When Colorado passed the Marijuana Initiative  I couldn’t help thinking about the “old days”.  By that I mean the mid to late sixties of my impressionable years of youth.  The Baby Boomers were the last generation to have to face a military draft.  So many of us were shuffled through the military as callow youths and two or three years later we emerge, on average, no worse for wear.  True a few died, many more were wounded to some degree, and then there were the walking wounded.  Those are the ones who came back with the problematic conditions of being unable to adjust to the realities of life.  I am not sure has this comes about.  For every middle class kid who goes off to serve his country there are several working class kids who do the same.  Some of us, like myself, come back with a lot of built up anger inside.  Call it the accumulation of mistreatments we collect every day for two or three years.  Or perhaps it’s just the fact that we don’t deal with stupidity well.  Others see things that cause them to retreat from life.  One way to deal with that harsh reality of war, severe wounds, mangled dead bodies, and the loss of your buddies to escape into that blurred world of drugs.  I must admit that I had a serious problem in tech school.  I go addicted to tranquilizers, pain killers, and muscle relaxants.  For a couple of months drugs own my mind before a doctor made me go cold turkey.  For others, things like boredom, pressure from superiors, the general treatment received in service life, all these were excuse enough to try a little pot.  You see, beer wasn’t that easy to get as an enlisted man and hard alcohol damn near impossible unless you new an NCO who would buy it for you.  Besides, the beer was a joke, all the government would sell was 3.2 and you’ll piss it away long before you get enough of a buzz to make much difference.  On the other hand, there were half a dozen dealers in your company and the supply of pot seemed almost endless.  They tell me it was good stuff, too, like Hanoi Red, and Thai stick (combined with opium), and some good Cambodian weed.  the names were colorful and I have forgotten most of them.  But drugs weren’t to my liking.

 

On the other hand, some of the grunts I worked with thought nothing of toking once, twice, maybe three times a day.  I was not in a combat unit.  My group was communications and we laid the telephone cables, placed the poles, strung the wire, did the repair, all that stuff that rarely gets you killed.  Yeah, we had a casualty at least once a month because someone got careless or was in the wrong place when the rocket landed, but we were not the hero types.  Some of us, when our hitch was done went to work for the phone company.  That is where I met Bob Day.  He was hired a year before me because he was a draftee, two years active and one reserve.  I was a full three year man, regular Army.  There was a guy from combat engineers working on the crew, another who had seen all his service in Germany, lucky dog, Louis Diaz, ex door gunner, Gene, three year Navy man on a submarine, and an ex marine, saw action in the DMZ.  The other members were older and may have had their draft time and may have not, didn’t really matter.  I think there were two guys our age whose draft numbers were high and never got called.  Out of all of these guys, Bob was the most personable, that popular type in high school.  I would bet he never really had much in the way of any real achievements in life but he was popular.  Good with the jokes, seemingly even tempered, you know the type.  He probably would have made foreman in three to five years if he had had any ambition.  From what I could tell, you made foreman for one of three reasons: you were popular with men on the crew, you had some arcane technical knowledge, or at least they thought you did (one of the foremen was suppose to be a wiz at using a piece of equipment in trouble shooting but I never saw him use that equipment effectively, always some reason why the machine failed), or you were good buddies wit the second line manager.  On occasion the company would screw up and actually promote on real merit.  Yeah, I though Bob was on the track for promotion.  Now me, well, I’ve never been popular, can’t play the kiss kiss game, and don’t have some great and glorious technical knowledge.  If I got any special favors they would be few and far in between.

 

I talked with Bob on occasion, he seemed to be a nice guy.  He never saw combat, had been a desk jockey in supply.  I suppose that is where he acquired his pot habit.  I mean, this was not the recreational use stuff promoted by pot smokers in Colorado.  He had no war wounds for which he needed pot as his painkiller of choice.  He just had a habit that he indulged several times a day.  For him it was at least one a day while at work and if Red was around, Dave Mueller, then why not another hit?  Dave was another one of those popular types and eventually they were both put on the same crew doing important but minimum work.  About a year later I remember chancing upon Bob near the end of the day.  He needed help with a particular operation and since I was the closest one I was elected.  As we worked together he started telling about his marriage and how hi wife was leaving him.  He was a bit depressed over the fact that she was moving about two hundred miles to a different city and taking their little girl with her.   Well, one of my rolls is father confessor and since I was more stranger than friend he chose to confide in me.  It is almost a fact that we will tell strangers far more of our troubles than our friends since we don’t care what strangers think of us.  I could tell Bob was having his problems.  I don’t care what potheads tell you, it affects their work, I’ve seen it too many times to farr that that nonsense.  Bob had been making mistakes and finally I just shooed him on back to the garage while I finished up.  The next morning he came up to me and was thanking me for helping him.  He seemed to be a little worried that I might tell the rest of the crew.  So I reassured him that, hey, no problem, we all have one of those days.  but a couple of months later it was obvious that he was having one, then two, then three of those days too many.  And one day he had an accident, broke his arm.  I didn’t see Bob for about six weeks.  Then one day he showed back up for work.  I don’t think the time off had done much for him as he looked a little haggard.

 

A month after that I chanced to work with Bob on a job.  We got along okay, I’ve had better partners and I’ve had worse.  “My wife obtained a restraint order against me, said I was a bad influence on my daughter.”  “Really, why is that?”  “She thinks I smoke too much pot.  She says it’s not good for ‘her’ daughter to seen me smoking pot.  Like the kid can really tell the difference between my joint and the cigarettes I smoke.”  “You’d be surprised, Bob, kids notice far more than we think.  They may not be sophisticated but they ain’t dumb.  Know what i mean?”  He thought about that for a couple of minutes as we worked side by side.  “Maybe you’re right.  Yeah, maybe yo’re right.”  We stopped for lunch an hour later and I could tell that Bob still had a lot on his mind.  It was as if he was trying to come to some understanding, some decision.  Just before we buttoned the work up for the day he told me.  “I think I’m going to change, at least cut down on my pot.  You know?  Got to see my little girl again.”  I didn’t work with Bob or even speak with him again for another two months.  I had to stop by his job site to let him know I would be working in the same cable, a sort of courtesy call.  We passed the time of day for a few minutes, then he told me, “It’s really hard to stop.  I’ve tried and tried, but I just can’t do it.  I just can’t….you understand, don’t you?”  “Yeah, I understand.  Like trying to quite smoking.  You know, I quit smoking before I went in the Army but every think the drill sergeant said ,’smoke em if you got em.’ well, I just had to start up again.  You know?”  “Yeah, thanks, I know, yeah, ah…, yeah, you’re right.”

 

I wish I had a better something better to offer Bob right then.  He needed more than I could give him, he needed what he could give himself and yet wouldn’t.  I never saw Bob after that.  He had gotten a transfer to some remote corner of the state.  I heard indirectly that he had acquires one girl friend after another and had almost lost his job.  I lost contact with most of those guys I worked with when I went inside, started working in the electronics side of the phone company.  That was a whole nother world, as they say.  Most of the linemen and cable splicers as well as the installers were laid off and went to work for contract companies.  No union so you had to hustle if you wanted work.  I doubt Bob would have made the transition, he was always one toke over the line.