MAN AND RIFLE REACHING

Man and Rifle Reaching

     It was near the end of our three weeks at Camp Matthews, the rifle range. Our drill instructors had behaved like blacksmiths, sticking us and our M14 rifles into a fire until everything in every boy‑man of us that did not have to do with rifle was burned away, then hammering what remained of each of us together with his rifle until a new, unified instrument was forged. This is pretty literal: in the sitting position, for example, the rifle's sling pulled the left elbow in toward the body's centerline in an attitude which muscles and tendons aren't really designed to adopt. After ankles were crossed in the dirt so that each knee was supported by the opposite booted foot, the spine had to curl forward until each elbow reached past the supporting knee.

     At the beginning, few of us could get even near this position. As Marine Corps drill instructors always had, ours simply kicked us into it: it was a boot to the back, a knee to the neck, a kick to the elbow, all amid a whirlwind of shouted curses and warnings that failure to get it right could result not only in the individual Marine's death, but in the deaths of his comrades as well. That was against regulations. In fact, it was the ultimate crime, not because the Marine Corps loved us, but because such a death would end that Marine's contribution to his unit's victory and because it would necessitate writing letters to our mothers, whose usefulness on the planet had ended once they had turned their sons over to the men who would temper all that softness out of us.    

     One of Gunny Rogers' favorite exercises was for the purpose of preparing the muscles of the right shoulder to hold the rifle steady in the offhand position. The M14 weighed over nine pounds unloaded, closer to eleven charged with a 20‑round magazine, more yet with a bayonet fixed on the end. Accuracy could mean your life, or someone else's. Accuracy required holding the rifle steady. Holding the rifle steady required strong shoulder muscles. This was what Marines did.

     The exercise started by turning your body ninety degrees, so that your left shoulder, instead of your chest, pointed downrange. Then you put the rifle to your shoulder for the offhand position. They taught us a special way of doing this. First you brought the rifle up in front of your chest, with the muzzle pointed downrange. But instead of holding it in the normal firing position with the sights and top of the weapon pointed at the sky, you rotated the rifle ninety degrees away from your body so that the bolt handle pointed toward the ground, and the sights away from you.

     Then you curled your head and chest out over the rifle, the way you would lean over to pick up a baby from a crib. This made a nice hollow at the base of the shoulder for the toe, or bottom, of the butt plate. With the rifle still flatways to the ground, you tucked the toe of the buttplate into that nice little pocket you'd made, snugged it in tight, then rolled your head and upper body and rifle upright all in one motion, at the same time rotating your right elbow clear up past the horizontal until it was nearly vertical. That put your upper arm in the most efficient biomechanical position for supporting the rifle's weight, with the right arm making a vertical triangle like a section of bridge truss, from the shoulder up to the elbow and back down to the hand at the rifle's grip. The left arm made a triangle supporting the rifle from below, with the left hand cradling the stock at its balance point.

     The Gunny would have the whole platoon spread out with double spacing between the four squads and our rifles raised in this position, then order us to drop our left hands. He ranged in front of us, scowling and taunting those who wavered with the usual insults: pussies, girls, non-hackers, pukes. The contest was to see who was the last to drop his rifle. One time, I remember, that was me.

     So we lived Rifle. Not gun. Rifle. In boot camp, to call your rifle a gun was a sacrilege the penance for which was to stand in a place where the rest of your platoon could see you but the outside world could not, with your penis in one hand and your rifle in the other, reciting:

This is my rifle,

This is my gun.

This is for fighting,

This is for fun.

We cleaned our rifles and fired them and cleaned them again. We cleaned our rifles and did calisthenics with them and cleaned them again. We became rifles: the Marine Corps expression for grabbing a man by the shirt front and bracing him up against a wall was to "grab him by the stacking swivel," which is that little metal hook near the end of the forearm on many military rifles, used to engage three rifles with one another to form a free‑standing tripod on a parade ground or bivouac area.

     Each of us was forcefully laminated around his own rifle, like the blades of the Japanese katana swords that had been faced in their youth by some of those who were now training us. And, though all our rifles would have looked alike to an outsider's eye, each of us was so familiar with his own as to be able to recognize it from a few feet away as easily as one could pick out his own brother or sister on a playground full of kids. We caressed their walnut stocks with linseed oil, and scrubbed their machined steel parts with Hoppe's #9 solvent, then wiped that off and oiled them lightly. Then we snuggled our boys' cheeks and noses down alongside them again, to store forever in our synapses the remembered smells of linseed oil and Hoppe's #9 and burnt powder.

     One day, as we were getting ready to go back to the firing line after noon chow, I stepped to the corner of our tent and reached for my rifle, which was leaning there. Something happened, a quick small thing which I will remember when I have forgotten most of the rest of my life. As I reached for the rifle, and my hand came near it, the rifle itself seemed to move, to tip itself out from the corner of the tent, taking a little hop into my hand as if it were impatient with the slowness of my reach. The rifle seemed to have had the same intentionality forged into it that had by then been forged into me, and was leaping from the corner of the tent, into my ready hand, in its eagerness to get back to work.

