As Common as Chewing Gum

Crewcut, clear-eyed and firm of jaw, Colonel Gerald V. Kehrli had been a model Air Force officer for 28 years. In May 1970, he took command of a less-than-spirited air transport squadron at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airbase, and before long the unit was back at a peak of morale. "It was guys like Colonel Kehrli who gave you that go-go spirit," one of his former officers said last week. "He was the kind of man you really wanted to work for."

As it turned out, the squadron was high on Kehrli in more ways than one. In Saigon, a military court sentenced the colonel to three years in prison and fined him $15,000 not only for being an enthusiastic user of marijuana but also for passing it around to his men, often at pot parties in his quarters. At the colonel's trial, a young intelligence officer testified that Kehrli had even been a pot proselytizer at Saigon military officers' clubs. "Marijuana is a good thing," Kehrli told the officer during one conversation. "It allows me to understand my men and close the generation gap. I use marijuana and both my officers and enlisted men use marijuana."

Candy Habits. Outside Kehrli & Co., few career men--and even fewer field-grade officers (major and above)--ever develop a sustained taste for Pleiku Pink, Bleu de Hue, Cambodian-made Park Lane No. 2s, and the myriad other varieties of marijuana that have become freely available in South Viet Nam. But many other military men do. "Nobody raises an eyebrow now if someone suggests that out in the field, where the arm of military law is relatively relaxed, 90% of all noncareer G.I.s smoke grass," reports TIME Correspondent James Willwerth. "It is as common as chewing gum here, and the young officers are smoking it nearly as much as the enlisted men."

Pot has been a pervasive feature of the G.I. scene since the mid-1960s, when canny Vietnamese (who prefer to chew betel nuts or smoke opium themselves) began cultivating the growing military market. Last-fall a Pentagon investigating team returned from Viet Nam with a report that drugs had become a serious "military problem." Last month the U.S. command in Saigon announced an all-out campaign against narcotics, complete with a 64-page directive and plans for ground and aerial searches for fields where marijuana is grown. Military surveys taken over the past two years have shown that from 30% to 45% of the troops in Viet Nam have used drugs, mainly marijuana. Of the 11,000 G.I.s who were apprehended or investigated last year for drug violations, 75% were pot smokers.

What most worries American commanders is the more recent--and more dangerous--spread of heroin. In 1966, there were only four disciplinary cases involving hard drugs; in 1970, there were 1,751 cases. In one 79-day period last year, 75 G.I.s died of suspected or confirmed use of heroin. Perhaps one in five G.I.s has smoked or "snorted" heroin. "Shooting" it with a needle is not yet widespread, which means that most heroin-addicted G.I.s in Viet Nam have weak "candy habits" that can be broken. Even so, warns Colonel Thornton E. Ireland, the U.S. provost marshal in Viet Nam, "We've got a problem. Don't let anyone kid you."

The problem became evident late last summer, when tremendous quantities of very pure (95%), very cheap (as low as $1.50 per 150 milligrams) powdery white heroin began turning up all over South Viet Nam. U.S. military officials trace the "smack" not to Viet Cong deviltry but to Chinese entrepreneurs in Bangkok and Vientiane, processing centers for the opium poppy grown in Thailand, Laos and southern China.

A crackdown on marijuana in Viet Nam gave a big boost to heroin, which is odorless and more easily concealed than grass. Troopers hide their "horse" in empty rifle shells, salt it in cigarettes, sniff it in Vicks inhalers, or practice "shotgunning"--blowing heroin smoke through the barrel of an M-16 into a friend's nostrils. There are "shooting galleries" where men can snort or mainline in comfort, as well as "skag bars" in Saigon where a G.I. who orders his beer "with" gets a cap of heroin stirred into his suds. Recently, soldiers have wound up with suds in suds; some greedy dealers are substituting detergent for the real stuff. Only three blocks from Tan Son Nhut is "Mom's," an alley of private homes run by the enterprising wife of a South Vietnamese army sergeant, where G.I.s can get acid, speed, heroin, mescaline, joints rolled on an electric machine, hollow objets d'art for smuggling, and--of course--girls. For no more than $7 a day, a soldier in Viet Nam can finance a heroin habit that would cost $50 to $100 a day back home in New York or Detroit.

What to do? Military courts are no answer, partly because junior officers hesitate to enforce drug regulations--either out of empathy or from fear of getting "fragged" (hit with a fragmentation grenade) by men in reprisal. An "amnesty" program, which allows drug addicts to get treatment without going to jail (where many guards are pushers), has been under way for several months, with modest success. G.I. radio and TV stations fire off antidrug slogans. Sample: "Don't let drugs be your bag, or you may go home in one."

But there appears to be no real antidote for drugs in an expeditionary force whose members are lonely, bored, at times frightened, and always under tremendous pressure from their peers to go along. Though all in all the number of really serious users--particularly of hard drugs--is limited, a great many G.I.s at least dabble in narcotics. It is one sorry byproduct of the war that cannot be eliminated by Vietnamization: as the U.S. soldiers come home, all too often they bring their new habits with them.

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