CANAL/ DOGS OF EBERLEIN STREET

I was barely 15, but what I saw and did – and the decisions I made -  at the canal that late winter day, and what I saw others do and not do, is still with me more than 50 years later. I’ve told it to students in my martial arts classes, as a way to get them to think – ahead of time – about how important it is to move when it is time to move, when a few seconds can mean the difference between life and death.

                                             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.

The following story is about the time I felt the deepest fear of my young life. I would remember it in Vietnam. I still remember it.

Dogs of Eberlein Street

     I was sixteen. We lived in the Shasta View Apartments in Klamath Falls, another leftover WWII housing project that we lived in for most of my childhood because they were always the cheapest. The project was on the far side of town from the high school, and since it was winter and I was in basketball or wrestling practice every day after school and missed the bus, I walked home in the dark.

     I'd long since found the shortest way home. By the time I got to Eberlein Street, bordering  the northern edge of the project, I had it made. One night I turned onto Eberlein and was halfway along it, with only two or three blocks to go, when a dog came out and started barking at me. I tried to ignore it. They can smell fear, I'd always been told, so act like you're not afraid.

     But the dog persisted. It wasn't your typical front‑yard mutt sounding the alarm as you passed its territory. The dog seemed really angry, though I hadn't done anything, and hadn't strayed from the sidewalk. I got scared. The dog came in closer, barking and growling with real menace. It went for my ankles. I turned and kicked; it dodged just out of reach. It seemed to become even angrier. Other dogs in the neighborhood started barking. A second dog came out and joined the first. It seemed to have the same peculiar anger, as if the two of them had just discovered a kid who had severely abused them as puppies.

     They teamed up on me, making it difficult to move along the sidewalk. More dogs came. There were five or six. They all behaved the same way. I was terrified. I broke and ran. That infuriated them even more. Oh no you don't, they seemed to say. They worked like a wolf pack, cut me off. They got me in a circle. I broke out and ran. They cut me off again.

     I made it to the street light on the corner across the street from the project. They cornered me there in the cone of light at the base of the pole, barking furiously and growling and taking turns lunging in to nip at me. I was doing a frantic dance to avoid their teeth, trying to kick at them to drive them back, yet reluctant to actually kick one hard for fear they’d just tear me apart.

     I yelled at them, yelled for help. Porchlights were on all along the street, but no one came. I couldn’t believe that the noise the dogs and I were making didn’t bring people pouring out of the houses to help, or at least to see what was going on. But no one noticed. The human world was locked away inside those houses, and I was banished to some bestial zone outside it.

     I finally flailed and yelled and stumbled my way across the street. The dogs peeled off and left once I entered the project. I ran into the apartment. I was shaking. I got out my .22 Ruger single‑action revolver, which Mom had let me buy on my sixteenth birthday, and just held it. I wanted to load it and go kill them. I knew I couldn’t just walk out in a populated neighborhood and start shooting, but every throbbing part of me wanted to. Mom tried to calm me down, and kept an eye on me lest I load the pistol and head for the door.

     That night I went to bed and lay awake, holding the pistol, still shaking at times, looking out the window, looking for the dogs, wishing they would come up to the window, now that I was armed, wishing they would try to attack me again, right through the window, so that I would have no choice but to load and shoot, wishing I could shoot and shoot and kill them all.

DRESS BLUES/ ALMOST A COWBOY

     Bill Gano was my step-dad when we lived in Grants Pass, and for a while longer when we moved to Klamath Falls. He’d take me and Darrell hunting and fishing, and teach us the ways of the woods. I was sorry when he left.

Dress Blues 1

     Bill took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30‑30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30‑30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30‑06, and later, the M-1 Garand. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere.

     We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me.

     The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by ‑ of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town ‑ an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals ‑ some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth ‑ on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers.

     The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform.

     The man in the uniform was watching me ‑ with approval, it seemed ‑ handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world.         

     I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in.

     "No," I said.

     The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked, and the feeling he brought into the room. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that."

     The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained.

     I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.

     "Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval.

     I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are.

     As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.

     I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.

    Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank were dirt poor, but the finest human beings I never new. Not long after the episode in the gun shop, they got Darrell and me a summer job on a ranch in Northeast Oregon.

                                                  

Almost a Cowboy

     Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank got Darrell and me hired on for the hay harvest at the Wellman ranch on the Powder River near Baker, Oregon. Bessie and Lank had lived in Baker since they'd come west from Missouri in 1940, except for a brief return in the 1960’s. Stan Wellman was Lank's hunting partner and all‑around sidekick. Stan's father, Les, owned the ranch; Stan was the foreman. Les, still vigorous, was over seventy.

