I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson Page 24
It did basically the same thing to them. And when I say the same thing I mean that it intensified their feelings. If they had a lot of fears about the combat action, they became really paranoid, and when they heard a gunshot it really scared them. You would see them dive behind bushes or fall to the ground really quickly. They were truly scared. I think it is because of the fact that your feelings are so much intensified and your fears are so great that you react differently to different situations than you would ordinarily. I don’t think you can have someone out in the field who is smoking marijuana and expect rational actions from them at all times because their view of the world when they are high is not that orderly or that structured. A lot of things don’t really make sense to you. You could find yourself out in the middle of a field and you have been smoking pot and all of a sudden you ask yourself a question like “What am I doing here?” It hits you. Like what am I really doing here? And this can go beyond just a moral conviction about not fighting. This can go to your head. “You know you can get killed doing this sort of thing” or “I don’t want to do it.” While other people just got carried away with it, I never did anything really crazy while I was using drugs. But I have ridden through villages with a .38 of my own and I put my arm over the side and just pointed it at different people and pretended in my mind that I was just shooting them down. I would have been smoking a lot of marijuana and I think that had I been agitated at the time or something happened which scared me it would have been a very easy thing to shoot instead of just pretending.
I think that everybody acts differently when they are really high, when they have smoked marijuana, and most GI’s did after a while. Many smoked while sitting up at night alone pulling guard duty. This is mostly the heavier smokers I’m speaking about now. Just before going out on a patrol or to set up an ambush they might smoke some.
And I know personally now, that it was a very dangerous thing to do. In difficult situations, say at night, if anyone moved near me I might have taken a shot at him.
We had a number of accidental deaths while I was over there and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of those “accidental” deaths were possibly caused by some GI’s being scared under combat conditions because of marijuana.
When I said the heavy marijuana users, I said that because it was mostly the heavy users that smoked marijuana when we were out on missions. The guys who smoke it only occasionally generally wouldn’t smoke it when we were out on a mission. When I said “heavy user” I meant somebody who used it like every day, pretty much all day, as I did. And I would say about 25 percent of my outfit fell into this category. And then, perhaps, from 50 to 75 percent of my outfit smoked pot irregularly.
Why was there so much drug use?
I think it had to do with the extraordinary amount of fear, the harsh realities, they had to deal with. They weren’t accustomed to the pressure and sought some relief. Facing reality is easier when you are high. Reality is altered, made more comfortable by drugs, and I think this is basically what causes the drug abuse.
That is particularly true about the idle, bored GI’s not in combat. You don’t want to just lie around and think about what you are involved in. It would be much more comfortable to lie around and just be high and not have to deal with the fact that the next hour or the next day you are going to be going back out and facing the people who are hostile and want to kill you.
I think another big thing was the apathy that smoking marijuana created. Once we got into marijuana we weren’t really interested in the war thing; you know, it just didn’t seem relevant to what we wanted to do. You know the thing of serving your country, and any other reason that somebody might have there, kind of went right out of the window because our whole thing was we wanted to be high. There was no purpose to too much of anything else that wasn’t directly related to us getting high.
After I arrived in Vietnam I used drugs constantly for the remaining two years of my tour of duty, including pills and opium as I became familiar with them. I think the environment came into play, had something to do with it. I know now that I have to take the responsibility for my own actions because there were guys around me who didn’t use drugs, but I think that the environment played a big part in it.
The military code on drugs was never really enforced. I was in the stockade for going AWOL after I came back from Vietnam, and there was one member of the Army CID that knew I was using drugs. I think he learned this from people in town somehow or possibly from one of his investigations. But as far as the officers or any of the people in my units are concerned, they didn’t know, and nothing ever happened to me because of drug use. I was never treated for any drug use, obviously, because they didn’t know, and I was never punished for it. The Army isn’t a very personal place, it isn’t a very sensitive place, and most of the people who are in charge of the Army don’t seem to me to be very sensitive people. They seem indifferent to a lot of the personal problems that a person has. They really weren’t concerned with anything except your doing your function as a soldier, and as long as you did that they really didn’t care about anything else that might be going on with you.
I was court-martialed only once for going AWOL, but it had nothing to do with drugs. When I returned to Colorado from Vietnam I brought some marijuana back with me. At the time we weren’t really being searched very thoroughly so I brought back enough to last me a couple of months. I had eighty opium-treated marijuana cigarettes. I even had a bag with a broken zipper that nobody bothered to open. I tried to open it. The zipper was broken. They told me, that’s all right, go ahead through. I had the cigarettes right on me in cigarette packs which were packed over there.
Quite a few of my friends smuggled drugs into the United States but none got caught. I knew one man who brought back $10,000 worth of opium to New York City.
