Bloods (17 page)

He said, “You’re under arrest. Please don’t move.”

Then in through a door to the office came another agent.

It was January 16, 1970. They locked me up on $500,000 bail. I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t raise it.

When I went before the judge, I was saying that we took the money because the community was in need. There are people out here hungry, I said. He said that was irrelevant to the crime. He was wounded in World War II. And I don’t think he liked me being a veteran doing what I did.

I got sentenced to the maximum ten years on the federal statute of robbery of a mail custodian without putting his life in jeopardy. And I got ten to thirty years under the District of Columbia statute for armed robbery.

Johnson got the same sentence. Jones got three to nine years.

The inmates at Lorton Reformatory in Virginia, they welcomed me with open arms. They were amazed we tried this thing for the community. It was like “power to the people.” Heroes, basically.

At first, I got off into a lot of self-study and self-development. Spiritual, mental, and physical. I used to be the first one out on the track and last one in. I was running about 50 miles a week, really. I got into studying ancient Africa and was fascinated with the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. I learned of the oneness of the universe and the single creator which Akhenaton propogated from the throne of Egypt before the time of Moses. And I took the ancient Egyptian name Ari Sesu Merretazon, which is now my legal name. It means “guardian servant chosen to do the will of the Creator.”

Then I got into my brothers. Each evening I was
organizing. We had set up ALERTS. It would stand for Association Library Educational Research Team for Survival. The concept was that you give us the information, and we will get the education. The prison authorities tried to keep us from publishing an independent inmate paper, but we won a consent decree to publish. Then I organized a residential religious council for those with religious faith to stop the conflict between the orthodox Muslims and the Black Muslims, the Baptists, and the Black Jews, and whatnot. We became the cooks, servers, busboys, and line monitors in the mess hall. And that stopped all the chaos at dinnertime over people fighting for food and eating on dirty tables.

I was looked upon by the men like some type of adviser-counselor. They would come to me to have me write letters to their wives. Or help them with legal problems if I could understand them.

But more and more I started talking to Vietnam veterans. The VA wasn’t coming down to the prisons, and they had problems with upgrading discharges, getting benefits, and counseling. We realized that we just had to do it ourselves. So I set up the first veterans affairs office inside a prison. We had our own office space, regular office hours, filing system, typewriters, and people just donated enough equipment for us to do the job. And the VA acknowledged us in the prison.

We called it Incarcerated Veterans Assistance Organization, and I wrote a self-help manual on how to set one up inside a prison. I testified before Senator Alan Cranston. It was the first time ever that Congress heard testimony relating to incarcerated veterans. The administrator for programs at Lorton accompanied me to Chicago to participate in veterans’ forums. And I visited the White House with other veterans to meet President Carter.

We got over 500,000 Vietnam era veterans in prison, jail, on parole, probation, or awaiting sentence. Most because of drug problems caused by the war. Or they ain’t able to cope when society don’t care about them. Over half of them are black veterans. So we keep trying to spread the organization. I’m helping to start a veterans office at Grater Ford Prison near my home in Philadelphia. There are more than 100 across the country today.

Back in January of 1975, I got the ruling from the appeals court saying that the judge errored in sentencing us under both those statutes. It had to be one or the other. So I contacted a lawyer at Antioch Law School to help me put together a petition for reduction of sentence. Besides learning about my good behavior in prison and all my work with veterans, the judge could see a physical change. The turban I wore. The African dress. And he knew about the support systems I had with veterans’ organizations outside and how I would keep helping veterans. He said he would give me the benefit of the doubt, and he reduced the minimum sentence under the D.C. statute to six years. That made me eligible for parole that day.

One week later I went before the parole board at nine o’clock in the morning. By noon I was in Washington, D.C. Free.

It was August 25, 1975. I had served five and one half years.

The vision I had seen sitting on that stoop when I was twelve had said the number five.

I have taught a law course at Antioch on the urban mission of developing lawyers who want to represent the poor. I’ve counseled Vietnam veterans at the Vet Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the West Philadelphia Corporation, I am helping neighborhood people reduce their energy cost so they will have money left over for economic development. Maybe to invest in a recreation center or even a business.

I am married, and we have a beautiful baby girl.

Johnson is still in prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Jones is probably out. The government said it only recovered $60,000 of the money. I told the authorities I gave what I had left to a friend, but he ripped it off when I was in prison. To prove I still have no knowledge of where existing money from that crime may be and that I did not receive no money after I came out of prison, I went on the television show
Lie Detector
. And the result was no. I don’t want involvement with that type of experience anymore. The money to me was like blood money. I can make money in legitimate ways.

I still think of Vietnam. I come to realize really that
the purpose of the war was something more than any of the men who were fighting realized at the time. It was like a power play. And the people in charge kept getting overcommitted, overextended, and just didn’t know how to pull out. No matter how patriotic we was fighting it, we was like cannon fodder. And I will always be thinkin’ that way until the government shows me how we benefited from it.

In Vietnam and in Lorton I was with men at their darkest hour. We listened to Aretha Franklin together in both places. And we cried together, and longed for the World together.

War is prison, too.

About a year ago I saw Streeter on a D.C. transit bus. He was having problems. He would express that he could not find a job. He had lost his wife. He was talking very slow and very deliberate. His speech had slowed down. His whole demeanor had slowed down.

