Welcome to MyTomFoster's Military narrative

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The Order to Report for Armed Forces Physical Examination was sent on November 9, 1970. I was living in Tempe. The Local Draft Board, No. 39, indicated that I was required to report no earlier than 6:45 AM, or later than 7:00 AM. When I received the Statement of Acceptability - DD62, the box was checked that indicated FOUND FULLY ACCEPTABLE FOR INDUCTION INTO THE ARMED FORCES.

I  was living in Tempe, Arizona, attending Mesa Community College in Mesa full time, on "double-secret probation" in March of 1970 and in January 1971 "scholastic suspension." There went my S1 student draft deferment. My family had taken off in all directions and I needed a direction of my own. I was  working the four-to-midnight night shift at the Broadway Shell gas station in Tempe.

It was early 1971 and my Selective Service Lottery number was 59. I was getting dangerously close to being part of the war in Vietnam, which I opposed and protested against. There was no good news about Vietnam, the Paris peace talks were at a standstill, anti-war sentiment was at its highest, morale and discipline was an issue with soldiers and drug use, especially heroin among troops was rampant. Additionally, race relations in the military needed to be addressed. My buddy at work, Louis Lang, also had a low draft number. We were anxious, bored, and tired of checking tire pressure and changing oil. There had to be more to life than this. I don’t remember the exact conversation between us, but it must have been something like, “Dude, let’s join the military together!”

Our first choice was to see the Navy recruiter who, after taking one look at us, sent us to the Army recruiter down the hall. We enlisted in the army for three years under the “Buddy System” and would go through Basic Training at Fort Ord, California together. We were placed into Project VOLAR (VOLunteer ARmy) for Basic Training. VOLAR, which began a month before we joined, was an experimental program devised by President Nixon and Chief of Staff of the U. S. Army (CSA), General William Westmoreland. A harbinger of the impending all-volunteer army to help ensure retention and reenlistment. Among other directives, VOLAR was initiated to make Army life more attractive by ditching reveille formations, omitting bed check, and easing weekend pass policies. The beer hall at Ford Ord, which opened the month before I arrived, served 3.2 beer. The program slogan was “Today’s Army Wants to Join You.” To this day I still don’t know what that is supposed to mean.

Enlisting for three years rather than two assured me and Louis our choice of our Advanced Individual Training after Basic Combat Training (BCT), which meant a military occupational specialty (MOS) rather than the default, infantry, which was a step toward combat in Viet Nam. Louis was an ace mechanic and chose Aircraft Maintenance as his post-basic Advanced Individual Training (AIT). Because I had “some college” and tested high on office systems, I chose Clerk School. Seemed safe.

Thanks to my training in typing from the nuns in high school, I breezed through Clerk School AIT and became the instructor’s assistant to help other soldiers through. Ostensibly, this was a foreshadowing of my future career. It was this experience when I began to see the value in continuing my education and a career pathway as an educator.

Because I enlisted under the VOLAR Program, our Basic unit had some weekends off. This was quite a perk and major change in the rules. I was fortunate because my folks were 180 miles up the 101. 180 miles from home cooking and a real bed. The bus trip had a layover in San Francisco. It was there that I discovered what was to become my favorite city, especially the utterly fascinatingly hip North Beach. During my four-hour layovers I would walk around spending time at the USO, City Lights Bookstore, and many other hot spots. Although I had been there a few times before, this was different. I was on my own, and being in the city was a time of enlightenment and awareness for me. I became an instant, ardent fan of the Beats and anything else I could read in a few hours at City Lights Bookstore.

I got to know the beautiful Monterey/Carmel area well, and made friends fast at Fort Ord, and also found myself hanging out with a group of students at The Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey. Being in their company and experiencing their intellectual curiosity and engaging conversations caused me to think about my own educational path after the army.

