Читать книгу First to Last: The Tale of a Biker - Dennis Lid - Страница 9

Chapter Three Interruption

Years of Drought Without a Bike

It was the dry period – a time without a motorcycle that lasted seven years. My life as a biker had just begun during my teenage years and a long interruption had already intervened. This drought was like a plague or blight on my life. There would be other periods like it in the future. They would be memorable only by their extreme monotony. “Into every life a little rain must fall.” Yet, the quest continued even during the dry years.

My fledgling biker’s life was severely interrupted when the family moved and I was sent off to boarding school. I had to sell the motorbike. There was no choice in the matter; it simply had to be done. My parents took a chance, garnered all the cash they could muster from their known assets, threw in with a partner and went into the resort and hotel business. When the house was sold and their first resort lodge at Lake Tahoe was purchased, I became a bike-less boarding student at Saint Mary’s High School located in Peralta Park, California. What a change it was compared to the nice home we had on Thornhill Drive in Montclair. The school was fine, but housing for boarding students, though appreciated, was very old and decrepit. It remained rather inhospitable even after a homemade paint job of my two-man room. Peter Hookendyjke, my Dutch roommate, and I made the best of it. We dwelt and studied there for the next two years until graduation from high school gave us relief. Both of us then went off to the University of Santa Clara in California, Peter as a Mechanical Engineering student and myself into Liberal Arts as an English Major. I graduated four years later; Peter left for Holland after completing his junior year. He didn’t graduate. I never heard from him again and didn’t know the reason for his abrupt departure. Word had it that there was a family problem of some sort, and that he joined the Dutch Air Force after returning home. Some friendships end abruptly and are never reestablished, as was the case with this one. God speed was my wish for him.

Finishing School and Beginning Work

I chose the University of Santa Clara because it was close, affordable and my application was accepted there. The business my parents engaged in at Lake Tahoe didn’t last. The partners didn’t get along well and so dissolved their business affiliation. Each traded their share of the partnership for a smaller commercial property and went their separate way. My folks ended up in Menlo Park owning and managing a restaurant and quaint hotel by the name of the Marie Antoinette Inn. It was close enough to Santa Clara for me to live at home, even though I preferred boarding at the university. I lived and worked at home during my freshman year, and then I bought an old 1948 Chevrolet convertible and became a boarding student at the university. It was more convenient and conducive to studying, and my father was willing to pay the boarding costs. Those college days constituted four long, hard and boring years with the exception of my writing, drama and military ROTC classes. I knew I needed a degree, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Perhaps I’d end up in teaching, or the military or who knows what. Anyway, the bachelor’s degree was an essential first step; it was a necessary ticket-punch for the professional life. That sheepskin was a mandatory requirement for a successful life in the 1950’s era. So I endured unto graduation and received my degree and lieutenant’s commission into the regular army.

After graduation, the United States Army took over my life. Wow! What a change. Since I wanted more than “three hots and a cot” to start off my military career, the first thing I did was to partner up and get married so as to start my family life just prior to entering the service. I won’t dwell on that mistake, since it ended in failure eleven years and two children later. Let’s just say I shamefully added to the divorce statistic and disrupted a few lives. I’m not proud of it, but it’s a fact, and I contributed to the mess. A decade later, after a bit of alimony and years of child support payments, the marriage was annulled. It was a very negative and disillusioning time of life for all concerned. The quest for the Holy Grail seemed all but halted. Even thoughts of motorcycles and the life of a biker were temporarily shelved. I was like a blind man groping in the dark for quite some time. I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel a number of years later and started living life again. The bottom line to this part of my life is that divorce or annulment is an episode to be avoided if at all possible. The best way to ensure that is to be wise enough to choose the right spouse to begin with. As Shakespeare once wrote, “All this the world well knows, yet few know well how to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” Let’s leave it at that.

Acclimatization to Army Life

After attending Infantry Officer’s Basic Course and Airborne training, I was assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington for three years of Infantry duty with the 2d Battle Group, 47th Infantry. For another year, I attended the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, California, and studied the Vietnamese Language and culture. Thereafter, I went off to war in Southeast Asia as a Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) Army Battalion Advisor. That lasted for half-a-year in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in II Corps at a place called Tan Canh near Dak To. Things experienced on combat operations in the highlands will fill another book some day. I finished my combat tour of duty at Tuy Hoa on the coast of the South China Sea as a Psychological Operations Officer advising the South Vietnamese Army G5 Section (Psychological Operations) at that location. That was “fun time” as well, but the telling of those experiences is reserved for a more appropriate time and place. The basic lesson learned was that war is an ugly and numbing experience best avoided if at all possible. It should definitely be a last choice in attempts to rectify the human condition. Yet, in a humble and belated defense of the Vietnam War, and in the words of a respected source, I dare to say: