Group Photo In Front Of Donated Baseball Backstop

Photograph by Specialist Fourth Class David Robert Crews

One fine day on Okinawa, the 30th Artillery Brigade gave one portable, three section baseball backstop each to three different Okinawan civilian schools. I went along as official photographer to photograph the process of giving and setting up the backstops.

There wasn’t much to photograph at the first two schools, because all that happened was a tractor trailer truck with the backstops on its flatbed trailer pulled up to the school and a small crew of lower ranking GIs, from my Army unit, got out of an Army car, that I was riding in with them, and then they unloaded the backstop while the school kids stayed in their classrooms. We had a couple of U.S. Army officers with us who were riding in their own car, I believe that the highest ranking GI there that day was a major.

At the third school, the GI crew took the last backstop off the truck and set it up near the school building on the school’s field. There was a group of official Okinawan school administration personnel there to meet us and accept the gifts for all the schools. That group included a Japanese-English Interpreter.

As soon as the backstops were in place, the school sent out some kids to be photographed in front of it, along with all the school officials and the GIs. Those GIs were the two Army officers, and five enlisted men--one enlisted man had driven the truck, one had driven the car, and three who were car passengers, along with me, had helped the two drivers unload the backstops. That group of Okinawans and Americans all lined up in front of the backstop, and I got down on one knee out there about 40 feet away from them to take some photos of that international gift giving scene. I focused my lens on the group, set the exposure on the camera, said smile, brought the camera up to look through it and squeeze the shutter, but no one smiled. They all looked back at me with solemn looks on their faces.

I asked the interpreter how to say smile in Japanese, he told me and I said it in Japanese three times, then English one more time, I gave them all big, friendly smiles when I was doing this, but every face in that group stayed the same. That just wasn’t going to work as one of my photographs. Not for this dedicated photographer it wasn’t!

An idea flashed across my brain pan; I instantly knew that either it would work like a charm or I’d look dumb as the dirt I was kneeling down in. I wasn’t going to be satisfied that day unless I got a certain great photo that I had seen in my head when I kneeled down there, and if I ended up only looking like a fool then that gamble had to be taken.

I looped my camera strap around my neck, placed the camera onto my chest in a position that allowed me maximum recovery speed of it, and I stuck my thumbs in my ears, wiggled my extended fingers up in the air, stuck out my tongue at them, and went, "Nyaaaah!"

It worked!!

I swooped up my camera in my hands and grabbed that great shot which I was determined to get. That’s this photo here on this blog posting.

Left click on the photograph to enlarge it. Now look at every face on the photo, and you will see how well my idea worked.

David Robert Crews
ursusdave
Okinawa
Army
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

Imitating The Photographer

Photographs by Spec. 4 David R. Crews

These two photographs were taken right after the previous group photo was taken, and before the kids did the ceremonial dance that is on the photos in the next blog posting below this one.

Those kids in these two photos were having the time of their lives by goofing around with a soldier from a foreign land who had just made their normally solemn faced school officials break out in smiles and laughter along with everybody else. And now the kids were being allowed to act funny too and to thoroughly amuse themselves in a place that was run on ancient, Asian style discipline which requires children to be quiet and polite during most times when they are in the company of their elders. You can see that the goofy kids were imitating a visiting U.S. Army Photographer who was had just acted real goofy himself.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

The Thank You Dance

Photographs by Spec. 4 David R. Crews

The kids did a traditional dance for us American GIs as a thank you for the baseball backstops.

I was amazed at how my first professional grade camera had frozen the action on the sand kicking up from the shoe of the girl in the front. This was the first time I had taken shots of people while they were moving around. Photography is all about learning something new every time you try something new.
If you take a good look at these photos you will see how the left sides are lighter than the rest of the photo and are slightly out of focus. This was because the enlarger in my photo lab had the wrong lens for it. But I couldn't do anything about that because the 30th Artillery Brigade was not authorized a photographer so I could not order any of the right equipment through my supply sergeant. This photo is actually a first print reject; I made several other prints that had the light part darkened by me 'burning in' that area, that's custom photo lab work. The schools we gave backstops to and the Army all got 4x5 and 8x10 prints of all the photos in this series.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

The Big Pileup

Photography by Spec. 4 David R. Crews

The way this wild-fun-mayhem got started was, after the official ceremony and Thank You Dance were all over, I began taking a few candid photos out in the school yard which the kids all wanted to be in. They were being very happily competitive amongst themselves about this, the girls got squeezed out right away, so I came up with a quick idea to make it a whole lotta’ fun for the boys who lasted through the first round of competition.

I had the guys in the front line of the group stand there with their arms outstretched and holding the rest of the boys back; then I stepped back about twenty feet, stopping to draw a line in the dirt at ten feet; and then at twenty feet away from the group I focused my lens on that ten foot mark; then, as I watched through my camera, I raised my arm and dropped it suddenly to signal them all to dive in at the ten foot mark, where I photographed them at here in this shot. I did that three or four times till they almost got too wild.

I seriously doubt that any of them ever completely forgot this day, because in their society children are taught to be quiet and polite most of the time when they're around grownups. I was very aware of this while doing the photo assignment and was careful not to let the kids get too wild for too long. In fact, right after this shot was taken I began to slowly, carefully (cause they had almost surrounded me by then) retreat backwards towards the Army car that I had ridden there in with the crew of GIs who had taken the baseball backstops off the trucks and set them up. Those GIs were already sitting in the car, over there about seventy-five feet from me and my mayhem; they were having a great time watching all this fun and had noticed when I started backing up towards them. I was nearly tripping over krazy-kids while damn near falling down laughing, and those GIs were all grinning and smiling and laughing and loving life at that moment too.

I turned around towards them and yelled, "Hey man! I gotta get outa here!"

The driver hollered back, "Yeah, we can see that, hold on, we're comin'!"

Then he slowly inched the car towards me.

The other guys in the car were all bouncing around inside there and laughing and poking each other with elbows (while remembering bits and pieces of what it had been like some years before that day when they were just school boys too). As the car eased on towards me, while avoiding touching any of the krazy-but sweet and wonderful-kids, the guys were laughing uproariously and hollering stuff like, "Hold on Crews, we're coming, hold on there man, we'll getcha'. Don’t let ‘um knock ya down there buddy, stay on yer’ feet! We’ll getcha’ outa’ there." Them GI buddies of mine were bouncing around in the car and hootin’ and hollerin’ like a buncha’ krazy-kids themselves.

I was getting all tangled up in, and nearly pulled down on the ground by, hilariously laughing little Okinawan school kids when one of my buddies opened the back left side car door and jumped out and sorta' rescued my (nearly falling down from laughing) GI butt from the escalating mayhem.

Everyone who was there that afternoon in that dusty school yard on the subtropical Island of Okinawa had a great, memorable time.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

The Kids Had To All Wash Their Hands Before Eating Lunch

Photography by Spec. 4 David R. Crews

I thought that it was great how the children had settled right down after that fun-filled-wild-mayhem, when their teachers told them it was time to wash their hands for lunch. They were back to being well disciplined, quiet, and polite in the company of grownups again, as is 'the norm' in Asian societies.

I remember that while I was printing copies of this shot, I was fascinated by how I had frozen the water in mid-stream like that, because I was learning about what my new professional grade camera equipment was capable of.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

The Kids Sit Down For Lunch

Photography by Spec. 4 Crews

After I took this shot, the Okinawan interpreter came over to the Army Officer in charge and told him to go tell me that I could not use this photo for official publication, because the school lunches were substandard even though they were 50% subsidized by the U.S. Government.

Later, in my photo lab, I had to make myself one 4x5 print of it to see what the problem was, but the lunch doesn't show up well because all the other shots I had taken that day were outside so I was not using a flash when I grabbed this shot real quick. The second after I took this shot, as I lowered my camera from my face, I was deeply moved by the gentle, sweet looks on their faces; they must have felt surprised, honored, and pleased to be photographed so many times by an official American Army Photographer that day. That really made me feel warm inside; this made me want to take some more shots, so I had stepped back from the classroom door and was kneeling down and pulling my flash out of my camera bag when I was told not to take anymore photographs of the school kids and their lunches. The officer was very discrete about, and he cupped his hand halfway over his mouth as he bent down towards me to half whisper the official command, he had a genuinely friendly-hey army buddy smile on his face, and was thoroughly polite about it.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

Start Reading My Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property Story At The Blog Posting Below This One

The following twelve postings on this blog are set up so that you can read on down through them and then onto the older posts pages because the rest of these postings are all parts of one story.

Begin reading this story at the blog posting below this one, scroll on down as you read, then hit the older posts button at the bottom of each page. This is the best I can do for a web site on my very low income disability pension. This blog setup works well enough though if you give it a fair try.

Introduction To: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

In this section of my manuscript about being a U.S. Army Photographer on Okinawa you will learn all of the pertinent facts about my Army photographer experiences, and my long struggle to have the Veterans Administration acknowledge the truth about my military service. The truth is that I was assigned to work as a photographer in an Army missile unit that was neither authorized a photographer nor a photo lab.

You will learn of my Army photographer assignment’s devastating effects on myself, and then my family, friends, and the women in my life.

You will read a little bit about my alcohol and drug abuse and some of the things that happened to me along the way to sobriety.

This story contains far more details about my struggle with service connected depression than I ever wanted to go public with. But the VA declares that my depression is not service connected, because numerous VA staff members have flatly declared that I am making up everything about my U.S. Army photography job being unauthorized, and militarily immoral, so I feel compelled to tell everyone whom I can just exactly what the truth of this matter is.

I hope that this story is read by many, many people, including most of my family members, former female companions, old friends, and some other people who have been disappointed in me for the way that I have lived my life.

During my childhood years and on through when I was maturing from teenage years to young adulthood, my life had shown great promise. Back then I appeared destined to spend my adult years as a rugged outdoorsman and a top notch photographer, but my life has fallen far short of that promise, for reasons which only I seem to understand.

Anyone who reads this story, and follows the Internet links in it, will be given a fair opportunity to understand why the bulk of my adult life has been the way that it has been and how I am struggling and working to be my more complete, true self.

I ask you to read my story and to make your own determination on whether I am telling the truth here or not. So many people over the years have disbelieved me that the more individuals whom I adequately inform of the truth, the better the chance that I have of finally finding any peace of mind before I die.

You may consider this to be my side of a court case to prove my innocence and to clear my name of all false accusations and charges, and to restore some of the respect and self respect which I was stripped of by the actions and lies of certain individual soldiers who were in the 30th Artillery Brigade Headquarters Battery missile unit on Okinawa during 1970-71. I say certain individuals, because I had many great friends and plenty of good buddies in the 30th Arty Brigade, amongst other fine men who were also among the majority of 30th Arty Bgde soldiers who never did me any wrong in any way.

This story dispels many unkind myths about me. Please read it through, and follow some of the Internet links in it to see what is there which helps to back up all that I say.

Thank you for your time and your interest in my story.

[I had to break this section of my story up into eleven parts, because of the blog software’s limitations on this much text. So scroll down to read my story, I believe that it will both interest and surprise you all along the way. ]

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

Part 1 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

My Manuscript Begins

I worked hard at being the best photographer that I could be for the 30th Artillery Brigade air defense Hawk and Nike Hercules missile unit on Okinawa, during 1970-71. The 30th Arty Brigade personnel were thrilled by the way that I handled them as my photographic subjects, by how quickly I produced the photographs after shooting them, and by the way that my photos of them at work and play turned out real nice.

I had to print photos for publication in our brigade monthly magazine, and other army publications, plus for display on our brigade’s bulletin boards. I was always ordered to print extra of copies of my photos to be given to the troops who were pictured in them. That made me feel pretty damn good inside, because I knew that my work would be important to those comrades of mine and their families for years and decades to come.

I was the first Army trained photographer to be assigned to work as the 30th Arty Brigade’s ‘official photographer’.

Before I was assigned to the 30th Arty Bgde, their photographers had been soldiers from the brigade who were supposed to be working there as radar techs, company clerks, or whatever their original jobs had been in the brigade. But they wanted to be photographers, so they eagerly volunteered to shoot and print photos of the 30th Arty personnel at work and play.

There was no slot for a photographer in the 30th Arty Bgde, which meant that I could never get a promotion in rank, nor could I requisition the necessary equipment and supplies, which meant that I had to use my own personal money to buy most of the camera equipment and some of the film needed to do my U.S. Army job.

The 30th Arty’s photographic laboratory that I worked in was set up in a nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber which was in an underground communications bunker that we called the Mole Hole. The photo lab negated the intended use of the chamber. Clearly, my photo lab was against Army Rules and Regulations.

The soldier whom I replaced as a 30th Arty photographer, Spec 5 Swigget (not sure of the spelling), told me that he was being paid to be a clerk up in 30th Arty Headquarters Brigade’s office building. He said that because the 30th Arty was not authorized to have a photographer, he was listed in the 30th’s unit roster as a clerk, not a photographer. I do not know what I was listed as on the unit roster, or if I was listed at all.

Swigget told me on my third day at the 30th Arty that when opportunities for promotion “came down” they would be distributed amongst the various army units like this: three soldiers get to go from E 2 up to E 3, one soldier gets to go from E 3 up to E 4, and so on; the individual soldiers then had to compete for the promotions by proving that they were most worthy for them through their personal conduct and efficiency ratings, their MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) evaluations, maybe recommendations from their sergeants and officers, I don’t remember all of the exact terms or requirements that he cited, but it was by achieving requirements like that that they had to show that they were worthy of the prize of a promotion in rank. Swigget informed me that it was the MOS evaluation that prevented me from getting a promotion, because my MOS was not authorized to be in the 30th Brigade.

I can show you on my army discharge records this official statement: “Soldier has no record of evaluation in his MOS.”

There were two guys working as photographers for the 30th, when I was first assigned to work there. One was Swigget and the other was named Medley (not sure of the spellings). They were about as lackadaisical, nonproductive, and sloppy about their photo printing as could be. Medley turned in 8×10 photos printed backwards and with white, photo chemical thumb prints all over them. Medley was off photographing, then in the lab developing and printing, his own stuff more than the 30th Arty’s, because he had a contract with a travel magazine that had paid him to do travel photos of Okinawa. It infuriated me. Swigget just didn’t give damn. They had reputations for taking three months to get photos printed after they had shot a job, then when I took over the lab it averaged me three days to do it in.

I asked Swigget how he got away with being the way he was in the army. While pointing over at the 30th Brigade Headquarters office building, he replied, “I’ve got too much on too many of them for them to do anything about it.” My immediate guess at the time was that he meant the ins and outs of our illegal photo lab situation.

