YOUNG AND STUPID

                                                With God on Our Side

     Steve McLaughlin and I had been buddies at 29 Palms, had both gone through radio telegraph school at San Diego, and both ended up on Okinawa in 1964. My new outfit was the Twelfth Marines, an artillery regiment headquartered at the US Army's Camp Sukiran. Steve was in another outfit on Sukiran.

     One day I ran into Steve at the camp library. "C'mere," he said, and led me into the listening room where you could play records from the library's collection. He showed me an album cover; I looked at it while he put the record on and set the needle down on the song he wanted me to hear. The album was by this beautiful young folk singer with long, flowing black hair. Her name was Joan Baez. I'd never heard of her.

     The song Steve wanted me to hear was "With God on Our Side." It was by some guy named Bob Dylan. Never heard of him either. Steve wasn’t sure what the words of the song were getting at, and wanted to know what I thought. We played it, talked about it, played it some more. We were trying to figure out what it meant. It was clearly a song about war, about what an important thing war is, about how important it is to get it right if you do it. It seemed, on the one hand, a very reverent song. "...but you don't ask questions/when God's on your side." That made sense to us. It went perfectly well with how we'd been brought up, and with how the Marine Corps had trained us: Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die....

     But was there something else? The question nagged at us as we played the song again and again. The singer and the words were so sincere that we tended to take the song at face value. She was clearly pointing out that in wars, both sides often claim to have God on their side. What that seemed to us to mean was that one side had to be wrong, since God wouldn't be on both sides at once. So it must be a song about how important it was to be on the right side. That would be us, of course.

     But would it? Could she actually be saying that both sides might be wrong? Wow. We didn't think so, but maybe. We left the library without coming to a conclusion that satisfied either of us about what the song intended. What we did agree on was that we'd sure like to meet that babe on the album cover.   

What Marine Sentries Do

Sergeant Vance

     Sergeant Vance was a recruiting‑poster Marine, a redhead who wore his hair so short that what little was left blended with his skin, leaving the impression when he wore his Smokey the Bear drill instructor's hat that he had no hair at all. Can't get any neater than that.

     He had stood some serious sentry duty. One day he was instructing us on how Marines went about doing this. He told us of having a prestige assignment in Washington, DC, where he'd been posted at gates and doorways used by high‑ranking government officials to attend important meetings. There was this high muckety-muck conference, he said. It was more important than usual, and it was even more important that no one but people with this certain pass be allowed to enter. Some would try, he was told. They might even be legitimate government officials. They might try to pull rank on you. But if they don't have this pass, you stop them, period.

     Vance was put on the gate because his appearance was always impeccable and because he could be counted on to follow orders and not to be intimidated by powerful people trying to go where they didn't belong. Sure enough, here came this long black limousine, with the driver in a black suit and tie, and a very authoritative-looking older gentleman in the back seat, dressed in a tuxedo. Sgt Vance thought he recognized him from news photos, but wasn't sure. He didn't spend a lot of time with newspapers.

     The driver stopped at Vance's guard shack and rolled down his window. Vance asked for the pass. The driver said he didn't have one, but it was okay because his passenger was Senator So‑and‑so, whom everybody knew. Vance told him he was sorry, sir, but his orders were not to allow anyone to enter without a pass. The senator rolled down his back window and spoke to Vance, saying he was in a hurry and indeed had a pass but had forgotten it and didn't have time to return for it, or he'd miss this very important meeting.

     Vance said, "Sorry, sir. No pass, no entry."

     The senator had had enough of having his authority usurped by a lowly Marine sergeant. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to drive on through the gate.

     The driver barely had the limousine in gear when Vance's .45 service pistol was out of its holster, he'd jacked back the slide and chambered a round, and touched the pistol's muzzle lightly against the driver's temple.

     "You move this car one inch, and I'll kill you," he said softly.

     The driver and the Senator both turned pale. The limousine turned around and left. The senator squawked like hell, and tried to get Vance busted. His commanding officer said he'd done the right thing, and quietly transferred him to another unit.