CANAL

                                             Canal

     I’d just turned 15. We had moved across town to a little rented house on Coli Avenue, a dirt street one block long overlooking Klamath Lake. It was just the three of us again; Mom had divorced Bill Gano before we left the project, as she would later do with her fourth and fifth husbands.

     When it was time to get a haircut, I'd take a bus across town to my favorite barber shop near the project. It was at the far end of a bridge across the big irrigation canal that ran through town.

     People were always drowning, or nearly drowning, in that canal. It was wide and deep and its banks were steep and hard to climb out of, not like most river banks. It was late winter the time I went for this haircut; the water was muddy and thin ice lined its edges. Everyone knew that old cars and other junk lined its bottom, ready to snag any kids brash enough to ignore their parents' warnings. Of all the stupid things we did in those days, I never knew anyone who swam in that canal except this one person, this day.

     The barbers were three older men. I liked them, and the place, and the customers. It was a man's place, where boys were welcome. Stories were told: fish stories, hunting stories, work stories, war stories, broken‑down pickup stories, stories about women. They kept it pretty clean when kids were in the shop, but had a way of telling one another what they had to tell without coming right out with the four‑letter words. Not too many, anyway. It was: Here, boy, here's your peek behind the green door. But if your mom asks, we didn't say anything that bad.

     I was sitting in the chair with about half my head cut when a woman burst into the shop, gasping "There's a woman in the canal, she's goin' under!"

     We all ran out. A crowd was gathering on the bridge, pointing downstream and towards the levy that formed the opposite bank. Some of us from the shop ran across the bridge and down the road that formed the top of the levy. Everyone was pointing and jabbering, but no one was going down the bank. Before I knew what was happening, Claude, the barber who’d been cutting my hair, and I were out front. Then I was down the bank, trying to reach the woman as she drifted past, and trying to keep myself on the bank by grabbing at tufts of grass. She was too far out, and the grass didn't hold.

     I turned, looked up the bank. "Gimme somethin' to reach...." But nothing came: no rope, no 2x4, no long stick.

     The next thing I saw is what I will remember for the rest of my life. I saw the way the people had arranged themselves, the way their line of faces welled in my vision as I looked up, my feet down at the waterline, beseeching them for help.

     Most of the people were back on the bridge, standing safely behind the rail, pointing excitedly, not moving to help. They were watching something happen to someone else, like spectators at a ball game. Others scurried about on top of the levy, talking with adrenaline‑jerked movements about what was happening, what should be done, looking for something I could use to reach the woman.

     And there was Claude, the kindly, slightly overweight, nearly bald barber in his late fifties or sixties who'd been cutting my hair. He was just over the cusp of the bank, holding the hand of someone above him, holding my hand with his other. My feet were in the water. The universe, which had been wheeling, slowed wonderfully, narrowed, focused. The next time I would have that feeling would be eight years later, in a Vietnamese village named Tho An.

     I looked at Claude. Up to that instant, it had seemed that each time my eyes met a face in my desperate search for help, that face had simply rejected my gaze, thrown it back at me. But now as I looked up at him, he looked back in a way that was different from everyone else on the canal. My vision took on a cinematographic effect: everything to either side of us, especially all the other useless faces, became blurry. His face came into sharp focus in front of mine, and seemed to move closer than the two armlengths still between us. It seemed inches away. He spoke calmly. His meaning was transmitted more by the way his eyes looked into mine than by his words, which were: "There's only you and me. I'd go in, but I got a bad heart. I'd be dead as soon as I hit that water." Then he just looked into my eyes. At that moment I loved Claude for his clarity, and knew that he wasn't lying or making excuses, that he really would have gone in the water if he thought there was a chance of ending up with two live people instead of two dead people.

     It was good enough for me. I scrambled up the bank, ran along it till I was a few yards downstream from the woman, whose head only now and then broke the surface, and jumped as far out as I could. The water was cold, but I scarcely felt it. I swam out to her. She was too far gone to struggle, which helped. But she was overweight; it felt like trying to tow a waterlogged stump in a dinghy.

     I got her in to shore. By now there was more help. We horsed her up the bank. I remember thinking how undignified she looked, and hoped she didn't mind how we were handling her. An ambulance came and took her away.                 Somebody gave me a ride home, so I could shuck my wet clothes and dance off the shivers in front of the oil heating stove. I changed into dry clothes and the man who’d brought me took me back to the barber shop and Claude finished cutting my hair. I was the talk of the barbershop, but Claude and I didn't say much. We just looked at each other, feeling a little apart from the others. He didn't charge me for the haircut.

     The woman lived. She never bothered to thank me. She had jumped, not fallen, into the canal. She had mental problems, and apparently had made other attempts at suicide.          

     A good thing I got out of that afternoon was what I learned about time: when it's time to move, don't fuck around. Everybody on the canal that day except Claude and me had milled around in what I considered a deadly mixture of fear and incompetence. Even I had waited too long. As I have relived the experience over the years, one thing jumps out: those few seconds right after an emergency happens are the richest time, the time when a simple, well‑directed movement can save lives, can turn the course of events. A fire that can be put out with a shovel and a cool head one moment can become, in a minute, a huge and killing thing. What will seem recklessness to some can actually be the safest thing to do, to snuggle right up to the danger, to seize the situation in its early seconds and turn it towards life and away from death.