In Colorado I started getting involved with a lot of the camp followers. These are people that are prostitutes, gamblers, thieves, drug users, and pushers that kind of follow Army towns. In Colorado I mostly used marijuana and pills and cough syrup on an everyday basis. I left Colorado and came to New York City where I started using cocaine, heroin, occasionally LSD, the amphetamines—I was using all types of drugs at this point. After a few months back in New York and Connecticut I went back to Colorado where I was using heroin, cocaine, and drinking a lot of cough syrup, and smoking marijuana—just heavily involved in all types of drugs. I was into about every type of crime that you could get into, in order to support my habit at this point.
I would steal from other soldiers, civilians; I would sell marijuana on the post. But I was never arrested and never got into any trouble for it. I was breaking into houses, and after a while I was selling heroin and cocaine. And just doing a lot of stealing. These are basically the things I did while I was in the Army. When I was honorably discharged after three years I got into some other things.
My commitment to Daytop was for two counts of carrying a dangerous weapon, aggravated assault, possession of narcotics, and using a female for immoral purposes. From the time I came back from Vietnam to the time I was arrested I continued carrying guns. I think it was something I got obsessed with over there and fit very well into the image of what I thought was a man I had gotten from the Army, the image of being tough and fighting and this whole thing being what manhood was all about. I carried a gun until I was arrested two different times here in Connecticut. The first time for possession of narcotics and possession of a dangerous weapon. I went into a hospital and I stayed about three months and I really didn’t do anything for myself. I came back out, and in about four months I was arrested for the offenses I listed above and committed to Daytop.
I now have found some direction. I am presently a resident of Daytop, Inc., at Seymour, and I’ve been there for about two years now. I should be graduating shortly. Daytop is a self-help program staffed and run entirely by ex-addicts. It is an eighteen-to twenty-four-month program and deals with helping the individual grow up and get a good
enough understanding of himself to deal with the realities that he finds around him without having the need for drugs.
I have been involved in other programs, but for me Daytop has been the only effective approach to my problem. I’ve seen it work for a lot of people around me as well.
When I leave Daytop I may do some community work. I have had a number of different job offers from people that I know in the community because I am interested in community work. I have learned to deal with people through being in Daytop and through running groups and being involved with getting an understanding of myself and others. I would like to continue working with people either in the community or possibly with the Daytop staff.
Since my discharge from the military I have not heard from them at all. I filed for a claim with the Veterans Administration. I was wounded when I was in Vietnam and I never got any compensation for that. I was also shot in the foot when I was on pass from the Army when I was in Colorado. I’ve been limping on my foot for the past three years, and I haven’t gotten anything for that either. While I realized that I have to take most of the responsibility for my becoming a drug addict, I don’t think that the Army has helped me at all in overcoming my problem, which started pretty much in the Army. I think that if, in that period of my life when I was as confused as I was and as messed up as I was, if I had gotten some good guidance at that point I might have been turned in the right direction. But instead I was given a lot of bad values I feel. I was helped by a very insensitive organization to get further and further down the road to destroying myself. I feel that since I did get heavily into drugs while in combat and while fighting at eighteen years old, I feel the Army maybe should compensate me for this.
I talked to a lawyer about it and I filed a claim with the VA. We decided to wait and see what kind of action they would take. I’m not sure if the VA is really planning to do anything about this or not.
So I’ve been inactive for the last two years, and the Army hasn’t done anything up to this point to help me with this thing at all, either financially or with my rehabilitation.
To sum it up, I was a pretty mixed-up kid when I went into the Army, but the type of guidance I received there didn’t help. Things got worse. I became more confused about manhood, responsibility, and a lot of other things. Although I can’t hold the Army entirely responsible for my being as messed up as I was, it didn’t do me any good.
I think that drug-using servicemen are getting a real bad deal from the government and have been for a long time. They have been looking at the problem and treating these people as criminals. Addicts are not criminals. I feel we are people who are sick. I feel that drug addiction is the symptom of a problem. The problem, the sickness, must be treated. To look at this as a crime is really wrong, and it will not solve the problem. I think it is in part a reflection of a lot of the confusion we find around us in society today.
I think your military Drug Legislation S. 4393 is a good bill. I think it could be improved with stipulations in it for more money for drug programs. I think that a lot of people now who are being sent to jail really should not be and a lot of people who aren’t being helped at all should be. I think that the government should allot more money to different drug programs so that we in the programs could handle a larger input of people who are using drugs. I think that Daytop could probably do a lot more if we had more funds, but it seems that the state of Connecticut hasn’t really been meeting its responsibility in terms of dealing with drug addiction.
XXI
Politics Today
The political outlook at the approach of the 1968 elections had not been particularly encouraging. Robert F. Kennedy was dead. Martin Luther King had been taken away from us. Rockefeller had withdrawn from the Republican race, leaving us with the Nixon-Agnew ticket. I did feel quite strongly about the possibilities of positive leadership under Humphrey because of his past record on civil rights. However, despite a hard campaign in which I was given freedom to work completely on my own, we just didn’t have enough time.
