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seethed at the military bigwigs who rarely ventured out of Saigon, yet loudly boasted that the Vietcong were running scared. He began to wonder why he was killing Vietnamese teenagers in the name of suchvain and callous men.
    Holder’s fury peaked after he made a fateful error. In late September, just weeks away from wrapping up his third tour, Holder drove into Saigon to buy some marijuana. Once he secured a pack of pre-rolled joints, he foolishly decided to smoke one on the roadside before heading back to base. He didn’t realize he had entered a neighborhood that had recently been declared off-limits to American troops; the streets were teeming with military policemen looking for violators.
    A moment after Holder lit the joint, an MP pulled up alongside his vehicle and placed him under arrest. Holder was escorted back to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where he was stunned to learn of the punishment he now faced: six months in the stockade and ademotion to private.
    Unfortunately for him, Holder had been nabbed in the midst of a marijuana panic. Politicians on the home front had become alarmed by new research alleging that the drug was crippling the war effort. One study, published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, had warned that marijuana was causing American soldiers to experience psychotic episodes in which they could easily murdercomrades orwander into minefields. Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut cited such research in claiming that the My Lai Massacre of March 1968, in which American soldiers had slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese villagers, had been caused by marijuana abuse. He informed the Department of Defense that he planned to conduct congressional hearings “to let our people know if our soldiers in Vietnam have suddenly become brutal storm troopers or whether, as I consider more likely, some of them have become the victims of a drug problem that has already torn asunder thefabric of American society.”
    The Army responded to this political pressure by declaring war on pot—“the first popular war we’ve had in a long time,” quipped one Pentagon official. Drug-sniffing dogs were called in from Okinawa tosearch soldiers’ footlockers; suspected farms were doused with herbicides; and those arrested were shown little legal mercy, regardless of howfaithfully they had served. Despite having earned six service stars during his twenty-three months in Vietnam, Holder was court-martialed for marijuana possession andhanded the maximum sentence.
    Holder was sent to the Long Binh Jail, or LBJ, a military prison notorious both for its overcrowding and for its tense racial climate. Originally built to house 350 inmates, LBJ’s population had soared to more than a thousand by late 1969. Over 90 percent of those inmates were black, and many complained that they had been singled out for incarcerationbecause of their skin. (“A white guy goes out and kills 13 gook babies and gets away with it,” a former LBJ denizen carped to a United Press International reporter. “A brother doesn’t shine his boots one day andhe gets nine months.”) The guards, by contrast, were uniformly white, a situation that exacerbated the inmates’ feelings of injustice. The year before Holder began his term at LBJ, the prison had been roiled by a two-day riot in which the facility was nearly destroyed; sixty-three guards were wounded, and an inmate was beaten todeath with a shovel.
    Holder did not experience such violence while at LBJ, but the prison’s skewed demographics reminded him of the harsh lesson that he had learned in Coos Bay: achievement could never trump race.
    Still, Holder was not quite ready to give up on the Army: as soon as he was granted early release from LBJ after serving twenty-nine days, he signed up for a fourth tour in Vietnam. No longer welcome in the Razorbacks, he was transferred four hundred miles north to Phu Bai, where he was assigned to the 101st Aviation Battalion’s assault helicopter