     Most of the work was done with tractors, but Les had kept his horse‑drawn sickle‑blade mowers and dumprakes. At a time when most ranchers had acquired baling machines, he still stacked his hay loose. The process of getting it from standing hay to stacked hay had several steps. First it was mowed, mostly by mowers attached to his big John Deere diesel tractor or one of the two or three others he had around ‑ I remember a Massey‑Ferguson, an Allis Chalmers and maybe a small Case. But sometimes ‑ partly just to show off, Stan said ‑ Les would hitch a single horse to an old steel‑wheeled mower he had and clean up along fences or along the willows by the riverbank where it was dangerous to drive a tractor. Claimed he had more control with the horse‑drawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good.

     After a field was mowed, the fresh‑cut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel‑curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelve‑foot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twenty‑year lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two‑and‑a‑half‑foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again.

     Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done.

     Darrell and I had hired on at three dollars a day, plus meals at the harvest table and cots in the bunkhouse. We'd start our day before dawn, walking to the pasture in the dark while it was still soaked with dew to catch the horses and get the halters on them and lead them into the barn and buckle on their collars. Then while they were chewing their grain we'd step up to the post where each horse's harness hung on a long peg, and slip the rump end of the harness up onto our shoulders like Les had taught us, sliding each new strap down until the entire harness was arranged along the arm. Then we'd reach up and grab one of the hames in each hand and walk over to the horse and throw the whole business out along the horse's spine with a motion like coastal fishermen use to cast their nets. Next, it was step back alongside the horse and distribute the straps along his back until the rump strap dropped in place. Then grab his tail and free it from that strap ‑ the one that took the pressure when you backed up the rig ‑ so the horse could use his tail against the flies. Then go back to his neck and slip the hames into the grooves in the collar, making sure they were seated, and buckle them together in front of the horse's chest. Then there were just a couple of straps to buckle loosely under the belly. The bridles would go on after breakfast, when we were ready to back them to the rig and hitch the doubletree to the horses' collars, and the tugs to the dumprake.

     But first we'd go to the house where Les' wife would feed the crew a huge breakfast which we'd finish in time to hitch up and start the tractors and be headed out through the gate as the first light slanted across the fields.

     Les Wellman lost no time getting his three dollars a day's worth of work out of us. The first morning, he showed us how to catch and harness the horses, drove to the field with us and showed us how to operate the dump‑rake, and turned us loose. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven, getting to drive real horses like that, doing real ranch work, just like we'd heard about from the grown men and seen in movies.

     The romance was quickly tempered, at least for me. Returning from the field the first evening, feeling sunburnt and exhausted and hungry and thirsty and full of myself, I was driving along the edge of a field next to a barbed‑wire fence when a horsefly ‑ an attack bomber of an insect ‑ spooked my team, and they bolted into a full runaway, with me bouncing on the steel tractor seat and holding onto the reins for my very life. The world spun and jounced and became a huffing clanking juggernaut on which I was stuck like a confused flea, which could destroy me equally easily if I stayed perched on the tractor seat or if I tried to get off it. I remembered the old hands' stories of what a man looked like if he fell under a runaway dump rake and got perforated by a dozen or so of the giant steel teeth and then dragged over rough ground. I decided to try to stay on the tractor seat, using my hold on the reins to stay upright. I heaved my hundred ten pounds against the ton and more of galloping horseflesh, trying to make my desperate whoas heard above the roar of hooves and horsebreath and machine.

     I'd just about gotten them slowed into a manageable run, when the rig hit something and the tongue broke between them, and they spooked again.

     Somehow the rake's teeth stayed locked up in the traveling position, and somehow I stayed in the seat. But it was a long ride. Every time Pete and Bill started to settle down and began responding to my desperate pulls on the four heavy leather reins, the broken point of the tongue would stick in the ground and break off and cause the rig to lurch violently and they'd spook again. Finally there was no more tongue to break off, and they ripped the tugs loose from the rake and took off and the universe was suddenly still as I sat looking at the strands of the barbed‑wire fence in front of my nose.

     Les Wellman came driving up on the "Johnny popper," which was what we called the John Deere because of the noise its diesel engine made. He throttled it down and looked me over. By the time he spoke, Stan and some of the others had come up as well. Les actually had a hell of a sense of humor, but you'd never know it until you'd been around him awhile. His way with a joke was to get other people to laugh till their sides hurt without ever cracking a smile himself. So, did he ask if I was alright? Nah. What he said was, "Well, don't just sit there, boy. Go catch yer horses.”

One day when the harvest was nearly over, Mom came out to the ranch to visit Darrell and me. We showed her around, trying our best to act like old hands. We'd walked her out to the pasture to introduce her to the horses, and were back in the barn showing her the harness and other tack and how we did this and how we did that. There was a steel‑grey horse in a box stall at the end of the barn. We knew little about it, except that it was a stud colt. He was as big as a good‑sized saddle horse, because he came from larger draft stock, like Pete and Bill. But they were gelded, and the colt wasn't, which explained why he was so full of beans.