     When Vance had finished his story, one of the recruits raised his hand. Vance nodded: "Yes, Private?"

     "Sir, would you have shot him, Sir?"

     Vance looked the kid in the eye, letting the tension in the Quonset hut build as if he were conscious of only that one recruit and not the other seventy of us who fretted around the edges of the seconds he waited to speak.

     "Yes," he said quietly, with a slight shrug. "And so will you, if those are your orders. The point, Privates, is this: nobody gets by a Marine sentry who's not supposed to."

                   

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.

SEMPER FIDELIS

B. Semper Fidelis

                                       Gunny Rogers 1: Mama's boy

     We were in formation on the platoon "street," the narrow asphalt strip between the Quonset huts that were our billets at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers was the Duty Drill Instructor. He was strict about boot camp's spit‑and‑polish regimen, though not as strict as the others. You could see that he pushed it more for the sake of discipline than of "military appearance," a phrase we heard a lot. Gunny was a combat man. He was said to carry a bayonet scar across his chest from the First Marine Division's great battle at the "frozen Chosin," Korea's Chosin Reservoir. Some of the guys in the platoon said they'd seen it one day when they'd been in the Duty Hut on cleanup duty, and "Guns" had his shirt off.

     His older brother had been killed in one of the first tanks to make it to the beach at Tarawa, a name that resonated among us like Mecca does among Muslims or Calvary among Christians. So he'd enlisted in the Marines as soon as he was seventeen, and sure enough volunteered for tanks. I didn't get the impression that he did it out of a desire for revenge so much as just wanting to continue the bloodline, but revenge was probably in there too. Japs had killed his brother, and there would probably be more gooks to fight before he retired, if he made it that far.

     I had done something wrong. Wrong, or at least inadequate, according to the Gunny's way of thinking. He was squared off in front of me. How could he make me feel so small, when he was several inches shorter than me?

     But he did. I can't even remember what I did, or didn't do. Gunny had decided it was time to get in my face because he had sensed some weakness in me, some hesitation about our common enterprise that could cause me to fail in combat, and he was just using some excuse to get his personal welding torch inside my machinery and plug the leak before it was too late. "You're weak." His voice growled from beneath his Smokey Bear hatbrim, that icon of Marineness. The brim nearly touched my nose. His force field was overpowering. I had to struggle just to keep standing at attention, which of course was the point.

     I was a mama's boy, he said. He couldn't figure how I'd made it this far; he'd had me figured for one of the washouts. He said I was one of those pussies who write complaints about mean ol' Drill Instructors home to their mommies, and their mommies write letters to their congressmen, and their congressmen send some civilian puke out here to fuck with My Marine Corps.

     "Do YEW write letters like that back home to YER mommy?" Gunny Rogers sneered into my face.

     "No sir."

     "I can't hear you."

     "NO, SIR."

     "Are yew SURE?"

     "NO SIR!"

     "You're not sure?"

     "Sir, I mean YES SIR!"

     His left hand came up and cuffed me on the right side of the head, knocking my glasses askew.

     "So, you been writin' letters home to your mommy, sayin' bad things 'bout My Marine Corps?"

     "SIR, NO SIR, I HAVE NOT WRITTEN ANY BAD THINGS HOME ABOUT THE MARINE CORPS, SIR."

     I hadn't, either.

     "Will yew ever in the future write such letters home to yer mommy, like for instance telling her that mean ol' sonofabitch Gunnery Sergeant Rogers hit her precious little puke of a son?"

     "SIR, NO SIR, I WILL NOT WRITE ANY LETTERS LIKE THAT, SIR."

     The Gunny kept at it a while longer. He went to great lengths to let me know, and in the process let the whole platoon know, that mothers, and mamas' boys, were the biggest problem the Marine Corps and, for that matter, the whole goddamn country, had. He said that if the Marine Corps wasn't allowed to operate in its own good goddamn time‑honored, battle‑tested fashion, the country might just as well forget about defending itself.

