Missouri Squirrels
That December of 1966 I decided to visit my Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank Hickman in Wheaton, Missouri. They'd made another of their moves between Oregon and Missouri. I'd go by Greyhound, of course: even the accumulated wealth of a year's overseas pay, combat pay, and a corporal's wages was quickly gobbled by the cost of life at an expensive private college; a plane ticket was out of the question.
The bus didn't go through Wheaton; it was too small and out of the way. It was nearly dark when I got off the bus. I asked directions. There were no local buses, no taxis. Bessie and Lank lived several miles from where I stood.
I walked half the night along rural Missouri roads. Dogs would awaken with the crunching of my boots on gravel, bay their alarms, passing awareness of my presence to the dogs at the next farm. It was a little scary, but none of the dogs came after me. Sometime in the night I got lost, and had to knock at a farmhouse, waken someone, and ask directions. I apologized. They said it was no trouble.
A few days later I was stacking firewood on Bessie and Lank's porch. An old man was walking by out in the street. He stopped to watch me. At least, that's what I thought at first, that he was just watching me stack wood, to pass the time like old men will, maybe to pass judgment on my ability to lay up a neat and stable rick of wood, which is a recognized art among country people. I began to be more careful.
Then I realized that he wasn't so much watching me work as looking at me personally, at who I was. I straightened, nodded. "Howdy," I said.
"You kin to Bob Metcalf?" he asked. No preliminaries, no introductions, no chitchat about firewood or the rare skift of snow that had Wheaton drivers sliding all over Main Street. "He was my dad...." A dozen questions bubbled in me, but none formed quickly enough. "Y' look just like 'im. I delivered mail in these parts for thirty years." He turned and walked on.
We were going out to see Dan Metcalf, my grandfather, who lived near Monett, a town even smaller than Wheaton. He'd long since separated from my grandmother Elizabeth, a woman who'd had long flowing black hair as a young woman, who my dad had always claimed, with some pride, was part Indian. Maybe Cherokee;([1]) she'd come from Oklahoma.
Dan's current wife was Rose, who was always spoken of (though never in her presence) as "a reformed prostitute." Even out of her presence, people never said "prostitute" without "reformed" being attached. They were trying to be generous to her because, they said, she was good to old Dan. But you could tell they were working at it. And you could tell she felt it, but she just went about her business. I wasn't quite twenty‑four, but had probably seen more prostitutes than most of the Metcalfs and their neighbors combined. Rose didn't look like the ones I'd seen. She looked more like Aunt Bessie to me: a plain‑spoken, plain‑looking, hard‑working country woman. Except for an extra air of worldliness about her - a tinge of sadness, it seemed to me, at knowing and having lived a truth that everyone else also knew (some more directly than others) but would never say aloud.
Dan was a lean, kindly old man who was glad to see me but was clearly holding back. He didn't say much. Bessie and Lank figured later that I reminded him too much of his son, dead only six years. My dad had committed suicide at age 40, in 1960.
Dan and Rose both looked to be people who had cleaned up their acts considerably from the way they'd lived until well into their middle years. Dan came from a long line of moonshiners. The story had it that one night he'd come home likkered up and blasted a hole in his own roof from inside the house with his shotgun, just for fun.
I wanted to go hunting. Something in me needed to close that circle, to carry a rifle meant to put meat on the table instead of to kill another human and leave him to rot in the mud. Bessie and Lank thought about it a while, and said, Well, we might go out and visit Lank's sister and brother‑in‑law, Dorothy and Floyd Jennings, who lived in Thomas Hollow, one of those folds in the Ozarks like those where most of my extended family grew up. (They spelled the word h-o-l-l-o-w, but everyone said "holler". Bessie and my mother were born and raised on a 160-acre homestead in "Star Holler".
They were a little reluctant to drop in on the Jenningses, especially Floyd. They seldom saw this man. He kept to himself, didn't have a lot to do with relatives and even less with outsiders. Don't expect him to cotton to you, they warned. He's just that way.
We drove out to Thomas Hollow. Lank brought along his slide‑action Remington .22 rifle, which was very accurate, for me to use in case Floyd could be talked into a hunt.
We all sat down in their cabin's small living room. Dorothy busied herself offering us coffee and cookies. Bessie and Lank introduced me, said I was just back from Veet Nam. Floyd lit up, started rocking animatedly in his chair. "I was there durin' the war," he said. "Well," he went on, "guess I should say, durin' the other war, or World War II, or whatever." Actually, he said, he'd never been ashore in Veet Nam. But he'd been aboard a Liberty ship in those waters. "Yup. Spent quite a spell thar. Hell, most people 'round heah never had no idy they was such a place, let alone whar it was. Leastwise till this war come along. I'd say somethin' about it, an' a body'd just shrug. But I knowed. I was thar. Durin' the war."
Lank and Bessie had relaxed. Lank chimed in that he'd told me Floyd had a pretty good squirrel dog. Still got 'im?
