Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story: OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983

Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story: OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983:   Ocotal is the capital town of Nicaragua's northern province of Nueva Segovia. I arrived there in late October, having finally prodded t...

OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983

  Ocotal is the capital town of Nicaragua's northern province of Nueva Segovia. I arrived there in late October, having finally prodded the Sandinista bureaucracy (efficiency was apparently not a revolutionary concept) into giving me written permission to travel and work as a journalist in areas near the Honduran border where contra ambushes had recently been taking place.

     Ocotal's central plaza was like many in Latin America. Broad paths connected adjacent and opposite corners to form an X-in-a-box. Blue-painted concrete benches sat, cool and quiet, at intervals along the pathways, in the shade of banana and palm trees. Children too young for school played around the benches on weekdays; adults gathered to sit in the shade and talk during the hot noons. The old Catholic church on one side of the square faced the municipal building on the other. A mural portrait of Che Guevara covered a large wall directly opposite the municipal building.

     Ocotal was the locus of a history I needed to touch. That history seemed embodied for me in a drinking fountain on one side of the square. It was a cairn of irregular stones and mortar seven or eight feet high, with the ceramic fountain and a bronze plaque set into the side facing the street. The plaque said that the fountain, and the potable water system of which it was the culmination, were a symbol of the cooperation between the peoples of Nicaragua and the United States. The ceramic fountain embedded in the stone cairn was long since broken; the plumbing which had once furnished water to it was also broken.

     The fountain had been erected during the reign of Anastasio Somoza García, the first of the Somoza clan of Nicaraguan dictators. He had risen to power through the Guardia Nacional, the anti-guerrilla army that had been trained and officered by U.S. Marines in the 1920's. The guerrillas, or "bandits," as the Marines called them, were the band of nationalist revolutionaries led by Augusto César Sandino, namesake of those in power when I was in Ocotal. One of the Marine officers who fought with the Guardia against Sandino was Chesty Puller, the greatest Marine hero they'd told us about in boot camp. Another officer, from an earlier intervention just prior to WWI, was Smedley Butler, one of two Marines ever to win two Medals of Honor.

     Somoza García, stepchild of those Marine heroes, had had Sandino assassinated, and once the Marines had left, turned the country into his fiefdom (“Nicaragua es mi finca” was a favorite expression) and the Guardia into his palace guard and counterinsurgency police. 

     The old Marine cuartel, or headquarters, was also facing the square, on the street at right angles to the one with the fountain and the mural of Che. The small original USMC plaque was still on the door in late 1983. 

     There was a major battle in Ocotal in 1929 between Sandino's men and the Marines, who were surrounded all night in the cuartel. The siege was broken by Marine aircraft from Managua, in what was apparently history's first use of the technique of dive-bombing.

     I looked up a fifty-seven-year old man named Joaquín Ponce, who had been a boy in the town at the time of the battle. I asked him to tell me what he remembered, and he told what he’d heard as a boy growing up, saying that the Marines were caught by surprise and trapped, and that only the bombing had saved them. He said that the bombing killed many people in the town; he didn't know exactly how many. 

     A heavy-set young woman was in the room with us, a militant Sandinista soldier who seemed to be a political watchdog sent to keep tabs on what was asked by, and said to, a foreign journalist. As I told Ponce about my own Marine history, including Vietnam, she became visibly furious. How could I have done that, and what was I doing here? 

     I explained to her and to Ponce that I now felt very differently than I had then, that I now thought that the Vietnam war was stupid and unjust, but that at the time I thought I was doing the right thing, and that I had been lied to about the situation there, and that in any case I'd been like so many other young men, thinking more with other parts of my body than with my brain. She bought none of that, and just sat there and glared at the ex-Marine who had dared crash the gate of her hard-won revolutionary world. 

     Ponce smiled a rueful, knowing smile: "Sí, Usted tuvo más corazón que cabeza;" literally, that I had more heart than head, but a fair translation of the phrase we'd used among ourselves in the Marine Corps, "more balls than brains."

