With the gays in the military debate still alive and well, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a guy named Jake, in a place called Vung Tau, Vietnam, while laying around in a hospital bed recovering from a shrapnel wound.
“It’s about time you joined the living,” boomed an unfamiliar voice. I glanced over through squinting eyes at the bunk next to mine and there was a balding, extremely overweight G.I. I had never seen before.
“You missed your morning grub,” he added. After rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I glanced back over to get a better look at my new neighbor. He was busy wolfing down his breakfast like there would never be a tomorrow. “Man, this is the life, ain’t it? he asked. Then, after he had devoured the last of his powdered eggs, he added, “Where’s my manners? My name is Jake. What’s yours, son?
“Daryl,” I answered as he thrust out a bushy hand for me to shake.
“Where you from, Jerald?” he asked as he grabbed my hand and shook it as hard as he could.
“California,” I said as I struggled to release my hand from his vice-like grip.
“You’re putting me on,” he said, obviously elated. “Which part?”
“Sacramento,” I said.
“Well, I’ll be damned! Ain’t that something? I was born and raised in Frisco. We’re neighbors!”
“Is that so?” I said, forcing a smile.
“You ever been to the city?”
“Yeah, lots of times,” I said.
“What’d you think of it?”
“I like it.”
“Personally, Jerald, I hated the damn place, and you’d probably hate it, too, if you actually had to live there. I finally said the hell with it all and moved the whole fam-damily back down to Los Angeles. I was determined to get away from all the hippies and the homos.” He paused for a moment to gulp down a glass of orange juice. “Yes-sir-re, them damn homos were the final straw. I’m G.I. from head to toe, and I can’t stand homos. And talkin’ about perverts, my sister, Joyce, is really into this religious thing, and she says God is getting all the homos to go to live in San Francisco for a reason. Know what that is?” I shook my head no. “Well, according to the Bible, and Joyce spends a lot of time reading the Bible, once God gets all the homos good and settled in, there’s going to be one hell of an earthquake, one about twice the size of the big one back in 1906, and as the whole damn city falls into the bay, all the homos are going to be washed out to see and drowned.” He looked at me for a response. “And Joyce really knows what she’s talkin’ about,” he assured me. “She’s a very religious person.”
Jake harangued me with his intolerance for just about every minority group imaginable for about a week, but he always saved his most venomous words for gays, especially gays in the military.
“Every time I find one,” he told me, “I beat the hell out of them. I don’t want one of them in the military, not one. The military is for Americans, not perverts!”
It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that the Army didn’t really need to get rid of Blacks, Mexicans, Asians and Gays, it just needed to get rid of Jake.