Those two clerks masquerading as official photographers had been in the army, and working as clerks for the 30th Arty, for long enough times for them to acquire the army know-how and contacts to scrounge up photo supplies. Unfortunatly for me, they never took the time and made the effort to introduce me to the right supply clerks or photographers in other units who could help me to get into a photo equipment and supply scrounging and swapping circuit. Those two Army clerks didn’t mind using their own camera equipment to do the job, because to them it was much better than working at a desk tap-tap-tapping their days away on an Army issue typewriter.

I have natural abilities and compulsions to work hard at photography, and I did that for the 30th Arty, despite my film stock running low, then running out at times. I had to buy some film with my own money now and then, and then my film stock would be replenished with any old stuff that my 30th Artillery Brigade Headquarters Battery Public Information Office bosses (sergeants and commissioned officers) could scrounge up for me. I had no choice on the black and white film types that I had to use or if the film was past its expiration date or not. No professional photographer wants to have to go shoot a sunny, outdoor job using high speed film that is designed for low light conditions, or visa versa. Nor do we want to use any expired film at all to do a job, unless we want some hazy, muddy looking negatives to print artistic, special effects photographs from.

The Army had trained me for fifteen good weeks to be a photographer. It was top notch training, no doubt about it. But, when I enlisted and signed up for the United States Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School, my recruiter informed me that the Army only guaranteed that I be trained as a photographer, not that I would work as one. The Army could have assigned me to do any job that they needed me in. The 30th Arty Bgde could have made me work for them as a clerk, a cook, a missile crewman, or anything else where they had a slot to fill, but there was no slot for a photographer there.

Despite all of that nonsense, I kept up my good photography work until those gross infractions of rules and regulations caused me too many unnecessary, and insurmountable problems.

The 30th Arty’s photo lab had been set up, several years before I got there, by a guy named Jim Whitcomb of Houston, Texas. I found Jim through Internet searches using–”30th Artillery Brigade” + photographer–as a search term. Jim is a successful photographer, and he had been featured in an issue of the American Society of Media Photographer’s magazine which is on the Internet.

I spoke to Jim on the phone about a year or so ago, and we talked for over an hour about how he had scrounged photo equipment and supplies through contacts that he already had had in the military, about the lab being set up illegally in the decontamination chamber, etc.. Not only had Jim been in the 30th Arty Bde for awhile before he set up the lab, his father was a career soldier. I didn’t ask what rank his dad had held, but Jim was an enlisted man who hung out after work on Okinawa with officers, not the enlisted men in the 30th Arty Headquarters Battery, where he had a private room in the barracks. When Jim could not get a promotion in rank, because there was no slot for a photographer in the 30th , an Army General, who was a drinking buddy of his, personally saw that Jim received a promotion.

You can contact Jim at:
Studio Houston Digital Photography
5401 Mitchelldale Suite B2
Houston, Texas
Phone 713 682 0067
Fax 713 682 0067
Email sales@studiohouston.com


I believe that there is government evidence to prove that there was no authorization for the 30th Arty photo lab or photographers. The evidence is in the morning reports and unit rosters for the 30th Arty Bgde that are on file at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, MO.. The evidence could possibly be the lack of entries which state that a person with a photography MOS was ever assigned to the 30th Arty. Something that can help me must be there; maybe there is a list of the number of clerks, cooks, etc. that the unit was composed of. I tried to get those records, but I cannot afford to pay for the research, copying, and shipping of them.

[This Internet site of mine is technically a blog, but I use it as a poor man’s web site. So it has its limitations that I overcome in various ways. My only personal income is a Veterans Administration non-service connected monthly disability check which is so low income that I barely keep a roof over my head. I have to do this writing and Internet posting on an old computer which I found sitting next to a dumpster, it barely makes it on my slow dial-up Internet service. Just keep these facts in your mind as you read my story, because you may wonder why I don’t do more to gather the necessary witness statements and other evidence which I need to prove all that I am relating to you in this story.]

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 2 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

DEPRESSION SETS IN

I had arrived on Okinawa during the last week of June in 1970. Previous to that point in time, I had made it through the Army’s basic training and then their Photographic Laboratory Technician School with high enough class work grades, plus excellent Conduct and Efficiency Ratings, which earned me the rank of Specialist Fourth Class, with only ten months of military service to my name—three months inactive prior to entering basic and seven active. That’s a quick darn rise from the rank of E-1 to E-4.

Then, beginning in the late summer of 1970, I began to suffer from severe depression and some troubling anxiety. It screwed up my sleep patterns something fierce; I couldn’t get to sleep till near daybreak, my dreams became so intense that they exhausted me, and I had trouble waking up in the morning. I never would have made it through basic and photo training if I had been like that previously. I was now suffering from an acquired sleep disorder.

My depression and problems getting to sleep had something to do with the anxiety which I experienced because of my reasonable concerns about that damned photo lab negating the intended use of the decontamination chamber during a possible nuclear attack on Okinawa.

I may have some kind of an anxiety disorder, but it has always helped me to be a safer person, it has never kept me from doing dangerous things that were either necessary or just for the thrilling fun and/or accomplishment of it. I just pay more attention to safety than most other people do when I do them daring things.

Several times, when I was a kid setting on a beach watching all of the other beach goers playing and swimming around in the water, I was struck by deep, wrenching concerns for their safety out there. I wondered what I would do if any of them needed my help if they had begun drowning. The consequence of those wrenching concerns was that I took Red Cross swimming lessons as soon as I was old enough to and finished up four swimming seasons later with a Red Cross Junior Life Saving Certificate at the age of fourteen.

You had to be sixteen to take the Senior Life Saving Course, but I never got to take the Senior Life Saving Course because the beach down the street from my house, where I had to take my swimming lessons, was closed because of water pollution when I was fifteen years old. But the only difference in Junior and Senior Life Saving was the number of laps swum during training and the distance we had to swim during our final exam, when we had to save a life guard who was pretending to drown.

The point is here that although I may have an anxiety disorder, any extra anxiety which I may possess has usually served me well during my life as it spurs me to be a safer minded and acting person.

Unfortunatly, I was apparently the only soldier in the 30th Artillery Brigade who felt anxious about the photo lab in the decontamination chamber.

I sure as hell was the victim of too much unprecedented anxiety when I lay awake, tossing and turning, in my bunk at night in the 30th Arty Brigade Headquarters barracks while trying to figure out how my had life gotten so insane, how could I be the only soldier in the brigade not allowed to get a promotion, why do I have to buy camera gear and sometimes film to do army work, and if the Communists attack will my photo lab being in the decontamination chamber cause tens of millions of deaths in America?

Now hold on there, that tens of millions of deaths fear truly does sound nuts. Doesn’t it? It does to the Veterans Administration.

The decontamination chamber had to be there for a military reason. Right?

If the 30th Arty Brigade Headquarters Battery did not get instantly nuked to crispy cinders by an airborne Communist nuclear attack on the island, then we might get an indirect hit from a nuclear war head. In that case, the chamber was there so that any brigade personnel who were pertinent to the operation of the Mole Hole’s equipment, but who were not in the Mole Hole at the time of the attack, could wash any nuclear snow off of themselves, and then go underground for two weeks to complete our assigned mission of coordinating defensive strikes with other U.S Army units, and the other branches of the United States Armed Forces. The 30th Arty Bgde Mole Hole was part of a chain of defense that was designed to stop the Commie Rats who had nuked Okinawa from flying their bombers all the way across the Pacific Ocean and nukin’ the freakin’ United States and killing tens of millions of Americans.

Well, anyway, that’s sort of the way that Swigget explained it to me on my first day in the 30th Arty Bgde photo lab—the facts are from him, but the flavor of it is mine.

Hey! Think about this: if you were alive when that photo lab was in the decontamination chamber, then that tens of millions of deaths number could have included you.

Maybe too many people feel that because the nuclear war didn’t happen, it couldn’t happen; consequently, in their way of thinking, my problems with the lab being in that chamber are simply bullcrap.

If the war had happened, and the decontamination chamber had been needed, but the photo lab had negated the use of it, then most likely everyone in the 30th Arty Bgde would have died. So the individuals who were responsible for allowing that photo lab to be there had nothing to worry about.

The degree of probability of the decontamination chamber being needed in a nuclear emergency does not matter. What matters is that I believed that because the Army put it there, it needed be maintained so that it was ready to do what the rest of the United States Armed Forces expected it to do. To me, it was a weak link in our chain of defense; a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Therefore, I still say that I was right, that it was healthy thinking, when I became deeply disturbed, shocked, and depressed that the entire command staff and cadre of noncommissioned officers of the 30th Artillery Brigade allowed the photo lab to function in the nuclear emergency decontamination chamber of the underground bunker communications center that we called the Mole Hole. I can not make it any plainer than that.

It seems that nobody but me, back then or today, was shocked about learning that the photo lab was set up in the nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber.
For many 30th Brigade personnel, it may be because by 1970-71 many of the soldiers serving in the 30th knew that the at least one of the missile systems which we manned were obsolete. We had medium sized, single stage Hawk, and larger, two stage Nike-Hercules Missiles.

I was not privy to any information about our missiles being obsolete, until after I had spent over six, long, frustrating, angry, demoralizing, depressing months worrying about the potential consequences of my photo lab being in that damned decontamination chamber.

The way that one of my 30th Arty comrades, and a few other guys who were relaxing with us in our barracks after work one day, explained it to me was that our Hawk and our nuclear war head armed Nike-Hercules missile systems couldn’t react fast enough to raise, aim, and fire any missiles before one of Communist China’s or Russia’s Air Forces’ newest, swiftest nuclear bombers could fly in on Okinawa, do more damage to the island in a few flashing moments than the horrific World War Two Battle of Okinawa did in a month. Then the aircraft could head straight for the United States of America, where our families lived and were incorrectly, but proudly, believing that our military jobs were supporting and helping to maintain an around the clock alert and ready defensive position which was an important part of America’s chain of defense against Communist world domination during the Cold War.

[I just searched the Internet for a web page to link to which explained that the missiles were obsolete. According to the web sites I saw, it was the development of intercontinental ballistics missiles that made the Nike-Hercules obsolete, not enemy Air Force bombers. The Nikes could not shoot down other missiles very well. I am leaving in what I was told by the guys who were part of our 30th Arty Bgde Nike-Hercules system, because that was all I had to go on back then. There still must have been at least some chance of enemy bombers coming at us at any time. Either way, in 1970-71, many of the soldiers of the 30th Arty knew that our missiles were obsolete.

However, the strategic landscape was changing and by the mid-1960s it was clear that massed Soviet bombers were no longer a credible threat while Intercontinental Ballistics Missiles (ICBMs) were. The U.S. defense posture shifted to deterrence and the Nike became obsolete. Most Nike sites were closed by the end of 1974, with the exception of batteries in Alaska and Florida that stayed active until the late 1970s. The last U.S. Army Nike Hercules sites continued on duty in West Germany and South Korea until 1984.]

If our 30th Artillery Brigade air defense missiles were obsolete, when I was in that unit, it appears that we weren’t a reliable part of any defense.We may have been able to provide some help in thwarting a nuclear attack though; some 30th Arty Bgde missile sites may have gotten off a shot or two at incoming enemy aircraft; we may have had some chance of completing the part of our brigade’s mission that the Mole Hole was there for, even if we did not get to shoot down any attacking aircraft.

The problem was, the soldiers who had set up that photo lab and then the ones who had kept functioning, where it was in the decontamination chamber, may have figured that the fact that our missiles were obsolete meant that the photo lab wasn’t ever going to cause any deaths at all.

Was I a fool to at first believe that the 30th Arty Bgde was an integral part of the free world’s chain of defense against Communist military aggression, and was I a fool for fully believing that having the photo lab in the decontamination chamber jeopardized tens of millions of lives?

Well I’ll be a dumb son of a bitch! I suppose I was.

But, I didn’t hear that stunning tid-bit about our obsolete missiles till I was already real angry, deeply depressed, and thoroughly stressed out to the max about my whole 30th Arty Bgde situation.

[It bothers me that I may have had it wrong as to exactly why the Nikes were obsolete, and it will bother certain other veterans more. The Hawks may not have been obsolete, but they were upgraded in 1971 to keep up with our enemies developments in aircraft. What those guys told me in the barracks that day was all I had to go on though, up till today. It was barracks scuttlebutt, but we all felt like we had been crapped on when we were talking about it. My buddies were correct about the Nike-Hercs being obsolete, that is what matters most.

Today, September 6, 2006, (I am adding this to my blog posting today) I found out, during more searching for historical facts about Nike-Hercs, that they were obsolete when the 30th Arty Bgde set up that photo lab in their Mole Hole’s nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber.

What I found just now on the Internet, during my second search for obsolete Nike-Herc and Hawk info, is the following:

After 1955, Hanford’s air defensive installations began the transition to Nike Ajax missiles; later replaced by Nike Hercules missiles. By the late 1950’s, the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles had rendered Nike missiles obsolete.

The Nike Hercules replaced the Ajax missiles in the late 1950’s. By 1960, however, the development of the intercontinental ballistic missiles had rendered Nike missiles obsolete, and the Nike sites were abandoned when Camp Hanford was deactivated in 1960 and closed in 1961.

Basic HAWK was developed in the 1950s and initially fielded in 1960. The system has been upgraded through a series of product improvements beginning with the Improved HAWK in 1970.

I have not been able to find info on the Internet to support a claim that the 30th Arty Bgde’s Hawk Missiles were obsolete in 1970-71, but there is historical info that the Hawk system was improved during 1970-71. On December 21, 1971, over a month after my discharge from the Army, the improved Hawk system was type classified Standard A. It appears that this means the improved Hawk was given a stamp of approval by the U.S. Military. Then, in May 1972, improved Hawk support items were first deployed to Germany. This historical info may mean that the improvements were made because the Hawks were more or less obsolete in early 1971, when my buddies first told me about any of our missiles being obsolete.

The 30th Arty’s photo lab was set up in their Mole Hole around 1968, so it probably never endangered anyone’s life. It is doubtful that the Mole Hole was ever going to be used in any nuclear confrontation during the time in which the lab was set up in there, because the missiles were not going to be used, because, after 1960 any Communist airborne attack would have most likely been by intercontinental ballistic missiles, not bombers.

This historical information just might exonerate Jim Whitcomb, and all the others responsible for that photo lab being where it was, from being considered negligent in their U.S. Army roles as defenders of the free world.

