Haircut - 1969
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Most of the folks in D Troop were teenagers in the 1960’s and many of us had the attitudes and proclivities that came from that era. And many of us who were drafted came to the Army with long hair – the style of the day. Bringing this background, we were not really disciplined about keeping our hair within the Army regulations – add to that the difficulty of finding spare time to do personal stuff with all that was going on, and the length of one’s hair was not generally high on our priorities list.
One of my favorite RLOs (Real live Officers – Commissioned Officers) in the unit was CPT Moose (Garrett Marcinkowski), who was the XO for the unit when I first arrived – in fact, he was the one that picked me up from the Aviation Office when I arrived and drove me back to the unit. Being the XO, he was the enforcer of regulations and discipline for the unit – and with me, he was always there to remind me that my hair was getting a little long.
One day after a fairly stern reminder, I was headed out with a scout team to a fire support base (FSB) to support their activities in the field. We actually arrived a couple of hours before we were needed, and the FSB commander told us to land and hang out until they had their mission going. Like many FSBs, this one had a small “town” of locals right outside their gate, so we wandered over to get some sodas and mingle with the locals. Right on the edge of the “town” as we approached it was a barber shop (actually, a single barber chair set next to the dirt road, with a long extension cord going back into the town for electricity). Since I’d just had a not so friendly reminder from CPT Moose that I needed a haircut, I figured this was a sign.
I approached the barber to see if I could get a haircut. Of course, he did not speak a word of English and I spoke even less Vietnamese. He sat me down in the chair and I explained using gestures that I wanted a haircut, but only wanted a little bit taken off – using a hand gesture of holding my thumb and forefinger about a quarter inch apart. He indicated by smiling and nodding that he understood – so he draped me with an almost clean cape and got his electric shears fired up. All military folks clearly remember their first haircut going into basic training, and the non-military folks have probably seen it in the movies – the barber takes his electric shears and places them on the victim’s forehead and shaves a swath down the middle of the head, leaving about a quarter of an inch of hair – then proceeds to pretty much shave off all of the rest of the hair.
Whelp – my Vietnamese barber got the shears going – placed them on my forehead and before I could say “NO” proceeded to cut a nice swath down the middle of my head! So now I had what could best be described as a reverse mohawk haircut, with the center of my head now having a swath of one quarter inch hair. Well, what can you do? So, I just had him complete a military skinhead type of haircut. My copilot and the entire Scout crew could not stop laughing at me – and fortunately, I did not have a gun with me, so we went about our business.
We completed our mission and headed back to Cu Chi. I was walking back to the hootch area from the flightline with my equipment and came across none other than CPT Moose going the opposite way. He stopped me with an incredulous look on his face and after staring at me for a full 60 seconds asked me to remove my hat. He inspected my new haircut, smiled, and went on his way without a single word – just a big grin on his face.