers aren’t allowed to bring any outsiders onto the base. But I doubted that the charge would result in any of the assailants going to jail. There was also the possibility that someone could catch Big T with a loaded weapon in his possession. But it seemed highly unlikely that someone would be able to do that and live to tell about it.
I was way too inured to the oxymoron of military justice at this point; there was no justice in the U.S. Army. Doing the right thing held only one certainty: I would be a pariah, a rat with no real hope that so much as one single person would support me.
The next day was business as usual in the barracks, with no indication that anything criminal had occurred the prior evening. All was forgotten, at least for most of the men in the barracks. If I hadn’t seen her eyes, maybe I, too, could have pretended it never happened. There were probably about 100 men in the barracks that night, virtually all of whom pretended to sleep through screaming, banging, crashing and ultimately gang rape. I saw not one single person even so much as put the lights on in their room, and I wondered why.
As a 19-year-old hanging out in my bunk in Cooke Barracks in Göppingen, Germany, I didn’t really spend much time thinking about the violence or the racism that I encountered. It was simply part of my experience. No doubt, it wasn’t the environment that I had dreamt of before I decided to enlist. But truthfully, who can imagine from the outside what the army is really like?
Later, I wondered if what I experienced was commonplace in the army or not. Were all the U.S. Armed Forces around the world as violent, and sometimes evil, as they were in the late 1970s in Germany, right after the Vietnam War?
For the most part, Cooke Barracks was closed off from the prying eyes of the press. We were thousands of miles from home, in a base that was largely removed from German society and its norms. In some sense, it was a microcosm of American society, with blacks, whites and Hispanics living together. But unlike back home, we lived together in close quarters 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with access to virtually unlimited quantities of booze and drugs. We had no choice but to deal with each other all the time.
The U.S. Army, the great green machine, had forced all of us together, no matter what we had been accustomed to back home. Some of us wondered what the army was even doing in Germany and whether it would even be possible for our relatively small number of soldiers to ward off a full-scale, Soviet/Eastern Bloc offensive through the plains of central Germany, the Fulda Gap. We were training for a war that most of us figured we’d probably wind up losing—though we rarely talked about it. Many black soldiers quietly wondered why they should be the ones in harm’s way when the nation didn’t seem all that grateful or willing to provide the sort of opportunities that were commonplace for people with white skin.
The officer corps was almost completely comprised of white, college-educated men, while the majority of the rank-and-file soldiers were black and Hispanic. In the combat arms branches, such as infantry, the blacks and Hispanics usually outnumbered, or were at least on par with, the number of white soldiers. They also tended to be considerably more street-smart; they enlisted at a slightly older age, too.
Many of the black men whom I knew were fine soldiers. But there was a small percentage who were militant, violent and truly intimidating to those around them.
No doubt, the level of violence that I experienced in the army hardened me and perhaps set the stage for my decision to enter a motorcycle gang, where the violence was even greater. For years, I wondered why I seemed to be surrounded by violence in the army, and why my experience was so different from others who followed similar paths. I suspect that there was something about my size and level of fitness that made me the perfect target. Someone who stood over six feet and weighed a muscular 195 pounds was a more impressive target than someone who stood five foot six and weighed 150. No one would be impressed if you took out one of the wimpy Southern kids in the barracks. But they may well be impressed, and feel intimidated, if you took out someone who was big and fairly muscular, like I was. I was large enough to merit a “pat on the back” for the guy who took me on, but not so large as to be a serious threat to someone. Bullies don’t like to lose fights.
To be certain, any honest soldier who served could likely tell people stories of racial intimidation and violence. Going into the army, I had no idea that sort of thing even existed. I doubt I would have enlisted had I known what was happening inside Cooke Barracks.
