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Three Student was involved in various infractions and was preoccupied, apparently, with his social life off post. Official explanation in Joe’s Personnel File for his dismissal from the Army’s Primary Helicopter School in 1966 Joe Hooper got into the Army by accident. After leaving Sandra and Robert, he moved to Burbank and spent four months doing low-end factory work in nearby Glendale. By May of 1960, he later told his childhood friend Tom Johnson, “he was bored and he didn’t have a good job and he didn’t know what he wanted to do.” He decided to reenlist in the Navy. He arrived at the recruiting office just about quitting time and the Navy recruiter was already gone. But a nearby Army recruiting station was still open, so Joe became a soldier rather than a sailor.1 After attesting that he had no record as a juvenile delinquent, passing the medical exam, and filling out enlistment papers, Joe received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy Reserve on May 30; the next day he enlisted as an e-3 (Private First Class) in the Regular Army for three years.2 Joe entered an institution that was stridently anti-Communist. In 1959 the Army adopted a new political indoctrination program to help young soldiers distinguish Americanism from Communism. Centered on ten pamphlets that comprised the Democracy versus Communism series, the program represented an unrelenting attack on Communists, accusing them of innate violence, perfidy, hypocrisy, and heavy-handed oppression. Communism resulted in a sheeplike population huddled behind the Iron Curtain, deprived of all those marvelous attributes, such as freedom of speech and press, that defined America. Reading the pamphlets, an individual learned that Communists were just like Nazis, only worse.3 After completing basic training at Fort Ord, California, Joe volunteered for airborne training. Considering his risk-taking and hypermanliness, this decision was not surprising. In mid-July he departed for the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he made his first “practice” jump from a tower on August 8 (his twenty-second birthday) and his first real jump from a plane three weeks later.4 One can imagine the tense would-be paratroopers on the tarmac awaiting their turn that hot, humid August morning, running in place, going through equipment checks, being harangued by drill sergeants about the fatal consequences of even the slightest mistake, and getting one last opportunity to “chicken out,” which some invariably did. Not Joe. He boarded the plane, took his seat across the aisle facing some other excited (or scared) young man, then sprang to life when the jumpmaster ordered the men to stand and hook up their static lines. A green light came on, signaling “Go!” Down the cargo bay, clumsily, to the open door. Then hurtling backward, driven by a blast of cold air, plunging toward earth, and suddenly, viciously, snapping to a near-stop as the parachute opened, driving “your nuts into your belly if you didn’t have the harness set right, snatching you hard even if you did. The pain was welcome, considering the alternative . It was life itself grabbing hold of you.”5 Giddy relief, and perhaps a few moments to admire the world at your feet before gravity took hold with a vengeance and trees, rocks, and bone-breaking hard ground leaped out of the earth directly at you. Touchdown, a quick rolling fall, a gathering of the silk, a glance skyward as other ’chutes billowed above, a wave of exultation at being alive. It wasn’t Joe’s only thrill. He also found a willing sex partner in North Carolina, and in September 1960 was arrested for “cohabitation,” although the charge was later dismissed in court. After being with the 82nd Airborne for thirteen months, the Army sent Joe to Korea, where he joined Company E, 20th Infantry Regiment, activated there in June 1960 as an “orphan” since no other units from the 20th Infantry were in Korea.6 Stationed at Sihung-ni, a village of mud huts with dirt floors nestled in the barren hills south of Seoul, it provided security for the nearby 83rd Ordnance Battalion.7 Company E’s Sihung-ni compound was four or five square blocks, enclosed by a fence topped with barbed wire. The ammo depot E Company CHAPTER 3 55 guarded was in an isolated location approximately ten miles farther south so a steady stream of vehicles trucked the guards...

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