One day while walking around the base, out of the blue, I saw a familiar face. It was Jim Ryan, former football teammate from high school and brother of one of my best friends, Joe. Soon afterward, during a weekend visit to San Diego to party with Jim’s brother, Joe, I ended up spending the night on Joe's minesweeper, the USS Conflict. That one night sleeping aboard the ship in those tight bunks made me grateful that the Navy passed on me and Louis. I recently talked with Joe about this experience and neither of us can quite piece together the details of that weekend, though I am certain we had fun. Joe gave me his bunk to spend the night after celebrating in San Diego. He forgot to tell me he was supposed to serve the ship's captain breakfast the next morning. At 4 o'clock that morning some sailor was shaking me saying, "Joe, JOE, you gotta serve the Captain!" I said I'm not Joe. After some confusion, the sailor found Joe and I went back to sleep. 

The country was experiencing a lot of unrest leading up to the summer of 1971, due to anti-war protests and escalating racial tension in the military as well as nationally. The army, in particular, was struggling with soldiers refusing to go to war, dodging the draft and going AWOL. Harsh sentences were handed out for those even talking about dissenting. Military organizations in general also didn’t have a handle on race relations in general. These two issues collided at military installations during that summer. In my last month at Fort Ord I witnessed one of these uprisings on base. Four days after I graduated from AIT, and while I was awaiting orders to my next duty station, there was a concert on base. Three bands, Canned Heat, Southwind and Abdulah, were invited by the post commander to play at a concert on Sunday, June 27 at the Fort Ord Stadium to “increase morale” of the troops.

Fights broke out between civilians and soldiers. MPs were busting heads as the civilians were throwing wine bottles at them. Individuals took to the streets, burned buildings and destroyed other property. There was anger in the air as night fell. We were in lockdown and scared as hell in the barracks as I watched my classroom being broken into; typewriters were thrown through windows. The bowling alley, snack bar and other buildings were on fire. It looked like a battle scene for days. Seventeen individuals were arrested and hundreds were injured. The event was a failure of leadership highlighted by bad timing, uncoordinated military police and inadequate security. I had only read about this level of violence. This was repeated on other military installations. Witnessing it first-hand jolted my awareness about how racial and other societal tensions play out when bad leadership decisions are made. The racial tension was not isolated to this period of time. It existed long before and does today.

After AIT, and the day before my 19th Birthday, reassignment orders finally came down. There was lots of excitement for getting answers to two questions: where would we be sent to and was it Vietnam? I'm going to USA Overseas Replacement Station Fort Dix, NJ and, most likely, Europe. I also received NATO orders to comply with our international presence there. With a 13-day leave I had to be at Fort Dix by 0745 hours on July 12.

Meanwhile, The Twenty-sixth Amendment took effect which changed the voting age from 21 to 19. It was time for all of us to take a look at the new right and responsibility to choose our leaders. Although the US still had 250,000 soldiers in Vietnam, the Paris Peace Talks were still stagnating.

This was a long trip. I went from Fort Ord to Sacramento, Sacramento to Los Angeles, LA to Phoenix, Phoenix to Chicago, Chicago to Philadelphia, then bussed to Fort Dix, NJ, mostly on standby and in a summer khaki uniform. I carried everything I needed in a duffel bag. The total cost for flights was $101. My travel voucher for $179 didn't quite cover meals and lodging however. I did stay at friends' houses when possible.

Spent a rainy, humid, and dreary week at Fort Dix. It was a long and anxious wait. Coincidentally, I met another guy, Andrew McGurn, who was going to the same area with the same training, finance. Perhaps we would be stationed together. We became fast friends and both ended up at Second Finance. Andy and I still talk today. Between the waiting and eating, there was lots of processing. Interviews, clothing, signing papers, etc. I didn't have a particular unit or location assignment yet, that was to come once I arrived in Europe. Hopeful for a decent area and interesting work.

During my time back in Phoenix on leave was very awkward. Our country was still at war and my friends did not know how to react to me because of that awkwardness. In fact, their reactions were mixed. While curious and hopeful for me, there was an air of suspicion that anyone in the military represented the war. 

Finally, I received orders to my permanent station in Europe. I was relieved to know that I wasn’t going to war but stunned that about half of my Basic Training cohort would. During my leave before reporting to Fort Dix, I went home to Arizona to be with friends. It was hard to understand why some were cold to me while others weren’t but I eventually realized that represented what was wrong with the war.