I was terribly disappointed in Nixon’s 1968 victory. I feared that his Administration would cater to the conservative backlash that seemed then and now to be increasing in American politics.
Nevertheless, soon after his inauguration, I wrote Mr. Nixon, reminding him that in 1960 I had been solidly in his corner because I believed him to be sincere about wanting to see the hopes and aspirations of black Americans realized.
“I opposed you as vigorously in the last election,” I wrote Mr. Nixon, “because I felt strongly that your position regarding the Old South, the rumors about Strom Thurmond, and the report from the convention would adversely affect the goals we as black people have set.”
Since he had been elected, I continued, all of us—those who supported him and those who opposed him—would pray that his years in Washington would be most successful. I was afraid that unless the Administration took action indicating that it had some empathy with the problems of my people the bitterness between blacks and whites would inevitably grow to the point of explosion. A lack of understanding of the complexities of these problems seemed obvious to me in some of the statements made by some of Mr. Nixon’s newly chosen Cabinet members. I warned him that young blacks were sincere and unafraid. I predicted that only sincerity and enormous effort on the part of both races could prevent a holocaust. I ended my letter with the hope that the President had the capacity to provide the necessary leadership. I received a reply that was characteristic of most political correspondence and said little except that my letter had been received.
The President’s appointed Attorney General Mitchell went through motions of filing suits against abuses of voting rights, job discrimination, education and housing. However, Mitchell and the Administration demonstrated a marvelous sleight of hand, holding out the promise of progress in the one hand and appeasing the Silent Majority and the sullen South with the other. It was a game of one baby step forward and two giant steps back. The hostility to and “benign neglect” of the black man caused the few token blacks selected for high office to quit in disgust and others to run like hell if it appeared they were being approached with job offers. Only very brave or very insensitive blacks accepted Nixon Administration appointments. The tragic case of James Farmer—who learned the hard way that the Administration cared very little about the health, mis-education, and welfare of blacks—is a classic example of the kind of yawning credibility gap anyone hired by Mr. Nixon had to fight in the black community.
In January, 1970, as chairman of the board of Freedom National Bank in Harlem, I was one of several witnesses who appeared before the Senate Small Business Committee’s Sub-committee on Urban and Rural Economic Development. Joe Namath, Willie Mays, Pat Boone, and Hilly Elkins, the New York producer, were some of the other witnesses.
I had a chance, then, to take a good swing at Mr. Nixon’s obviously forgotten pledges of what he would do, if elected, to promote black capitalism. I testified that I believed the country’s next real crisis would be in economics and politics because blacks, in spite of campaign oratory, were still being denied “a piece of the pie.”
Actually, the hearings were called to discuss the franchise business, which then represented $90 billion, or 10 percent, of the gross national product. I was at that time vice-president of a seafood outlet that was seeking to establish franchises all over the world. However, the committee chairman, Senator Harrison Williams, decided to broaden the subject to explore other economic questions.
The New York Times of January 21 reported as follows:
Mr. Robinson said that, “The poor relations between black Americans and the present Administration are causing a serious rift in this country.”
Mr. Robinson, a Republican and long-time supporter of Governor Rockefeller, criticized the Administration’s black capitalism program, which is administrated by the De- partment of Commerce. Under the program, the Federal Government matches 2 for 1 the investments of big companies to finance ghett
o enterprises.
He said the program was failing because of bureaucratic inefficiency, red tape and mistrust by Negroes.
In a small, packed hearing room in the new Senate Office Building, Mr. Robinson contended that because of such problems, businessmen do not want to deal with the Commerce Department’s Office of Minority Business Enterprise.
“Making more black millionaires is not as important as moving people from $6,000 a year, to $15,000,” Mr. Robinson commented, adding that “Mr. Nixon and this Administration are the key to this program.”
President Nixon failed to keep the promises he had made and he continued to bemoan the fact that blacks didn’t trust him. On one occasion, with what I really regarded as counterfeit humility, the President said he hoped to gain the respect of blacks. After that I wrote him again. Below is an excerpt from my letter of February 9, 1970.
If you are sincere in wanting to win the respect of Black America, you must be willing to look at your own administration’s attitude. There seem to be no key officials in your administration who have an understanding of what motivates black people. I find it difficult to believe there will be any, when it appears your most trusted advisors are Vice President Agnew, Attorney General Mitchell and Strom Thurmond. How can you expect trust from us when we feel that these men you have selected for high office are enemies? You would not support known anti-Semitics to placate Jewish feelings. Why appoint known segregationists to deal with black problems? If you could see a projection in terms of influence by others of your administration, men like Secretary of State Rogers, Secretary of Commerce Stans, HEW Secretary Finch and Housing Secretary Romney, many of our frustrations would dissipate. Confidence in and respect for you will be based upon the attitudes of those whom you trust.
I respectfully submit this, and hope that it is received in the same spirit as it is sent.