     The real point he was making, of course, was that if I could stand up to him, I might be able to stand up in combat. After a while, he seemed satisfied that he'd gotten his welding done, and moved on down the line. 

CRATER LAKE

                                                    Crater Lake

     A few days after high school graduation in 1961, I got a summer job as busboy in the cafeteria at Crater Lake National Park. The concession company hired mostly college students to work in the cafeteria and lodge. Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, the owners, felt that all those bright young faces were good for business. And we were cheap labor, willing to work six or seven days a week. A majority of the students hired were girls, because most of the jobs had to do with waitressing, maid service, and operating souvenir stands.

     So there were a lot of pretty, unattached females around. I was eighteen, but still hadn't had much experience with girls. I'd always been really shy around them. Scared might be more like it. But now I was going to college, I had scholarships, I had a job, I was out on my own. This would be my big chance.

     There were two sisters on the staff, so near in age that they often were mistaken for twins. I fell in love with the older sister. She would be a senior in the fall, which made her three years older than me, a huge gap. I didn't care. I thought she was beautiful, but in a relaxed sort of way, with a low, easy laugh that said she didn't take her looks as seriously as many women do, didn't want to taunt you with her beauty.

     It wasn't hard to get acquainted, on an Oh‑hello, I‑know‑who‑you‑are basis. All the staff ate in the cafeteria where I bused tables. Employees ate in our own section, and were supposed to bus their own dishes. But we would always cruise the section with our buscarts anyway, to banter with the others. Sometimes if we weren't too busy we'd do somebody a favor, if they were stuck at the end of one of the tables against the wall, and get them a dessert or whatever from the food counter. We had some stature because we controlled the music, and they'd have to ask us if they wanted to hear a certain song. The Ray Coniff Singers were big then, and we all had our favorites. "Harbor Lights" was one of mine. It spoke of parting, of a love more frustrated than realized. Maybe that's what attracted me, the longing to go down to the harbor and depart, in the dark amid strange sounds and smells, for unknown parts of the world, connected to, but not bound by, a love at home. And maybe, after some odyssey that left you scarred but whole, you'd come back and she'd still be there for you.

     When my secret love would come in I'd think of something to get her to notice me, like making sure the place she wanted to sit was clean. Without crowding her, I'd eavesdrop if she and her friends got to talking about music they liked, and I'd go over and play something I'd heard her mention. If she noticed and smiled in my direction, I'd clean tables like a whirlwind the rest of the day.         

     Sometimes we'd have to stay after closing, clear the cafeteria, and scrub and wax the floor. We’d be lucky if we got done by midnight. Mr. Griffin would give each of us a chit for a meal in the main lodge's dining room for that chore, since it was extra work. Those meals were pretty snazzy ‑ tablecloths, real silverware, wineglasses, the works ‑ and expensive. And there weren't a lot of the chits around. So any guy with a couple of them in his pocket was considered pretty good date material.

     I saved up two chits and gathered my courage. Normally I wouldn't have had the nerve. She was so beautiful, so grown‑up ‑ so... well, womanly. But I was feeling like pretty hot stuff. The way that happened was I'd gotten a day off, and since I liked to run, I'd jogged the ten miles around the rim to where the trail went down to the boat docks, and got a ride around the lake on one of the launches operated by a Coast Guard vet for the park concession owners. It was a great day, and when I got back up to the rim it was still before noon. What the hell, I thought, and took a right turn instead of a left. That would take me the rest of the way around the rim, instead of the short way back: a day's run/walk of roughly thirty‑six miles instead of twenty.

     It was wonderful for a while. I'd had lunch and water down at the lake. I was on top of the world, jogging along at 7,000 feet, on a bright day, topping a ridge where the road was a bridge leading right up into the lone white cumulus cloud anointing the blue of the rest of the sky. That lasted a few more miles, then reality set in.

     Several kids from the staff were hanging out in the lobby of the lodge when I stumbled in, well after dark - feet blistered, badly sunburned, woozy from dehydration and electrolyte depletion. They just gawked at how fried I was. There was quite a buzz about it for a while, about how it was a crazy thing to do, but great that I could pull it off. I was a temporary star in our galaxy.