These newly discovered, to me, historical facts sure as flyin’ f### don’t help me to deal with what happened during my U.S. Army tour of duty in the 30th Arty though. It makes me feel worse to think that certain U.S Army and Government leaders knew these facts for ten g**damn years previous to my assignment to work in a Nike-Herc brigade.

I don’t know what to think. One Internet source claims that our Nike-Hercs known to be obsolete by 1960, others say it was in the mid 1960s. Either way, they were obsolete before I was ever assigned to the 30th Arty Bgde.

Now knowing that serving my country in the 30th Arty Bgde had been known to be a possible waste of everyone’s time, and tax payer’s money, for several years before my military service began, angers me even more than I have ever been.]

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 3 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

Some Kind Of An Emotional Breakdown

At 10:00 hours on October 20, 1970 I had some kind of a nervous breakdown. It was an emotional breakdown of some kind. I do not know the exact psychiatric term for it. Numerous times, the VA has dismissed what I say about what happened on that day, because if it isn’t diagnosed in their official terminology, than they don’t have to recognize it as real mental health event. They refuse, by they I mean many VA employees over the years, they refuse to make a psychiatric determination on what happened to me that on awful day.

On that day in October, the First Sergeant woke me up in my bunk at approximately 09:30 hours. I should have been at work by then, and he ordered me to get up and report to his office. He was pissed off at me for the problems caused by my acquired sleep disorder; and I was becoming more and more pissed off everyday, as I struggled to understand how in the hell I had gotten into such a lousy situation as that 30th Arty photographer’s job was.

In the First Sergeant’s office he asked me what my problem was that he had to go wake me up after I should have been at work.

I more or less said, I requested a transfer out of the brigade, you said that I was too valuable, so you won’t transfer me. I can’t order equipment or supplies. Now I can’t get to sleep, then I can’t wake up. Just let me transfer out.

The First Sergeant told me to move out of my semi-private two man room in the barracks and move down the hall into the twenty man squad bay. "Maybe when the lights there go on in the morning and all those other guys get up for work then you will too," he said.

On my way down the stairs to the First Sergeant’s office on that October 20th morning, I had become determined to fight for my rights and not leave the First Sergeant’s office without an agreement to allow me to transfer out of the brigade. Instead, I gave in, tossed my self respect into the small, olive-drab green trash can sitting down there beside of his desk, walked back up stairs to my room, and on the way had a nervous breakdown of some kind. It was brain battering, gut grinding, and soul crushing. It culminated with me punching my fist through a barracks window. It was the most humiliating, devastating, and embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. I have it all written out in length, but I am not ready to open up all the way about it.

I still haven’t completely recovered from that trauma yet. Something snapped inside of me that day—some circuit breakers went off and they have never been reset. I have pleaded, begged, threatened, and calmly explained to many employees of the Veterans Administration that I need help resetting those circuit breakers, but none of them have ever believed my 30th Arty Bgde story.

I think about these things everyday. Sometimes at night I rehash the individual parts of this story over and over again. They are on my mind first thing on some mornings. I think through the details of them during daily activities. I don’t see or hear parts of TV shows and movies at times when these memories overwhelm me. I think about how to get these truths acknowledged by the Veterans Administration. Maybe I have some undiagnosed disorder which causes this. It would not happen if the trauma hadn’t happened though, that’s for sure.

My sleep patterns are still horrible, sheer horror at times, and debilitating. I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat, and I have to change my frigid, dripping wet undershirt. I hate living like this. It is humiliating.

I had disturbing dreams about Okinawa for over twenty years after I was discharged from the army. Over and over again I dreamt that I was trying to escape from somewhere on Okinawa, and in others I kept trying to get back to the brigade to finish doing something.

When I applied for that transfer out of the 30th Brigade, back in August or September of 1970, it was for inter-island transfer only. After telling me bluntly that I was "too valuable", they did say that they could get me to Vietnam in two weeks, if that was what I wanted.

I turned down their kind offer.

There happened to be three army office clerk lifers in the First Sergeant’s office on the day that they offered me Vietnam, and not one of them had been to, or was about to volunteer for, Vietnam. The way that one, who was a Spec 6, looked back over his shoulder and snickered to number two, a Staff Sergeant, who grinned snidely back at the Spec 6, and then glanced at the First Sergeant and grinned at him, and then the way that the First Sergeant reacted to them other two clerks by snickering into his cupped hand as he walked away from us and over to the other side of the room, indicated to me that a veiled threat had just been delivered to me.

The unspoken, veiled threat amounted to this, "Crews, you better shut up and get it in your thick head that we ain’t letting you go. We can’t replace you. If you don’t do what we say, no matter whether we get you supplies or not, and especially if you go above our heads out of this brigade to try for a transfer, or if you are stupid enough to complain about your situation to the Army Inspector General or to your Congressman, if you keep it up and push this request for a transfer any further, then we will finagle the paperwork to get you sent to ‘Nam just like we finagled the paperwork to get you here. Even though the 1970 Army is only allowed to make you do one overseas tour per three year enlistment, and you are legally allowed to stay on Okinawa if you transfer out of this brigade."

The photo lab situation didn’t get any better, so later on I decided to take them up on that kind offer to transfer me to do my military duty in The Republic of Vietnam. I informed a room full of my buddies about it, three had recently returned from Vietnam, and the whole room full of my good friends convinced me not to transfer to Vietnam. (you can find the full I Applied For A Transfer story on my other Okinawa blog)

At any time during my assignment as a photographer for the 30th Arty Bgde, I could have taken the chance of writing my Congressman about the situation.

You must know very damn well that ‘whistle blowers’ are often retaliated against by the individuals or entities whom they had ‘blown the whistle on’. Had I ‘blown the whistle’, and consequently screwed with the careers of the lifer soldiers who were responsible for having that photo lab in decontamination chamber, and then finagling the paperwork to scam the army into sending them a real photographer to be their personal property, all soldiers are government property, those lifers would have done all that they could to retaliate against me and try to send me to the worst duty station possible; that probably meant getting me sent so far up into the jungles of Vietnam that I’d never get back home again.

At this point in my story, I will again receive the usual feedback, from some people, who will say that my assignment to the 30th Arty Bgde was better than being sent to Vietnam and getting wounded or killed or captured by the enemy and held as a Prisoner of War. Yep, that’s probably true, but it don’t make what happened to me in the 30th Arty any more right, or less devastating. I took the chance of being sent to ‘Nam when I enlisted, same as everyone else. If the cards would have played out that way, and I had survived fighting in that war, I might be much more proud of my military service today.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk maryland

ursusdave

Part 4 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

My Final Photo Assignment

Several months after hearing that tid-bit about obsolete missiles, I photographed the last assignment that I can remember doing.

That photo assignment was at the officers club. The 30th Brigade’s officers’ wives had a fashion show up there on a weekday afternoon. The best part about it was that I spent the afternoon surrounded by curvaceous female anatomy. I was twenty years old at the time, and the youngest officers wives were a year or two older than me, because most officers had a college education and many of their wives had met them while they were both in college. There were plenty of pretty college graduates all around me. I was the only man in the room.

The next to the worst part of the afternoon was when I had to have the duty driver, who rode me to the officers club, stop at the PX so I could buy some film to shoot the assignment.

The worst part was when one young, pretty, slender, but shapely, officer’s wife leaned in close to another sweet young thang standing near me, touched the other woman’s arm gently with her fingers, and she said to the other wife, in a hushed, giggly tone, "You know of course that the missiles are obsolete."

It was obvious that they did not care that their husbands’ jobs were not very important to the free world’s defense against Communist world aggression. Then it hit me that they didn’t mind about the taxpayers not getting their money’s worth out of any of us 30th Arty personnel. I became instantly aware that the reason that they didn’t care was, most likely, because all that mattered to them was that their husbands were not in Vietnam.

Due to me being worn down to a frazzle by the whole 30th Arty photographer situation at the time, you coulda’ knocked me down with the false pony tail that one of them wives was wearing.

Not only did I already know the stunning fact that our missiles were obsolete, thanks to a sergeant buddy of mine, from one of our missile sites, who had told me one sad day that some of his section’s missiles didn’t have all of the parts that they needed to be able to fire, I also knew that not all of our obsolete birds could fly. Then add to all of that the experience of witnessing those two wives giggling about it, and you end up with one fully frazzled soldier.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk marylandursusdave

dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 5 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corp Property

I TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE FOLLOWING EXPLANTION OF THE FACTS. IF ANY PERSON, PERSONS, OR U.S. GOVERNMENT ENTITY WISHES TO CONTEST THESE FACTS, MY CONTACT INFO IS AT THE END OF THIS STORY.

Should I Have Ever Been In Possesion Of
Crates Of U.S.M.C. Photographic Paper?

Sometime during springtime in 1971, shortly after shooting that officers’ wives fashion show, I ran completely out of photographic printing paper. I told the lieutenant who was in direct charge of me, Lt. T. Gordon Barber (eddiebar@bellsouth.net), to get me some photo paper, or there was not going to be anymore photos printed. He didn’t like that at all, but he came back into my photo lab later and handed me an army supply company order form which had photographic supplies listed on it. I immediately, happily filled it out and turned it back into him that very same day.

Two weeks later Lt. Barber comes up to me, in my barracks mess hall right after I had eaten lunch, and excitedly says that he has something to show me over at my photo lab. I hadn’t been over there very often during those two weeks, because I had no photo paper to print my negatives with.

When we got to the entrance of the Mole Hole, I saw that a big pile of heavy, wooden crates had been dropped off in the short entrance tunnel there just outside the large, underground vault style door to the bunker.

Lt. Barber gleefully, proudly said, "Look what I got for you! Crates of 8x10, black+white, photo paper."

I was pleasantly surprised; I was so happy to see those desperately needed supplies that I was nearly jumpin’ up and down; there was a huge, wide smile of relief on my face, for about a lightning fast second and a half, until it registered in my brain that the crates had PROPERTY OF U.S.M.C. emblazoned all over them in large, black, painted letters---those crates were stolen from the United States Marine Corps.

It was a crushing experience for me, because, I was in the U.S. Army, therefore, to the best of my knowledge, back then and now, I had no right, in any way, shape, or form, to be in possession of any U.S. Marine Corps property.
I looked at the U.S.M.C. logos on the crates and thought, "Holly shit! I’ve got way too much stolen Marine Corp property to hide in my little photo lab."

The reason that I say stolen is because it was Marine Corps stuff. If it had been U.S. Army, it would have been scrounged materials. If the crates would have had U.S. Army emblazoned on them, I would have stored as much of the paper as I could in my photo lab; then anyone who saw the U.S. Army crates that were left out in the entranceway would think that I had the right to posses them. Had that been the case, I would have accepted the stuff with glee, as equal to what Lt. Barber felt when he showed them to me, because that is the way things go in the military.

I just talked to a Marine Corps Recruiter on the phone about this. I bothered him for a few minutes, but he had enough time to spare for us to concur that in the eyes of most Marines, it would have been stolen property, and if certain ones of them had caught me with the stuff, I’d a been in for some kind of a butt whuppin’.

I stared hard at the U.S.M.C. logos on those contraband crates and angrily asked Lt. Barber, "Where the hell did you get these?"

He was still gleeful and proud of himself as he replied, "I have a friend who is a captain in the Marines."

That captain had done his friend the lieutenant a personal favor that probly was a returned favor or it had to be returned at some time. You can bet your butt that both of their butts would have been in a sling if certain other Marines had found out about it. Marines are famously dedicated to Semper Fi, they are ever faithful to their beloved Corps, that captain had done his fellow Marines wrong.

As I stood there surveying the scene and focusing in on the shocking facts of the situation, I realized the fact that the crates were stacked up nice and neat right out there where anybody who walked anywhere near them would definitely see the U.S.M.C. logos painted on them, and therefore identify them as stolen Marine Corps property. I could feel an avalanche of painful, shocking realizations pouring down on me and adding to the weight of the crushing anxiety which I was feeling as a result of me suddenly, unexpectedly being in possession of those stolen crates of photographic paper.

I was pissed off.

I realized right away that this could cause me serious legal problems if the wrong person found me to be in possession of those crates. It may have been enough to send me to Ft. Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary to ‘do hard time’. The Marines were America’s worst supplied branch of military service at the time, so I seriously doubt that their photographers were willing to peacefully part with any supplies at all.

I felt even more crushing weight coming down on me, when I looked closer at the crates and saw that they were clearly marked—THIS PAPER FOR USE WITH RED SAFE LIGHT ONLY. My photo lab had a reddish orange safe light.

If it had been crates of U.S. Army paper, I would have immediately set out to see if there was anywhere to swap some of it for a red safe light. With all that stuff to barter with, I had a lot to spare for one little ole’ red safe light.

I informed Lt. Barber that this paper could not be used in my lab.

"Whaaat?" Lt. Barber said, looking a bit unbelieving of me.

I nearly snarled at him, like a bear who had just stepped into a solid steel, jagged toothed, leg hold trap, and I growled, "Comere! I’ll show ya."

I opened a crate, took a box of paper out of it, and then walked into the lab with him following me closely; he was sporting a mean scowl on his face and was mumbling curses lowly towards the back of my head.

I opened the box of paper in my photo enlarger room, where it was very dark, except for the reddish-orange glow from my safe light, and put the paper into the developer. It turned completely black in less than a minute.

"See, it’s the same as taking it out in the white light," I growled at the scowling, now also growling, and still mumbling curses lowly, lieutenant.

Then he marched on outa’ there in front of me whilst cursing and mumbling lowly down towards his shoes.

The facts of this matter get worse.

Those damned crates had been placed right next to where the 30th Arty Brigade commander’s chauffeur driven official U.S. Army car’s official parking place was. Anyone visiting the brigade commander, who may have ridden around with the him while touring the island and/or our missile sites, could have seen the U.S.M.C. logos on those large wooden crates. Any visitor who was given a tour of the Mole Hole would have had to wind their way around the pile of crates in order to enter the underground communications bunker. I wasn’t worried about my brigade commander, who was a full bird colonel, seeing the crates, because I figured that he had to be in on it all in some way.

But, if those Marine Corps crates had been discovered to be there in the entrance to the Mole Hole by a visiting Marine, or any high ranking U.S. military or government official, or any one of the Japanese Army Officers or government officials who were occasional visitors to our missile sites, which they were going to take command of after Okinawa reverted to Japanese control in upcoming 1972, or by any regular GI who thought that it was his sworn duty and obligation to report the situation, or who just wanted to start a bunch of trouble, and possibly get himself a promotion for doing it, if any of those completely feasible scenarios had occurred, then I would have been in deep doo-doo for sure.

