Dave Blalock

        One night we were sitting around the barracks in Vietnam getting high and smoking dope and passing around this full page ad in The New York Times that a guy who had just come back from R&R in Hawaii had clipped out. Everybody’s reading and saying, “Wow, this is great, this is really neat…why don’t we do something on this date, November 15th.” We only had two days to do anything. We came to a decision that we’re going to wear black arm bands and we’re going to refuse to go out on patrol. And then some other guys said, “Why don’t we spread this to these other units, to the engineers, to the 1st Cav guys and everyone else in our camp.”

        The next day we went around to all of our friends and contacts in the other units and put out the word — what do you guys think of this thing, we want to do this, we want to shut the whole base camp down on that day. The word spread and it seemed like everybody was going to do it, but we weren’t sure. I remember the night before the 15th we were up all night long, wondering what they’re going to do or what’s going to happen with the 1st Cav guys, trying to assess what was going to happen, how successful we were going to be. Finally we fell asleep. There was a little MP detachment on our camp, these were dog handlers. The MPs ran the PA system and they played the morning taps — military music — in the morning over the PA system. The morning of the 15th we wake up at about five in the morning, and instead of playing the military shit, they put Jimi Hendrix’ Star Spangled Banner on. And nobody even told the MPs about this thing! These guys were obviously into it also.

        So we went in morning formation with our new commanding officer. The former CO was blown away six weeks earlier — he was killed, fragged. The new CO was pretty slick and all the officers were afraid of us at that point. So we went out in morning formation and we’re all wearing black arm bands. It was like 100% of the enlisted men, everybody’s wearing a black arm band, including some of the war doctors and the helicopter pilots. The CO comes out and he says, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do today, you guys. I think we’re going to give you guys a day off.” He was real slick with it.

        So then we jumped in a jeep and cruised around the perimeter to the other units to find out what was happening, whether they were going to be successful. The engineers were in formation. We pulled up on the edge of their company area and their CO had pulled — he knew who the leaders of the thing were — them out of the ranks and threatened to shoot them on the spot unless they took their black arm bands off and anybody that refused to go out and do their duty for the day would be shot for mutiny. Whether they’d do it or not is another story, but that intimidated a lot of the other people because only 50% of the engineers were wearing black arm bands. But they ended up not doing any duty anyway because a guy sabotaged all the bulldozers and everything, and nothing worked. So they couldn’t do anything.

        Anyway, that was the influence of a full-page ad in The New York Times. Somebody saw that and gave us the opportunity to do something bigger than just killing an officer or something like that.