I met Chuck T. Miller on a bus rumbling from the San Antonio, Texas airport to Lackland Air Force Base. It was June and miserably hot, a suffocating kind of heat I never experienced in coastal Santa Barbara, where the on shore breeze keeps the temperature mild. Chuck was sitting three rows in front of me, talking loudly to a big black guy across the aisle from him. Nobody else had the nerve to say a word for fear of ticking off the sullen looking Staff Sergeant perched behind the driver.
But Chuck was jawing away and I found his voice and manner annoying. I assumed he was talking so much because he was just as apprehensive as the rest of us about the major life change that awaited us when we passed through the front gate at Lackland. We’d already had a taste of the strange new world we were about to enter when the Sergeant cussed us out for moving too slowly to the bus.
The real abuse started the minute we got off the bus and formed a ragged line in front of a diminutive Tech Sergeant named Garcia, who whacked a clipboard against his thigh to emphasize the orders he was shouting at us. Garcia’s job, of course, was to scare us shitless, and he had a knack for the work. There was this pudgy kid from Ohio named Joe Grassley that Garcia started picking on the minute the poor sap stepped down off the bus, and he didn’t let up for the next six weeks. The way Garcia saw it, Grassley couldn’t wipe his own ass properly.
Garcia played no favorites. He made it clear that he hated all of us equally, regardless of where we came from or the color of our skin, though I think he reserved special disdain for Californians; he claimed we were all radicals and dope fiends. Every guy in our flight was degraded by Garcia at least once. When my face broke out near the end of the first week Garcia took to calling me “Pizza-face.” He caught a kid named Davis jerking off in one of the toilet stalls and thereafter Davis was “Jack-Off.”
One of Garcia’s favorite tricks was to pop in on us around one or two A.M., just to see if the airman on guard duty was at his post, awake and alert. It was on one of his nocturnal visits that he nailed Chuck, sound asleep in the bunk he had dragged clear across the barracks and wedged into the guard station.
The difference between Chuck and the rest of us was that Chuck honestly didn’t give a shit about anything. He actually started laughing when Garcia lit into him. Even the heaviest sleepers among us shot out of our bunks when Garcia’s voice boomed off the cinderblock walls. Garcia ripped Chuck up and down, calling him every name in the book, even tossing in a few choice phrases in Spanish. And through it all Chuck laughed, and the more he laughed the madder Garcia became.
By the time I worked up the nerve to slip out of my bunk and tiptoe closer to the action, Garcia’s wrath was losing steam. The sergeant wasn’t used to anyone defying his authority, let alone a stringy kid from California who seemed to have a real problem understanding that here he, Garcia, was God.
I’ll never as long as I live forget what Chuck said or how calmly he said it: “That was a weak rant, Sarge. I know you can do better. Tell you what, retool the act and come back for another try.”
It was vintage Chuck, a verbal broadside that knocked Garcia for a loop and sent him reeling out the door cursing at the top of his lungs. After that episode Chuck was the undisputed leader of our flight. But don’t get me wrong – Chuck paid a price for mouthing off like that – KP duty for the duration of basic training, a shit job, though Chuck made the best of it. When asked how he could stand four or five straight hours in the sticky hot kitchen, Chuck just smiled. “Boys, there’s women in that kitchen, and I hereby promise you that I will screw one of them before this is through. Next time you go through the serving line check Maria out.”
Chuck claimed that he banged Maria no less than a dozen times in a storage closet, though we had no way of verifying if it was true or just one of his many tall tales.
And that was Chuck in a nutshell – a born bullshitter. During that long, hot six weeks of basic training, and later, eighteen weeks of technical school in Wichita Falls – another of Texas’s garden spots -- I heard Chuck tell many variations of his story, the details morphing depending on who was listening.
Version 1: His father wrote for TV shows and his mother was an artist. The marriage was tempestuous and marred by excessive drinking and violence. Chuck was an only child.
Version 2: His father was the business manager for a “world famous rock band,” while his mother worked as a professional mystic in Hollywood, reading the vibrations and auras of A-list movie stars. Chuck had a younger brother named David who had perished in a flash flood at the age of four. Pressed for the name of the rock band his father managed, Chuck would say, “Think Hotel California.”
Version 3: His father worked for an “agency” of the federal government and was out of the country for months at a time; his mother was a homemaker who took in sewing to make ends meet. Chuck had a younger sister named Kasandra who was born with only three fingers on her left hand.
Version 4: His father was MIA in Vietnam, shot down over Hanoi. His mother was a mentally unbalanced emergency room nurse who spent more time with her boyfriend than with her son. Virtually on his own from the age of five, Chuck was forced by cruel circumstance to cook for himself, do his own laundry, and bandage his own wounds.
Version 5: His parents were dead, killed in a car accident in Peru when Chuck was only a baby. He’d been raised by his maternal grandparents on a ranch in Wyoming which he hated and had fled when he was thirteen. He had hitchhiked from Wyoming to California with the clothes on his back and a few possessions in an Army knapsack. He drifted from Denver to Vacaville and from there to San Francisco where he lived with a family of anarchists and dope peddlers with ties to the Symbionese Liberation Army.
I’m sure Chuck had two or three or seven more versions reserved for contingencies.
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