Angry, racing thoughts had created fleeting visions of fragments of each and every one of those possible scenarios across the inside of my forehead, as we walked back out through the entranceway, past the U.S.M.C. emblazoned crates, and I looked from that angle out towards the colonel’s parking place and back to the crates and back out towards the side door of headquarters office building.

If I had been charged with possession of stolen Marine Corps property, anyone who believes that Lt. Barber would have owned up to giving me those stolen government goods please raise their hand. OK. If all of you who raised your hands will kindly give me the numbers to your bank accounts, I have millions of legal dollars that I need to store in them.

I had given Lt. Barber a complete list of the supplies that I needed to be able to continue working in my photo lab, and all he got me was a great big pile of potential problems.

As furiously fleeting thoughts about all of the facts concerning this Marine Corps property situation were racing through my mind, the scowling, growling, mumbling and cursing Lt. Barber and I walked all of the way out of the underground bunker’s entranceway and into the brightly sunlit outdoors.

Lt. Barber turned, shook his hands and arms up and down in his unjust furious frustration, stomped his right foot down and forward towards me, and said, "Jeezus kryste Crews, you have friends in other units who are photographers don’t you?’

I was hotter than the east end of a west bound Nike-Hercules Missile, and getting warmer by the split-second, as I answered, "Yeahhh."

Lt. Barber then inquired angrily, "Well then, why don’t you get them to get you what you need?"

I had asked myself that question many months before that, and I gave Lt. Barber the same answer as I had given myself, "Because they ain’t into that kind of a thing.
You gotta be some kinda hustler to know how to do that and not get caught. They’re not like that."

Then I angrily laid into him with, "Gah-damn man! I gotta have them supplies! I ordered ‘um two gah-damned weeks ago, now where da hell are they?"

"Well bitchity-bidgidy-boop (unintelligible gripes) Crews! I’ll see what I can do, but you oughta try and do something yourself," Lt. Barber blubbered, in a tone more pleading than an army officer should allow himself to use when speaking to a low ranking enlisted man like I was.

I had two friends who were also U.S. Army Photographers stationed on Okinawa. Both had attended army photo lab tech school with me. One was Bruce from Pennsylvania, and the other was a southern boy named Bob.

Bob had landed a job in the smallest and most top secret army intelligence unit on the island. Bob sure as hell had to have a good clean record to land that intel job, but he was in sync with how things worked in the military world. He might have been amiable to a request that he scrounge me up some of his photo lab’s supplies. But I wasn’t ignorant enough to ask him to take that chance for me. Or more precisely, I wasn’t ignorant enough to ask him to take that chance for the 30th Artillery Brigade personnel who wanted me to produce photographs of them at work and play.

Bruce, on the other hand, definitely wasn’t capable of pulling off any midnight scrounging maneuvers for me. He was too gentle of a person. He couldn’t deal with the natural guilt and the worry of getting caught. He also had a good job. He worked for the public information office of a large army intelligence unit. There are scroungers in the military, and there are non-scroungers who often make good use of the scroungers. Bruce was not the scrounger type.

I couldn’t deal with asking Bruce or Bob to scrounge up (steal?) stuff for me. It would not only have jeopardized our friendships, if they got mad, but if they had gotten caught it could have meant some real trouble for them. I was born and raised with an ample supply of common sense, so I was not going to ask a man who is assigned to a military intelligence unit to take stuff from their company for me, because, as you probably know too, they have spies there who spy on the spies.

On top of that, in the springtime of 1971, I was far too stressed out from being saddled with the guilt of knowing that my photo lab negated the emergency use of the decontamination chamber, and worn down by the anger that came from me having to pay out of my pocket for photo equipment and film to do my 30th Arty photo assignments with. I was not going to add midnight scrounging anxieties to that load of garbage which I was saddled with.

Bob and Bruce loved their jobs. When Lt. Barber had tried to talk me into jeopardizing their choice photography jobs, his tone of voice and body language insinuated that I was neither smart enough nor dedicated enough to my job to have considered the idea of asking them to scrounge for me. He was also insinuating that I should go door to door to every army photo lab that I knew of and to beg like a stray dog for the supplies that they may have been short on themselves, that every other army photographer was allowed to order via his company’s supply clerk. That was a like a painful kick in my groin.

It was one painful, crushing thing after the other, for me, over at the Mole Hole that day.

There was, is, and always will be scrounging and swapping of equipment and supplies going on amongst people in the military. I knew about it as a kid.

For one thing there are plenty of scrounging and swapping scenes in war movies. John Wayne often had him a slick scrounger in amongst the troops who were close to him in his war movie’s, and they were always funny and popular to the audience; in the movie The Green Berets the character Peterson was my favorite scrounger of all times. I also knew of a few real scrounging and swapping stories from my military veteran father and uncles when I was growing up. I understand and endorse the afore mentioned activities.

Right after I had informed Lt. Barber that I would not ask my photographer friends to do his job of securing me photography supplies, as he furiously stomped on over to, opened, and walked through the side door of the 30th Arty Bgde headquarters office building, I turned back around, looked hard, and unbelieving, at the pile of U.S.M.C. crates.

I thought about it all.

I realized that I couldn’t get my supplies through regular channels, Lt. Barber couldn’t scrounge up the supplies that I needed, I never lucked into a friendship with an army photographer who was in a position to help me out with scrounged stuff, I hadn’t learned how to form the right connections amongst supply personnel to be able to scrounge up the supplies myself, I came to the shocking, crushing realization that I was never going to get the supplies that I needed. That still hurts. I wanted to continue doing good photography.

My soul had soared during that lightning fast second and a half before the Marine Corps logos on those crates had registered in my mind, and when I had believed, for a pleasantly surprised, jumpin’ up and down, happily relieved, fleeting moment, that I was finally going to be able to print up the photo assignments that I had shot in the previous three weeks plus all of my future photography assignments. But after realizing that I was never going to get the supplies that I needed in order for me to do the job of an army photographer, which I had voluntarily signed up in the army to be trained to do, my spirit was just about thoroughly crushed to death.

I had done a great job as a photographer for the 30th Artillery Brigade, until my supplies ran out.

Lt. Barber wrote some unkind, untrue words about me in my personal army records. He came to the 30th Arty Bgde in January 1971, over three months after my nervous breakdown, and well into the period where I had become fed up with the photo lab situation. I would understand his point of view and why he wrote those things in my records, but he had to have known that my assignment to the 30th Arty and the photo lab were against Army Rules and Regulations.

Or what ever military laws they were against. I have had fellow veterans or VA staff nit-pick at this story when my statements were just a little bit off target. I aimed at whatever laws or rules were broken by my assignment to the 30th Arty as a photographer and the photo lab in the decontamination chamber. For three decades, VA staff and other people have tried to discount just one itsy-bit of this story so that they can say that it is all bullcrap. Sorry to the rest of you, I had to clear that up.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 6 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

No Photo Paper Meant
No Way To Do My Job

The 30th’s officers, their wives and kids, the enlisted men and their families, all appreciated the way that I treated them as my photography subjects. They loved it when I gave copies of my photos to all who asked, not just the ones who ordered me to, and anyone higher in rank than me often either requested or outright ordered me to give them copies. I gave what was right and fair, because photography of that type is there to give the troops moral support. It is all about promoting good moral, so that soldiers can feel good and do their jobs good. I figured that “we were all in it together”, and that the cooks should cook good, the clerks should get their paperwork done right and in a reasonable amount of time, etc.; I believed that everyone of us should do our jobs the best we could, after all, we all worked for each other’s benefit. I kept up that hard work, and the freely giving of my work and my natural, God given photography talent, until my photo supplies ran out. It is that pure and simple.

After the supplies ran out, I simply refused to pay anymore out of my pocket for them.

Then I quit pretending that I had film in my camera when I was shooting photo assignments, as I had done because I had been ordered to do assignments when I had no film for my camera.

We soldiers didn’t have pocket money all the time back then; our pay was low and most guys ran out of cash in the first week after payday; when there was no film in the lab or money for film, I had to go on 30th Arty assignments without film for my camera, it drove me nuts.

When there was no usable photo paper left, and no film that I could trust, as most of it that was stored in my lab was old, expired bulk roll stuff that somebody had been ready throw out when it was given to whoever got it for me, the 30th Arty individuals who were in charge of me still expected me to do photography for them.

It was an impossible situation, a living nightmare—no way out, no way to do what I was ordered to do.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade
dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 7 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

I Receive My Discharge

I began to seriously consider suicide as being the only way out of my impossible situation.

I mentioned my suicidal thoughts to some of my friends in our barracks one evening, and one of them stopped that nonsense right then and there. He was a black guy named Ellis from St. Louis. Ellis was a wounded Vietnam combat veteran, who had grown up in a tough ghetto neighborhood. When I let my suicidal feelings slip out in front of those army buddies of mine, my close friend Ellis was the only one who picked up on it, amongst the friendly joking and laughter going on all around us at the time. Ellis walked over away from me a few steps, turned back and halfway looked at my face, clenched his fists tightly at the end of stiff arms stuck down at his sides, and said, “Crews! Crews, don’t you ever let me hear you say that again. Let em tell you something brother. This army ain’t worth dying for. I found that out over in the ‘Nam. All that shit I saw over there and now I’m right here with you in this stinkin place and you tell me you wanna kill yourself over this shit? Man! I am going to go home after this and forget about this place and that gahd-damned Vietnam. You are going to go home and forget about this place too. We are both going to go home to our families, and we’re gonna forget about the army, and move on with our lives like this shit (military bullshit) never happened. You got that brother?”

Yes I did.

Thank you Ellis, I love ya man.

My depression became so severe that I couldn’t function enough to finally be able to write my Congressman or go to the Army Inspector General and report what was happening to me at the 30th Arty. The thought of reporting the situation had come into my mind on many days and it came to me everyday right after there was no hope for my photography career to keep going, when the paper ran out and most of the film was too old to trust.

The evidence to prove my case against the 30th Arty was all there. The lab was in the Mole Hole, I was still not working at a unit roster listed MOS (as far as I know), the Marine Corp crates were there at the Mole Hole. So there was enough rope to try and hang a few of the individual 30th Arty personnel who were guilty.

That is a lot to ask of a twenty year old enlisted man.

The guilty had so much more power than me that it seemed like a suicide mission, and it might have been. They may not have gotten to send me to Vietnam, but I would have spent the rest of my army enlistment watching my back to avoid being stabbed there, long distance style, by 30th Arty Bgde army lifers who had old army buddies in army units all over the world. My personal records could have been sabotaged, or they could have ‘disappeared’, especially my pay file. I knew of that happening as revenge tactics in the military. The word could have been put out on me that I was a trouble maker, or a rat, or something like that.

You must know from what you have experienced in your life, that the victim is often made to look like the bad guy.

Yes, that was a lot more than most people expect a young man, who was just two years out of high school, to stand up and jump into by himself.

I left the crates of Marine Corp photo paper for Lt. Barber to worry about, I wasn’t going anywhere near them again. I wouldn’t go near the photo lab anymore at all. I wandered around aimlessly or laid on my bunk in a depressed funk. That was not how I desired to perform my military service to my country.

I couldn’t care anymore. The undo stress had depressed me to the point that it didn’t matter anymore what they might do to me. My spirit had been so thoroughly crushed that it was nearly of no use to anyone at all.

The only reason I can figure that they didn’t put me in the stockade for dereliction of duty was, because they knew that they had no right to tell me to do photo assignments in the first place. It might not look good in a court-martial if I used that as a defense and brought it all to the attention of the wrong people—like soldiers who were out to advance their own career by putting the legal screws to any other soldiers, no matter what their rank or position was. So they sent me to work in Gunner’s Gym handing out tennis shoes and basket balls to GIs who wanted to shoot some hoops after work.

That left me with nothing to be proud of.

I felt like a complete failure. I had failed to be an integral part of defending my country’s freedom, as I had expected to be doing one day ever since I had been a little boy growing up in the USA and loving my family, my country, and American style freedom.

I have taken some flack from one or two other military veterans, about me being angry about not being able to requisition equipment and supplies. What they said was that during their time in the military they had to make do without certain pieces of equipment and some supplies which they had needed to complete their assigned military tasks, but they had learned to adapt to their given situations with what ever they could find or put together and get the job done. They asked me why I hadn’t adapted with what was available to do the job.

In the U.S. Army Photographic Laboratory Technician School, I was taught adaptive techniques like how to adapt to producing photographs in poorly supplied, out in the boondocks type, combat areas by doing things like adjusting photo developing chemicals for use in dirty swamp water and, if I remember correctly, how to use any available medical and other chemicals to mix my own film and paper developing solutions. But, as far as I know, film and photo printing paper have to be manufactured and delivered to a photographer in order to get the job done.

An instructor at photo lab tech school had showed us how to make a “pin hole camera” out of an old box; but using one of those cameras requires a long film exposure time, each sheet of film must be loaded and unloaded into and out of the box in complete darkness, and that just ain’t gonna’ do the job at an officers club banquet or soldier of the month ceremony. In other words, “what da hell did you expect me ta do, build my own damn camera outa scrap materials?”

I had to buy and supply most of my camera equipment, and some of my film, to do my assigned military photography tasks, when I was stationed in the 30th Arty Bgde on Okinawa, that was more than enough of my money, from my meager army pay, being used by me to adapt and get the job done. I wasn’t paying for expensive photo printing paper too.

Had I gone ahead and paid for the photo paper, film, and then quite possibly photo development chemicals, out of my pocket, it would have either been a case of bribery or giving in to extortion.

Although I may have shown some sort of inner weakness or personal flaw by not stepping forward to ‘blow the whistle’ on the 30th Arty Bgde for having that illegal photo lab and also me as an unauthorized photographer, I would have been an even weaker person if I had given in to their extortion style, veiled threat that I either quietly acquired my equipment and supplies anyway I could and did everything they said, or else I would be ‘volunteered’ to go dive into that deadly quagmire going on in Vietnam at the time. Had I given in to those extortive ways of the 30th Arty personnel who were in direct control of me, I may have gone back to civilian life to become a financially stable photographer, but I’d most likely possess too weak of a character to be writing this revealing story about my life.

