Page 69 - MN

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Warehouse on Cannery Row. That band was really, really good. Gary Ryan played banjo and was maybe the best 4-string player I've ever heard. Al Ring played trombone and drums and Dave Tobiason played beautiful rag time and dixieland piano. I played banjo, and I was nowhere near good enough to play with those guys, but we drank a lot and I faked it. I also did some comedy songs.
It was there that I met Don Duncan.
He was sitting at the bar and we had a couple of beers and talked. I didn't think much of it, another army guy from Fort Ord who seemed nice enough. The next day I got back from lunch and the guys in the office asked me if I was in trouble. I didn't think so, but they told me a Special Forces sergeant covered with medals was in looking for me. It turned out that Don was an actual real-life soldier with a bronze star and a hell of a life story. He'd briefed Defense Secretary McNamara in Viet Nam and had done all the stuff the real Special Forces guys did in jungle warfare. We became friends and rented a house in Pacific Grove. I commuted to the army.
In time I introduced him to all my hippie musician friends and they had long, serious talks about the war. Don had gone to Vietnam, fought, and then come back to be a recruiter for Special Forces. He'd turned down a bunch of wacko G.I. Joe wannabes. Then he went back for another tour of duty and the guys he'd turned down started showing up in Special Forces. The standards were dropping and the war had changed. No longer were they trying to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, and Don could see the writing on the wall.
He came back and next thing I knew he was on the cover of Ramparts Magazine, in full dress uniform, under the headline, "I Quit". He then wrote a book about Vietnam and the war, which was riveting. I've tried to find it now but I can't. I remember one great passage, where he was sneaking down a jungle trail and looked up to see a tiger right in front of him. He said his rectal pucker factor went up 100%.
He joined the anti-war movement and toured with Joan Baez to speak at rallies. I checked awhile ago and he passed away somewhere in the midwest, pretty much unknown to the people in the area.
Another time I was in the Warehouse, drinking at the bar, and started talking to an Irishman named Jim Horrigan. We got around to golf and I told him I'd worked at a golf course while I was in high school, cleaning clubs, picking up range balls and running the pro shop. It turned out Jim was the sergeant who ran the Fort Ord golf course. Two days later he had me transferred out there to help run the pro shop and do the books. The first month I did the books I was missing $10,000. Jim was not impressed. He gave me a short course in bookkeeping and we found the $10,000.