     Les came into the barn and went to the colt's box stall. We walked over and introduced Mom to him. The colt was loose in the stall, which was large enough for him to be range around and bump the sides and stamp, even rearing back on his hind legs and pawing the air like Roy Rogers had his horse Trigger do in the movies. Pure male, pure power. Les spoke to me, all business: "Dean, take this halter and get in there and put it on that horse and tie him up to that ring in the corner post, while I go get my farrier's tools. I got to work on his hooves." He turned and left the barn.

     I quartered an apple with my pocket knife and took the halter and stepped between the rails of the stall. The horse reared back on his haunches and pawed the air and stamped the ground and laid his ears back and whinnied loud. "Son, are you sure...?" Mom sounded worried. But sons, of course, delight in worrying their moms, and in going ahead with what worries them even when the sons themselves realize that what they're doing is stupid. Besides, I couldn't back down from something Les had told me to do. "It's all right, Mom," I said, expressing more confidence than I felt.

     I moved slowly. "Hoa," I said in as steady a voice as I could muster, wishing my voice would hurry up and change so I could make that deep, calming, almost crooning sound the older men made when they walked up to a horse. "Hoa, boy." I kept talking, slow and easy. I don't know if it was the apples or my voice, but he settled down some. He let me approach, feed him one slice and stroke his nose ‑ "Slo-ow now, easy, easy, fella" ‑ and his neck and shoulder. I raised the halter and got my arm around his neck. He threw his head, lifting me off the ground like some toy human. I talked him down again and gave him another piece of apple and used another to back him into a corner of the stall with me at his head and fed him the last of the apple and while he was chewing it I slipped the halter over his nose and up over his ears and reached under his throat and buckled it. All the while he fidgeted, knocking me about with his head. I turned him around and walked over and got one end of the rope through the snubbing ring in the corner, then used its mechanical advantage to take up whatever slack I could every time he moved his head. Now when he threw his head the rope jerked hard against the steel ring, and the halter strap cut into the back of his neck. He'd let off, and I'd gain some rope. We repeated that dance until I had him snubbed up in the corner with two half hitches.            

     I was stepping out between the slats of the stall, carefully out of range of the colt's rear hooves, when Les came back into the barn carrying his rasp and nippers. He leaned over the top rail and looked at how the colt was tied in the corner.

     He actually showed surprise. "Goddamn, boy. Don't you know that horse ain't even broke?" His little joke, which I hadn't gotten at the time, was supposed to have been that I would get in the stall, and the colt would rear and snort and terrify me into climbing back out in a hurry. I guess he'd forgotten what a boy will do when a man has challenged him, or when his mother is watching.

Darrell and I had never worked so hard in our young lives, but we hated to see the haying season end. A few days before we finished, Les had put me up on the Johnny Popper - the one with the hand clutch that you leaned way forward with a dramatic motion to engage ‑ and turned me loose bucking the hay that Darrell and I had bunched with the dump rakes. Was I something!

     Then the hay was all up, and Darrell and I had to get our stuff from the bunkhouse and put it in the old blue Studebaker. Les came around and asked if I wanted to ride fence for a while on some pasture land he had out on the Virtue Flats sagebrush country on the other side of Baker.

     Was he kidding? Ride fence? On a horse? A saddle horse?! Mom! Please, Mom! M-A-A-A-M! I must have sounded like a scared lamb.

     It wasn't to be. It was late August; she had to be back to work in Klamath Falls, and Darrell and I had to start school. We left Baker, unhappy to go but thrilled at what we'd done that summer. Wait'll we told the other kids some of the stuff we'd heard in that bunkhouse. I still remember one verse the older boys sang to the tune of "The Old Chisolm Trail":

                   Last time I seen 'er,

                   ain't seen 'er since,

                   she was jackin' off a nigger

                   through a bob‑wire fence,

                   gonna tie my pecker to a tree, to a tree,

                   gonna tie my pecker to a tree.

     We stopped at a gas station to fill up for the drive home. Mom asked me to pay for the gas. Huh? I said. Darrell and I were rolling in dough: three dollars apiece for every day of the haying season – about eighteen days - and we'd had no time to spend any of it. We'd never had close to that much money in our lives.

     "Son, that's all the money we have," she said. In fact, she needed for both of us to give her all we'd earned, until she got us back home and got back to work herself. She was sorry, but that was just the only way.

     We gave her all our money. We knew she was sorry, and that she wouldn't

lie to us and just take our money for herself. She said she'd try to save us a little

spending money out of it.

FIRST BLOOD/ FINDING JESUS

I was a young kid, seven or so, when I shot at a robin on the housing project lawn with my bow and arrow. To this day, over 50 years later, every time I see a robin, I remember this story. 