I spent a humid, rainy week at Fort Dix, New Jersey awaiting travel to Europe then flew to Frankfurt, then to Worm and finally ending up at 2nd Finance Company, small finance unit (about 45 military personnel) in Giessen, GY, population 80,000. We were responsible for paying military personnel in our area. My first assignment was in the Travel Section which provided pay for permanent and temporary travel. By the end of my two and a half years, I was section chief of travel supervising up to half a dozen men.

Historically, Giessen was the site of an airfield from the early 1900’s, later a Nazi air station, and eventually one of the most logistically important hubs to the military and the European Theater. The most famous army soldier previously stationed in Friedberg, 25 miles from Giessen, was a cool guy named Elvis Presley. Troop strength in all of Germany, at the time, was about 215,000 soldiers as part of the Cold War series of geopolitical agreements since World War II. There are about 34,000 military personnel there today. The area, The Fulda Gap, was significant following the war since it was thought the Soviets would use that area to attack the American occupied sector. We were stationed only a few miles from the East German border.

At 2nd Finance Section I met the greatest group of co-workers I could have hoped for, some of whom I talk with to this day. Most of the individuals in my unit had completed their education or were on their way. It continued to affirm how I needed to take formal education more seriously. I made a promise to myself to continue my education at whatever cost. Through a partnership between the US Army and The University of Maryland, I took a psychology class at night as an earnest effort to get started.

It was a tight group and, because we were in charge of paying everyone, mostly artillery and support soldiers and MPs, we never did regular army things often associated with the military.

Because of the size of and Finance, most of the guys in our unit didn’t live in the barracks or eat in the mess hall. We lived in houses or apartments in smaller towns that surrounded Giessen. During my time there, I lived, with and without roommates, in five different houses and apartments. My favorite was a house in a small hamlet called Dutenhofen. Instead of driving, the route to work was a short walk followed by a brief train ride, then a short bus trip and easy walk to get to work. It was there where my roommate and I  heard from the “mayor” about excessive water usage because we took showers every day which was verboten. Also, we couldn’t figure out the solid trash system, so we used the company three-quarter ton pickup to take the monthly accumulation of trash to the local dump. The experience gave me a sense of individual responsibility and resourcefulness.

One of our favorite stories from the unit was a time when my CO, Maj. Nosker, kindly asked me to get a haircut. I said I would go to the barber shop right away. As I was exiting the building, a general from the adjoining artillery unit was coming in. It was rare to see a general in our area. I saluted and he stared at me during his return salute. “Where the hell do you think you’re going, Foster?” he asked, noting my name tag. “To the barber shop, sir.” “Bullshit, Foster!” “Really, sir.” He was fuming. “Who’s your company commander? Bring him to me now!” I ran upstairs and interrupted Maj. Nosker who asked, “What is it now, Tom?” I told him the general wanted to see him downstairs. Nosker flew downstairs to the waiting one-star. I’ve never seen a field officer move that fast. After some period of dressing down my CO, the general asked about me. My CO answered, “Foster was going to get a haircut when you stopped him, sir.” “Bullshit, Nosker!” the general yelled. The general took a closer look at my CO and noticed he was wearing a  buckle not appropriate for his dress kaki web belt. Suddenly the heat shifted from my hair to the major’s belt. Probably remembering that our unit was in charge of money, the general left in a huff. I went for a haircut and Nosker and I had a good laugh afterward. I couldn’t appreciate my CO any more than I did that day. Our entire unit thought it was a great story.

A few of us in the unit routinely went to concerts in Frankfurt. We would take the three-quarter ton full of GIs usually to the famous Jahrhunderthalle or the Festhalle. The driver, usually me, and passenger in front wore fatigues over their street clothes and, in the back under cover, were a half-dozen or so of us in civvies. We would see everyone from Ray Charles to The Rolling Stones, The Who, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Procol Harum in their formative days. You can hear us on Three Dog Night’s live double LP, Around The World.

