ALMOST A COWBOY

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 horsedrawn sickleblade 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 steelwheeled 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 horsedrawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good. 

     After a field was mowed, the freshcut 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 twelvefoot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twentyyear 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 dumprake, 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 barbedwire 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 frantic 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 barbedwire 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 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 bobwire 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.    

MISSOURI SQUIRRELS / HUNGER 3

Missouri Squirrels

     Christmas vacation 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 43, 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 in the air above the trough, and sea snakes swimming close to shore. 

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

                              

Hunger 3

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

RELEARNING WAR: KICKING THE LEAVES/TOWNIES

Kicking the Leaves

     It was mid-August when I left Vietnam; by the end of the month I was on campus at Colorado College. It was the biggest culture shock of my life, except maybe for the one I'd felt on arrival at boot camp. I was free! and it was terrifying. I didn't know how to act. I was used to deferring to certain people, having others defer to me. Here, everybody just sauntered around, wore whatever they pleased, talked to one another like - well, like civilians. I remember standing in bright sunlight on the curb outside the student union at Rastall Center. A pretty young woman pulled up in a Jaguar or BMW, jumped out, and greeted a friend she hadn't seen since Spring. I stood there with mouth agape, staring at and listening to two foxy coeds compare their summers in Europe and South America. Goddamn, I thought. Anybody wanna hear about my summer in Southeast Asia?

     I was the first Vietnam vet on campus. I remembered the conversation in the staging tent at Danang, and walked around stiffly, looking over my shoulder, waiting to be accosted, surrounded, yelled at. The opposite happened. As word got around, people began approaching me, tentatively, with sincere questions. Mostly, just "How is it over there?" No one showed me the slightest disrespect; several people expressed admiration for what I'd done. Some questions had a political content, but nothing that felt accusatory. The questions centered around the war's human cost: simply, were those numbered hills and rockpiles worth the blood they cost? 

        And they would ask for stories. 

     Sometimes I‘d tell the story of Howard's Hill, or my story of the fight at the well in Tho An, or of trying to get a medevac chopper in to a radio operator's wounded buddy and being told "you're too late." Reliving those stories, against the background of (now, fellow) students' questions about whether those fights were worth what they cost, continued the process of recalibrating the way I looked at the world, and my place in it, that had begun at the well in Tho An. The context of our interactions was one I hadn’t expected: instead of being attacked by these people, and looking around for fellow Marines to cover my back, as I’d expected upon leaving Vietnam, I’d been welcomed, if tentatively at first, by the people I’d expected to be my enemies.  We took classes together.  Some were now my friends. Though I would never lose my intense loyalty to fellow Marines, these were now my people. I wanted them to like me.

     One evening that fall I was studying in my dorm room, alone as usual. I put aside the philosophy or history or politics assignment I was working on, and just sat and thought for a while. I drifted back to the moment in August when I’d thrown my seabag and weapons and web gear aboard the truck, taken one last look around at the olive drab tents and red dirt and the new outhouse on the ridge, said goodbye to a couple of off-duty buddies who’d come out to see me off, and promised myself to study this mess until I could see a way out of it. 

     I was studying, all right: I was already known on campus as the Nam vet who always had three to six books under his arm, and was actually reading all of them. But I wanted to learn more. Always more. If I was to answer, or even speak intelligently to, the question Why war?, what great lever could I get my hands on to move my mind, or the world, or whatever it was that needed to be moved? 

     I opened an atlas to a map of the world. Shit, it was big. Look at all those countries. Look at all those people.

     Communication. I can’t understand all these people unless I can talk to them, understand what they’re saying. I decided that evening that I had to study languages, beginning with those that would allow me to communicate with the most people, over as much of the globe as possible. I was already in a Spanish class. With English and Spanish, I could talk with most of the people in the Western Hemisphere, except Brazilians. 

     Good start, but what else? Looking at the map, I thought: China. It had a great land area, and an even greater population, proportionally. China already loomed very large in world history; its presence was only bound to become greater. The next day I approached Professor Frank Tucker after a history class and asked him if Chinese language study was offered on campus. He said no; we had Spanish, French, German, and Russian, besides classical Greek and Latin.

