29 PALMS

Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twenty‑four hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night.

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."

                           

29 Palms

1. Ungentle

     I had midwatch, midnight to 0400, walking post around our 155mm howitzers in the battalion's gun park. "Twentynine Stumps," California. Desert, my ass: deserts were supposed to be hot. This place of sand and rock was cold, knuckle‑numbing fucking cold.

     I walked around and around the guns. My boots crunched the cold sand. For diversion I broke the ice on shallow puddles left from a recent winter rain. Toward the end of my watch, a new skin of ice would form where I had kicked the holes by the time I made the next pass. The hawk was out.

     The cold made the stars seem closer. They glittered, along with the frost crystals and the silvery steel barrels of the cannons, the galvanized metal of the quonset huts and the glass headlight lenses of the dark hulking trucks.

     And cold was clear. The air had nothing in it: no blowing clouds of gritty powder, as came in summer sandstorms; no billows of blue‑black diesel exhaust we'd kick up above the motor pool when we worked on our vehicles in the daytime.

     There was no one to talk to, no sound to hear except what I made. But seeing... the fierce clarity of the air seemed to demand everything around me to jump at my eyes. I stopped to look. What was around me ‑ the big guns, quiet now but pregnant with awful noise, the hulking unlovely trucks with their starkly utilitarian knobby tires ‑ seemed peculiarly visible in the cold clear air, seemed to be broadcasting a special silent demand to be seen, just now and just as they were, by me.

     I took off my right glove. The cold bit deeper, but for a moment I experienced the feeling more as sharp than cold. I touched things. I walked up to where the inclined barrel of a 155mm howitzer pointed off toward the low jagged ridge that formed the base's horizon to the east. The combined light of cold stars and cold moon and cold floodlight crept into the cannon's dark maw and disappeared.

     I reached up and put my bare fingers into the howitzer's mouth, just over six inches in diameter. The steel's deep cold bit my fingers. I looked at the steel ridges of the rifling that spiraled down into the barrel. The ridges were square and sharp.

     The canvas covering lashed over the cannon's breech was frozen stiff, rough to the touch. I kept touching cold rough things: the howitzer's tractor‑like tires, the steel wheels, the lug nuts big as a medium-sized dog’s paw, the sharply threaded studs onto which the nuts were tightened, the gun's two I‑beam ways that converged at the tow‑ring, the angular fenders of the trucks, the crude steel grates that guarded their headlights, the frozen ropes, the canvas, the chains. I touched my own uniform, my equipment: the hard angles of the grooves in my rifle's flash suppressor, the machined edges of its receiver and operating rod handle, the serrated windage and elevation knobs on either side of the rear sight, the grooved plastic canteen cap with its flat keeper chain, the rough web belt, the checkered bayonet handle with its machined slot for my rifle's bayonet lug, my canvas field jacket, more rough than warm; the webbed rifle sling that cut its groove into my shoulder, the inhospitable steel pot on my head. Snaps, buckles, zippers, eyelets, all with their clear signal of what was to come. My mind scanned the words I knew, feeling that one word, and one only, was trying to insinuate itself into a prominent position before me. It came: ungentle. I had, through the simple succession of my own choices from among life's options, landed myself in a situation where nothing soft or gentle or comfortable or comforting was to be found.

     I put my glove back on, slapped my hands together, and went back to walking my post.

2. Old Enough to Bleed

     It was Monday. In the squad bay of Headquarters Platoon, "K" Battery, 4th Battalion, 11th Marines, we were hashing over the weekend's liberty. This was about the time I remember a Pfc named Waymire coming back from his weekend announcing something really new, really big. There was this hot new group, four guys from England, played this great music, wore their hair clear down to here (putting his hand on his shirt collar). Called themselves the Beatles.

     "Beetles?!" we howled. "What a stupid fucking name! That’s just an ugly bug.”             
     "Naw," Waymire corrected. "Beatles, b-e-A-t-l-e-s. As in 'beat,' or 'beatnik,' get it?" He was feeling pretty smug with his knowledge of the latest hot civilian thing.                   
     Two of the guys, lance corporals, were buddies who went out together to San Bernardino or Riverside or one of the other towns that were within driving distance if you could get your hands on a car that worked. I was nineteen; they were a little older.