                                                               First Blood  

     As a kid I loved Indians. It started with some illustrated books in the school library. One book about the Iroquoi tribes became especially totemic for me. There were earth-toned renderings of the insides of longhouses, with sleeping platforms of poles lashed together with sinew and piled with robes of animal skins, with the space and the dusky‑skinned people and the implements of their lives ‑ the beaded moccasins, the deerskin leggings, the obsidian knives, the stout bows and hide quivers of feathered arrows ‑ lit only, but magically, by firelight. I began to live in a fantasy world. I wanted to wear those skins, carry those weapons, live in a space as richly textured, as warm, as right as the interiors of those longhouses. I wanted to be one of those people.

     I saved the cardboard cards out of Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the ones that separated the layers of biscuits. Each card had instructions from the comic-book character Straight Arrow on how to make some kind of Indian artifact: how to lash on a flint arrowhead, or how to carve a spearhead out of wood and harden it in fire.

     I made my own bow out of a seasoned branch and some heavy string, and it worked pretty well. Arrows were a different matter. I searched every tree in my life ‑ there weren't many, there in the project - but couldn't come up with a single stick straight enough to fly at all true.

     I saved my allowance and collected pop and beer bottles till finally I could afford a store‑bought arrow. I shot and shot. I got to where I could hit with some regularity a pretty small target, if it wasn't too far away.

     One day I took my bow and arrow outside and started for the end of our building, to shoot in the sagebrush out along the railroad tracks. I saw a robin hopping on the grass in our yard. It was hopping away from me with its head down, absorbed with whatever it was trying to catch to eat. I stalked it from behind. It never saw me. I got close enough, aimed, let fly. The robin screamed, a sound I had never heard a robin make, and ran clumsily along the grass, dragging the arrow which had entered its ass, right under the tail. It screamed and ran, wobbling desperately until the arrow dropped out on the grass. The robin hopped and finally flew weakly out of sight. My heart pounded; I felt blood pulsing in my throat and head. I didn't understand what had happened. I didn't understand why I had shot at the robin ‑ people didn't eat robins ‑ or why I had hit it, or why it didn't die, or what I would have done if it had died. 

Mom had kicked our dad – second of her five husbands – out of the house, and she and my younger brother and I had moved to Southern Oregon. There, still a boy, I became a Christian. That lasted twelve years or so, until one day in a burning village…

Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue's Knife

     We were living in a little rented house on Conklin Avenue in Grants Pass. Darrell and I met a kid named Eugene Wright, who was my age and lived a few houses up the street. He'd come around trying to sell Cloverine Brand Salve, some all‑purpose ointment that magazine ads said you could sell door to door and make a lot of money. It came in tins the size of a snuff can. He didn't sell many.

     Something had happened to Eugene's parents; there was some reason they couldn't raise him. He lived with his grandparents, the Hogues. He was an only child, a chubby kid who wasn't very strong. He'd been labeled a sissy, and took a lot of shit from other kids. He was very religious.

     He and I became friends for a while. He didn't do much that I liked, like playing football or baseball, but he did read books, so we had that in common. He talked a lot about Jesus. I got bored with that, but everybody said it was the truth so I figured it must be so. He worked at converting Darrell and me. I remembered a time in Pasco when I'd asked, "Mom, is there a real God 'n' Jesus?" She'd just said, "Yes, dear," as if I'd asked if the sky were blue. I wanted more of an answer, but none came.

     Mom had been praying a lot more lately. It was pretty much in the air we breathed. In the small towns we'd always lived in, whenever somebody was born or died or got married, the seriousness of the occasion meant that it was a religious one. Heads would bow, some old man would pray out loud, and you had to be still.

     Eugene kept after us to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior. He warned that we'd go to Hell if we didn't, and we knew he was right because everybody else said the same thing. The difference was that most people only said that if you asked them, and Eugene said it without being asked. Darrell and I shrugged and said, Well, guess we better do it, sure don't want to go to Hell. (Back then, you always capitalized nouns like heaven and hell and any pronoun or adjective that referred to God or Jesus.)

     So one time when Eugene was talking about Jesus we asked him how you went about doing this.

     "It's easy," he said. We'd need a special place, one that was sort of secret and private. We were at his house. He led us out back to a shed that had a partial attic and we all climbed up there and knelt down, which we'd have had to do anyway because there wasn't space under the roof to stand. This was perfect, Eugene said, because Jesus didn't care where you accepted Him as long as you did it, and He could see everywhere, so you didn't have to be in church. (Pretty good, seeing through walls. Wish I could do that.... I imagined myself walking down Conklin Avenue watching women bathe.) Darrell and I hoped Eugene was right; we didn't want to go around thinking we were saved and then end up in Hell because we'd gone about it wrong.

     So we knelt on the boards in that shed's attic and Eugene Wright asked us if we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and we said we did, and we all bowed our heads and Eugene said a prayer and that was that. We were Christians. Eugene was excited. Lots of preachers don't do that good, he said, getting two in one week.