     I wrapped my newly bolstered confidence around me and went up and asked that dream woman if she'd like to have dinner with me in the lodge dining room. I had two chits. Got 'em for waxing the cafeteria floor, I told her as I proudly offered her the fruits of my hard work.

     She looked at me for a moment ‑ rather a longer moment for me than for her, I think. I will never forget her look. She smiled. It was, as always with her, a genuine smile. She seemed pleased, and a little surprised, that I had asked. She even seemed to like me, but, I began to sense, in a kid brother sort of way. To this day, I think of the word "bemused" when I recall her look.

     "No thanks, Dean," she said. "But really, thanks for asking." Damn. The usual class: no phony excuses, just... No, thanks.

     Harold Lawrence, the boat crew chief, had a special presence among us. He was older, all of twenty‑six or so. He'd been in the Coast Guard; he'd been around. He drove boats for a living, entrusted with people's lives out on waters that could get dangerously rough, while the rest of us drove buscarts and sold souvenirs. Ashore, he loved his fun, and could kick-start a party by walking into a room. He also carried a certain edge; there was a detectable aura of danger about him at times.

     Women especially seemed to notice him. He wore sunglasses with lenses that curved around to the side to protect the eyes from sunlight glancing off the water, but he still had faint crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, enough to make him look salty but not old. He was always sunburned, and his dark blond hair was bleached and blown about by the wind whenever he came in off the lake.

     I had a pretty serious run‑in with Harold. He was sitting in the employee section of the cafeteria, regaling younger workers with some story. He had a few beers aboard; he was feeling his oats and enjoying his status as star of the current show.

     I came by with my buscart. Harold turned and told me to go get him something from the kitchen. Didn't ask me. Told me.

     "I'm a busboy, not a waiter, Harold," I said. "Get it yourself."         

     The party was over in an instant. Harold sat and looked at me a long moment. He let that dangerous part of him that we'd only seen hints of come right out through his face. He lifted his chin at me.

     "Go get it," he said.

     "No," I said.

     Everyone just stared at us, staying clear of the sparks. I stood there in front of him, as resolute as I was scared. Still skewering me with his eyes, he finally understood that, however badly I might come out of it, I was ready to go the distance rather than have him order me about like that. He let it drop. Sometime later, he apologized to me, in front of some of the same people who'd been there when it happened. I thought that showed real class.

     Some time after that, and after I had asked the woman for a date to the lodge dining room, I was walking along the hall in the first floor of the lodge, and happened to look in through the door of the cocktail lounge, that exotic place forbidden to eighteen‑year‑olds like me. She and Harold were sitting opposite each other at a small table, their elbows almost touching. They didn't see me stop for a moment. They didn't see anyone but each other. They weren't all moony and romantic; they were just two intense adults interested in each other. In fact, I thought that she took Harold with a grain of salt, that though she found him interesting, she seemed to have a boundary in place that wouldn't let him too close for too long. Still, I would have given anything, or done anything, to have her look at me the way she looked at him.

     That fall, I entered Oregon State University as a freshman in engineering. I got good grades, my scholarships were renewed, and I was re-hired the following summer, 1962, for my old job at Crater Lake.

     By midsummer I was restless. Crater Lake was a beautiful place, but busing tables wasn't the most adventuresome way to spend a summer. And Oregon State began to seem a less attractive place to go back to. I liked the engineering classes, but there were no women in them, just a bunch of guys like me with glasses and 24‑scale log‑log split bamboo slide rules. Besides, I had a yen to study foreign languages, or poetry; something that had less to do with things and more with humans. I decided to collect my pay, buy a good bicycle, ride around the Western states with the most beautiful mountains and rivers, and find a new college.             

     The kids on the staff threw a party for me, with a cake that said "Happy Bicycling Dean". I rode down into northern California to visit a buddy in Yreka, then headed back across Oregon to visit my mother in Pasco, just across the line in Washington. My older brother Lance had settled back there after his Army hitch; Mom had taken Darrell and moved back there to be near Lance and his wife and the grandkids, after I graduated from high school.

