suspension.
After about a year and a half of college, Jack had finally exhausted his final reprieve. He was reclassified 1-A, declared fit for service and about to receive his greetings from the local draft board. Few escaped military induction in the late ’60s.
To Jack, joining the Navy seemed the least objectionable alternative to the rifle and rucksack clusterfuck of Vietnam. The Navy, of course, was in Vietnam up to its waterline, but they mostly slept in soft beds and ate hot chow. The only downside to enlistment was a four-year hitch versus the two years Jack would have owed had the draft come calling. The Navy attracted more than its share of college boys willing to serve, but unwilling to be sacrificed. Be All You Can Be resonated with far more appeal than Join the Army and Die. Unfortunately for the Navy, education and blind obedience were largely incompatible qualities among recruits of the day. But this was the era of the body count and Jack Stricklin’s body would count just fine on the deck of a ship headed, of course, to Vietnam.
Jack would handle the Navy like he handled everything else—he would make the best of it. His father had served, and he too would do his duty. But he did it on his own terms, which actually meant doing as little of his duty as was humanly possible.
Jack had been assigned to the USS Wichita, the lead ship of the Wichita class replenishment oilers. Having undergone refitting at the Boston Naval Shipyard, the ship made its way to Long Beach where he joined the crew. In a few months they would be refueling ships operating on Yankee Station in the South China Sea.
Jack Stricklin found his groove in the spit-and-polish Navy thanks to the one ability he actually mastered in high school—typing. If you’re going to fight a war, the typewriter may not be the sexiest weapon in the arsenal, but it could be the most powerful. Armed with little but a lightweight bond and a single sheet of carbon paper, Typist Mate Jack Stricklin could inflict more damage than a company of Rangers. Here is where the true power lies. Single-spaced, in triplicate.
It was a job he could do in a coma. Jack spent most of his time staying high, and the rest making sure every shipmate who cared to join him was well-supplied. Even then, Jack knew he didn’t want to sell joints or grams. The reward hardly justified the risk. So he organized a network of distributors to sell his pot from stem to stern, making sure there was ample margin for everyone. It was his first real distribution network and it seemed to be working just fine.
With Mike Halliday and Dave Blott keeping him supplied, Jack was probably making as much money every month as most of the officers in his chain of command. He was definitely having more fun as he counted off his days on an advent calendar stocked with tightly rolled joints. It took Jack Stricklin no time at all to figure out the Navy and how best to endure his hitch. Now it was just a matter of doing the time.
JACK STRICKLIN
Mike Halliday and Dave Blott were my suppliers. One or the other usually had pot. At first, they’d send me a little for my own personal use. Then everybody started coming to me, so I’d get more and more.
Mike was a total genius when it came to packaging pot. He’d seal it up in coffee cans, cereal boxes, cookie tins—all the things you’d send a guy in the service. The pot was always manicured and packaged like it just came off the shelf. I was getting the whole ship high.
One of the guys on the ship—a black guy—he was a regular buyer—a distributor. He was a good guy. I’d even front him the pot sometimes. He always paid. Well, one day this guy gets in a fight with another guy—I mean, he beat nine shades of shit out of him. And the guy that took the beating got even by ratting him out.
So when the Shore Patrol shows up to arrest my guy, they find a list of names that he carried in his pocket. My name was at the top. Well, they came down on me even harder than they came down on him. They offered me everything but a commission if I would name names. But that wasn’t going to happen, so I was court martialed and convicted—my first pot bust. It was an eye-opener.
The lesson I learned was that it’s not always your own fuckup that gets you. You can be as careful as you want, but if you don’t surround yourself with people who are smart and loyal, you’re not going to survive. What kind of fucking pot dealer walks around with the name of his supplier written down in his pocket?
I never for one minute thought I was going to quit dealing. But I thought a lot about how to do it better. And I had a lot of time to think. I was sitting in the Long Beach brig when the ship deployed to Vietnam. I rode the chain from there to San Diego, then to Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the Naval and Marine Corps prison.
The prison in Portsmouth was a fucking dungeon. There were some bad motherfuckers inside, maximum-security, maybe the scariest prison I’ve ever been in. You didn’t have to wonder who was a killer—they all were. But in a funny way that worked out for me, because I knew if I could survive there, I could survive anywhere. The prospect of doing time never scared me after that.
A lot of people might have been discouraged to find themselves in a maximum-security military prison. The food was lousy, beds hard, inmates largely homicidal. There was not a lot of fun to be had. But Jack possessed several unusual qualities that would enable him to adapt. One, he was a world-class sleeper. He could take a nap on the business end of a jackhammer. Doing time was a whole lot easier when you were unconscious. Two, he had a knack for making friends to help him pass the time. And three, he could score pot in a convent.
“Dear Mike,” he wrote. “It really sucks in here. It sure would be nice if you could do something for my smile…”
Mike Halliday knew, of course, that all mail in and out of prison was carefully screened. He took it as a personal challenge, meticulously manicuring the finest Mexican pot and packing it perfectly into an emptied tube of Crest toothpaste. He added small nails to achieve the exact weight then resealed the tube in its original box. It was as pristine as the day it left the line. He tossed in a toothbrush for good measure and included a short note.
Dear Jack, Sorry I can’t help you out, bro. I’m afraid this is all I can do for your smile.
MIKE HALLIDAY
I had this guy in Cleveland—a black guy I had sold to when he was stationed at Fort Bliss. He called me one day after he got out of the Army and said he wanted about twenty-five pounds, which I ended up getting from Dave Blott. But I couldn’t take the time off from work to drive it to him, and he didn’t want to come get it.
So the first thing I did was build a bricking machine—my first one. Honestly, it was a piece of shit, but I managed to press the pot into bricks, exactly the size of milk cartons. Then I sealed them with wax—dog proof, right? I packed those milk cartons in an old footlocker and threw some worthless shit on top. Then I went down to the Greyhound station and put it on the bus to Cleveland.
For some reason, the guy in Cleveland never came and got it. I don’t know if he thought the load was hot, or if he found Jesus, or if he was just a chickenshit. But he never picked it up. So I went down to the bus station and had it sent back—it was twenty-five pounds of pot. I wasn’t about to let Greyhound have it.
By the time I got it back, that footlocker had stickers on it from as far away as Detroit, and it was beat to shit. Greyhound sent that thing everywhere. But nobody ever got a sniff of that pot. I ended up fronting the whole load to a guy I knew in El Paso.
A couple of days later, I opened the morning paper and right there in the Borderland section was a picture of those milk cartons. The caption said, “Police Seize Dog-Proof Pot.” It was the first load I ever lost.
Somewhere around that same time, I met these guys from Tennessee. They were just walking around San Jacinto Plaza in downtown El Paso trying to score. So happens one of the guys I worked with at Phelps Dodge, a Mexican dude, he wanted to get a sideline job, so I gave him some of my garbage stuff to sell. And there he was