     Some time later Ebenezer Hogue, Eugene's grandfather, put a .22 rifle to his head and killed himself in their living room. Eugene and his grandmother couldn't bear to stay in that house, so they moved a short distance away. Mom rented their house. She let us see the bloodstain on the wooden floor once, then put a rug over it and we moved in. It was the best house we'd ever lived in, with a back yard big enough for a vegetable garden. We’d learned in school that Indians had taught the Pilgrims to plant corn and beans in the same hills so the beans climbed the cornstalks. I planted ours the same way, and sure enough I didn't have to put in poles for the beans.

     Eugene gave me a hunting knife that had been his grandfather's. He didn't want to keep it because it saddened him, and he wasn't a hunter anyway. It was pretty old, with a small brass hilt. It had had a handle of two pieces of some early plastic, one riveted to either side of the tang. One side had fallen off. It had a crude sheath that Eb had made. He'd told Eugene it was the Indian kind. (The old man had told Eugene about seeing real wild Indians as a boy. When Eugene retold the story to me, I was so thrilled I could see a file of dusky figures, moving among the trees like a warm breeze, disappearing over a ridge.) The sheath had leather covering the blade but also wrapping around most of the handle. That way you didn't need a keeper strap, which brush could unsnap anyway when you walked through it, plucking out the knife without your even knowing it. Plus you didn't have to unsnap anything to draw the knife; you just grabbed the top of the handle and pulled it out. The hunting knife I carry to this day has a sheath I made the same way.

     It wasn't a pretty knife, but it was mine. I didn't like that it was missing part of the handle until one day when I was throwing it in the front yard. Most hunting knives are heavier on the handle end, making it harder to control how they turn in the air, thus harder to stick. Having half its handle missing gave Eb's knife a nice balance.

     I practiced. There was a tree in our front yard that was big enough that I could hit it every time, and its bark was soft and even, so the knife would stick easily when I could make it hit point first. I became a kid zen knife‑thrower. I would spend hours a day standing back from that tree, throwing the knife, retrieving it from the tree or wherever it had bounced to, walking back, throwing it again.

     It was a matter of grip, release, and distance. It worked best to grip the knife by the blade and throw it overhand so the knife made a half turn and arrived at the tree point first. Once I saw the principle involved, I chose a favorite grip, the one with most of the blade in my hand, and settled in at the distance from the tree where that grip would give me a nice half turn and stick in the bark. I threw and retrieved and threw and retrieved. After a few days I could stick it almost every time at my chosen distance. I began to throw harder, and that changed things for a while but when I found the right combination it became even more consistent. Then I chose a spot in the bark for a smaller target, and before long I could throw the knife hard, stick it most of the time, and often very near that spot. Then I no longer seemed to be throwing the knife; it just flowed out of me as I let it go. 

CARTOON

I was always “the good kid.” I studied hard, tried to please parents and teachers, Sunday school teachers, Boy Scout leaders.

I started school in the years when the country was in the grip of fervent anti-communism, personified by the paranoid rantings of Senator Joseph McCarthy, of Wisconsin. Being just a kid, and a “good kid” at that, I didn’t know any better than to accept what I was told, and to do my best to live up to it.

                                                  Cartoon

     I was in the first or second grade, which would have been in the period 1949‑51. Art was my least favorite class; most of the other kids could make drawings and paintings that even I could see were better than mine.

     The assignment was to draw a cartoon. The teacher explained what a cartoon was, and the class turned to. The topic was Communism. If I ever heard the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy, I don't remember it. What I remember is a lot of emphasis in that class, as well as in others (social studies in particular) about Communism, how Communists, also called Reds, were very bad and didn't believe in God and were trying to take over the world and yes, even America. America was good and strong because we were Christian and free, but we wouldn't stay free unless we all fought hard against the Communists.

     The teacher approached my island of stillness in the sea of flailing elbows and crayons. She was concerned and helpful. But I just couldn't do it. I couldn't think of anything to draw, or anything that I could draw that would be recognizable.

     She wouldn’t give up. She hovered at my shoulder, kindly but insistent: Now, think. What have you learned about Communism? Can you draw that? Just try, Dean. Don't worry, cartoons aren't even supposed to be good drawings. They're supposed to make things look bad or stupid.

     She asked what was the simplest thing I could think of that I'd learned about Communism. When that turned up nothing I thought I could draw, she asked whether I thought Communism was bad. Oh sure, I nodded. Then she asked, What's the simplest thing you can think of that's bad?

     The phrase "snake in the grass" came to mind. I'd heard my parents say it about someone they didn't trust. Good, she said. Can you draw that? Go ahead. Draw that.

     I drew a squiggly line to represent a snake, and a few pencil strokes for blades of grass. I lettered COMMUNISM underneath it in my kid's scrawl.

     "See?" the teacher said. "I knew you could do it."

THO AN IS BURNING/ TOYS/ KY HOA

Most of my memoir has now been posted. But people have read “bits and pieces,” because of the periodic nature of the blog. I hope when the entire book is published – in paper, between covers, in its entirety – that the experience of reading it as a whole clarifies some things that might at this point still be unexplained. For now, I want to make some posts, and comment on them. My comments will be presented in this type, so readers can distinguish them from the text.  As always, comments and/or questions from readers are welcome. There’s a box for comments at the end of each post.

