"Doc"

     They say that friendships that you develop in high school are much more intense, longer lasting than those made in college.  The reason given is that in high school you are just in the process of entering adulthood and usually your teenage, immature emotions, run somewhat wild and your relationships become very intense. You also tend to identify and bond with your peers more so than at any other time in your life.  In college, although you may maintain a friendship for a four year period as in high school, but it is usually not quite as intense.  You are more mature, have more interests, and your goal is to finish college and get a degree, while in high school.....well, its high school!  No one really thinks that they are not going to graduate!
     But for those who have served in the military, that is another period when intense friendships are developed.  In the military, depending on where and when you served, you may face danger together as well as extreme hardships.  This experience tends to cause some very strong bonding, you truly become brothers.
     In an earlier blog that was titled "Some Heroes I Have Known" I mentioned my friend Doc Barnes.  I really did not do justice to him by mentioning him so briefly.  He deserves much more, for he was an amazing person, an amazing friend.  He was actually the very first person to befriend me when I had arrived at my new unit, the 7th Special Forces Group.
     I was a lowly PFC at the time, freshly out of Special Forces Training Group where I spent 8 months in training.  I had been in the army for almost a year and a half, first going through the basic training, then AIT and Jump School, before arriving at the Special Forces Training Group and doing 8 more months of training - one month of MOI (Method of Instruction), four months of Communications training, and finally, three months of Branch Training (today it is called "Q" course).   Frankly, I was sick of training by that time!  Little did I know at the time that I would be constantly training, as everyone else did in the Special Forces!  The training never stopped!
     I was assigned to a barracks in B Company, so I trudged my way with my duffle bag and other gear and found myself in an empty barracks, with only one person in it, but apparently with almost all the bunks taken.  There was only one bunk with its mattress "S" rolled to indicate that it was empty.  So I put my gear down and proceeded to put away my stuff in the empty wall and foot lockers. 
     There was a tall, lean fellow lying on the bunk next to mine.  He was a Sergeant E-5 according to the three stripes on his sleeves.  However, there were dark areas below the three stripes to indicate that at one time that shirt had seen more than three stripes!  The man glanced up at me (he was reading a book) then went back to reading.  I noticed that the book he was reading was Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  That was surprising.  You didn't usually find a typical Army NCO reading Tolstoy!  Playboy, perhaps, or maybe a James Bond novel that was very popular at the time, or a Western, but Tolstoy?  That was unusual.
     As I started to put away my meager supply of reading material, the reclining sergeant noticed one of my books and commented, "Well....I see we got someone literate, or do you just look at pictures!  James Joyce, no less!"  Then he added somewhat sarcastically as he went back to reading his book, "You don't look Irish to me!"  I saw his name tag and knew that his name was Barnes, so I quipped back, "You don't look Russian to me!"  He glanced up in surprise, then smiled and said, "Touche!"  Then he stuck his hand out, without rising from his bunk and added, "I am Will Barnes."  I shook his hand and introduced myself. 
     That is how I first met Doc and we became friends from that point on, a friendship that lasted many years, until his death ten years ago.  It was unusual for an "old timer" like Doc to be friends with a "newbie" like me.  He was an NCO, a senior NCO until he was busted down to E-5 for drunken misbehavior.  He had been in the Special Forces for a number of years, a veteran of many deployments.  I was a brand new prospect, newly assigned to the unit, and I was about ten years his junior.  Yet, we became friends, good friends.  Aside from the age difference, it was highly unusual for an NCO to befriend a PFC!
     William Gerard Barnes, better known as Doc, was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York in a working class Irish family.  His father was a New York City policeman and his mother a stay-at-home-mom.  Doc grew up wanting to be a soldier.  That is all he wanted to be, but his mother had other plans.  She wanted him to become a priest!  So, like the good Irish Catholic kid that he was, after graduation  from high school, he entered a seminary in upstate New York.  All the time he was studying to be a priest, he felt that he needed to do something else, that priesthood was not his calling.  So, to the great disappoint of his mother, just a few months prior to graduating, he quit and joined the Merchant Marines! 
     For the next couple of years or so, he sailed the seven seas.  In those days there were no TVs or videos for entertainment, nothing on those merchant ships.  The only thing he could do in his spare time was read.  He had already become a voracious reader while in the seminary, but now he doubled that!  He read everything and anything he could get his hands on.  At the same time, he got to see quite a bit of the world.  Doc was, without a doubt, one of the best read individuals that I had ever met!
     After a couple of years he quit the seas and joined the army, his first love.  He volunteered for the Special Forces and quickly rose in rank.  He was offered a chance to go to OCS and receive a commission, but he declined, preferring to remain an enlisted man.  By the time I met him, he had been deployed to three or four different countries and spent a year in Laos on "Operation White Star," a CIA sponsored classified mission to fight the communist Pathet Lao. 
     He had reached the rank of E-7, Sergeant First Class, and was assigned to the 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa after Laos.  However, he got drunk one night and was arrested by the RASP for doing some damage in a bar in Naminoue.  He spent a night in the stockade and the following morning busted down to E-5!  His assignment to the 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa ended shortly and he was reassigned to the 7th Special Forces Group.  I met him just a few weeks after he had arrived from Okinawa, with his new, reduced rank!
     Someone higher up must have had it in for Doc.  For the longest time they would not promote him.  Usually, someone busted down like that regains the stripes after a year or so.  But such was not the case with Doc....as he said, "somebody up there doesn't like me,"  paraphrasing the title of a movie, Somebody Up There Likes Me.  Pretty soon I caught up with him when I made sergeant E-5.  Fortunately, shortly after that Doc got one of his rockers back and went up to staff sergeant.
     Doc and I had many adventures, both good and bad, too many to mention.  A month before I left the army, Doc was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam, so we parted company, but we corresponded regularly.  After the army I spent about a year in San Francisco before going to Okinawa.  Shortly before Jo and I got married on Okinawa, Doc was assigned to the 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa for the second time.  We had some good times together, before he left for Vietnam again.
     Jo thought he was "crazy," she really didn't know what to make of him at first, but I think she got to like him.....sort of.  When our son Tony was born, he was given a middle name of William, in honor of my friend Doc.  Doc was quite pleased with the naming and being an "unofficial" godfather.  He gave Tony one of those gold "railroad" pocket watches with a long note addressed to him.  Leave it to Doc to come up with a gift like that.  We did not give the watch or the accompanying note to Tony for a long time, since we felt he would not appreciate it as a kid.  When Tony became older we gave it to him and it became one of his prized possessions.
     Doc was badly wounded on one of his TDY trips to Vietnam from Okinawa.  After we left Okinawa and returned to California, I received phone calls from Doc frequently from various locations.  At one point the army wanted to give Doc a medical discharge because of the wounds he received.  He fought that and stayed in the army.  Doc not only stayed in the army, but he stayed with the Special Forces, going on two additional combat tours in Vietnam before that war came to an end. 
     Doc finally retired in the mid 1980s and got married.  However, Doc's drinking as always got him into trouble, this time he didn't lose any stripes, but his marriage fell apart.  He was a heavy drinker in the 1960s and never let up, and it finally killed him.  It wasn't his multiple combat tours of duty and numerous purple hearts that he received that killed him, it was the booze!  Doc volunteered for combat duty and spent a total of about four years in Vietnam during that war!  He also spent a year in Laos and several shorter TDY "missions" in various "hot spots" that put him in harms way.  He survived it all, but died of drinking!  How ironic, yet he was truly an American hero, putting his life on the line for this country time and time again.