​A lot of people protested the Vietnam war. A lot of people fought in the Vietnam war. Some did both.

​

They called me "Buddha."

I was a good Catholic boy when I left the States. I carried a new St. Christopher’s medal an old girlfriend had given me. My faith fell by the wayside late one night on a listening post outside the wire at

Dong Ha. As artillery shells screamed down around me, I realized that I didn’t  believe in the big guy in the sky,  that I was taught about in Sunday school.

I became an atheist. That changed when I met a sergeant whose Japanese wife had converted him to Buddhism. He explained that the Buddhist concept of life and death was like a revolving wheel of good Karma and bad Karma. The old Karma wheel goes on rolling forever. The only way off of this endless ride was to slip into the void, a place beyond good and evil, a perfect place called Nirvana. The bad news was that no one, including Buddha, could take you there. You had to find your own path. In the meantime, my path would be spent following around a mechanical revolving duck in a shooting gallery called the DMZ. This duck was wearing captain’s bars so I followed, but he was still a duck.

                 My teacher about the basics of Buddhism was a supply sergeant nick- named Ski. As a child, he was a member of Hitler’s youth corps. His only memory of those days was of American soldiers giving him chocolate bars. He met his wife while stationed in Japan. There are as many different variations of Buddhists as there are Baptists. The sect Ski belonged to was over a thousand years old. The main temple was on Mount Fuji. They had a mantra that they repeated every day. Ski told me that if I repeated the mantra over and over, I could have anything I wanted. It sounded good to me. I putt this mantra to the test the very next morning. I was on a working party filling sandbags. As I worked, I said the mantra over and over. After a couple of minutes I said to myself,

“I want off of this working party and I want off right now!”

I looked up and saw the gunny running towards us.

“Grab your rifles and get down to the front gate, go!”

I threw down my shovel and ran to my tent. I grabbed  my M16 and ran to

the front gate. I thought about the mantra as I ran towards the gate. What had I gotten myself into? There was a two and a half ton truck waiting at the gate with the engine idling. A minute later we were speeding down Route 9. I thought to myself, who am I: a Christian or a Buddhist? If I met my maker today, which hat would I be wearing? Buddha had gotten me off of the working party. Buddha had me riding down the road in this truck. No reflection on Jesus, but I wasn’t gonna quit the fat man now. If, today, the great cosmic wheel of birth and death turned for me, then I was going out as a Buddhist. 

Articles