Reply #24: Exactly

[TahitiNut]

The 'great motivator' in the stateside meta-military at the time was the spectre of "maybe you'd rather be in Viet Nam?" Of all the guys I knew and have known, only about 1% looked at 'Nam as something attractive, either for (military) career advancement of some generational 'proof of manhood.' All the rest of us viewed it as some kind of gaping maw of hell, ready to swallow us up. The National Guard was overloaded with guys who traded a 6-year (and more) PITA for a chance of a year in hell. The stateside clerks and record-keepers were highly motivated and very over-qualified.

The only ones I ever saw who were overloaded and mistake-prone were the one's handling the hundreds of thousands of returnees at Oakland Army Base. We were coming back through there from 'Nam 24-by-7 and, at that point, didn't much tolerate delays or horse-shit. To my knowledge, nobody stayed overnight at OAB on the way back. We came in through Travis AFB and went through the gauntlet of out-processing at all hours of the day and night.