     I was hanging around the corner in Ocotal where the local buses loaded and unloaded, asking if there was a bus to Teotecacinte, which is about a kilometer – a half hour’s walk - from the Honduran border. There were none. Someone said I could get as far as El Jícaro (which the Sandinistas had renamed Ciudad Sandino) or Jalapa. Someone else said I'd have better luck heading for El Espino or Las Manos, which are near a section of the border much closer to Ocotal than is Teotecacinte, but not as far north. I was puzzling over whether to take the path of easier access or to chance striking off in the direction of Teotecacinte, with less hope of getting there but, I thought, more to write about should I succeed. 

     An intense Nicaraguan man in his late twenties, who  reminded me of the actor Ricardo Montalban, approached. I'd noticed him scrutinizing me from the crowd. He asked where I wanted to go. I hesitated. Was he a cop? An agent? If so, for which side? And what did he want with me? 

     He wanted business. He had a jeep, he said. Doble tiro, four wheel drive. It ran good, he said. For fifty dollars, I could have him and the jeep for the whole day. He'd take me anywhere I wanted to go. Teotecacinte? I asked. His wince was visible. Why there? I'm a journalist, I said. I hear the contras have been crossing the border and raiding in that area. He nodded, winced again. Teotecacinte, okay. 

     His name was Alejandro Guillén. We drove around Ocotal while he bought fuel, said goodbye to his wife at their little house on one of Ocotal's dirt back streets, then to his girl friend on another street across town. He looked at me as if to ask if I was sure, gave a tense shrug, and we headed northeast into the bright morning.

     As we drove north from Ocotal, I asked Alejandro if he’d seen any other North American journalists in the area. He reached into a cubbyhole in the dash, pulled out a new business card, and handed it to me, saying this guy had recently been through, and was his last customer. It was the card of Stephen Kinzer, of the New York Times.

     We passed ambush sites marked by white crosses and fresh flowers (it was shortly after November 2, Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, when Latinos honor deceased relatives). We drove through the village of San Fernando, where, Alejandro told me, Sandino had led a miners' strike in what turned out to be one of the early armed confrontations between Sandino and the government of Somoza García.

     In San Fernando we had to stop and visit the local comandante, who, when we entered the building where he held sway, had one boot up on a low stool, getting a shoe shine from a young boy. His manner with the boy, and with Alejandro and me, was that of someone who liked the fact that he had been given some authority, and was not averse to letting us know that. After making sure that his boots were shined to his liking and taking his sweet time signing my permission slip to continue up the road, he dismissed us.

     Alejandro didn't seem to have any particular love for either side in the war; he seemed mostly to want to be left alone to do business. He didn't mind telling stories against both sides. He asked the rhetorical question, Who are the new bourgeoisie? and answered it himself by saying that it was the Sandinista comandantes and their hangers-on, with their nice houses and cars and special privileges.

     And he told a story, which he said was well known among Nicaraguans, about the former dictator's son, who was named after his father and nicknamed "Tachito" by those who liked him, because his father had been known as "Tacho,” but was called "El Chigüín" behind his back. The nickname had some derogatory origin; when I asked about it I never got a better answer than a shrug and a contemptuous leer(

). "El Chigüín," the story went, returned after his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and assumed command of EEBI, the Guardia Nacional's Escuela de Entrenamiento Básico de la Infantería, or Basic Infantry Training School. More than a military training institution, EEBI was the Guardia's counterrevolutionary elite. If you called it a Soviet-style NKVD with US military training and weapons, you wouldn’t be far off.

     Guillén said that, while training his recruits in EEBI, Tachito Somoza had a little call-and-response shouting match to raise their fighting spirit:

     Somoza: What are you?

     Recruits: Tiger!

     Somoza: And what does the tiger drink?

     Recruits: Blood!

     Somoza: And where does it get this blood?

     Recruits: From the Nicaraguan people!