Or, if I had eagerly gone along with the 30th Arty’s bullcrap and had willingly paid for most of what was needed to produce nice pictures of them at work and play, I would have been some kind of a conniving briber. If I were the type of a man who would have paid money out my personal funds to go along with that bullcrap in order to stay out of Vietnam, well then, instead of being the low income, depressed and lonely victim of service connected mental health disorders which I am today, I’d probly be a back stabbing, lying, cheating, conniving individual who may have been financially successful in his life, but who was a dismal excuse for a human being. I’d be the self centered kind of a man who only looked out for his own good, a man who had no love to share with this world of ours. You probably wouldn’t want an individual like that setting across the table from you at one of your family get togethers, like Christmas dinner at your house. That is not my cup of tea; I couldn’t live with being like that.

For most Veterans Administration personnel, U.S. Army personnel, politicians, and others whom I have related the facts of my time stationed in the 30th Arty Bgde to, this is all either a figment of my imagination, or it don’t mean a thing to them cause it’s my problem, and they don’t wanna’ hear about it. It seems to me that as far as those government personnel are concerned nothing about my life means anything in this world at all.

I was ready, willing, and able to work hard at any job that the army assigned me to do, whether it was as a photographer, a typewriter tapping clerk, an infantryman, or whatever the army needed me to do. I had expected, though, that the army would give me at least most of the equipment and supplies needed to do the job. I also expected to be given the opportunity to work hard for promotions in rank.

My personal military records are a full of crap. The 30th Arty Bgde sergeants and officers, who were in direct charge of me, put it all over the place in my army records that I refused to continue doing my photography job, not that I was illegally assigned to the brigade and had worked hard for them until my supplies ran out. Either the army’s records are incorrect, or I have just written one outstanding piece of fictional literature.

Old military records are brought up in situations like court cases, political endeavors, and employment opportunities every day. I have been living with the fear of dealing with the lies that are contained in my incorrect personal army records, in one of those type of situations, for my entire adult life. As long as those incorrect records are there to haunt me and possibly be brought up and used against me by someone, the traumatic effects of those lies will continue to effect me in a negative way.

Though I had enlisted for three years, one year over the military draft’s requirement of two years, so that I could be guaranteed photography school, I was discharged from the army on a General Discharge due to unsuitability after only two years in the service of my country. I still have full veteran’s rights and benefits, but that unsuitability garbage takes all of my pride of service away from me and my family. If to be suitable for military service means that I pay for my own equipment and supplies, and most importantly that I do not ‘blow the whistle’ on any gross infractions of military rules and regulations, then it is most certainly true that I am unsuitable.

My Army discharge may not have been legal. If the 30th Arty Bgde was not authorized to have me there in the first place, then were they authorized to sign the paperwork to give me a General Discharge?

I believe that because they were not legally authorized to have me in their brigade, they were not legally authorized to fill out and sign the paperwork that lead to my discharge from the Army.

Sometimes I wonder if I am still legally in the Army. This is a serious question. I have often thought that the way to get the Army to investigate my claims about my 30th Arty Bgde situation is to sue for my back pay, but then the Army would probably say that I allowed this to happen, so they might declare me to be a deserter. My three year enlistment was sure enough up a long time ago, but the Army still had to legally discharge me for it to be all over. It’s a set of possibilities that a good lawyer might have an answer to.

My discharge was upgraded to honorable about twenty-five years ago.

The upgrade was not because of my particular situation, it was due to some class action suit won against the army by other veterans who had received unsuitability discharges and had disagreed with the way that the army determined unsuitability or some part of the process. What this means is that still I need to clear my name.

On November 18, 1971, when I returned back to the United States of America, from Okinawa, to receive my General Discharge, and I stepped back onto American soil, I did not feel at home again in my own country.

When the actions and lies of those individuals in the 30th Artillery Brigade, who had kept that photo lab situation going, had crushed my soul, and when that devastating bullcrap of theirs had prevailed over the plain truth, I not only, justly, put the blame on them, I saw it as a failure of the entire system of American military rules and regulations. I also saw it as a failure of all who had taught me to value America as the best country that the world has ever known, and a land worth working for, fighting for, and dying for. That made me feel like I had lost my country, my home, my family, and all that used to be me.

I don’t know what my family believes happened on Okinawa, or what my father and mother and grandparents and a few of my aunts and uncles believed before they passed away, I’ll never have the chance to make sure that they all know the true facts now. But it sure as hell hurt them all bad to see me come back angry, depressed, and a totally different young man from the one they had nurtured and loved as he grew up and whom they were proud to see do his duty by joining the military instead of running off to Canada or dodging the draft in some other way like many other young American men did at the time.

Due to my severe depression, and acquired sleep disorder, among other problems, I am now living on a small non-service connected Veterans Administration disability pension. I am non-service connected for it because the VA only recognizes the fact that depression has screwed up my life something terrible; they do not acknowledge the cause as being service connected, because they don’t believe a word that I have said here in this non-fictional narrative, even though VA doctors and staff have heard these facts from me over and over again for over thirty long, suffering years. Consequently, the VA refuses to treat the cause of my depression and to help me to recover as fully as possible.

I am also limited in what I can do in my daily life by degenerative spinal injuries that I received in vehicular accidents, that were not my fought, which occurred after my military service.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 8 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

Rehab

In the late summer of 1970, when my sleep disorder began to take its toll on me, I tried to get to sleep by drinking some beer late in the evenings. That did not work.

So I began to go out to the track in the evening and run a mile or two, then went to the enlisted man’s club and had a few brews. That combination of exercise and alcohol didn’t garner me any better sleep either.

Unfortunatly, I began to drink more and more beer in a failed attempt to become sedated enough to be able to get some sleep and some solid, peaceful rest. That escalated to using booze for self treatment of my growing depression.

Before that, I had usually only drank alcohol on weekend nights while socializing with other people.

That booze treatment does not work for anyone, as far as I know. It may work to relieve a short blast of depression that some people go through, but for chronic depression it is one of the worst things a person can do.

Some mental health counseling programs in the Veterans Administration, and some civilian, consider alcohol abuse as a symptom of other problems, others say it is a only cause.

My depression, then the subsequent sleep disorder, came first. Then I drank non-socially to relieve emotional pain and suffering. I have said this many times to various VA councilors, but they never believe anything that I ever say to them about what happened to me on Okinawa, so they say that alcohol caused the depression. This also frees the VA from having to pay me service connected moneys to compensate for my depressive disorder.

I never drank alcohol when I was working in the photo lab, nor during the work day at any time.

I did drink on duty when I had to photograph 30th Arty Brigade’s formal affairs at both officers and NCO clubs on weekend nights. But I did not consume intoxicants before I went to the events. The higher ranking soldiers at those affairs always ordered drinks for me, after I had taken one of my famous candid photos of them, that they did not expect till they saw my flash go off, and then realized that they were looking good and obviously having fun when I took a shot of them partying with their wives, friends, and comrades. I did not drink too much to be able to “keep up the good work”, as many event attendees gratefully said to me, as I moved amongst them photographing them all to my heart’s content.

My alcohol drinking became a serious problem for me later in my life. I smoked some marihuana along the way too, and tried to beat my blues with some other drugs, some illegal, some prescribed to me. The only illegal drug that I ever consumed very much of was weed.

I did not use alcohol all during my adult life. It came and went in stretches of several years drinking, months of not, months drinking, weeks not doing it, days on, days off of the stuff, then over a year sober at one time, then back to drinking again. I rarely ever drank booze before late in the afternoon, I never needed that morning shot to start my day.

I was in two VA alcohol and drug abuse rehab programs.

Just before they shipped me off to the first rehab, they gave my brain a Cat Scan to see if I had organic problems causing me to think up this 30th Arty story and actually believe it. They try anything that they can think of to prove me to be lying about what happened in the army.

The first rehab was the wrong one for me. It was a sixty day recovery and treatment program set up in the Coatesville, Pennsylvania VA Hospital by and for heroin addicts—mostly hard core junkies from the Philadelphia area.

The junkies in that rehab gave me a hard time, because they figured that my stories about bumming spare change in front of a neighborhood bar, to get me a quart of beer, and peacefully passing the pot pipe amongst my friends was nothing compared to theirs about stealing $500.00 worth of merchandise a day, to sell for less than what it was worth, in order to support a $200.00 a day heroin habit. Then when they had no dope or money they would beat and stab one of their friends and steal their friend’s last bag of heroin.

I was put there because it was the toughest VA drug and alcohol program on the east coast.

My life was so screwed up, because of the alcohol and drug abuse, my untreated service connected depression, and my added anger and frustration at the VA, that they misdiagnosed me as having a far more severe substance abuse problem than I had. My anger and frustration were obvious in the way that I responded to them in group therapy meetings, where they put me down for saying anything about what happened to me in the Army. The VA staff, and some patients, showed disrespect towards me, along with accusations of me being full of bull about my 30th Arty Bgde experiences, much of the time while I was in any VA hospital. The longer that I stayed in that VA rehab, the worse it got.

I re-injured my lower back while I was in that rehab; my body was clearly wrenched out of whack. There was a rock hard muscle spasm in my lower right side that felt like a boulder was under my skin, but the rehab staff said that I was faking it. There is no way to flex or voluntarily harden the involuntary muscle that was locked up in spasms. That was another nightmare—in a hospital and being refused treatment for severe, crippling pain.

I reluctantly left that rehab and went to begin a fifty-eight day VA sponsored stay in a halfway house. I was reluctant to leave the hospital, because it was obvious to me that my back problem was too far gone for me to survive out there without getting an operation on it first. The VA rehab staff declared that I had become “institutionalized” and didn’t want to leave their institution at all. I didn’t tell them this, but I could barely stomach being in the place or in the company of most of the jive-ass junkies in there. I did let them know that I definitely wanted to get out of there and go back to living a free life again. I had to leave the hospital and go to the halfway house.

The very next morning I could neither stand up straight nor hardly ambulate at all.

I had to go back to the VA hospital. But not before the staff at that halfway house had denied me the use of a pair of crutches to help me make it to the halfway house’s transportation van. There were several pairs of crutches in the resident, recovering alcoholic, nurse’s office, which was right across the hall from the bedroom where I was, nearly helplessly, laying on the floor while involuntarily curled up in agonizing pain. When I asked to use a pair of crutches, a heartless halfway house recovering alcoholic, live in, substance abuse councilor said to me, “If I told you that there was a bottle (of booze) out there that you could have, you would crawl out there to get it. If you want to go get in that van and ride back to the hospital, you can crawl out there to it.”

That halfway house councilor was a veteran who had completed a different rehab program at the VA hospital which I had just come from. That program was for veterans who’s substance abuse problems were mostly from heavy alcohol consumption, and who also suffered from emotional disorders, and that is the rehab that I believe the VA should have sent me to.

Because that know it all, asinine councilor wouldn’t let me use the crutches, nor allow anyone to help me walk out to the transportation van, it was a slow, wobbly, painful struggle to ambulate out there, but I made it to the van. The van driver dropped me off out in back of the hospital, the snidely jackass refused take me all the way up to the hospital’s admissions area entrance, so I collapsed onto an outside bench and had to get a passing patient to go get me a wheelchair and a nurse’s aid in order for me to make it all the way into the admissions area.

That stay in the VA hospital lasted for three and a half months, for two reasons.

One reason was that it was absolutely best to see if my back injury would set itself right by giving me bed rest. That is normal procedure. They kept me on that status, in a medical ward, for over two months though, which I believe was about twice as long as usual. They should have realized that after a month or so it wasn’t going to right itself.

The second reason that they kept me in there for three and a half months was because certain nursing staff in there thought that I was faking it, and they did not want to give me the costly medical test that I needed to have in order to prove my injury. I affirmed that fact, well hell some of them treated me like an unwelcome stray dog, so I knew what was up, but I affirmed that fact when I asked two friendly nurses, who worked on two separate shifts, about it, and they said that it was true.

The VA finally did that medical test, and it showed a real bad ruptured disc in my lower back. Then the VA did the back operation. After the operation I spent a few more weeks in the hospital receiving physical therapy. Then I was discharged, and I returned to the halfway house.

You may be wondering why in the world would I go back to that halfway house.

I had to keep pursuing sobriety, because I knew who I was, who I am, and that guy is all right in a lot of ways, flaws and all, and he has always wanted to live his life to its fullest. I have never lost hope. I had to pursue sobriety with all of my might.

My life had been mostly shrouded in misery for the eight or nine years previous to me entering that rehab. During those years, I had some good times here and there, along the way, some real good times, and funny, wild and crazy adventures, but I was always aware that my life had a dark cloud of depression floating through it at all times. I didn’t call it depression, or anything at all, back then, except maybe The Blues, but I was painfully aware that something was wrong with me. I needed to get sober in order to stop the various problems which over indulgence in alcohol and marijuana cause, and then to be able to put up a strong resistance against the soul suppressing effects of that dark cloud, who’s clinical name is depression.

If I had allowed the asinine antics of certain individual employees, patients, and residents in recovery to make the rehab or halfway house unbearable to me, the only safe place available(?) for me to live, was back home to live at my parent’s house. That meant going back to the neighborhood where I had grown up and had the easiest time at pursuing nightly intoxication, and where I would again be a puzzling disappointment to my family and long time friends. They had no way to understand, nor was I capable of communicating to them, the soul shattering severity of the impossible situation which I had been forced to endure while in the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa, and it being the basic reason for my debilitating depression, with its exhausting sleep disorder.

I couldn’t stand the idea of once again placing a sad excuse for my self back upon the shoulders of all the people whom I cared for most in this world; I was ashamed of and appalled at myself, because during those eight or nine years previous to entering rehab, I had been a very unstable, unproductive person—which was 180 degrees opposite of who I was when I landed on Okinawa the first time (read my Maine stories). That left homelessness on the streets of my hometown or somewhere else as the only other alternative to not completing the rehab and halfway house recovery programs and then getting a job, along with a place to live on my own.

Somehow, early in the recovery process, the VA had convinced me that a rehab followed directly by a stay in a halfway house was the best route to sobriety, so I was going that way no matter what kind of ignorant crap any asinine individuals might throw at me.

Having the VA rehab program staff, in chorus with a bunch of Philadelphia junkies, call me an outright faker about my back injury put a real damper on any good that the rehab was designed to do for a person in substance abuse treatment. My back operation and post-op recovery time split up my stays in the rehab and the halfway house, and that is not good, because it is best to do the two types of treatment programs in a continuous flow.

The splitting up of recovery treatments would not have been so bad if the VA rehab staff had come across the hospital courtyard to the medical ward to see me now and then, and to wheelchair me over for some rehab group meetings. But they were convinced that I was faking my injury and didn’t want anything to do with me. About a week after I had my operation, on a wheelchair trip to the hospital’s little retail store, I encountered the director of the rehab. He couldn’t look me in my eyes as he quickly spoke to me, acknowledged that he had heard that I had the operation, and then he quietly moved on.

