There's a reason that I was only 17 when I joined the Army.

On my first day of school, in the first grade, I was six years old, just like the other kids in class. I lived in a small town in Texas. The elementary school had been built during the Depression, and the hallways were like huge caverns.

I had been looking forward to going to school. I expected to have great learning handed to me like candy on Halloween. My little mind was thirsty, like a sponge.

At the end of the day, when we were dismissed, the teacher called me up to her desk! I was very nervous. I thought I had screwed up somehow. We were the only two people in the room. I was a shy, scrawny kid anyway, and this was pretty scary.

She had a book, and she asked me to read from it. I did (I had been reading and writing for about a year. My parents used to show me off, like a trick dog   —   when I was five years old, they'd have me read the editorial page of the Dallas Morning News aloud for their friends). And that was it. She asked me to read, and I read to her, until she told me to stop. The teacher then took me down the hall to where my mother was waiting for me. I didn't get punished for anything. Mom took me home. It was all a big mystery to me.

Until the next day. Without any explanation (nobody told me why), I was put into a different classroom with different kids. And they were a year older than I was. I was in the second grade! They had "skipped" me, or "double-promoted" me.

This is why I was only 17 years old (a good four months shy of my 18th birthday) when I finished high school and walked across the stage in a black robe. It was the early 1970's.

The day after my high school graduation ceremony   —   and I mean the very next day   —   I packed up my belongings in my little car and left my sleepy little hometown, headed for the bright lights of Dallas.

I found a furnished apartment for $125.00 a month (including utilities). No central AC, just one anemic window unit. It was a very hot summer. I jacked around with odd jobs for a while. I was bored and broke. So I joined the Army before my 18th birthday.

I talked my father into signing the permission form. "Look, Dad, I can go to college now, and struggle for four years, and beg you for money every month. Or I can spend three years in the Army now, and when I get out, I'll have G.I. benefits, and the government will pay for me to go to college." He signed.

Base pay for an E-1 was $282.00 per month, plus free food and free housing. And free medical benefits.

I had the good fortune to take Army basic training (they don't call it "boot camp" ... that's the Marines) during the fall. Summers in Louisiana are very hot and humid. Fall is cold and humid.

I went to Shreveport to be sworn in, and then a bus took us to Fort Polk. We arrived at night, and they put us into a barracks and told us to find a bunk and get some sleep. We were still wearing civilian clothes. Some of us had long hair. I was stupid enough to show up for military duty still wearing a goatee.

The next morning, the sun rose on my very first day of military service. They lined us up outside the barracks, and marched us to a big building where they issued our uniforms to us. We were given hats, shoes, boots, socks, belts, jackets, the whole works. We stuffed everything into a big duffel bag (also issued to us). It weighed a ton.

As part of inprocessing, they did the initial setup of our records   —   personnel file, finance records, medical file. I sat at a desk where a young man was asking me questions, and recording my answers by typing things onto a form that was rolled into an electric typewriter. He asked me, "If you're stationed in the United States, where would you prefer to be?

"Texas," I answered. He typed something onto the form ... tick-tick-tick-tick.

"And if you're stationed overseas, what's your preference?"

"Vietnam," I said.

He looked at me for one second, and typed something onto the form. Probably the word "idiot."

I can honestly say that, before I turned 18, I had the guts to do something that neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton could do:   Join the Army and volunteer for Vietnam.

They took us to a "barber shop" where we got our heads shaved. All of us. This was the cause of much joking and kidding. They made us pay them $1.25 for a 15-second haircut. I still had my goatee, which made me look particularly ridiculous (although nowadays, that's pretty much the Generation X look ... shaved head with nanny-goat facial hair). It was the first, last, and ONLY time I ever sported a goatee.

We were taken to another building, where we were told to put on our Army greens (the dress uniform) and line up for the very first photograph ever taken of us in uniform. One of the civilian guys noticed my goatee. "Hey, you!" he yelled. "Get rid of that beard!" He pointed toward a door at the back of the room.

I couldn't help noticing that he was only a civilian, and I wondered where he thought he got off giving me orders. But what the hell.

