After completing the book and getting it ready to go to print, I was going through my files a few months ago and came across what might have ended up as the last chapter of the book.

Our “Hey, Hey, We’re Not Dead Yet” reunion change all that.

As such, I’m also not sending this out as a regularly scheduled Dispatch or SITREP. It’s going out under its own title — on a Tuesday.

I hope you enjoy it.

Drop me a note through our “Contact Us” on the menu bar. We’d love to hear what you think about something I wrote that didn’t make the book.

Your regularly scheduled Dispatch will be in your email box tomorrow.

—Maria Florkowska (The Last Checkmate)

When I got home, the United States had just been through one of the most consequential and tumultuous years ever—it would change the country forever. It had been one traumatic event after another as a wide array of social and political trends that had been building for years reached critical mass. A lot of shit had gone down, and it was going to take me awhile to wrap my head around any of it.

I had missed it all—I had been busy looking for mines, repairing blown up bridges, pulling dead bodies out of rivers, building piers and docks, and blowing shit up. When I got home I hardly recognized the place.

Nothing showed me how far I’d been left behind more than one night three weeks after I got home, December 14, 1968, when I went to see The Doors at the L.A. Forum.

I felt lost — like I no longer belonged. As we walked into the venue, the warm smell of colitas and patchouli oil hit me hard, but the real shocker was the crowd itself. All around me were “flower power” people in wild clothes, curly hair flowing, dancing and singing, passing joints like communion. It was a lot to take in.

Still, I was there for the music — a chance to hear The Doors play my old jukebox favorite, She’s a Twentieth Century Fox, the same song we used to crank up while diving that plane wreck on the Potomac River just a little over a year earlier.

Inside, the scene got even crazier. Bic lighters were still four years away, but that didn’t stop people — many who’d been protesting the war while I was in the Mekong Delta — from lighting sparklers and, unbelievably, throwing them into the crowd

And I thought I’d seen some crazy bat-shit stuff in Vietnam. Was this one of those “flashbacks” our parents warned us about? I laughed it off, but what happened next would set the tone for the night.

Jerry Lee Lewis was the opening act. The backstory was that had wanted Johnny Cash, but the promoters didn’t want to hire a “felon.” (For the record, Cash had been arrested three times but never convicted of a felony.) So, they booked “The Killer”— the original bad boy of rock ’n’ roll.

Almost from the start of his set, the crowd was shouting for Jim and The Doors.

Jerry Lee grew more and more frustrated until he finally jumped up onto the piano and barked, “OK, for all those who love me, God bless you. For those who don’t . . . ” while flipping off the crowd. Then he climbed down and stormed off the stage.

Standing there in the chaos I should’ve realized it was more than just a bad night for Jerry Lee — it was a sign of how much the world had changed while I’d been gone. The music, the mood, even the manners of America were different now. I’d come home from Vietnam to a country that no longer moved to the same beat. And I didn’t know it yet, but that feeling — that disconnect — wasn’t going away anytime soon.

Most of us guys in the 523rd Dive Section were potheads. Our jobs were stressful — especially when we were diving in the dark zero-visibility muddy waters of the Mekong Delta. We worked long days, sometimes handling explosives — and those of us living on the dive barge were on twenty-four-hour call. All the while, there were a bunch of tiny guys out there trying to kill us. A lot of times… we just needed to sit back and chill.

We’d served under enough alcoholic NCOs to know we didn’t want to go down that road. So, we imbibed in the Can Sa (Vietnamese-grown ganja… OK, pot).

And for those of us who smoked, Mike Garver was our Pied Piper. I hadn’t seen Mike since my last night in Vietnam, when we demolished four bags of Cheetos and a couple of bottles of Mateus wine, passing orange-dusted joints back and forth on the roof of our old dive barge hooch — now transplanted to the middle of the 523rd’s compound in Vung Tau.

Sometime in late ‘69, Mike showed up on my doorstep. As we shared a joint, he told me he and his girlfriend were heading to South America to buy a mule and hike across the country.

Garver and his stories scared the hell out of my new young bride — and I didn’t see Garver again until sometime around 2015.

Looking back, we were all trying to find a way to level out and maintain our sanity — some chased it, some buried it, some lit it up and watched the smoke drift away. I guess we each had our own kind of therapy.

America held its first military draft lottery since World War II. Blue plastic capsules containing every birth date were mixed in a large glass container, and one by one they were drawn to establish the order in which young men would be called for military service. Low numbers meant a high likelihood of being drafted; high numbers often meant avoiding the draft altogether.

My birthday was picked 324th. I was filled with confusion of how I felt about this. Would I have given up the experience of the last year to bypass Vietnam?

Surprisingly, the answer was no.

This hits at a core wound — one that shaped the post-war experience for a lot of Vietnam vets, but especially those in specialized roles like Army Divers.

These men weren’t just isolated overseas — they were isolated before they got there, and after they came home. There was no established “Army Diver Brotherhood” waiting to welcome them back, no built-in legacy network to plug into.

They went to war as a ragtag crew of draftees who passed through Basic and Dive School, and then got dropped into Vietnam without ever meeting the men who came before them. Those original Army Divers were ghosts — mythical names in faded logbooks, maybe, but not flesh-and-blood brothers.

And when these divers came home, there were no reunions. No unit patches. No elder divers in bars swapping stories. Just silence.
To make it worse, the mainstream military support networks — like the VFW—closed their doors to them. Literally.

The war was still raging, and the country was already trying to forget it. So these guys came back, not only from a war nobody wanted to talk about — but from a job nobody understood, wearing a uniform that had no place to hang its helmet.

This left them doubly unmoored. No welcome home from the country, and no welcome from within the military. They weren’t just “forgotten veterans” — they were invisible ones.

They say, a lot about writing a book has more to do than the stories you tell — A lot has to do with what you take out.

This was certainly one of those cases.

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