My post-op recovery time, and then my stay at the halfway house, were both peppered with a complete lack of any apologies, or apologetic behavior, on the part of any of the asinine VA staff, halfway house staff, or fellow patients in recovery who had incorrectly declared me to be faking my back problem.

All of that insane stuff about me faking my back injury sort of nixed most of the good that the sixty day rehab treatment program, and the fifty-eight day half-way house stay, might have done for me. I was justifiably angry, frustrated, and depressed when I left that half-way house. Thankfully, my depression wasn’t as bad as when had I entered the VA rehab though, because all of that time just being sober was enough to eliminate most of the aggravating effect on my depression which substance abuse had.

The VA has always maintained a self-serving misconception that they were as helpful to me in my first VA substance abuse recovery program as they could be. That’s bologna.

On the first day that I left that half-way house, I bought myself a quart of beer.

It was my decision to pick up a drink every single time that I did it, I take full responsibility for that.

The second VA rehab was fairly nice and was well suited to me. I am still thankful for the help that the sober minded, good hearted VA staff there gave me, and the fellowship of my brother veterans who were in there with me. What they did for me in there during that time helped me to stay sober for almost a year, after I completed the rehab’s twenty-eight day treatment program.

I slipped up about a year after that rehab and went back out drinking again for several years at a very sporadic rate of several days drinking in the evenings, then weeks of not touching a drop. Just enough to keep up the misery, but not enough to kill me.

In June of 1994, I was determined that my substance abusing days had to end. Or I was aware that the end was near. It was quit or die. I craved sobriety worse than the breath of life itself. That sporadic rate of drinking was enough to render my life down to barely survivable.

Even though my substance abuse was not a full time preoccupation to me in 1994, I had to get, and stay, sober in order to get well in any other way.

During the first week of June 1994, I went down to the Fort Howard, Maryland Veterans Administration Medical Center and asked to be admitted to detox. My second rehab, and detox, had been in that facility. They said that there were no empty beds for me. Nothing they could do about that. As long as it was absolutely true. They told me to come back another time, as long as it was during daylight working hours, when the full staff was on duty. I knew from that previous time in detox and rehab that patients had indeed been admitted at night, but their rules seemed to change when I was concerned.

The next week, I went back down to Fort Howard, Maryland VAMC and tried to enter detox again.

I drove drunk down to there late at night, and walked into the admissions area. I was quite well drunk, but not in a blackout, I avoided those terrible things by keeping my booze consumption down to a nine 12oz. beers per drinking night maximum and a six 12oz. beers minimum.

The only staff member in the admissions area at the time, a male nurse, nurse’s aid or something, got real uptight about me coming in at night and bitched about having to now go summon the only doctor on duty to process me in. He did not say that they could not admit me, just, “Oh man! Now I gotta go and look for the only doctor on duty in the hospital right now!” He was so nasty about it, he didn’t want to get up off his lazy ass for me, that pissed me off, and I told him to forget it and I left.

Fort Howard VAMC is out on a peninsula, there are no side walks on the 4-5 miles of road that a person must use to get there, there was no bus service down there anymore, there was no person with me in admissions that night, it had to be obvious to that VA staff member, who didn’t want to help me be admitted, that by me leaving meant that I may be going out to drive while under the influence of alcohol, as I obviously was. That angered me even more.

The wearing down effect of years of frustrated anger at the way that the VA had treated me time and time again, the residual effects of the 30th Arty’s treatment of me which the VA had exacerbated by their piss poor treatment of me, the exhaustion caused by the lousy life I endured at the time, all piled up on top of my intoxication. When I made it into the driver’s seat of the car that I had been living out of, by the grace of God I went no further. I couldn’t deal with the guilt of driving back out that road in the condition that I was in.

I spent the night there in the VAMC parking lot, while sitting in that driver’s seat and suffering severely from intense emotional pain and distress. It must have been a real pretty site to see. Around daybreak another male nurse, nurses aid, or something, pulled into the parking lot, parked, got out and headed in towards the hospital to go start his day shift. He must have had just the opposite kind of attitude, about life, his work, and us veterans, as that night shift staff member had. When he walked by me sitting there in the car looking so pretty well shattered, he noticed it right away, even though it was still a mostly dark outside. He bent down, looked in at me, and asked if I needed any help. I said no, he shook his head a tad bit, smiled at me, for me, and walked on. He was a mature, reasonable man who instinctively knew when he could or couldn’t help a person. But he may have kept an eye on me from a distance, as he went about starting his work day.

When it was good and light out I left. There was no way that I was going back in there to be rejected again that day.

The next morning, I drove back down to the Ft. Howard VAMC. I knew that there was a good chance of a patient moving out of detox on any morning, after their allotted days were up. That way I would be first in line for that bed.

But, as I said, I only drank in the evenings. The VA staff gave me a breathalyzer, and I passed that test as being sober at that exact time, though I had been drinking the previous night. The nurse who had administered the test said, “We can’t admit you, there’s nothing for us to detox you for.”

I said, ” I told them (other VA staff) last week that I only drink at night! They said last week that the beds were all full, they told me then not to come in at night, but to come in during the day, when all the right staff was here to admit me, but I only drink at night. I have been using a friend of mine’s old car to live in. It’s out there in the parking lot now. I have to drive around to survive. I will probably drive drunk tonight if you do not detox me. I can’t help my self. Don’t you want to get another drunk driver off the street?”

Her reply was that I was not in need of a detoxification from any intoxicating substance.

“Oh yes I am,” I said, “I have smoked some pot this week, give me a urine test.”

She said that the VA doesn’t consider marijuana something to be detoxed from.

I was shattered. I needed help.

I went outside to where the patients hung out at picnic tables while smoking tobacco and socializing. I figured out who the guys in the rehab program were by the fact they were wearing street clothes, not hospital pajamas, and they had patient’s ID wrist bands on. I asked them if there were beds open in detox. They figured up who was leaving detox that morning and coming to the rehab that day, how many beds were empty the previous night, and counted out seven empty beds waiting there for me. There was almost no way that seven detox beds could be filled in one day. I told them about the staff turning me down for admission because of the breathalyzer test.

One fellow veteran said, “Hey man, you gotta come in here all woooo-woooo-woooo, ya know what I mean.” He pointed to his buddy standing next to him and said, “He was smashed at three in the afternoon when he got here, they let ‘im right in. Ya gotta come in pickled, or they won’t admit ya.”

I informed them that I got too sick with a terrible headache every time that I drank that early, and they reiterated their advice to come back in the afternoon with a full load on.

Much of the reason that my life was so miserable back then was because of my depression. But, I was well aware that the substance abuse definitely caused, and also seriously aggravated, some of my mental health problems at the time. I was not in denial about this at all. I knew that as long as I abused my life it would only get worse. I had to stop that self abusive activity in order to be in a healthy enough condition for me to be able to win any forward ground in my battle against depression. I had to get the VA’s help, which I had earned the right to by my military service, to detox and begin living a sober life again, then pursue in-depth treatment for my depression. I needed to detox, and then maybe go through another twenty-eight days in the rehab.

On that June 1994 afternoon at the Fort Howard, Maryland VA Hospital, I was at the end of my rope.

I drove out of that place and headed on down the road.

I needed money to drink beer later that day, and I found some aluminum windows and a storm door in a dumpster. I sold them to the recycler, and spent the rest of that afternoon hanging out at a long time friend of mine’s house. My friend fronted me a dime of weed, that I wanted to smoke while drinking some beer later that night. Marijuana eases upset stomachs, and that helped keep me from getting too ill in my gut and brain when I drank the amount of booze which I knew that I needed to get “woooo-woooo-woooo”. It also helped ease the onset of a hang over, when I smoked some just before trying to go to sleep at the end of a drinking night.

I waited till almost dark and bought six large cans (24oz.ers I think they were) of Harp Lager. I was ready to roll.

I drove down to my nephew’s house that was close to the Ft. Howard VA Hospital. I hung around there out in the darkness of a tiny stretch of woods next to his place, and got as high as I ever wanted to be, when I had used to want to get high. I was miserable though, so I avoided my nephew, and he stayed in his house watching TV or something with a few of his friends.

I was in a considerably confused frame of mind. Twenty-some years of Veterans Administration bullshit clogged my brain.

When I drove on down to the VA that night, well, if someone would have dragged me out of that car and had shot me for being that intoxicated while operating a motor vehicle on a public road, I’d a told St. Peter not to hold it against them when it was their turn to try to pass through the Pearly Gates. I will always feel deep guilt about driving like that. It was the worst I ever was while driving.

It was around 10 o’clock at night, when I entered the admissions area of the Ft. Howard VA.

The staff there that night were about as hostile as they could be to me. They were determined not to admit me. I told them that I was drunk (it was more than obvious), I know you have a bed for me in detox, I have been in the detox and rehab here before, I need to get my head cleared out and my life on track, let me in.

Next thing I know one of the councilors who worked in the rehab, Jimmy, and who remembered me, is standing there saying, “Look Crews, you’re an alcoholic. Alcoholics always want everything that they want right now. You can’t have everything right when you want it.”

“Everything right when I want it?” I said. “I was down here three other times in the past week. I was here this morning. She (the nurse who was standing beside me) gave me a breathalyzer.”

“No I didn’t,” said the nurse, “you weren’t here this morning.”

“What?” I blasted out. “You never gave me back my VA patient ID card, it’s still in my file, I called here about it, when I couldn’t find it to put back in my wallet later. Look in my records, it’s in my records that I was here. I know if you’re still here you worked a long day and you’re tired, yeah, you were the first one I saw when I was the first one to walk into admissions this morning. You walked in at (I gave the exact time), how the hell would I know that if I hadn’t been here? ”

“Well I don’t know, but you weren’t here this morning,” was her cold, terse reply.

A doctor came in with my file in his hand, and introduced himself to me, then looked totally unbelieving of me as I spoke. The he pulled my ID card out from under a paper clip that held it in my file.

“See! There’s my ID card! I was here this morning.” I was getting justifiably pissed off again.

That nurse was as cold and brutal to me as a Nazi interrogator, “Well your ID card is in there, but that doesn’t prove that you were in here this morning.”

They were way over the line of reason on this one, and I started getting real upset, “What the hell is wrong with all you? It is in my file that I was here. Look it up! He’s (the doctor) looking in there. Well, did you find it?”

He did.

I was in a bad emotional place by then, I was about to lose it.

I began to loose my grip, “Aw jeezus kryste almighty, this is every gah-damn time I deal with you people. You been calling me a liar for twenty gah-damn years about all I say happened to me in the army, I was called a liar by the VA when my back was out of whack, and then they had to operate on it, now you call me a liar about something that I just proved you wrong on and you say I don’t know what I need when I say I need a detox for kryste sake. When do you people quit?”

Jimmy asks, “Well what happened to you in the army?”

I gave him a quick, bitter tasting lowdown on what happened.

But then Jimmy jumps in on me, “Look at me,” he pokes his right index finger into his chest, “I did two tours in Vietnam. I’m an alcoholic too. I know what you need. You don’t need detox. Now go on out there and come back next Wednesday, we will have an opening in the program then. Come back then if you’re serious about getting sober, and you want to get back in the program again.”

You may say, at this point, that the VA staff is well trained, they know what their doing, so they’re always right, they’re never wrong, and I have no bone to pick with them about this. I disagree with that mind set.

They suddenly realized that I had driven down there. Unlike when I had driven down there on that previous night, when only the one lazy ass staff member was in the admissions area, there were too many staff in the admissions office this time who all knew that they’d be responsible for sending a drunk driver back out on the road.

They asked me who they could call to come and get me.

I told them that there was no one to come get me, and I wasn’t leaving.

They told me that I had to leave the hospital, right then and there. I told them that if I left to walk out of there that, “something bad is going to happen to me.”

It felt like my insides were broiling from anger and frustration, caused by the twenty-plus year build up of all that I have informed you about so far. I was thinking that if I went out and walked up the lonely, dark road out of there, I was afraid of either exploding inside, from the intense, painful pressure of all those angering memories raging inside of me, or I might involuntarily walk out into the Chesapeake Bay and swim away.

They looked in my file to see who my emergency contact was. It was my mother.

Those ignoramuses called my mother.

During two rehabs, and three VA hospital stays for my degenerative spinal injuries, I had been taught all about VA hospital patients’ rights to privacy. We were taught to answer a pay phone in the hall with, “I don’t know if he is a patient here, let me go ask.” Even if the patient that they had asked for was standing right next to you. It is illegal to photograph a VA patient on hospital grounds. If my mother had called the VAMC to ask if I was a patient there, she would be told yes if I was there, but not why I was there. I can’t remember all that we were taught, but that should be enough for you to know that I had every reason to be angry about them calling my mother.

They called my mother and told her that I “was drunk again” and that she had to come down there and get me.

My mother could have been too ill to deal with hearing that. She could have gotten real mad and come down there and started a lot of trouble in the admissions office. What if a drunk gets into a fight with their emergency contact during the drive home. It is highly likely that someone who is called and told that their loved one is drunk and can’t drive may say to let the drunk rot, we’re done with helping him. There are plenty of potential bad outcomes to a situation where a VA patient’s emergency contact is told over the phone that their loved one is drunk and needs to be removed from the VA as soon as possible.

When them ignoramuses informed me that they had called my mother, I went off like a fireworks fountain. Thirty some years of emotional pain, frustration, and justifiable anger, erupted out of me. It was similar to my breakdown on October 20, 1970. Except this time I was sedated by beer and pot, had it not been for that, I would have torn that place apart.

Instead of grabbing up furniture and throwing it all over the place, as I had felt a nearly uncontrollable urge to do, I sat there nearly frozen in place on a low, metal stool. Years of emotional pain exploded up and out from everywhere deep inside of me. It came up from the depths of my soul; a soul that had been crushed and crammed as far down inside of me as it could fit. It blurted out of my mouth in the form of gut wrenching, embarrassing mutterings, that I neither remember well nor want to. Some of it liquefied and poured out of my eye sockets, then down my slowly twisting face. It seemed to erupt out of the entire outer layer of my skin, like I was covered with a million microscopic sized volcanoes.

It was humiliating. It was better than destroying property and physically hurting any innocent VA staff who would have been called to the scene to help subdue me.

Let me wrap this up.

