(Part II, Part I can be found here)
In his book, American Warrior: The True Story of a Legendary Ranger, Gary O’Neal tells about the time when he was still too young to join the military without parental consent, at 16 he “borrowed” an older cousin’s birth certificate – unbeknownst to his cousin – to “legally” enlist in the Army.
O’Neal was eventually caught when the Army noticed two soldiers with the same identification number receiving pay. “I just wanted to be in the Army to get away from where I grew up,” said O’Neal. “I just basically ran away from home. I saw a target of opportunity.”
Growing up with dyslexia caused O’Neal difficulty in school. This was during the late ‘50s and early to mid ‘60s, long before the affliction was recognized as a possible root cause for poor performance. “I had problems reading and I had problems spelling. The math. I’d get things mixed up. Back then, they always called me ‘stupid’ because I couldn’t read,” said O’Neal.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic were O’Neal’s self-admitted “Achilles heel,” his weak points, which led to disrespectful taunting and ridicule by ignorant classmates, often followed by a school yard fight and O’Neal getting in trouble. “I got tired of people calling me stupid. And I knew I wasn’t stupid. I could drive a tractor at 8 years old, I could milk a cow when I was 5. I was riding horses in rodeos, and I’m roping, and I’m doing all kinds of stuff. Tearing engines apart, putting them back together. Planting wheat, and planting corn. At a young age I was doing a man’s job. I wasn’t stupid.”
The military method of teaching – explanation, demonstration, practical application (explain-see-do) – supported with basic written material suited O’Neal well with his talent, or “gift” for having the aptitude for seeing something done then being able to do it himself. “The handouts and books were confusing to me,” said O’Neal. “The training in the military fit my disabilities. I seen it, and I did it. Just like mimicking. It was really easy for me.”
Training to work with demolitions as an infantryman, O’Neal was required to calculate a mathematical formula to do his job. “I had to do formula. I had to do algebra and trigonometry,” said O’Neal, who credited, “good instructors” in the Army, one who in particular noticed and approached him about his dyslexia. “One of the instructors said, ‘Gary, you got dyslexia?’ and I said, ‘What’s that?’ and he said, ‘Let’s check that out,’” said O’Neal. “So I went to the doctor, and they checked it out and said, ‘Yeah, you got dyslexia.’”
Fortunately for O’Neal, the US Army, and the nation, properly training and deploying dyslexic demolition experts for battle in Vietnam was as simple as ensuring recruits had dyslexic demolition instructors. “One of my instructors had dyslexia too,” said O’Neal. “And he showed me how he did it. With one eye. Before this, I’d look at a paragraph, and most people if they saw what I saw would get sea sick.”
Being treated better by the military – “the only color that matters is O.D. Green,” said O’Neal – than by peers in civilian life made military culture one he found attractive. His first deployment to Southwest Asia was an assignment to the 173rd Airborne Brigade (infantry), where he served at Battalion Recon, then Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP – pronounced lurp), and then on to Rangers. O’Neal served with the Rangers for the duration of the Vietnam War when he came back stateside to help form Ranger battalions.
He accomplished all this before becoming a combat engineer in Special Forces (SF), sometime in the 1970s. Applying for SF was a decision he delayed for many years based upon his own erroneous assumption he didn’t possess the right qualities and experience.
“I wanted to be SF in Vietnam, but I didn’t have enough education in the woods to do what they was doing in Vietnam,” said O’Neal. “Come to find out that I did a lot more.”
O’Neal became attracted to martial arts, and he trained understanding the superior power of the mind over the strength of the physical. “I always trained my subconscious,” said O’Neal. “I’m a conscious being. I’ll tell you the secret that I did. I trained my mind first, before I did the action. It’s just like watching a video. I would see it, and then I would repeat it in my head a lot. Then I could do it, and I just went out and did it.”
To be continued in Part III, the final part of this series, to be published in the March First Nations Drum.