     They were talking about their girl friends, two girls who were both fourteen. Both had just said they'd finally gotten to fuck the girls. It had been touchy, with nervous parents not liking the age difference. The guys said they'd played it just right, being patient with both the parents and the girls themselves. They were embarrassed talking about it, too proud not to.    

     Someone made a crack about cradle robbing. One of the guys - the taller one, is all I remember - answered, "Hey. If they're old enough to bleed, they're old enough to butcher."

3. Footprints

     It was a weekend. I either didn't have off‑base liberty, or didn't have any money. I decided to go for a hike in the desert that stretched out behind the barracks to the ridge and beyond.

     Some of the guys wondered at that... Jesus Christ man, there's nothin' out there, it's like the dark side of the moon, you could get lost and never found, it’s just artillery range, you could set off an unexploded round and be found in pieces. Still, somebody offered to go along, one of the others trapped like I was by rules or by the fact that last payday was long gone and it would be a while before "the eagle shit" again.

     I wanted to go alone. I've always had moments like that, when I've needed to separate myself from those around me, to go off and listen to my own voice and to the voice of the world and to a conversation between those two voices without the presence of everyday loyalties and concerns.

     There was no trail; I just plodded through the sand toward the rocky ridge that made a jagged dark‑blue line against the crystalline blue of the sky to the East. It wasn't quite summer, so it was hot but without that killing heat that would soon come. (Later that summer, we had a week when the temperature hit 125 degrees every day, when you were conscious of sweating but never felt moisture because it dried so fast, when walking outside made your utilities feel like when you were a kid and your mom had just finished ironing your jeans and you put them on fresh off the ironing board and they burned your legs.) I had my cartridge belt with two canteens, and a couple of candy bars. I'd be okay as long as I kept my bearings, which I'd grown up doing, though not in country like this.

     Approaching the ridge, then crossing it, didn't seem as dramatic as it should have been. I just kept walking, and the terrain gradually changed, the ridge looking bigger as the omnipresent sun signaled midday, then receded into a blue shape that looked much like it did from the base on its other side. The land beyond the ridge may or may not have been very different from the land where the base's buildings, which I now imagine would have appeared as rows of Monopoly real‑estate assets if viewed from the air, were laid out in rectilinear rows. It seemed that, perhaps less for its total lack of human constructions than for the fact that without buildings to look at, and without the skull‑occupying concerns that went with those buildings, I was now forced to look at the land itself, and not at the next street corner, the movie marquee, the shaved brown legs and halter tops of the officers' wives and daughters as they walked in and out of the PX.

     The land beyond the ridge was just big and empty. Vegetation was low, sparse: struggling to get enough water and not too much sunlight. Arroyos etched by flash floods lent occasional textural relief, but in the picture now bounded by my horizons, plant life and geological features dissolved into the vastness.

     I walked and walked, keeping the ridge at my back. Sometime in the afternoon I stopped to drink from my second canteen, and to look around. There was nothing but the sameness of the desert, the empty sunblasted distance capped by a skyfull of sun. I continued my slow turning, then pulled the canteen away in mid‑swallow. I must have been standing on a slight rise, though I hadn't noticed climbing one, still hadn't noticed any significant change in the empty landscape. I saw, off near the western horizon, a lone set of human footprints. They startled me, both by their mere existence and by the fact that I could see them from so far away. I speculated that the angle of the sun must have been low enough to cast a shadow into each footprint, making them visible against the bright sand for a long way.

     What wandering fool, what lonely soul, had been walking there? I let my eye follow the prints: slowly, slowly... as my gaze followed the meandering trail closer to where I was standing, I saw that it was heading in my direction. I followed, as if in dream, the approach of the prints to my hillock, looked down, and was adrenaline‑jolted into the realization that the footprints, the only visual interruption of the desert's emptiness, were mine. I was quite startled when I looked down at my boots and saw them standing in the final pair of prints.

     It was one of the most naked feelings I've ever had. I turned again, looking in the direction I'd been headed, half hoping that the trail would continue there so I'd have something to follow. But no: as much of the world as I could see was emptiness, and I was but a speck in it. I had arrived at no particular place, and with no signal by which to continue.

     I was chastened, even scared. I turned and followed my tracks back to the base, walking faster than I had on the way out.