I have thought – and said, and repeated, more than some folks have wanted to hear – that I am the luckiest combat vet alive. One good friend, also a Marine,  had a bayonet buried in his side by an NVA soldier. He was left for dead. Earlier, he’d been shot in one knee and one elbow, to the point where the woefully overworked surgeons were going to amputate both, until he threatened suicide if they did so. He also had a head wound. Another friend lost about half his right hand to a Rocket Propelled Grenade… and on, and on…

    Lucky me. I was shot at and narrowly missed (see the full chapter “Tho An,” in the Archive). I caught a near-fatal dose of Falciparum malaria, but happened to land in California a couple of days before it struck, which would have left me alone to die in a roadside ditch in Cambodia (see the chapter “Spook Hunting in Laos, also in Archive).

     So I’ve had an up-close and very personal look at war – not just in Vietnam, but also in Central America, and for a few days, in Palestine and Israel.

     All that doesn’t mean that my opinions are correct. There are veterans who have seen much more combat than I have, who disagree violently with me about what it all means.

     It does mean that my opinions are grounded in experience. And for what it’s worth, that experience has compelled me to study, as if my life depended on it, the conditions and ideas which led to the events I’ve lived through, and led me to put myself into those situations.

     Three days in and near the village of Tho An, in April, 1966, formed the turning point in my life. Everything I’ve ever done, witnessed, thought about, studied… oh yes: and dreamed… is clearly located in my (now, 68 years long) life, as either before or after one long moment in Tho An. Since that moment, one baby boy, his screaming mother, one old man, and some other children and adults from the village, have been my teachers. Every day, they’ve been my teachers.

                                

 Tho An        

     Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began. Others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.                       

     Attached to “F” Company, 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines, I was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements or attempts to flee.

     They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot Company's combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C‑4 from the blast. A sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.

     I'd imagined battle, but I'd never imagined this. The children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers' arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, yet feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.

     But the old man: he didn't wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before too long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I had ever seen on a human face. Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. There was even a feeling of the veil’s movement having a direction: top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of “F” Company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can’t explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.

     But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.

 But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.

As babies, we get our first impressions of the world from watching our parents – those beings closest to us, who feed us and wrap us in blankets and change our shitty diapers. As our vision widens, we begin to know the world our parents know. As language arrives, so do emotions: worries, delights, confusions… and,  in the lives of poor children, fears… and resentments. They breathe the air – the physical air, the emotional air –  which their parents breathe. Here’s a whiff of the world I was born into…

II. Learning War

     I first saw the world on January 23, 1943. Pearl Harbor was 13½ months in the past; the United States was at war with Japan and Germany. The 1^st Marine Division (which would be my outfit in Vietnam) had invaded Guadalcanal([1]) 5½ months earlier. Americans had invaded North Africa 3 months after that. The Soviet Army had counterattacked Axis forces outside Stalingrad, trapping 91,000 German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops inside a pocket. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus would surrender all those troops a week after I was born, and the Japanese would begin evacuating Guadalcanal a day later. Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term as President of the United States. The blockade of Leningrad was in its 502^nd day, of 872. Tatyana Savicheva([2]) was 5 months dead. Treblinka([3]) had been in operation 6 months, with 10 gas chambers working full time. In October of that year, Jewish slaves at the extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland, would stage a sufficiently successful revolt that the Nazis destroyed the camp for fear that the escapees would tell the world what had happened there, which they did.([4]) Japanese Americans had been rounded up and imprisoned in relocation camps.

In mid-1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson sent elements of the 1^st Marine Division to South Vietnam, the beginning of the long buildup of regular troops that was to give 10 years of war to the people of the United States, Vietnam (North and South), and the world. I arrived at Division Headquarters at Chu Lai in late September…

Ky Hoa

     Ky Hoa was an island just off the coast of South Vietnam near Chu Lai. We were posted on its seaward side, along the top of a cliff that dropped steeply to a narrow rocky beach.

     One afternoon I had sentry duty on the cliff. With the rest of the outfit at my back, my orders were to watch the cliff and beach below me, making sure no Vietnamese climbed the cliff toward our position, or moved along the beach past a point even with my post. If anyone was moving along the beach (it could only be approached from the mainland side of the island), I was to halt them. If anyone continued after I'd given the command to halt, I was to repeat it, and wave them back. If they still didn't stop, I was to fire a warning shot just in front of them, in the forbidden direction. If they still refused to stop, I was to shoot to kill.   

     A Vietnamese man came around the corner, clambering along the slippery rocks just up from the water's edge. He seemed to be looking for something in the tidepools. He was barefoot; his only clothing was something wrapped around his hips. He carried nothing in his hands.