The little room had a basin and an old safety razor. I got rid of the goatee (kept the mustache), feeling rather foolish at having shown up for military duty without having shaved it off.

They took my picture. It was the very first time I had ever worn an Army uniform. I still have the photo. God, I look terrible.

The sun had gone down on my first full day of military duty. They put us onto trucks, or maybe they were buses that had no seats; maybe they were cattle trucks. We rode into the darkness, holding our bulging duffel bags along with our civilian luggage, standing up. We were crammed in like concentration camp Jews headed for Ravensbruck. We didn't know if we'd be traveling like that for ten minutes or two hours.

Finally the buses stopped, and the doors opened. It was very, very dark outside the bus. Army sergeants that we had never seen before, wearing Smokey the Bear hats, stood at the open doors. "OUT!!! OUT!!! YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO BE OUT OF THIS BUS!!! MOVE, GODDAMMIT, MOVE!!!!

We scrambled frantically out of the buses, and were herded into our new homes ... Army barracks. One of the drill sergeants ordered us (in a very loud voice) to stand at attention at the foot of our beds (we later learned to call them "bunks"). He left.

We stood there in the dark barracks, rigid, teenage kids, not moving, dripping with sweat. Literally. I looked down and saw a ring of sweat droplets on the floor, with me standing in the center. The kid next to me, a guy named Bollinger, whispered, "I can't take this."

I said, "It'll get worse."

The drill sergeant who was assigned to our platoon was about 5'8" tall, a skinny little black man named Tommy Powell. He would get right up in your face and scream at you. He could say "motherfucker" without pronouncing any of the r's.

One day when we were standing in formation and he was "reviewing" us, he stopped in front of me. "I see you got a mustache, boy," he said to me.

"Yes, drill sergeant."

"I got a mustache, boy. You think you a man? You think you man enough to wear that mustache?" he sneered.

As I was trying to come up with an appropriate answer, he walked off.

That night, I shaved off the mustache.

Army basic training does involve "training" to a certain extent (I learned how to field-strip an M-60 machine gun in under four minutes, for instance). However, its real purpose is brainwashing. You come in as an individual; by the time you leave, you're thinking of yourself as part of a unit.

You don't even feel it happening, but it works ... pretty soon, you're all thinking the same way. There are 48 of you to a barracks, all the same age, all with the same haircut, all wearing the same clothes, getting out of bed at the same time each day, eating meals at the same time, living together, showering together.

And because it was the early 70's, each barracks had one guy who somehow got the nickname "Gomer." In one barracks, it was because the guy looked like Gomer Pyle. In another barracks, it was because the guy's name was Goldman.

The drill sergeants were loud and abusive, and made us do "punishment push-ups," but I always knew it was nothing personal. It was just their job. I never got angry at them, and to this day I bear them no grudge.

Whenever we formed as a company, and were called to attention, we'd yell (in unison), "DRIVE ON, DRILL SERGEANT, DRIVE ON!!!"

It lasted eight weeks. Only one guy from our basic training company went AWOL (it wasn't Bollinger). I lost 15 pounds ... and I hadn't even been overweight when I first enlisted.

On the night before graduation, somebody took up a collection ($10 from each person, as I recall), and our drill sergeant drove into town and bought boxes and boxes of booze, and brought it back to us in the barracks. And I got drunk for the very first time in my entire life. Soon the room was spinning. When I threw up, I'm afraid I got some on Private Martinez, a friend of mine whose English wasn't so good. He called me a "son-o'-ma-bitch." Sorry 'bout that, Paco.

And our drill sergeant, now wearing civvies, sat down with us, there in the dark barracks (it was after 2200, so the lights were turned off), and actually talked to us like a human being. Wow!!!! He was okay after all. He told us about how he had been shot up in Vietnam while rescuing a wounded guy, and how they replaced part of his intestines with plastic tubing.

And I never did go to Vietnam. The Army had other plans for me.

It has occurred to me: Hilton now has a hotel in Hanoi. Let's suppose I fly over as a tourist, spend one night at the Hilton, and come back home. I could tell people that (a) I joined the Army and volunteered for Vietnam and (b) I spent some time in the Hanoi Hilton. It would be very misleading, but it would be the truth.