                         

JINOTEGA, NICARAGUA 1983: SANDINISTA VETERAN AND USMC VETERAN TALK OVER COFFEE

     I walked into the Sandinista press office in the Hotel Intercontinental [Managua], again hoping to speed up processing of my request to travel in the area of the fighting [NORTHERN NICARAGUA, A HALF HOUR'S WALK FROM THE HONDURAN BORDER] between the contras and the Ejército Popular Sandinista, the Sandinista People's Army. I entered a room where business as usual had given way to faces that reminded me of Öle Ostergaard's when I'd shown him the  human vertebra, with an added charge. A group of Nicaraguan and other Latin American journalists were huddled around a low circular table, each with one ear leaned, in what had to be spine-wrenching positions, toward the small short-wave radio broadcasting news in Spanish from the center of the table. One journalist glanced up at me, at first in the offhand way that anyone glances up when another person enters the room. Then his face changed, a current passed among them, they all looked up at me, and on each face I saw the same pure, concentrated hatred that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of the old man I was guarding at bayonet-point, along with a group of screaming women and children, at the well in the burning Vietnamese village of Tho An in April, 1966. [I WOULD SEE THE SAME LOOK IN 1991, ON THE FACES OF HIGHLY EDUCATED PALESTINIANS IN A REFUGEE CAMP IN JORDAN, WHEN THEY LEARNED I WAS AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST.]

     The short-wave radio was broadcasting the first news of the United States invasion of Grenada.

     Jinotega, in a mountain valley between Managua and Nicaragua's northern border with Honduras, was a relief from the chaos and steamy heat of the capital. Contra raids had already penetrated that far south; I stayed there a couple of days talking to local people about the situation and petitioning the regional Sandinista comandante for permission to travel farther north, to the area near the Honduran border.

     Operating within my typically thin freelancer's budget, I found a stall where I could get a cheap plate of what I lived on most of my time in the country: rice, beans, and salty beef. At one of the plank tables, I got to talking with a young man about my age. He said he worked in construction, and when I said I did too, we swapped stories for a while. He bought me a cup of coffee. He said he'd served a hitch as a draftee in the Sandinista army. I told him I'd been in the Marines in Vietnam, quickly adding that I thought that war was a stupid mistake. His eyebrows raised; we swapped more stories. 

     When he told me his name was Juan Antonio Altamirano, I asked if he was related to Pedro Altamirano, the guerrilla leader who carried on the fight against the dictator Anastasio Somoza after Somoza had the nationalist hero Augusto César Sandino killed. Juan smiled, pleased that I recognized the name. “Era un tío mío: he was one of my uncles," he replied.

     I asked Juan what he thought of the contra situation. He took a deep breath, let it out in a deeper sigh. He patted the head of his young son and looked off at the surrounding mountains - mountains where Sandino had fought, where his uncle had fought, where Marines like Smedley Butler and Chesty Puller had fought as their names became legends that would be invoked to and by recruits like me, where Juan himself had fought. In those days, I usually had to take notes to remember the wording of something said to me in Spanish. But Juan's words slipped intact into my brain: “Si el ejército norteamericano viene aquí, habrá muchos ríos de sangre.”: "If the North American Army comes here, there will be many rivers of blood." 

     Juan didn't speak like an ideologue. He was a Nicaraguan, a nephew of a revered patriot. He loved his country. But he spoke now as a tired soldier, older than his years, the way my friends and I speak about Vietnam. He was already as weary of Sandinista bombast as others of his countrymen were becoming. But he was Nica, and told me he would fight again if it came to that; told me that there had been just too many yanquis coming here with rifles to have their way and to league up with dictators like the Somoza clan. He said that every Nicaraguan man, woman, and child would fight: with rifles if they had them; with sticks and rocks and Molotov cocktails otherwise. And not only Nicaraguans would fight. People would come from all over Latin America. This would be it, the great, long-awaited NO as people came from Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, El Salvador... muchos ríos de sangre.

(Excerpt from the chapter "Sandinistas," of my memoir RATTLESNAKE DREAMS)

CHINESE SOLDIERS, A6 AND WOLVES

Chinese Soldiers

     Back at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970, I got a job as teaching assistant in Political Philosophy for Professor Sheldon Wolin, a nationally known professor and writer whose best-known book was Politics and Vision. 

     During the winter quarter, Wolin had decided to include works by Asian writers, because the Vietnam war was still such a big factor in everyone's lives. Readings from the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were on the list, in particular On Protracted War, Mao's treatise stressing the importance of the relationship between political and military factors in conducting revolutionary or anti-imperial war. 

