Cigarette Smoke

When any of us go to the VA for medical treatment, we can depend on having someone stare at us and ask us if we smoke cigarettes. When I tell them that I used to, but that I had quit “cold turkey” back in the summer of 1964, I am seldom let off the hook, but quite often receive a lecture on the evils of smoking and second hand smoke. They also give me a brochure telling about smoking being bad for our health, and they never congratulate me on my having had the gonads to quit so long ago.

Now I wonder if the US Government, and the Military Forces might be proven responsible for a great deal of the tobacco addiction in the Veteran Population. When I was a kid in the Army, we were always given free cigarettes with our rations, and if we bought our own they cost about $1.00 a carton, or 10 Cts. Per pack.

Most old veterans can remember the long marches and the voice of a leader calling out; “Alright, take ten----smoke if you got `em”. Many of us realized that if we were non-smokers, we oftentimes were given some detail to perform, so as not to disturb those others who were busy smoking. For many of us kids, our response was to keep a pack of smokes in our gear, and smoke with the rest every time we took a break.

Of course a smoking break didn’t last long at best, and much too soon we would hear the order to “ Get off your butts and on your feet” and of course the following demand to; “GI them butts, and saddle up”. Wonder how many other guys found it easy to start smoking in the Army, and later on found it damned hard to quit. The VA probably should be required to compensate any “smoker” with lung cancer and a host of other diseases, who can prove that they were given cigarettes by the military. Guess you could say the link between smoking and cancer is accepted in most all medical papers.

When I go to visit the VA Hospital, I often see patients who are wrapped in pain and dragging along bandages, oxygen, drug-lines, and the rest of their sick-room equipment as they wander down the busy hallways, heading for the outside air where they can have that cigarette. One cold winter day in Albuquerque, I watched smokers shivering like dogs while they inhaled fumes, exhaled the smog made up of tobacco smoke and their own steaming breath, into that thirty degree temperature.

All my brothers served in the Air Force and all four of us smoked. Starting in the fifties and sixties, three of us realized that we were “hooked on cigarettes” and we just quit. My brother Bob was unable to lay down those cigarettes. The last time I visited with him, he had struggled out of his easy chair and walked out onto the screen porch, where he hung his oxygen on a nail, and then lit a smoke. As we sat there in the warm sunshine laughing and enjoying memories of our childhood days, Bob remarked; “I guess I will never be able to quit smoking!” and after a pause, he chuckled, as he added this phrase; “I guess I will quit when I die, won’t I!” Bob died three days later at age 65 years. His brothers and sisters are still living and some of us are approaching age eighty.

Bruce L Salisbury