     South of Lapine, Oregon, the railroad tracks crossed the highway at a sharp angle. My front tire caught in the groove beside one rail; the bike and I went down hard. One crank was bent so badly the bike was unrideable. I went to the library in Bend while I was waiting for a Greyhound to take me and my busted bike to Spokane. I found a reference book of colleges and universities, and went through all the listings in mountain states, and culled out the ones with strong liberal arts programs. Colorado College sounded best.

     When my bike was fixed, I pedaled east out of Spokane, crossing the Idaho panhandle in a day. That night, I slept in a campground at the base of the long climb to the summit, which was the Montana state line. The next morning I started the long grind, switchback after switchback of steep mountain highway, all in the lowest gears of the 10‑speed Raleigh. A freight train was making the same climb, and often the tracks came close to the highway. The engineer and I began to wave to each other; got to be pretty good buddies, in fact. It turned out that the mechanics of his engine and the mechanics of my engine yielded the same average speed all the way up that mountain. So we developed a sign language, encouraging one another, then making fun of the one who momentarily fell behind. This went on for half a day.

     Finally that freight train and I rolled onto the summit, crossing the Idaho/Montana line. The engineer leaned out and gave a half‑wave, half‑salute, and I was gone. Mileposts, the second hand on my watch, and a brain that was still number-happy from engineering classes, said I was making fifty miles an hour down into the St. Regis River valley. I made it beyond Kalispell, where I got so many flat tires that I couldn't keep moving. Money was running low, and at this rate I'd never make it to Colorado College in time to start school in the fall. I got on a train for Colorado Springs.

     The college was just what I was looking for. The campus was beautiful, the Rockies behind it were beautiful. They studied English and poetry and philosophy and all that good stuff. And there were girls all over the place. But it was a private college, and much more expensive than I could afford. Transfer students couldn't get scholarships in their first year. You had to pay your own way for that year, and if you did well enough, you could apply for scholarships. I'd been thinking about getting my military obligation out of the way anyway. I'd rather have gone to college, but didn't have the money to do it the way I wanted to. I told the admissions officer I'd just get the service out of the way, and see him in three or four years. "Fine," he said. I could almost hear "yeah, right" under his breath.

Sunset

             Sunset Over Klamath Lake
     Coli Avenue was a dirt street two blocks long. (Thirty years later, it still was.) Our house sat on a knoll between the highway's north entrance to Klamath Falls and the southern end of Klamath Lake. The Cascade Range rose against the sky beyond the lake to the west.    
     One day in 1960 I walked to the mailbox and took out a form letter addressed to me from the Veterans' Administration saying my father was dead. I read it standing by the mailbox. It didn't seem to affect me much at the time. I was seventeen; I'd last seen him when I was eight.
     One evening after the VA letter came I went behind the house and stood on the knoll and looked out over the lake. It was sunset. The Cascades were an uneven indigo line against the western sky; Mt. McLaughlin still had snow draped around its shoulders. Wind moved clouds around the sky above the mountains; the sun's afterglow played with shades of red, palest pink to crimson of arterial blood, even on to purple. There was enough rain about to punctuate the burning clouds with strokes of grey.

     The pulsating sky sent tremors through me. An electric arc seemed to jump between my past and future, not distant in time but perhaps in place. The sky seemed to be a signal from that future, a call to go places and do things. It thrilled and frightened me. I couldn't wait to get there.
     Years later, studying Russian, I would learn the word toská which means, primarily, longing. It combines longing for something one is separated from with sadness at the separation. It can be a longing for something which once was but can never be again, or something desired for the future but which one knows can never be.
     Now, on the rare occasion when I encounter the word toská, I remember the
evening I stood looking across Klamath Lake at the sunset over the Cascades. I
also remember how short was the time between that evening of longing and my
arrival on the far side of the world in situations far less beautiful, far less calm,
far more violent.

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.