They claimed that two doctors had heard that “something bad is going to happen to me” remark and it was interpreted as being suicidal. They wanted to commit me for a mandatory three day observation deal, but they have no transport to a VA psychiatric hospital at night. They called the county police to transport me to a county hospital.

Meanwhile, my sister picks up our nephew who lived near there, so he could drive the car/camper off the VA grounds, and they came to get me. They come in, I’m a humiliating mess, the staff tell them all about what is going on, I tell the staff to quit divulging my private patient info without the required written consent from me to do so, they ignored my rights.

I spent five days in the county shrink tank.

All they had to do was to admit me into detox the first place. But I had insisted that I was right, and first they had insisted that I was a liar, then that I was wrong about needing hospitalization. Ever since I started trying to receive help for a problem which they refuse to acknowledge, the VA never believes a word I say.

I haven’t touched a drop of alcoholic beverage ever since that terrible day in June 1994—thank God.

When some people read this about my substance abuse, they will declare that I am not worthy of any help from the VA, that anything bad that happened to me I deserve. It may be them with the same problem one day, whether they want it or not. Substance abuse occurs in every family.

My criminal record is clean, and I only got one traffic ticket in my entire life. And that ticket was for doing my wild Indian hanging off the side of his horse and shooting at pedestrians trick on a motorcycle, when a cop was watching. I saw the cop, I was sober at the time, but man o’ day did I have a bad hang over and was not thinking clearly.

I have used at least ten or twelve different legally prescribed drugs which were supposed to alleviate my sleep disorder, not one worked for me. Some anti-depressants that the doctors put me on worked to alleviate my depression fairly well. I am afraid of the long term side effects of those drugs though. More importantly, to my way of determining how much chemical additive to run through my body and brain, is the question, how high of a dose would I need if the VA acknowledged and treated me for the cause of depression that I have written about here in this document? Due to that point of view, which I hold today, I am not taking any drugs for depression or sleep disorder.

Sobriety has helped me to be a better person, but I am still depressed a lot. That depression stinks.

But! Fortunately, I think more clearly, and act more responsibly, without the haze from intoxicating substances fogging my thoughts.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 9 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

The History Of My Quest For
A Service Connected Disability Rating

Another thing that I have gone through over the years, when I deal with the VA and talk to them about my mental health condition being service connected, is that the VA’s pamphlets and guide books to a veteran’s rights all say that a service connected disability is only awarded for “a disease or injury incurred in or aggravated by military service.” There are plenty of veterans receiving service connected disability ratings for mental health disorders. I know veterans with such disability ratings. I don’t know how many times VA employees have told me that there are no service connected ratings for mental health disorders. About two years ago, I found a web site that lists the number of veterans in each state who receive service connected disability ratings for depression and other mental health disorders. But as far as I am concerned, in the minds of the some VA staff, that all does not exist. That’s another living nightmare they put me through.

In the past two years, I have gone to several different VA psychiatrists about establishing my service connection.

My assigned primary care giver VA psychiatrist said that he didn’t know me back then in 1970-71, so he could not make a decision on what had happened.

The next one said that he could not make that determination in the time allowed for an appointment, or several appointments.

The third one, Dr. Jacob Tendler of the Baltimore, Maryland VAMC, took the time to interview me. He had to, because the Board of Veterans Appeals ordered him to as part of my disability rating process.

Dr. Tendler said that my problem was something which I have never been diagnosed with before. Not by the myriad of VA and civilian mental health care doctors and councilors whom I have seen since my army discharge. He said that I have Adjustment Disorder.

By the definition of Adjustment Disorder, its symptoms begin within three months of a person’s life going through a traumatic change, and then the symptoms last for no more than six months. As far as I know, he never identified the causing stressor, so it must be my arrival in Okinawa that he says caused my traumatic stress. I loved that place. Read my story entitled A Wild Start, that is published on the Japan Policy Research Institute's web site, and on Magic-City-News.com, to see exactly how nicely I adjusted to Okinawa, like a hatchling Snapping Turtle swimming in a creek for the first time.

Copies of Army personal records, that I put in my VA file, clearly state in several places that the symptoms of my problems were first recognized by the 30th Arty on October 21, 1970, on the day after my nervous breakdown, or what ever that terrible event was. Evidently, he is saying that me simply going to Okinawa was the traumatic change, but I had been there for four months, since June 1970, before the symptoms listed in my records occurred. And it is in my records that those symptoms lasted for over a year till I was discharged. That does not fit their definition one little bit.

My problems from being assigned to the 30th Arty Bgde, and all that entailed, are all similar to what the VA’s, and the Army’s, definition of symptoms of several mental health disorders are. The definitions say that one symptom is that a person with certain disorders makes up lame excuses for not doing their job and being a productive member of society. Can’t do the job without being supplied the necessary equipment and materials. That is no lame excuse. But the VA doesn’t believe it happened that way. They believe the 30th Arty’s version that I simply quit working.

I am sick and tired of individuals in the VA, such as Dr. Jacob Tendler, declaring me to be lying about the situations which I have described to them quite adequately at all times.

Tendler also lied about me. He declared that by telling him the details of the photo lab’s placement in the chamber, I was “preoccupied with minutia and details on today’s exam.” How the hell could he understand the strange situation if I did not explain exactly how the photo lab was set up in the decontamination chamber.

He also declared that I “brought to this examination a prolific amount of evidence that he has compiled over the years, concerns about legal matters, fostering significant frustration and anger how the Army treated him, and he showed to the undersigned copies that he has written to the White House as well as to the Vice President and other public elected officials indicating how the Army treated him and why he should be compensated for.”

That “prolific amount of evidence” was copies of papers that were already in my VA file, but I knew that it would take a long time sorting them out of the large file so that we could talk about them during the examination, so I brought my own copies for us discuss.

During his examination of me, Dr. Tendler launched into intense questioning about “perseveration or obsessiveness as well as compulsiveness type of symptoms, veteran denied.”

He was trying hard to diagnose me for some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder or other disorder that I have never been diagnosed with before, something I do not suffer from, something absolutely non-compensible as service connected. Dr. Tendler did all he could to find something wrong with me that could stop my quest for a service connected disability right then and there.

I ‘turned the tables’ on Tendler during the examination, and outlined for him what it would be like if the VA did the same kind of thing to him as had happened to me. The man became very indignant, looked askance at me, leaned back slightly, as if to put more distance between us there in his office, he looked down at me, and haughtily declared, “I would sue them.”

I said, “Yeah, you see what I’m talking about? By me applying for a disability is the only way that I can sue them for what happened to me.”

He got real indignant then, stood up to shuffle some paperwork around his office, and nearly tried to back up away from me all the way through the wall behind him, and then blurted out, “You can’t sue the VA! You can’t sue the Army for this! You can’t sue the government at all! You can’t sue anybody! You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

I had no rely to that idiotic outburst.

Dr. Tendler’s misdiagnoses of me having Adjustment Disorder has been declared by the VA as non-compensible. But I have seen lists on the Internet of the numbers of veterans who receive such a service connected disability.

I have been trying to establish a service connected disability rating from the VA ever since the mid 1970s.

The first time that I asked a VA employee to begin my paperwork for a disability rating, I was in real bad emotional condition. My depression had overpowered me, and it looked like I could go no further on the road of life. I dropped off a hand written note at the downtown Baltimore VA Regional Office which was a serious cry for help. I did not outright threaten suicide, but it was intimated in the note. The note briefly explained my frustration and anger over the way that I could not stop feeling depressed ever since Okinawa, the way that my army photography job situation had turned into a nightmare, and the way that VA staff had dismissed me as a person of merit. After leaving that note at the reception desk, I went out and walked around downtown with a rather dismal, dejected look draped about my person. A few passersby walked a wide path around me.

I waited three hours, then called the VA. They wanted me to come in and talk to them. The first employee that I spoke to was a wise ass, he was not concerned about my problems at all. I hung up the phone and called back a half hour later. That time a fairly decent guy spoke to me. I tried to stand my ground and hold out for a guarantee that they would begin a full investigation of my claims about the 30th Arty Bgde, and begin the disability claims process for me. But they talked me into coming in to their office without that.

When I sat down next to the desk of the fairly decent VA employee, the first thing that he did was to wave my note in front of my face, poke his forefinger into the written words on it, and with a friendly, earnest smile on his face he said, “Look at this! You can write in complete paragraphs! We have guys who come in here who can’t even write a complete sentence. You don’t have any serious problems. You’re an intelligent man. You’ll be all right. Those other veterans don’t have a chance, but you can do what ever you set your mind to do.”

That flabbergasted me. I had no problems? Because I could write a full, high school English class acceptable paragraph?

Wasn’t much that a dragged down, depressed guy could do in the way of instantly formulating an opposing debate against that nonsense.

They set me up for an appointment with a psychiatrist, and I went on back home a still depressed, and now even more dejected, man.

The VA psychiatrist, whom they set me up an appointment for on that sad day, turned out to be the only VA staff member who has ever truly understood me. He was Dr. Hadir Babaturk.

Dr. Babaturk was a great guy to talk with, we got along fine. He had a good, positive attitude about life in general, his profession, and his patients. He was the only one who ever put any merit upon what I have to say about that 30th Arty Bgde situation of mine. I suppose that I should now rewrite this whole thing and say that all but one VA staff ever believed what I say in this document about my 30th Arty experience, but that would take too much time, so just consider it done the best I can. Besides, his opinion of me doesn’t seem to hold any merit in my quest for my records to be set right and a fair disability rating to be established for me.

One day, as I was just sitting down in Dr. Babaturk’s office to begin our appointment for that day, a young veteran stuck his head in the still open office door and spoke to the good doctor. Dr. Babaturk then reminded the young man to go get his shot. As the doctor closed his office door, he discreetly informed me that the young veteran was so severely mentally ill that he had to receive potent psychiatric medicine once a week by a shot in his arm.

The doctor then turned to me and said, “He’s getting what you should be getting for what happened to you over there. He never made it through his basic training, he had to go to the recycle platoon. You know what that is right?”

I replied, “Yeah, that’s where they put men who can’t make it through basic, and they keep training them over and over till they get it right. Our drill sergeants used to threaten to send guys there who tried to act incompetent on the firing range or something or just too stupid because they thought it could get them out of going to Vietnam.”

“Well,” said the doctor, “that guy was discharged from the recycle platoon and given a full disability for being so mentally ill. But he was like that before he went in. He never should have been allowed into the army in the first place, but he gets a full disability pay for life. Its not fair for you. Did you try to apply for your disability again?”

I told the good doctor, more or less: that you can write a full paragraph deal that day took the wind out the sails which supplied me with what little personal power I possessed for utilizing in pursuing a disability. It seems that the rest of the VA isn’t interested in recognizing the fact that I really am a sick fellow. And anyway, he may be right about me going to be all right. And I do want to be a functioning member of society again and work and go back to doing my beloved photography. I’ll try to get myself back together and on the way to a successful life again.

When Dr. Tendler was interviewing me, he said that he had read all of my VA file. After relating this Dr. Babaturk story to Dr. Tendler, I inquired of him whether Dr. Babaturk’s notes were in my file, and if he had read them. Dr. Tendler was standing and shuffling paperwork around his office at that moment, and he got all bent out of shape, I mean it, he got physically bent out of shape, as he said to me, “I don’t know if they’re in there. We (the VA) didn’t bring all the files with us when we moved up here to Greene Street from the Federal Building. I don’t know anything about those files.”

I recently received a full copy of the file that the VA is using to decide on my disability case, and Dr. Babaturk’s notes are indeed in the file. But there is no mention of his believing that I should be receiving a disability. When he had said that about me deserving a disability, it was during what was more of a casual conversation about that seriously ill young veteran than a part of our doctor-patient session, and I had told him that it wasn’t much use trying to fight the VA, and that I wanted to work and be normal anyway.

The first time that I can remember filling out the paperwork to apply for a disability was in the late part of the 1970s. It was up at the Togus, Maine VA Hospital.

A weird, burnt out looking old psychiatrist helped me to fill the paperwork out, because I told the staff in administration that I didn’t know what to define my disability as. The emotionally shrunken acting shrink and I were up on a heavy duty psyche ward at the time. As soon as we sat down at a desk to start on the paperwork, a severely mentally ill patient walked by us and muttered some indiscernible words to the old doctor. The doctor looked at me, shook his head, pointed to the patient, and said, “Look at him. He doesn’t even know what day it is. He has no idea when his birthday comes around. Do you know what day it is. Sure you do. What day is it?”

I told him.

“What is today’s date?” He added.

I said what it was.

He added, “You know when your birthday is, right? What is it? ”

This seemed to me like a bad start, as I said, “July 2. I was born on July 2, 1950. But I don’t remember a thing about it.”

He continued, “You can talk normal? Right? Sure ya do. You’re talking normal to me right now. You got no problems, he’s got problems. You really want me to fill this out?”

Yes I did.

“OK,” he said, “what is your disability?”

“I don’t know what to call it, that’s why they sent me up here to see you,” I replied.

Then I briefed him about the 30th Arty photo lab thing and told him a little about my Oct. 20, 1970 nervous breakdown.

“Well?” he says, with the usual VA staff style dismissive attitude towards me, “let’s put down nervous disorder. Do you think it’s a nervous disorder that you have?”

I was getting aggravated with his attitude as I replied, “Yeah, I guess. I had that nervous breakdown. You’re the doctor. What is it? What do you say?”

He put down nervous disorder.

That term is neither defined, nor mentioned in anyway, anywhere, in any official VA disability guides. It is not recognized by the VA as a term for any disability. He was a VA doctor, he knew that.

That weird old, burnt out shrink purposely sabotaged my second attempt to establish and receive my service connected disability rating.

About two years ago or so I applied for a service connected disability again.

Two VA administrative staff helped me to fill out the application. I did not know then, nor do I know now, what the correct term is to describe my disability. It may be depression, depressive disorder, I do not know. And my VA doctors won’t tell me. One of the two VA administrative staff saw one of my former civilian mental health care worker’s notes which had in them that I have PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That staff person put down my disability as “acquired psychiatric disability, to include PTSD.” Those two VA staff were very nice to me, they were kind and considerate, they did what they considered to be right. Unfortunatly, they did not look to see whether the VA’s requirement of a direct life threatening incident for a PTSD diagnosis was present in my file. The civilian mental health care councilor who put the PTSD diagnosis had made that determination using a civilian definition of the disorder.

(Crap! They have it in Internet news stories about VA PTSD requirements that a direct life threatening event must have occurred. Vietnam Veterans are denied PTSD claims because they have nothing in their records to support the direct threat requirement even though they were in a combat company. Now I see nothing on the VA’s web site about a direct threat.)

