TriX
Loc: Raleigh, NC
When I was getting ready to leave VietNam and the Army, growing out my hair so I’d fit into the long hair late 60s culture when I got home became a priority for me (GIs we’re not that popular then). I ducked the CO for weeks, and a friend in personnel arranged for me to come back through San Francisco instead of Ft. Dix because the scuttlebutt was that Dix was tough on haircuts for those getting out. Caught a hop from DaNang to Saigon for my civilian flight out and spent the night in a local hotel with my first hot shower in a year. The next morning, we all formed up on the hard stand at the airport in Bien Hoa, and they handed out our tickets home. Then they ordered everyone to take off their hats, and if you needed a haircut, they took the ticket back and you had to wait an extra day. Worse, there was only one Vietnamese barber in the PX who took delight in scalping GIs on their way home. And finally to top it off, Ho Chi Minh’s Birthday was only a day away and a ground attack was expected on the airport, so we wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. Not willing to sacrifice all this effort, I went to the base PX and bought a couple of Ace bandages which I wrapped my head in the next morning. After the hat removal routine, the E-7 walked up to me and said: “what’s wrong with your head sergeant?”. “Wounded,” I responded. He walked on down the line.
That night flying out over the jungle on a Flying Tiger commercial flight, watching the war going on down below with the mini gun tracers from the Hueys, I unwrapped the bandages, freeing my carefully preserved hair. A crusty old E-7 behind me was not amused about my hair and said so, but what was he going to do, send me back to VietNam? LONG story short, I made it through SF and home with hair intact. Just shows how far some people will go to have their long hair (and even long by Army standards, it was pretty short compared to the civilian population, but no “white sidewalls”).
You can’t make this stuff up...
SteveR wrote:
If you grew up hippy
Always love hearing that song even now.
There were no Hippies in my greater family. I was born in 1937 into a clan of mid-American farmers with strong work ethics and hard-core morality. Such nonsense would not have been tolerated.
FWIW, that image in the OP I saw earlier in one of the gun boards I visit.
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