     He saw me standing on the cliff, rifle at the ready, watching him. He kept moving across my front, with a cautious eye in my direction. I held up my hand. He saw it, but kept moving. “Dung lai!” I yelled. "Halt!"

     He kept moving, looking among the rocks, looking up at me. I yelled again. He moved again. Sergeant Vance leaned across three years and nine thousand miles to speak in my ear: "Nobody gets by a marine sentry who's not supposed to." I lowered the muzzle of my rifle, pointed it at the beach in front of him. He gestured earnestly toward the rocks ahead of him as he moved past the point to my front which I wasn't supposed to let him cross. I challenged him again; he kept moving forward.

     I jacked a round into the chamber of my M14, put the rifle to my shoulder, braced my feet along my line of aim, and sighted at a point one foot in front of him. I picked out a rock situated so that, if I fired at it, my shot would - if he were lucky - throw rock fragments into the man's lower leg, then ricochet out to sea. If he were unlucky, it would ricochet into his vitals and kill him. I tightened my right hand's hold on the rifle's grip so as to be able to support its whole weight with that one hand, and slowly, threateningly, waved the man back with my left hand. He paused.

     He said something in Vietnamese, and pointed again at the rocks in front of him. There was something there he really wanted. I brought my left hand back to the forearm of my rifle, quickly checked the elevation setting on my rear sight, lowered my cheek to the stock, sighted on the rock at the man's feet, began to squeeze the trigger - that crisp light slip of steel on steel - and braced myself for the kick of the rifle butt.

     The man turned and walked dejectedly back the way he'd come. My trigger finger eased forward as slowly as it had been squeezing back. I lowered the rifle without firing, clicked the safety on, and began years of thinking how close I'd come to shooting, how close he'd come to being wounded or killed… and how some part of me had desperately hoped the man would reach under a rock and pull out a weapon so I could finally do what I was there to do.

From the moment I lowered my rifle, just before I squeezed off a shot, and for the 40+ years since, I have thought about what had just happened to me, what I had done, what I hadn’t done… and what I had wanted to do. That very day, I began tracking, backward in my life, the powerful emotion that had been present as I sighted on the rock in front of that man: I had wanted to shoot.

     Why had I wanted to shoot? For some reason, even later that same afternoon, in moments between events as I was on radio watch in the Direct Air Support Center (DASC), on guard duty at night on the Division perimeter (see the chapter “Sergeant of the Guard,” in Archive), or when I found moments to myself, I tracked that desire to shoot back to accumulated resentments. I tracked it back to fears of the enemy lurking in darkness while on sentry duty, to not making the varsity football team in high school, to rejections by girls and women, to playground insults, all the way back to my parents’ not being able to afford a single Christmas toy for us when I was 4 or 5 years old,  and we lived in the war-surplus housing project.

Toys

     We were living at 32c Navy Homes, the World War II housing project built for enlisted men and their families, now rented as apartments to poor people, sprawled along the railroad tracks out at the edge of Pasco, Washington. Our dad was still with us. It was the late 1940’s. I was four or five and my brother Darrell two and a half years younger, so neither of us had started school.

     It was Christmas time. Darrell and I had begun asking for scooters, toy gun sets, I don't know what all. There wasn't money for any of that, so each time we'd pestered Mom she'd tried to trim our expectations. Santa Claus must have been in the discussion somewhere, but that's not what I remember.

     I remember one night when Mom was putting us to bed. Again, she was parrying our questions about Christmas. But Christmas was only a couple of days away, and this time I wouldn't let it go. I wailed "Look at our toybox!" Each time she tried to soothe me, I wailed "Look at our toybox!" again, shattering her apologies and her attempts to comfort me in my boy's unhearing rage. She gave up with a sigh heavy with resignation and the deep sadness of poor mothers everywhere.

     She turned around to the closet and pulled out our toybox. It was a small cardboard grocery box with two or three old, broken toys in it.

     "See, Mom, see?" I accused her.

     "I know, son... I know," she said, trying to comfort all three of us, not being able, tucking us in and fleeing the room.

---

[1] Twenty-three years later, I would stand in the open, off to the side of the village well in Tho An, side by side with a veteran of Guadalcanal, other island battles in the Pacific, and Korea. He was by then First Sergeant of “F” Company, 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines. He leaned close to my ear to be heard above the firing and said calmly, “You be the last man out.”

[2] See below, “Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku, Moscow, Vienna, Prague” p.335ff.

[3] The reader who may have seen Treblinka listed as a “concentration camp” should clarify that notion: the only things concentrated at Treblinka were corpses, ashes, and huge piles of clothing and shoes taken from the people who were reduced to ashes. Treblinka was an extermination camp.