I think that what happened to him in Vietnam was the damagingest thing I seen happen to one person.

I did not know how he felt about me seeing him again back in the World.

I did not know what to say to him.

The first one I killed really got to me. I guess it was his size. Big guy. Big, broad chest. Stocky legs. He was so big I thought he was Chinese. I still think he was Chinese.

We were on this trail near the Ashau Valley. I saw him and hit the ground and came up swinging like Starsky and Hutch. I shot him with a .45, and I got him pretty good.

He had an AK-47. He was still holding it. He kicked. He kicked a lot. When you get shot, that stuff you see on Hoot Gibson doesn’t work. When you’re hit, you’re hit. You kick. You feel that stuff burning through your flesh. I know how it feels. I’ve been hit three times.

That’s what really got to me—he was so big. I didn’t expect that.

They were hard core, too. The enemy would do anything to win. You had to respect that. They believed in a cause. They had the support of the people. That’s the key that we Americans don’t understand yet. We can’t do
anything in the military ourselves unless we have the support of the people.

Sometimes we would find the enemy tied to trees. They knew they were going to die. I remember one guy tied up with rope and bamboo. We didn’t even see him until he shouted at us and started firing. I don’t know whether we killed him or some artillery got him.

One time they had a squad of sappers that hit us. It was like suicide. They ran at us so high on marijuana they didn’t know what they were doing. You could smell the marijuana on their clothes. Some of the stuff they did was so crazy that they had to be high on something. In the first place, you don’t run through concertina wire like that. Nobody in his right mind does. You get too many cuts. Any time you got a cut over there, it was going to turn to gangrene if it didn’t get treated. And they knew we had the place covered.

Another time this guy tried to get our attention. I figured he wanted to give up, because otherwise, I figured he undoubtedly wanted to die. We thought he had started to
chu hoi
. And we prepared for him to come in. But before he threw his weapon down, he started firing and we had to shoot him.

And, you know, they would walk through our minefields, blow up, and never even bat their heads. Weird shit.

But I really thought they stunk.

Like the time we were heli-lifted from Vandergrift and had to come down in Dong Ha. There was this kid, maybe two or three years old. He hadn’t learned to walk too well yet, but he was running down the street. And a Marine walked over to talk to the kid, touched him, and they both blew up. They didn’t move. It was not as if they stepped on something. The kid had to have the explosive around him. It was a known tactic that they wrapped stuff around kids. That Marine was part of the security force around Dong Ha, a lance corporal. He was trying to be friendly.

I think it stinks. If those guys were low enough to use kids to bait Americans or anybody to this kind of violent end, well, I think they should be eliminated. And they would have been if we had fought the war in such a manner
that we could have won the war. I mean total all-out war. Not nuclear war. We could have done it with land forces. I would have invaded Hanoi so many times, they would have thought we were walking on water.

The people in Washington setting policy didn’t know what transpired over there. They were listening to certain people who didn’t really know what we were dealing with. That’s why we had all those stupid restrictions. Don’t fight across this side of the DMZ, don’t fire at women unless they fire at you, don’t fire across this area unless you smile first or unless somebody shoots at you. If they attack you and run across this area, you could not go back over there and take them out. If only we could have fought it in a way that we had been taught to fight.

But personally speaking, to me, we made a dent, even though the South did fall. Maybe we did not stop the Communist takeover, but at least I know that I did something to say hey, you bastards, you shouldn’t do that. And personally I feel good about it. People like Jane Fonda won’t buy that, because they went over there and actually spent time with the people that were killing Americans. That’s why I feel that I shouldn’t spend $4 to see her at the box office. She’s a sexy girl and all that other kind of stuff, but she’s not the kind of girl that I’d like to admire. She was a psychological setdown, and she definitely should not have been allowed to go to Hanoi.

I learned a lot about people in my platoon. I learned you have to take a person for what he feels, then try to mold the individual into the person you would like to be with. Now my platoon had a lot of Southerners, as well as some Midwesterners. Southerners at the first sign of a black officer being in charge of them were somewhat reluctant. But then, when they found that you know what’s going on and you’re trying to keep them alive, then they tried to be the best damn soldiers you’ve got. Some of the black soldiers were the worse I had because they felt that they had to jive on me. They wanted to let me know, Hey, man. Take care of me, buddy. You know I’m your buddy. That’s bull.

As long as a black troop knows he’s going to take a few knocks like everybody else, he can go as far as anybody in the Corps. Our biggest problem as a race is a
tendency to say that the only reason something didn’t go the way it was programmed to go is because we are black. It may be that you tipped on somebody’s toes. We as blacks have gotten to the place now where we want to depend on somebody else doing something for us. And when we don’t measure up to what the expectations are—the first thing we want to holler is racial discrimination. My philosophy is, if you can’t do the job—move.

Let’s face it. We are part of America. Even though there have been some injustices made, there is no reason for us not to be a part of the American system. I don’t feel that because my grandfather or grandmother was a slave that I should not lift arms up to support those things that are stated in the Constitution of the United States. Before I went to Vietnam, I saw the “burn, baby, burn” thing because of Martin Luther King. Why should they burn up Washington, D.C., for something that happened in Memphis? They didn’t hurt the white man that was doing business down there on 7th Street. They hurt the black man. They should have let their voices be known that there was injustice. That’s the American way.