     I had devoured much of that material - obsessively, as usual - along with People's War, People's Army, by Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who had commanded the forces which defeated first the French, then us Americans. As Wolin and I talked, he decided that, although he always lectured to the entire class and the job of teaching assistants like me was to lead discussion groups of a smaller number of students, in this case I should give the lecture to the class as a whole, because of the combination of my experiences in Vietnam, reading, and journalism in Southeast Asia.

     I re-immersed myself in the writings of Mao and Giap, even going back to Sun Tzu's thousands-of-years-old classic, The Art of War. When the time for my lecture came, I think I was too overwrought to do as good a job as I might have. What I tried to say was that Mao and Giap had invented a new calculus, which performed a new kind of summation of historical factors to make the answer come out in their favor. I drew on the blackboard a rough outline of the map of China, then put in symbols to represent the massive buildup of Japanese military power there during the 1930's. The map showed that the Japanese Navy controlled the coastal waters of China, and had strong garrisons guarding major port cities, rail lines, highways, etcetera. The Chinese fighters for independence, which at that time - the buildup to WWII - included both Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalists), had a tiny fraction of the weapons the Japanese possessed. 

     But, in spite of Mao's famous saying that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he taught that guns weren't the whole story. With the proper political organization, political will, and military strategy and tactics, China's huge population could overcome the Japanese occupation. Since they didn't have enough weapons but had so many people, they'd use people to get the weapons. Attacks would be planned on isolated Japanese outposts, with all the weapons the Chinese could gather in the hands of the leading attackers, who would overwhelm a small number of well-armed Japanese and escape to fight again, next time with more weapons.

     I used, as an example, Gunny Rogers' tales in boot camp of waves of attacking Chinese soldiers being slaughtered by U.S. Marines' machine guns at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, noting that although the Chinese took huge losses, they drove Allied forces back south of the 38th parallel.

     I don't know what effect my lecture had on the class. But soon after I gave it, I had this dream.

      Dream: A6 and Wolves

I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which is what they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, aircooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against Marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those Marines killed the Chinese. They are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.

     I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.

     I lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco for a month, got rid of everything I owned except what I could carry in a backpack and two small boxes of books I stored with my friend Peter Balcziunas, and hitchhiked to Oregon. 

DREAM: MONEY MAN PURSUIT

Dream: Money Man Pursuit

A man, one man, is after me. He's decided I'm between him and what he wants. It has nothing to do with me personally, with who I am or with anything I've done. I try to dissuade him, but he won't listen. Only my death will clear his way. There is a long pursuit. Part of it is over the rooftops of the human community. I do good tricks to get away but he always picks up the trail again. I go through a library with all human knowledge in it, in such a way as to leave all that knowledge in the form of impediments for him. He comes through it all, picks up my trail. Along the way, some people try to help me, but can't. Others are afraid to try. He has an AK47 which he fires whenever he comes within range, barely missing me. I hear the bullets snapping around my head like the bullets snapped past my ears near the well in Tho An in 1966. I meet a friend, a fellow combat vet. He says, "Remember that time...?" and recounts my telling him of our shelling and bombing a battlefield after a firefight until nothing recognizable was left but mud blasted into tortured shapes. My friend connects that story to the pursuit I'm now enduring, but I don't know why, unless just for its implacability, its inevitable movement in the direction of death. He says he'll be a lot more reluctant now, after a battle, to do his usual job of walking the ground and looking for survivors and for evidence of what happened there. I'm weary of dreaming this dream. I know I can't escape this man who pursues me. I know he'll kill me if I don't kill him. I lie in wait. I get up close. Fear and strength struggle in my body. The fear and the strength stop fighting, come to an agreement. The only way out is for me to become a more focused killer than he is. I become that. He comes. His eyes are maniacal, yet more cold than wild. Methodical. I now have a pistol. I aim carefully. A good head shot takes out one eye, goes into his brain. He keeps coming. I shoot again, take out the other eye. He will not die. I shoot and shoot, all brain shots. I'm aware of a wonderful, terrible ability to focus, like when I shot the rattlesnake on the Rogue River, or like standing in the open under fire at Tho An. This focus allows me to compartmentalize my being, putting my revulsion at killing off in a corner with my fear of death and the physical distractions of my environment and of my pursuer's movements. His head recoils crazily with each shot. Still he comes; he won't get it through his head. I grab a short sharp stick. Bullets are not enough; it has to be more personal. I thrust, put all my body's strength behind it, with the butt of the stick against my palm, and drive the point into one bloody eye socket, through his head, out the back of his skull. He finally gets the point. He dies, but not before he gets what he came for. We are in a fast food joint, behind the counter. Dying, he falls toward the cash register, grabs a wad of greenbacks the size of a large man's fist, too large to swallow, but rams it into his mouth anyway, his face a swamp of gore as he falls dead, still trying to swallow the money. 