[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8381413.stm (Published Nov. 27, 2009, by BBC.)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS      

                               

I. PROLOGUE

Tho An............................................................................5

II. LEARNING WAR.................................................................8  

         Cowboys and Indians.........................................................9

Toys.....................................................................9

                       Cartoon................................................................10

                       Roy Rogers..........................................................11

                       Atomic Stove........................................................14

Mumblypeg..........................................................15

K'reans.................................................................16

First Blood...........................................................18

Hunger 1.............................................................19

Rogue River 1.....................................................21

Finding Jesus, and

      Eb Hogue's Knife……..................................23

A Rifle, A Pistol..................................................27

Dress Blues 1.......................................................33

Almost a Cowboy................................................36

Canal....................................................................44

Dogs of Eberlein Street........................................48                     

Rogue River 2:

Rattlesnake Air………….....................................51                             

Sunset over Klamath Lake...................................63                             

Second Buck.......................................................64                      

Crater Lake..........................................................67

Semper Fidelis..................................................................74

Gunny Rogers 1. Mama's boy...............................74                       

Sergeant Vance……………..................................77

Man and Rifle Reaching........................................80

Gunny Rogers 2:

The most powerful weapon...................................83

Dress Blues 2.......................................................86                     

Marine Corps History...........................................89

Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis.............................95                                        Banning...............................................................98

29 Palms      

 1. Ungentle........................................................100

 2. Old Enough to Bleed……………………....102

                         3. Footprints.......................................................103

                        Okinawa................................................................106        

With God on Our Side...........................................111

Tonkin.................................................................112                                Olongapo.............................................................121

Put Me In, Coach..................................................123

III. WAR…….............................................................................124

Oakland................................................................125

Going Over............................................................128

Ky Hoa..................................................................137                         

Gunny Rogers 3.....................................................139

Phantom Pisser………………...…........................141

Hunger 2................................................................144                                     
To Kill a Gook.......................................................145

Tam Ky.................................................................146

"You're too late."...................................................149

An Tan.................................................................159

Request Mast........................................................163

Tho An.................................................................166

Man and Pistol......................................................183

Rats.....................................................................185

Marines in Skivvies………………….................191

Howard's Hill.........................................................195

Sergeant of the Guard...........................................198                 
Wartime Is Wonderful............................................202                  Danang.................................................................208

IV. RELEARNING WAR................................................................211

 Back to School, Back to War.............................................211

 Kicking the Leaves...........................................................211

Townies.................................................................216                                             Missouri Squirrels....................................................218

Hunger 3................................................................223

Dark‑skinned Warriors 1..........................................224

Packing .................................................................226

Seminar.................................................................228

Cho Lon.................................................................229

Interlude:

        A Veteran's Dreams...........................................235

        Dream: Nazi Pursuit.........................................237

        Dream:

     Money Man Pursuit……..........................237                     

Mangbuk

                            The Camp.......................................................239

     Soldier Tin......................................................248
     Dream: Bodies of Water...................................258

     Dalat..............................................................259                                     
Saigon    
     LA Cop..................................................................262

                             Kids………………................................................263

                           Dream:

  Vietnamese Children.........................................265                                  
  Spook‑hunting in Laos.......................................266

  Mark................................................................295

              J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and

  Abraham and Isaac...........................................298

              Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku,

  Moscow,Vienna, Prague.....................................305

              Samaritan in Los Angeles...................................339

  Chinese Soldiers................................................340

              Dream: A6 and Wolves......................................342

              Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove..........................345

                             Triptych

                                     1. The Clubbing......................................359

              2. Bait....................................................362

                                      3. Dream: Vietnamese Women.................364

              Spider and Fly...................................................365

  Fear.................................................................367

  Guard Dog........................................................369

  Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle................................369

                                      Zen Warrior Bass Player.....................................371

              Sandinistas........................................................373

              Missing Man......................................................385

              Dark‑skinned Warriors 2.....................................398

  Dream: Guts......................................................399

     Indians and Cowboys........................................................399

                            Mercenary 1.......................................................399

          Rus Rus            

                                            1. Maco Stewart's Letter............................405

                    2. Flaco and Luque....................................408

                                            3. Babes in James Bondland.......................411

                    4. Rus Rus.................................................415                                                 5.                                         5. The Tape.................................................423                                                    
                    6. Lasa Tinghni….......................................428

                    7. Red Chief, White Chief............................432

                                            8. In Camp.................................................433

                    9. Border Crossing......................................435

                                          10. Skulls of Tulin Bila..................................440

                  11. Perico's Garrote,

and other stories..................  444

                  12. Meeting.................................................451                                                                      13.                                     13. Out of the Woods...................................461

                  14. Aftermath..............................................464

         Dream: Deadribs..................................................474

         Mercenary 2.........................................................474

                  Guns in Costa Rica................................................482                                               I nter                        Interview with Bill Gandall.....................................497

                   Guatemala: La Violencia........................................506

                  At the Battered Women’s Shelter...........................509

                  Palestinians and Israelis and Americans..................511

                  Dream: Dance of the Arrows..................................532

Ants.........................................................................................534

Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol....................................................535

IV. THE WEB (ESSAY)..........................................................................538