Prologue
I’m retired from writing the metro column for the Evansville, Ind., Courier & Press. I penned more than 6,500 stories and columns in a 39-year newspaper career on a variety of subjects from murderers and moonshiners to the members of a snake-handling church. My legacy website — www.pluggerpublishing.com — has links to some of my favorite columns as well as my writing about pet subjects, Appalachia and the civil rights movement. Scroll down to learn about my several books and plays.
In 2016, I learned that I have Asperger’s. It was a great relief to finally put a name on this “thing” that has sat on top of my head for so long. When I found out why I’ve always been different, it was like unbuttoning a cement overcoat. Now I understand why I think this, why I avoid that.
I blog on the subject at medium.com/an-aspie-comes-out-of-the-closet. I have been in touch with dozens of men and women who work with Asperger’s folks in their roles as counselors and therapists. I’ve also reached out to universities and colleges who have programs designed to help Aspies adjust to campus life. If I can contribute — even peripherally — to just one person having a similar “Aha” understanding, this effort will be worthwhile.
A decade ago, I wrote a memoir about my Army basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., in the fall of 1971 and how scared I was.
Scared because the military was new and I hate new. Scared because the Army is all about bivouacs and cooties and going to bed dirty and I require a daily minimum of two showers. Scared because I don’t prefer the company of strangers. Scared because I had just completed four years of free and easy college life, and now I was darkening down a path that would be the polar opposite.
Indeed, a part of me actually believed I would certainly be maimed, if not killed, because in my nervousness and fear I would do something to offend the Defense Department.
The stress was almost unbearable. The other trainees would wink at each other when the drill instructors threatened to throw the entire lot of of us into the stockade. I took the words at face value. I could just barely handle the barracks. How could I possibly deal with being locked up?
I didn’t know I was on the spectrum. I had never even heard the words. I just knew I was terrified.
My saga is based on a diary I faithfully kept during the proceedings plus notes I scrawled in moments of sit-down time during guard mount and KP and when I did typing work for the supply sergeant.
These days the United States has an all-volunteer military. Men and women with autism serve only if they want to.
That wasn’t the case in 1971 when the country was waist-deep in the Vietnam War. I had a low lottery number from the nationwide draft which meant the armed services required my presence.
I was trying to figure out a long-form project regarding my Asperger’s. Then it hit me. Let’s revisit the Army tale, but this time in full honesty and disclosure.
In my initial piece, I glossed over my lack of social skills and my inability to attract women because I wanted to appear at least somewhat cool. This time I’m telling the truth. Verily I say unto you. I was a virgin in the female department. Friendless in the male department. And, yes, not cool.
I’m keeping a good deal from the original manuscript. Here I am at the grenade range afraid I’ll drop the thing and my remains be scattered throughout the Midwest. Here I am being screamed at for not having the common sense to know how to attach the bayonet to the M-16. Here I am unable to make my bed in such manner as to please the Pentagon.
But I added material from the lens of my newly minted Aspie self that helps explain why I was so scared and why I was convinced only the worst would happen.
Why am I doing this?
— Sue me for bragging, but I think this basic training recollection contains some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever written. Fear indeed does begat humor. It’s devilishly delicious to look back at my Fort Leonard Wood experience.
— I want to help folks better understand Asperger’s. Here we have a real-life Aspie caught up in the dread and fear of a new situation and a new environment. What coping mechanisms did he use to get to the end?
— I want to suggest to Aspies considering the military that perhaps joining the service isn’t a good idea.
— While I hated every second of my military duty, I want to trumpet one positive outcome. In high school, I took many classes with boys and girls who were also college-bound. During my four years at Blacksburg, Va., I never hung out with anyone who wasn’t enrolled at Tech or some other institution of higher learning. One of the first persons I encountered in Central Missouri was a little black kid who came to the post in bedroom slippers — the only shoes the son of a sharecropper possessed. There were dozens of others in Alpha Company who came from poor households. Spending time with them was an education unto itself, one I badly needed.
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The book can be accessed for free online. If you’d like a complimentary print copy, I’ll be happy to provide one. Contact me at garretmath@gmail.com.
Matthew Skillern of Indianapolis drew the cover art.
Some of this material originally appeared in “Defending My Bunk Against All Comers, Sir!” by the Zone Press.
The photographs are public domain from the Vietnam era. Nary a snapshot was taken at Fort Leonard Wood.
The story is based on men I lived with in the college dorm, and those I marched with at FLW. With one exception, I did not use real names. I combined two or more people into one when I felt it necessary for clarification and simplification. I have also taken certain liberties in the telling of the story, particularly having to do with the precise sequence of events and who said what to whom.
Thanks to the Internet, I managed to contact several guys in my basic training platoon. They shared some details that helped with the narrative.
Drill instructor Raymond Waldspurger is quite real. I never forgot the compassion he showed to me and others during boot camp. I wrote to every Waldspurger on Google’s phone list hoping to get the right one. “Thank you so much,” I penned. “Your kindness meant everything to me.”
A few months before undertaking this project, I heard from Raymond’s sister, Mrs. Marion Copes of Pinellas Park, Fla. She told me he served 23 years in the Army and three years in the Navy. He volunteered for two tours of duty in Vietnam. Raymond moved to Florida in his later years where he did security work and was a maintenance man for a Catholic Church.
He died in 2015. Mrs. Copes found my letter when going through his things.
“He didn’t keep in touch with many from the military and I never came across any scrapbook or such in his papers,” she wrote. “The fact that he kept your letter must have been because it meant a great deal to him.”
I hope you enjoy the book.
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December 3, 2017
Garret Mathews
1054 Second Avenue, NW
Carmel, Indiana 46032