HUNGER 3

Hunger 3

[My first semester at Colorado College after discharge from the Marine Corps, recently out of Vietnam.]     
     
     Mike Taylor and I went to dinner at the cafeteria in Loomis Hall. He was sitting across from me, and next to him was another student with whom we both were slightly acquainted. We'd almost finished dinner when the guy next to Mike, without saying anything, reached over to take some food from my tray. Reflexively, I turned the fork in my hand downward and stabbed the back of his hand. Four small roses of blood appeared around the tines of the fork. The guy turned pale. Mike’s jaw dropped. They looked at each other, then at me. I shrugged: "Don’t fuck with my food," and went on eating with the slightly bloody fork.

MISSOURI SQUIRRELS

Missouri Squirrels

     Christmas vacation [1966, just back from Vietnam], after my first semester at Colorado College, I decided to visit my Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank Hickman in Wheaton, Missouri. They'd made another of their moves between Oregon and Missouri. I'd go by Greyhound, of course: even the accumulated wealth of a year's overseas pay, combat pay, and a Corporal's wages was quickly gobbled by the cost of life at an expensive private college; a plane ticket was out of the question.

     The bus didn't go through Wheaton; it was too small and out of the way. It was nearly dark when I got off the bus. I asked directions. There were no local buses, no taxis. Bessie and Lank lived several miles from where I stood.

     I walked half the night along rural Missouri roads. Dogs would awaken with the crunching of my boots on gravel, bay their alarms, passing awareness of my presence to the dogs at the next farm. It was a little scary, but none of the dogs came after me. Sometime in the night I got lost, and had to knock at a farmhouse, waken someone, and ask directions. I apologized. They said it was no trouble.

     A few days later I was stacking firewood on Bessie and Lank's porch. An old man walked by out in the street. He stopped to watch me. At least, that's what I thought at first, that he was just watching me stack wood, to pass the time like old men will, maybe to pass judgment on my ability to lay up a neat and stable rick of wood, which is a recognized art among country people. I began to be more careful.

     Then I realized that he wasn't so much watching me work as looking at me personally, at who I was. I straightened, nodded. "Howdy," I said.

     "You kin to Bob Metcalf?" he asked. No preliminaries, no introductions, no chitchat about firewood or the rare skift of snow that had Wheaton drivers sliding all over Main Street. "He was my dad...." A dozen questions bubbled in me, but none formed quickly enough. "Y' look just like 'im. I delivered mail in these parts for thirty years." He turned and walked on.

     We were going out to see Dan Metcalf, my grandfather, who lived near Monett, a town even smaller than Wheaton. He'd long since separated from my grandmother Elizabeth, a woman who'd had long flowing black hair as a young woman, who my dad always claimed, with some pride, was part Indian. Maybe Cherokee(

); she'd come from Oklahoma.

     Dan's current wife was Rose, who was always spoken of (though never in her presence) as "a reformed prostitute." Even out of her presence, people never said "prostitute" without "reformed" being attached. They were trying to be generous to her because, they said, she was good to old Dan. But you could tell they were working at it. And you could tell she felt it too, but she just went about her business. I wasn't quite twenty-four, but had probably seen more prostitutes than most of the Metcalfs around there. Rose didn't look like the prostitutes I'd seen. She looked more like Aunt Bessie to me: a plainspoken, plainlooking, hardworking country woman. Except for an extra air of worldliness about her - a tinge of sadness, it seemed to me, at knowing and having lived a truth that everyone else also knew (some more directly than others) but would never say aloud.