     I went back to my map and looked again at land area and political significance. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, and the hot war in Vietnam, which was very much entangled with the Cold War, had the whole world scared, and with reason. The following academic year I would continue in Spanish and begin studying Russian. And I would study French my senior year.

     I had a tiny single room in "Superdorm," our monicker for a big brick building that hadn’t yet been formally named. On my R and R to Hong Kong earlier in the year I'd bought a massive stereo system with two big speakers, a reel to reel tape deck, tuner, turntable, the works. I'd even bought my favorite tapes and records, at the PX on Okinawa, and shipped them home: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Percy Faith, Mantovani. The Ray Conniff Singers. Henry Mancini was a special favorite: "Moon River, wider than a mile/I'm crossing you in style...." That stuff soothed me, and I needed soothing.

     The guys in the dorm didn't know what to do with me. Who was this strange bird, holed up in his little amplified cave with this strange music? They were listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel.

     Marines, whisper whisper. Vietnam, whisper whisper. Still, I didn't seem dangerous. One guy named Cy, who was at CC from Minnesota on a football scholarship, actually thought it was kind of cool that I'd been to Nam. You know, ballsy. After a few weeks, when I'd leave my door ajar hoping somebody'd say hello, maybe even invite me to take part in the horseplay in the hall, Cy would cautiously poke his head into my room and ask how the hell I was doin'. Cy and I went to town one night and got drunk together, and became running mates for a while. Once when we were walking back from town, pretty well oiled, he threw his arm around my shoulders and said, "Dean, how'dja like to become a Kappa Sig?" 

     Being asked was a hell of a compliment, and I told him so. But though I was only a couple of years older than Cy, I felt a generation apart. My right hand still curved reflexively, wanting to hold a rifle stock. I said No, but thanks a lot for asking.

     

     Tom Gould came up to me one day after Spanish class. He said something like, "You look like somebody who's been around a little." Then: "Maybe spent a little time on your uncle's farm?" He said it with a knowing grin, and I knew he meant Uncle Sam. Tom had been a Force Recon Marine, and had gotten out just before most of his unit shipped out for Vietnam. He invited me over to meet his roommate, Mike Taylor, with whom he shared a basement apartment. Mike had served a hitch in the Army, but was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam. They reintroduced me to civilian life: macaroni dinners and medium priced wine in a messy kitchen shared with dogs and cats and even with actual human females. Later, the three of us rented a house off-campus with a Navy vet named Jim Martin and a Special Forces vet named Mark Streuli. The five of us became friends for life. 

     One predawn morning that fall of 1966, I was walking across the campus lawn between the library and Rastall Center, to my job washing pots in the cafeteria. That would earn my breakfast, and a little more. Heading out that early, in that cold, to that job and that food is not normally a set of circumstances to make the heart leap. But mine did. The lawn was covered with threefatfingered maple leaves in a layer so thick that my feet began to plow up piles of them as I walked. I laughed, and kicked the crackling leaves across the lawn. Everything was so wonderfully dry and cold, welcome opposites to hot and wet. I stopped in one of my kicked-up leaf piles and looked at the sky. I noticed the stars for the first time in a year, startled to realize that they had no relation to the war, that I was looking at them not to determine whether it was clear enough to dispatch aircraft on a mission of killing or mercy, but just to look at them. 

     I romped on across, kicking leaves and howling at the stars, delirious that I could walk this far, alone, unarmed and upright, making all this noise, and no one would try to kill me. 

Townies

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

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

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

      No.

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

      Fine. I will kill at least one.

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

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

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

        “Let’s go,” he said.

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

TAM KY

Tam Ky

     Angelo Walters and I decided we had to get laid. Tam Ky was a good place, we'd heard. There were lots of bars where the girls worked; you just made the rounds till you found one you liked.

     We needed an official reason to go. Even in the Marine Corps, you can't tell your commanding officer, "Look, sir, I need to go get laid." He may know what you're up to, but you have to cover his ass by giving him a story in case you get busted.

