TOWNIES

Townies

    Jim Price and I met at the college track. He was on the team, and I went there to run laps after classes. We were on north Nevada Avenue, walking back to campus after a late movie in Colorado Springs. There was no one else on the sidewalks and, at the moment, no cars on the street.

     A car turned onto Nevada Avenue and approached us. It slowed, passed us with heads hanging out the windows on our side, then its tires yelped as the driver veered to the curb. Five or six "townies" jumped out, young men out of high school who hadn't gone to college, who liked to rough up college guys for fun. 

     "Let's go!" wasn’t out of Jim's mouth before he was gone, sprinting up the street towards campus.

      No.

   I was just back from Nam. I was home, among the people I had fought for, or so I wanted to believe. The thought that those same people would try to re-immerse me in the fear I was trying to leave behind sparked in me an immediate, dedicated fury. Not hot fury. Nah. Cold fury. 

      Fine. I will kill at least one.

  The townies rounded both ends of their car and approached the sidewalk. I made no sound, no gesture. I unsnapped my corduroy jacket lined with synthetic fleece and stepped to a nearby fire hydrant. I draped the jacket over it and stepped back. Oh so methodical. In my mind was the handtohand combat stuff from boot camp: Be an animal. Attack, attack. Speared fingers on one side of the trachea, thumb on the other, plunge, pinch the grip closed, rip his throat out. Or break the bridge of the nose, then ram the broken bone up into the brain. A fist to the temple, with enough force, also kills. Or a speared finger through the eye into the brain.... 

     They were on the curb. Still I had made no sound or gesture. I remember folding my hands in front of me, at arm's length, looking at the townies and waiting. I leaned forward a little. 

     They stopped, each individually yet all nearly together. They seemed to recoil, like cartoon germs bouncing off that "invisible Colgate shield" we used to see in television toothpaste commercials. The apparent ringleader, now standing at arm’s length from me, looked me over carefully, then spoke:

     “Let’s go,” he said.

     They got back in their car and drove off. I put my jacket back on and walked along the sidewalk toward campus. I did not hurry. 

OKINAWA: WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE

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.