     Dan was a lean, kindly old man who was glad to see me but was clearly holding back. He didn't say much. Bessie and Lank figured later that I reminded him too much of his son, dead only six years. My dad had committed suicide at age 40, in 1960.

     Dan and Rose both looked to be people who had cleaned up their acts considerably from the way they'd lived until well into their middle years. Dan came from a long line of moonshiners. The story had it that one night he'd come home likkered up and blasted a hole in his own roof from inside the house with his shotgun, just for fun.

     I wanted to go hunting. Something in me needed to close that circle, to carry a rifle meant to put meat on the table instead of to kill another human and leave him to rot in the mud. Bessie and Lank thought about it a while, and said, Well, we might go out and visit Lank's sister and brotherinlaw, Dorothy and Floyd Jennings, who lived in Thomas Hollow, one of those folds in the Ozarks like those where most of my extended family grew up. (They spelled the word h-o-l-l-o-w, but everyone said "holler". Bessie and my mother were born and raised on a 160-acre homestead in "Star Holler".

     They were a little reluctant to drop in on the Jenningses, especially Floyd. They seldom saw this man. He kept to himself, didn't have a lot to do with relatives and even less with outsiders. Don't expect him to cotton to you, they warned. He's just that way.

     We drove out to Thomas Hollow. Lank brought along his slide action Remington .22 rifle, which was very accurate, for me to use in case Floyd could be talked into a hunt.

     We all sat down in their cabin's small living room. Dorothy busied herself offering us coffee and cookies. Bessie and Lank introduced me, said I was just back from “Veet Nam.” Floyd lit up, started rocking animatedly in his chair. "Ah was thar, durin' the war," he said. "Well," he went on, "guess I should say, durin' the other war, or World War II, or whatever." Actually, he said, he'd never been ashore in Veet Nam. But he'd been aboard a Liberty ship in those waters. "Yup. Spent quite a spell thar. Hell, most people 'round heah nevah had no idy they was such a place, let alone whar it was. Leastwise till this war come along. I'd say somethin' about it, an' a body'd just shrug. But I knowed. I was thar. Durin' the war."

     Lank and Bessie had relaxed. Lank chimed in that he'd told me Floyd had a pretty good squirrel dog. Still got 'im?

     "Oh yeah, he's gettin' on, but still does pretty good, for a collie." That was the first I'd heard of a collie being a hunting dog. I'd had two collies as a kid, Mike and Buddy, so we talked about collies for a while. Pretty soon we were up in the hardwood grove behind the cabin, Floyd and the dog and I. Lank said he'd not go this time, he'd lend me his rifle and let me do the huntin' 'cause I hadn't been in so long.

     The tree limbs were bare, their leaves now a crunchy mattress we walked on. With that noise, we'd never have seen a squirrel, but for the dog. The collie would run ahead, making a big circle out in front of us. Pretty soon he began to bark. "He's got one treed," Floyd said. We walked toward the tree where the dog was, and stopped a few yards away. Floyd motioned, Be still. Squirrels, when they hear a threatening noise, will go around the tree, putting it between them and the noise. After we'd stood still a while, the dog slowly circled the tree, moving away from us, barking and making a racket in the dry leaves. When the collie got to the far side of the tree, we saw, up high, just the head of a grey squirrel peek around the tree. I looked at Floyd. He nodded back at me. I raised Lank's rifle, pushed off the safety, took my time, got just the sight picture Lank had described to me, put the front bead where its top was at the center of the head, where the squirrel's eye would be if I could have seen it at that distance. I squeezed off the shot. There was a long pause. The squirrel slid, tumbled over a couple of branches, fell to the ground.

     We walked over. Floyd knelt and picked up the squirrel and examined it. He stood and looked at me, went so far as to raise his eyebrows. "Right in thuh eye," he said. "Don't waste no meat thataway."

     We shot four or five squirrels - "just enough for a mess of 'em" was how Floyd put it - and walked back to the cabin. His wife made us all a big pot of squirrel and dumplings. All the while Floyd and I sat and talked about Veet Nam, even though he'd never been ashore. We talked about the South China Sea, how there were flying fish that would bust out the side of a wave and glide, and sea snakes swimming close to shore.

     After all, we'd both been there, durin' the wars.