"Oh yeah, he's gettin' on, but still does pretty good, for a collie." That was the first I'd heard of a collie being a hunting dog. I'd had two collies as a kid, Mike and Buddy, so we talked about collies for a while. Pretty soon we were up in the hardwood grove behind the cabin, Floyd and the dog and I. Lank said he'd not go this time, he'd let me do the huntin' 'cause I hadn't been in so long.
The tree limbs were bare, their leaves now a crunchy mattress we walked on. With that noise, we'd never have seen a squirrel, but for the dog. The collie would run ahead, making a big circle out in front of us. Pretty soon he began to bark. "He's got one treed," Floyd said. We walked toward the tree where the dog was, and stopped a few yards away. Floyd motioned, Be still. Squirrels, when they hear a threatening noise, will go around the tree, putting it between them and the noise. After we'd stood still a while, the dog slowly circled the tree, moving away from us, barking and making a racket in the dry leaves. When the collie got to the far side of the tree, we saw, up high, just the head of a grey squirrel peek around the tree. I looked at Floyd. He nodded back at me. I raised Lank's rifle, pushed off the safety, took my time, got just the sight picture Lank had described to me, put the front bead where its top was at the center of the head, where the squirrel's eye would be if I could have seen it at that distance. I squeezed off the shot. There was a long pause. The squirrel slid, tumbled over a couple of branches, fell to the ground.
We walked over. Floyd knelt and picked up the squirrel and examined it. He stood and looked at me, went so far as to raise his eyebrows. "Right in the eye," he said. "Don't waste no meat thataway."
We shot four or five squirrels ‑ "just enough for a mess of 'em" was how Floyd put it ‑ and walked back to the cabin. His wife made us all a big pot of squirrel and dumplings. All the while Floyd and I sat and talked about Viet Nam, even though he'd never been ashore. We talked about the South China Sea, how there were flying fish that would bust out the sides of waves and glide, and sea snakes swimming close to shore.
After all, we'd both been there, durin' the wars.
Hunger 3
Mike Taylor and I went to dinner at the cafeteria in Loomis Hall. He was sitting across from me, and next to him was another student with whom we both were slightly acquainted. We'd almost finished dinner when the guy next to Mike, without saying anything, reached over to take some food from my tray. Reflexively, I turned the fork in my hand downward and stabbed the back of his hand. Four small roses of blood appeared around the tines of the fork. The guy turned pale. Mike’s jaw dropped. They looked at each other, then at me. I shrugged: "Don’t fuck with my food," and went on eating with the slightly bloody fork.
Dark‑skinned Warriors 1
I was sitting in the waiting area of the Colorado Springs airport, watching people walk by on the concourse.
Some soldiers were walking from my right to left. They were black, wearing dress green uniforms, with Combat Infantryman Badges on their chests above their ribbons, and, on their left shoulders, the gold shield with black horse's head of the First Air Cavalry.
A similar group approached them from the opposite direction. Something passed through all the men that was visible to me. It was the way they walked, and the way they recognized one another. They emanated a pride that fairly crackled in the air around them. Though all wore uniforms of the United States Army, the uniform very definitely was not the source of their pride. Rather, it seemed to come from deep inside the uniform. Their walk was not a regulation, head erect, shoulders-stiffly-drawn-back walk. It was a rolling thing, with shoulders turning in front of the body with each step, right shoulder with left foot, left shoulder with right foot. And the body dipped slightly with every other step, a kind of willful breaking of the rhythm, a sassy falling‑behind only to quicken the last part of the step in order to arrive in perfect time.
I had learned to recognize the walk in boot camp, when our drill instructors told us to watch another platoon in our regiment when they were on the "grinder," which is what Marines call the parade ground. That platoon had a black drill instructor who had a certain lilt to his cadence, and a slightly swooping march step that he was able to impart to his whole platoon. His cadence and step had so little difference from regulation Marine Corps drill that his superiors couldn't make him stop doing it because they couldn't describe the difference in words or point to a regulation which it violated. Besides, the man was a squared‑away Marine and an excellent drill instructor. So he got away with his little one‑man cultural revolution.
At least one DI snickered about that sergeant and his "ditty‑bop" platoon, and some of the recruits chimed in. Phrases like "jigaboo outfit" tumbled into the ice plant around the Quonset huts. But there was respect too, even among the mutterers, when the seventy‑man platoon, mostly white boys, took the grinder and performed a close‑order drill that had a rhythm, a visual musicality, that was beautiful to watch, and which no other platoon on the grinder could match.
These black soldiers in the airport had that walk, with an added edge: they were all back from Nam. It was a black man's walk, but also a black warrior's walk. As the two groups came abreast, a couple of soldiers in each group raised small, black enameled swagger sticks, each with a chromed .50 caliber cartridge casing capping one end and a chromed .50 caliber bullet capping the other end, in smart salutes. It had nothing to do with Old Glory or the United States Army. It said, I salute you, brother. We have been through the fire. We have lost some brothers. We have kicked some ass.
