IV: potsmoking, cultural context

[Doug Millison]

To Joe's personal testimony, I add that thanks to a winning number in  
the first draft lottery I found myself among the last batch of  
draftees, started a 2-year US Army program at Fort Ord, Monterey, Cal.  
in June 1972, then moved on to Camp Howze, R.O.K. where I spent 1973  
as a clerk in a mechanized infantry battalion a couple of clicks  
outside the DMZ.  Local pot was not potent but was plentiful and  
cheap, just a few dollars/kilo, in Seoul.  We kept boxes of it in the  
company day room, baked it in cakes in the mess hall.  Virtually every  
GI who wasn't a lifer, and many who were, smoked daily -- big clouds  
of smoke going up from the  3-story barracks buildings on the side of  
the hill looking out over a rice paddy plain after morning run and  
Taekwondo workout, during the breakfast hour.  Secret Air Force unit  
at the top of the hill, with their own tight security within the  
camp's secure perimeter.  The lifers who didn't smoke pot were all  
boozers, naturally, and more than a few of them would be drinking from  
bottles in the same barracks the rest of us were filling with pot  
smoke at 6 a.m. In the nearby R & R town of Song-ju-ri (sp?) they  
sold  OJ's by the pack - joints made by removing the tobacco from a  
filter cigarette, packing it with shredded pot, then dipping it in  
opiated hash oil, then rolling the joint in loose pot so it stuck to  
the paper. One of those would certainly put a young GI in a  
Sportellian mode for an extended period. Some enterprising draftees in  
our company managed to track down a source of that oil, brought back a  
jar of it so we  could craft our own OJ's. Daily smoking for a year,  
morning noon and night, in that already rather surreal environment,  
that was 1973.  Reading about Patty Hearst and her boyfriend Weed and  
the SLA, in the Stars and Stripes that year.  Armed Forces Radio.  The  
whole nine yards.  That's the year I discovered Gravity's Rainbow, in  
the Camp Howze library, just after its publication.  GR clicked with  
me on many levels, reading it in that setting.