I got a letter from my friend Jocko Crawford today. I haven’t heard from him in some time but his letters always make me smile. We were in the Army together, went through radio school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey and then to Panama.
We worked night shift at the transmitter site near Fort Clayton, just outside of Balboa. It was a backup site so we rarely did any real work other than swat mosquitoes as big as hummingbirds and answer an occasional call from our first sergeant. He would call now and then to make sure we were awake and not being attacked. I’m not sure who would have attacked us there, unless it was a group of Panamanians tanked up on cheap rum.
We would spend most evenings sitting on the porch in the thick tropical air watching the stars and talking about home.
Jocko was from Atlanta. His dad worked for the New Yorker Magazine and our childhoods were very different. He loved hearing about my life in small town Dora, Alabama. He was so unassuming, what I always thought an old soul might be. Even though we were the same age, I felt like he had lived more than I did.
Jocko is the only person I have ever met that was really at Woodstock in 1969. He said he wandered around the crowd asking people where the music was and they would always point in one direction and say, “ it’s over there man, it’s far out.”
He introduced me to the music of John Prine, Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills and Nash. I had played guitar for years but was never that good. Jocko played well and I learned a great deal from him.
I took Spanish at Balboa College, but Jocko got a girlfriend and learned to speak the language fluently. I struggled with simple phrases like,” Donde esta tu casa” – where is your house?
After a few months I got transfer papers and the talk was that we were all shipping out to Vietnam, but in the end, I was transferred to the other side of the Canal Zone-Fort Sherman, which was about 50 miles away.
Jocko helped me pack on a Friday and we rode the train to Colon. We sat on the steps of the caboose and dangled our feet as the train ambled through a verdant tunnel of vines and banana trees. We talked a little, but mostly just sat and listened to the rhythm of the wheels on the steel rails.
The tracks were built so close to the canal you could look off and see water, exotic birds and other tropical wildlife. At one point we passed a native Panamanian who had several Iguanas thrown over his shoulders. Not sure what they did with the beasts, and I was afraid to ask.
Friends picked us up at the train station and we took the long way to Fort Sherman. After I was settled in, we all met in the day room, played guitars and drank cheap Army beer until we forgot about home.
Most of my buddies scattered like marbles on a hardwood floor after the Army, but a few of us kept in touch, and I am so grateful that Jocko was one of those.