A friend, Eddie Christian, and I also saw early Pink Floyd and many, many other groups at the 2nd British Rock Meeting festival in Germersheim. A wild European-style Woodstock-type event. The number and variety of great groups in their early years and in this compressed period of time was an awakening for me. Although I had seen Hendrix and Cream in Arizona, access to these European-based bands was a musical feast.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though. The Baader-Meinhof Gang on May 11, 1972 bombed US Army V Corps in Frankfurt, 45 miles north, killing a Lieutenant Colonel. Eleven days later they bombed European Command Headquarters in Heidelberg, ninety miles south. Three soldiers were killed. Our unit was assigned 24-hour guard duty at different locations throughout the depot for a period of time. Four months after Baader-Meinhof’s attack at Heidelberg, on September 5, 1972 at the Summer Olympics in Munich, eleven Israelis and one German were killed in a hostage attack by Black September Palestinian terrorists. It was a tense time and, once again, we were on alert.

My Weapons Receipt indicates that I was issued a 5.56MM rifle as well as a M16A1. Why they would authorize me having a 5.56 MM is beyond me. I worked at a desk with triplicate paper forms, a typewriter and ten-key adding machine.

 My primary job as Chief of Travel was to pay soldiers for military-related travel. Serving in a non-combat arms duty was a luxury. I did, on occasion, carry a 45MM pistol when carrying bags full of cash to and from the American Express office. Also, I took my M16 to the range to expend clips full of ammo that were about to expire. Because I moonlighted as company clerk when needed, my Motor Vehicle Operator’s ID indicated I was to drive a sedan, half-ton and three-quarter ton truck as well as an unwieldy duce-and-a-half truck, which was a blast to drive weighing in at 13,000 pounds and getting 8 MPG.

Seems I always had a side gig then, as well as throughout my career. I was asked to be the cashier at the Belvoir Theatre on base selling tickets and counting money from the tiny booth. After selling the last ticket, I would watch whatever film was playing. Watching from the projection booth was usually more interesting because there was the click of the film and, occasionally, I got to change the reel. The young projectionist was married with a newborn child so I would take over if needed. This job gave me a greater appreciation for the films that we showed during the time period. Movies like Super Fly and Return of the Dragon would guarantee a full house.

Exactly two years, eleven months, and twenty-one days after I joined, it was time to go home, much more worldly, street-wise and self-aware. I got paid a pocketful of cash, $1,200 ($8,474.27 in doday's money) at Charleston AFB, SC and went up the east coast to visit a couple of army buddies. Reconnecting with army buddies was instrumental to my transition to civilian life. Almost all of them had moved on as civilians and, whether they knew it or not, showed me the way. Conversely, it helped them to know I was doing ok.

I first visited my good friend, Robert E. Russell III, who gave me an insider tour of The Pentagon where he worked. Twenty-seven years later, Robert was killed during the attack of the Pentagon on 9/11 in the very place Bob and I had visited. 

While visiting Robert I went to Walter Reed Hospital to visit a friend, fulfilling a promise I had made weeks before. From there to New York to visit another army buddy, Richard Montenegro from New Jersey. We saw as much of New York City as we could pack in the few days and nights I had. Off to Salt Lake City to do more visiting with another very close friend from Giessen. Gene and I were roommates in Dutenhofen and kept each other sane. I was his best man at his wedding and, unfortunately, his pall-bearer.

Then to Arizona and a few months of unemployment insurance and start my civilian life. Finally, after having been thoroughly convinced that finishing my education was paramount to my future success, I put my GI Bill benefits to work. I knew going from unemployment to the GI Bill would be a reduction in money, but working multiple jobs filled the gap. I didn’t stop until I had four college degrees, including a doctorate in education, and recently finished a rewarding career in education, teaching at the high school, community college and university levels. I dedicated myself to reaching out to veteran students, hoping to help them transition their own pathway to educational success.

The Vietnam War and the draft was on everyone's mind. Not only was there constant reminders on the TV and print news, people we knew were enlisting, being drafted or finding a way to avoid both. Prior to 1971, some of my friends found out they were ineligible because of “unfit for service” deferments (4F), others were in school full time making satisfactory progress (S1), the two most popular ways to avoid the draft.

Additionally, joining the ROTC or National Guard would almost guarantee not going to war.