And this black warrior's walk also said, Don't nobody fuck with us.
And it said Watch out, Whitey.
Packing
It was the summer of 1967, between my sophomore and junior years. Dave Miller, an oboist friend who played for the Air Force Academy Band, had gotten me a job working with him installing underground lawn sprinklers in Colorado Springs with a man who called his company Modern Mole, because he had this little rig that we pulled behind a small tractor that sank a bullet‑shaped piece of steel below the sod and pulled the irrigation tubing along behind it under the sod, instead of having to dig a trench and replace the sod.
One day Dave and I were having lunch in this one‑notch‑up‑from‑fast‑food place on Nevada Avenue. The dining area consisted of one big open room. Most of the tables were full. We were sitting at a table near one of the restaurant's three doors. I should say here that, although it was nearly a year after I'd left Vietnam, and those months on a bucolic private college campus that was as unlike Vietnam as I could imagine had begun to drain the habitual fear out of me, I still had my share of a combat veteran's instincts. (For that matter, even as I write this in 1992, I prefer to sit near a door in public places. Corners with a view of the whole room and all doors are best.)
A man opened the door behind Dave and stepped inside, just out of the traffic, and stood there unobtrusively. That is, he was trying to be unobtrusive. He wouldn't have startled me more had he been wearing a clown suit and leading a rhinoceros on a sequined leash.
He was tall, and had the combined thickness of limb and physical grace of a pro football running back. The picture rounded out: conservative business suit ‑ tailored, not off the rack ‑ and "high and tight" haircut. My eyes swept over him once; the slight bulge in his suit coat just above the right hip was more confirmation than surprise.
His eyes scoured the room with an utterly amoral professionality. He was looking for someone who didn't want to be found. My brain scanned that information and prompted me to look at the other two doors. Again, more confirmation than surprise: each was filled by a clone of the man who stood behind Dave, including the bulge at the waist.
"Hey, Dave, look! Those guys are all packin' guns!" I almost shouted. My voice carried across the room, splitting the hubbub of lunchtime conversation.
Dave dropped his fork and looked at me with wide eyes. I pointed with my chin over his shoulder. He spun around, his nose almost bumping into the bulge at the man's hip. He spun back around. I pointed at the other two doors. At the instant of my remark, the three had made eye contact with one another across the room. The man behind Dave gave a slight twitch of his head, and they were gone.
I looked around the room. Not a fork dropped, not a conversation was interrupted, not a head turned to notice the three armed men who had had the room sealed off, looking for someone among them.
Seminar
In the Spring of 1968, David Finley, my Soviet Politics professor, began inviting Political Science majors (I had a double major with Philosophy) to his house for informal seminars. One evening Jim Martin and I were there, along with several other students and one or two professors besides Dave Finley. We were talking about Vietnam.
The conversation got around to who was fighting the war. Colorado College is an expensive, private liberal arts college, so was topheavy with kids from families with money. This included some students whose parents were just flat wealthy, whose last names were on products we all used: Zellerbach, Seeburg, Coors, Grace are some I remember. I was there because I’d saved up combat pay and overseas pay for a year, I worked, earned scholarships, and took out student loans.
But as an institution, the college never seemed to me to be a place where snobbery or elitism or the arrogance that so often travels with wealth and power were the dominant tone. In the discussion on this particular evening, the feeling had already been expressed, then repeated, that the process of deciding who would go to Vietnam and who would stay in school was unfair. Some of the male students who were in the room by virtue of student deferments spoke with genuine emotion about feeling that, though they thought the war was wrong and had no intention of going, it was unjust for them to be able to have that choice, while the sons of poorer families did not.
The student body, and in particular the number of Poli Sci majors, were small enough that all of us in the room had been in at least one class together, and a small one at that. Of the male students in the room, only Jim and I had already served our hitches. We were both regarded as being among the top students in our class, and what happened next didn’t seem accidental. At least not to us.
One young man, an average student from a wealthy Eastern family, spoke up: "I don't see why we don't just let the peasants fight our wars for us. Isn't that what we've always done?"
I was coming up out of my seat as he finished speaking, but so was Dave Finley, who knew me well. He'd graduated from West Point, decided not to make the army his career, and went on to get a doctorate in Soviet studies. He was, and is, a thoughtful, gentle, and thoroughly fair man. He would later become Dean of the college.
Professor Finley stepped in front of me, gently but firmly putting his hands on my chest. I couldn't throw him aside because I had too much respect for him, and because we were in his home. I sat back down as several others glared at the speaker in disbelief and contempt.
[1] In the fall of 2010, my aunt Ruth Metcalf, my father’s sister, gave me a photocopy of a photo of my great grandmother Widders, grandma Elizabeth’s mother, whose mother was full-blood Cherokee.
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