THE CLOUDS LOOKED ON written by
Charles Barber Moe Armstrong as told by
In 1962, I left Illinois to join the military. I volunteered to become a Medical Corpsman - a Medic - with the Marines. This is where I got my nickname “Doc.” I was accepted in First Reconnaissance Battalion. I was stationed in California and then was transferred to Third Reconnaissance Battalion in Okinawa. I was able to swim long distances and spend time on the beach running practice combat patrols. I got my orders to be shipped to Okinawa in 1965. The plane to Okinawa was a lonely, dark, overnight flight. I remember waking up, falling asleep, and waking up, falling asleep, waking up again. Some of the people were soldiers, and some were civilian workers for the military bases in Okinawa. We were all headed for the Far East. We landed and I was transferred to a Marine Corps camp at a remote part of the island of Okinawa. There were no towns on the outside of the base, and there was no place to go. I didn’t mind that, because I brought my books, my records and my writings with me. So on the weekends, I stayed on the base and listened to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Bob Dylan records that I brought with me from the states. I listened to music and wrote poems, novels and plays. The life that I had known in the Midwest no longer appealed to me. I had grown up thinking about playing football at a University. Football had been pretty much the whole scope of my world. Now I enjoyed reading, writing and all kinds of music. Of course, Vietnam was out there raging. I wanted to go fight. I wanted to defend America and kill Communists. That’s the way I was brought up, in a Republican family whose politics were somewhere between Eisenhower and Goldwater. I thought
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