From about 1993 to 2003, I was treated by a civilian mental health care worker. She diagnosed me as having depression and anxiety disorders. She also put into my file that I have PTSD.

I used to tell her over and over again about my 30th Arty Bgde problems. It’s a wonder that she didn’t tell me to take a hike or move on with my life in some other way. She was excellent at her profession, she always got me to talk about that day’s goings on in my life, but I inevitably gravitated back to talking about the army photographer thing.

PTSD can be caused by several different types of traumatic situations. She agreed with me when I told her that it was a thoroughly traumatic thing which I had endured in the 30th Arty Bgde. She agreed that due to the fact that I believed that because the photo lab negated the decontamination chamber’s intended use, in my mind tens of millions of lives were in jeopardy. They were. Maybe not in terrible danger of nuclear annihilation, but that tiny link in our chain of defense, which should have been where my photo lab was, that link should have been maintained properly. That had indeed caused me uncalled for traumatic anxiety. I may have been a dupe for believing in the 30th Arty Bgde’s missile systems’ importance to America’s defense, but that shouldn’t mean that I’m the bad guy.

My mental health councilor’s diagnosis of me having PTSD is based on the fact that I suffer from many of the universally recognized symptoms of PTSD, as a result of my 30th Arty Bgde experiences. Those experiences include that nervous (?) emotional (?) break down experience of Oct. 20, 1970. Or what ever that tragic event was. The only problem is that she was using her civilian definition of PTSD. The VA’s definition requires a direct life threatening incident.

Last night, at this point in my writing, I stopped working on this manuscript and went onto the Internet to find some links about PTSD to put in this when it is published. What I reread, I hadn’t seen these web pages for about eight months, has now confused me more as to why the VA refutes my PTSD civilian diagnosis.

On the VA’s own web site, I found this:

Who is most likely to develop PTSD?

Those who experience greater stressor magnitude and intensity, unpredictability, uncontrollability, sexual (as opposed to nonsexual) victimization, real or perceived responsibility, and betrayal.

Those who report greater perceived threat or danger, suffering, upset, terror, and horror or fear.

Those with a social environment that produces shame, guilt, stigmatization, or self-hatred.

I say:

I was traumatized by real or perceived responsibility about tens of millions of potential deaths in a nuclear war, and I was betrayed by the 30th Arty Bgde soldiers who had forced me to work in a job that was not authorized by the U.S. Army, and then when blamed me for not having the equipment and supplies to do my job. It sure as hell was a fairly uncontrollable situation for a young, 20 year old soldier.

I perceived a great threat of danger to American defense against Communist aggressors, I was in fear of the consequences of the photo lab negating the decontamination chamber’s intended use. I certainly was intensely upset about it all, and I suffered every day on Okinawa, in the form of severe depression.

The army social environment produced way too much unearned shame and guilt in me.

I am still stigmatized by the false information in my personal army records, and my General Discharge for unsuitability.

I have hated my self ever since I did not stop the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa from making me pay for the camera equipment needed to do my army job, and from keeping me assigned to the unit when there was no slot for me, but mostly because I had not gone to my Congressman or Inspector General and made them take that photo lab out of the emergency decontamination chamber.

The VA’s PTSD web pages also say:

People who suffer from PTSD often relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks, have difficulty sleeping, and feel detached or estranged, and these symptoms can be severe enough and last long enough to significantly impair the person’s daily life.

I say:

In this document, I have adequately described most of these things to be a debilitating part of my life.

To the VA’s way of determining PTSD, the bottom line is a direct life threatening event.

My situation was an indirect threat to tens of millions of people, and the indirect threat of me dying for no good reason. I was willing to die at anytime for freedom, but to know that I may die because some other soldiers wanted pictures taken of themselves at work and play, at the possible expenditure of tens of millions of American civilians’ lives in a nuclear holocaust, caused me great traumatic stress at the time.

I experienced traumatic stress at the 30th Arty Bgde. Until the Veterans Administration acknowledges the truth about what certain individual soldiers of the 30th Arty Bgde did to me, they can not give a correct diagnosis of my mental health disorders. That is the true bottom line in my quest for a fair VA disability rating.

That brings us up to where my case for a service connected disability rating is today. It has gone all the way up through the appeals process to the Board of Veterans Appeals. They say that they believe that I believe what I say about my 30th Arty Bgde experience, but that it may or may not be true. That is as close to the truth as the VA has gotten.

I will be going to the next stage of the appeals process soon. That is to the U.S. Court Of Appeals For Veterans Claims.

There is one serious dilemma in this. No lawyer will take my case because of the lack of VA required direct life threatening event to support the PTSD part of my claim. The two VA employees who helped me to fill out my application for benefits should have known that this would happen. The application is in the handwriting of one of them. I don’t believe that it is their fought though. They should have been trained to look for the VA’s required life threatening incident to be documented in my file.

They put down “acquired psychiatric disability, to include PTSD,” as “The Issue” which I am seeking “entitlement to service connection”. That makes me think that proving that I do have a VA recognizable acquired psychiatric disability, even though I may have PTSD which does not fit the VA’s definition of it, I should be eligible due to the acquired psychiatric disability. But the VA has their strict ways of seeing things and I may have to begin the process all over again without “to include PTSD” included.

Pile those two mind boggling VA disability rating written requests on top of the 5 to 8 times that VA employees have told this veteran that mental health disorders are not grounds for a VA recognized disability rating, because they are neither a disease nor injury, even though I knew of veterans receiving disabilities for problems the same as mine, and now the VA is processing my claim that is based on my mental health disorder, top that off with the two recent times that VA doctors had lame excuses for not allowing me to speak to them about my desire to establish a service connected disability rating, add all that up and you have all that is needed to thoroughly depress any veteran.

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 10 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

Over Thirty Years of Compounding Trauma

My Army records say that I quit going to work, I refused to do my duty. This is the end of my suffering caused by those devastating lies, which are continually corroding my soul like rust eats at a solid steel structure, which has been the case for over thirty miserable years. It will be proven false very soon or I can’t go on.

It’s do or die.

This isn’t just something that happened thirty-six years ago, and it’s about time for me to forget it and move on. It is not only in my records, it is in my relative’s memories of me, it is in the way I feel about myself, it is still there in other ways, it still hurts me today, it is part of the way that I will be remembered after I die. It is my right as a free American to clear my name.

My emotional trauma compounds upon itself as the years go on and the losses of my not participating in society, the non-production of my photography, etc., the constant disrespect from the VA, the lack of respect that my service in the Army should be continuously giving me from my family and others, all build upon each other and add to the trauma that I experienced as a result of being forced to work as a photographer without any photographic supplies to work with.

Read the other 30th Artillery Brigade stories of mine on this web site. You will see what it was like over there for me when my buddies and I were having good times. It will be clear to you exactly what kind of a person I was back then. It shows that this American, Western Culture lad adjusted real well to being stationed on the Far East Island of Okinawa.

Read the stories on my Maine blog about Northern Maine Adventures. Most of those true tales take place just before I entered the Army. They are of a kid who went from the Dundalk suburbs of Baltimore to way on up into the deep North Maine Woods and fit right in with a completely different type of social scene than he had ever known before. See if that fits the Adjustment Disorder diagnosis. Those stories show that I adjusted real well to a new, radically different way of life in Maine.

That guy in those stories is not the one who is portrayed in the part of the U.S. Army personal records of David R. Crews that record what certain individuals of the 30th Arty Bde’s personnel have to say about him after October 21, 1970.
From November 17, 1969 to October 20, 1970, my conduct and efficiency ratings are “Excellent” .

It was.

From Oct. 21, 1970 on, they are listed as “Unsatisfactory”, but that is the word of a group of soldiers who had violated Army Rules and Regulations so seriously to my detriment that it could be said that they “broke the book of rules and regulations right over my head.”

I have kept my army discharge records for all these years in order to use them in a fight to make the Army and the Veterans Administration set my records straight. My efforts to do so began in the mid 1970s.

In 1977 I wrote a nice, informative letter, that was sent to the VA, and my Congressman, amongst others whom I can’t recall. That letter contained the basics of what is in this narrative which you are reading now. There was no response from anywhere to indicate that my problems are believed to be real or of any interest to the government entities that the letters went to.

In 1978 I wrote my Congressman about the 30th Arty Bde’s misuse of me, and the VA’s refusal to believe it or to help me overcome the emotional trauma that it caused me; but all he was concerned about was would the anger and frustration, which I let loose in the letter, lead me to commit violent acts against any government entity.

I wrote a letter in 1999 that explains my Army and VA problems quite well and concisely. It was sent to many elected officials, from the President of the United States on down, to the VA, to the U.S. Army, and to some news media type peoples. It did no good for my cause to remedy my situation.

I have been working at this off and on for three decades.

If the emotional trauma and damage from my military experience is not real, then I am severely mentally ill in a way that I have not been diagnosed to be by any of the myriad of doctors and mental health care workers who have treated me over the past thirty some years.

The bottom line is: one story is real, one is fiction.

If the story which certain individual soldiers from the 30th Artillery Brigade Headquarters Battery on Okinawa created about my dedicated service to my country is real, then the Veterans Administration is responsible for treating me for the mental illness that causes me to believe that my version of the facts is real.

Mine is the real story.


Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

dundalk maryland
ursusdave

Part 11 of: Lieutenant T. Gordon Barber and the Stolen Marine Corps Property

I Am Determined To Prove The Facts

That Are In My Story
And To Get Back Into A Real Life Again

Until about five or six years ago, I never made very much use of the writing skills which I have employed here to put forth this narrative. My serious writing began in the year 2000, when I was taking an English class at a local community college.

I have always known that I am a writer or at least that I wanted to be a writer, for my entire adult life, from all of the way back to when I was an eighteen year old Baltimore boy who became a bear hunting guide in Maine, up till now. I have known that my Maine adventure is a good story to write ever since it was happening, and then when I was on Okinawa I knew that those times too would make a good written story some day. I have told my stories verbally to many people along the way in my life, now finally some of the stories are put down in writing. It has taken me over thirty years of slow, painful healing time just to get myself back together enough to get this much done on this written manuscript, and it has a long way to go yet.

If it wasn’t for the depression, caused by my 30th Artillery Brigade experience, I believe that I’d have had a lot of my writings published during the past three decades.

I have rarely worked at my photography along the way from the springtime of 1971, when I ran out of supplies on Okinawa, up to today. I did get back into it seriously between 1999 and about 2003, when I was going to the community college. I have a lot of great photographs, which are not yet on the Internet anywhere, and negatives sitting around waiting for me to get back into it again and really, finally pull it all together.

If it wasn’t for the depression, caused by my 30th Artillery Brigade experience, I believe that I’d have been a successful, world traveling photographer during the past three decades.

I don’t really know the guy who is writing this, and who wrote the other stories about Okinawa and Maine that are on this web site, and the articles about the Veterans Administration. That photographer is real good at what he does, I wish I was closer to him. I do not feel like him. I am hardly in touch with him at all.

I need to overcome this depression I am saddled with and do all that I can do in this world. This writing takes me far too long and through too many rewrites to get it the best I can, but it still isn’t the best it can be. I need to write about a lot of things. I need to do as much photography as I can. I need to get out of my house and back into the outside world again. This depression has to be relieved.

I am 56 years old, my health is failing at an ever increasingly faster pace, I live below the poverty line in America, I am nearly completely withdrawn from all family and social contacts, so I don’t have very much longer to get this done nor very much money to do it with.

I am going to do everything that I can conceive of to make the Veterans Administration and the U.S. Army face these facts and to acknowledge them in my records.

It has hurt my family, and all of the other people who have ever been close to me and who were disappointed that this man whom they saw as good human being, an interesting conversationalist, a competent and accomplished outdoorsman, a fine photographer, an entertaining and informative writer would always fall into deep depressions and not continue to do the things that they loved me for and knew I could do and then be my full, wholesome self and to part of their welcoming social world.

For the bulk of my adult life, my depression made me feel unworthy of the love and companionship of a good woman or any children. I have never been married; I would not allow any of the few fine women who had shared their love with me over the years to be permanently saddled with the weight of my problems. I certainly didn’t want any beautiful, innocent children to suffer along with me.

I did my best to make sure that no sweet lady who had been physically intimate with me got pregnant. I am one of those men who will never know though, because I lived all up and down the east coast during some traveling days back in the years between 1976 and the early 1980s, when I went hitchhiking around, or had moved to different states while looking for a real life. Let’s hope that no child of mine had to grow up not knowing their father, even though it may have been worse if they had known me but had suffered because I could not provide for them. I pray that no child of mine was born to live not ever knowing me.

There is one, new driving force in my life now that precludes me from allowing the lack of respect from the VA to continue driving me towards a sad ending to my life.

In the past six years, for the first time in my life, I have become the most important, influential, responsible, and loving male authority figure in a certain child’s life. He is about my only reason to stay in contact with anyone in my family–I am that far into my depression driven withdrawal from society.

Six years ago, just as I had begun to pull myself back together in the direction of reviving my photography career and beginning my writing career, that you are witnessing an example of now, my little Grandnephew’s father was tragically killed in a car accident. I am that wonderful little boy’s closest male relative who is willing to help raise the child. For the first time in my life I have that kind of natural human drive actively pushing me to be my best.

I don’t know what is going to happen next, but this written document establishes that I have tried and tried for over three devastating decades to establish the truth and to work with the Veterans Administration to heal my emotional wounds.

About seven years ago, I called the Gunner’s Gym on Okinawa and talked to the Marine on duty there, it is no longer an Army post. The gym is right across from the old Mole Hole. The underground bunker is not in use anymore, it is closed up with a few strips of steel welded across its entrance door. If I could get some photos of the place, it may help my case. At least I have been examining every avenue to the truth that I can conceive of.

Hopefully, publishing this narrative will help me to finally establish the truth about my experience in the 30th Artillery Brigade on Okinawa, and to get the Veterans Administration to finally acknowledge this truth and to treat the cause of my depression, and give me some closure.

Then I want to work as hard as I can at my writing, at doing my photography, and at anything else that I’ve been wanting to do that I still can do for the rest of my life. I may never be able to do enough to be a great, world renowned success, but at least I’ll be busy, productive, socially active, responsible, and happy.

David Robert Crews
2727 Liberty Pkwy
Dundalk, Md.
21222

ursusdave@yahoo.com

Okinawa
Army
David Robert Crews
US Army
30th Artillery Brigade

ursusdave

dundalk maryland