The weird thing is that I can’t really complain about the violence I experienced in the army. Ultimately, it made me stronger, both physically and mentally. Maybe I should send my recruiter a fruit basket.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE DEEPEST RING OF HELL
At approximately 0630 hours one spring morning, the men of Bravo Company were headed back to our barracks, nearing the end of a required four-mile run. Wearing white T-shirts, fatigue pants and combat boots, we ran in step with an NCO calling cadence. Charlie Company was running in the opposite direction—and in tight quarters with us.
A black soldier from Charlie Company, one I’d never even talked to, grabbed and pulled my arm.
“I don’t play that shit,” I said, before nailing him with a very clean right cross. The move sent him flailing at speed through his formation. Before he even had time to stand, both companies stopped dead in their tracks and started glaring at each other.
Seconds later, a black sergeant from Charlie Company began walking in my direction, clearly hoping to retaliate. My platoon’s Sergeant First Class Tre Mallard, a tough white Cajun, stepped in front of him and took a stance telegraphing his willingness to fight. Mallard ordered the other sergeant to stand down, which he did—but only after giving me an angry stare. This wasn’t over by a long shot.
Striking me would certainly have meant a court-martial and serious trouble for the sergeant from Charlie Company. Or at least it should have, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under those rules, he was obligated to protect his men and to see to “the good order of the situation.” But there was no threat to the sergeant’s men when he came toward me. The soldier I’d hit was being helped to his feet, and I’d simply stood my ground. In my mind, I’d reacted as I had to. But clearly the soldier would have had to even the score or face serious ridicule (or worse) for letting himself get battered by a white soldier. There was no way that I wanted to provoke a full-fledged fight between the two units. I knew full well that I would have been in deep trouble had I done so.
The soldier who yanked my arm did not know me; the two of us had never had any beef. My guess is that he attacked me simply because he saw me as a soft target. No doubt, my counterattack surprised him—though one can only speculate what he expected me to do.
I suppose most black soldiers believed that their white counterparts were simply inferior as street fighters. Whatever success I enjoyed in this altercation probably had a lot to do with his shock at being counterattacked. I certainly didn’t have any special fighting skills at that point in my life, and I never possessed that natural knockout punch that some men seem to be born with.
I was frightened by the violent and militant black men who were often trying to stare me down; I was frightened a great deal of the time there, and for good reason. But for me, there was a greater fear than that of a physical beating. It was the fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a coward, a pussy. I wanted to view myself in the way Sergeant Jackson from Fort Polk likely viewed himself: with a grim, fire-eyed defiance of any weakness related to battle, either armed or unarmed. So it would seem my greater f
ear won out.
For days I heard rumors of my impending death at the hands of some of the black soldiers from C Company. But for reasons that were never clear, no one came after me. In the end, the original attack was just another act of random violence, the sort that I saw repeatedly during my tour of duty. The violence hardened me in a way that I didn’t fully understand at the time. As time went on, I would slowly become numb to the danger. My sense of fear lessened a bit each time, and so, too, did my sense of caring for the men around me. I suppose I would expect that to happen in men who’ve seen combat and risked their lives in the field. But we were all on the same side—and still on friendly soil.
One Saturday afternoon, I watched as a fight broke out at the mess hall between a white private and a black sergeant assigned to my squad. Most of the men were off the base, enjoying weekend leave. The two men had apparently gotten into some debate inside the mess hall. The white soldier was in civilian clothes, and the sergeant, who was on duty, was in his fatigue uniform.
I watched from a hilltop some distance away as the sergeant left the mess hall and ran across the commons into our barracks, where he changed into civilian clothes and then came back outside—where he stood and waited for the white soldier to come out. The sergeant then laid a solid beating on the soldier, who looked scared to death and never even attempted to fight back. Eventually, he fell to the ground, where he was kicked in the face. A handful of the victim’s buddies had no choice but to stand by and watch the incident transpire; they were surrounded by a large group of blacks who were making it clear that they, too, wanted a slice of the pie. The fight soon ended, with the victim lying bloodied on the ground. The sergeant walked back into the barracks, changed into his uniform and continued with his duties.
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