     Joe was an electronics technician. He'd go to Tam Ky “to check out some equipment.” I was just a radio operator, so couldn't use that excuse. I'd go as his security. Joe showed up ready to go, carrying nothing but his tool box, which he'd emptied of most of the heavy stuff. "Jesus, Joe," I said, "where's your rifle? What if we get shot down on the way? What if the VC corner us in a bar?" 

     "I don't wanna carry all that shit," he said. He grinned.  "You're my security man, right? I'll let you handle it." I went to the guard shack and loaded up with fragmentation grenades and 100 rounds of ammo for my M14. We went out to the helipad and hung around and asked a few questions till somebody pointed to a chopper revving up. We ran up and yelled "Tam Ky?" over the engine's roar and the door gunner waved us aboard.

     Tam Ky that day was like some Western boom town with all the miners either out working, or sleeping off hangovers. We went into a bar with one lone GI drinking in a corner. A bartender showed up and we ordered beers. A couple of bar girls came around, and we abandoned our beers and each went upstairs with one of the girls. 

     She was tiny. She was a grown woman, midtwenties or so, but just tiny. Short, and very slim. Couldn't have weighed over ninety pounds. She had her dress off, and her quickrelease bra and panties, by the time I'd taken off my soft cover - as we Marines called our cloth utility cap - hung it on a chair post, then found a safe place to lean my rifle against the wall where it wouldn't fall over and where I could get to it in a hurry by diving out my side of the bed.

     She sat on the bed and smiled as I undressed. She was trying to be pretty and inviting, trying to do her job. But fear was mixed in. I could see it. I had no idea what her life was like, how long she'd been a prostitute, how she'd been treated by her customers, how she'd been treated by the guy who was her last customer before me.

     Whatever that history was, she certainly had a history, and it flickered in her face as she watched me undress. I thought that part of her nervous smile was a plea for a sort of social contract: I'll be very nice and sweet to you and give you good sex if you'll be nice to me too, or if not nice, then at least not too mean.

     Watching her watch me undress - disarm would be a better word - I got the distinct feeling of seeing myself in a mirror. I began to see my movements as with someone else's eyes:

     I weighed about twice as much as she did. I wore glasses. I leaned a large, heavy, fully loaded automatic rifle against the wall where I could reach it easily. I took off my boots. I unhooked two fragmentation grenades from my belt suspender straps, set them carefully on their small flat bases on a little table a few feet from the bed, making sure their fuses were screwed all the way in. Then I looked at the large window that opened on the street, took the grenades off the table, moved the table farther from the window and closer to the bed, and put the grenades back on it. I checked the other grenades in my cargo pockets to make sure their fuses were screwed all the way in and their pins were bent over and hadn't caught on anything and started to straighten or pull out. I unbuckled my cartridge belt, which carried four 20-round magazines of 7.62mm ammunition, two one-quart canteens of water, a first aid packet with battle dressing, and a sheathed bayonet. I lifted it off by the belt suspender straps which hung its weight from my shoulders, and lowered it carefully to the floor. I unbuckled the khaki web belt that held up my trousers, slipped its buckle back through the first belt loop to the left of my fly, and slid my sheath knife from the belt: the custom made, hand tempered, Randall #1 fighting knife with a seven inch blade with its top edge sharpened a third of the way up from the point, a double fighting hilt, a handle of stag antler with customcarved finger grips, a sharpening stone in its own pocket on the sheath, and this engraved on the blade: 

DEAN METCALF 

                                                       2033406 USMC

     I set the knife on the table by the grenades, its handle toward the bed. I took off my jungle utility jacket, trousers, socks. Like most GIs in Vietnam, I wore no underwear. Too sweaty: it gave you crotch rot. I took off my dog tags, taped together with black vinyl electrical tape to eliminate noise, and set them on the little table by my knife and grenades. 

     Now we were both naked.

GOING OVER

Going Over

     Lieutenant O’Neill herded his little gaggle of Marines, most of whom were eighteen- and nineteen-year-old radio and radar operators who had never been far from the small towns or urban neighborhoods where they grew up, let alone to the other side of the world, aboard the AMERICAN CHARGER. Our equipment van was craned over the side and lowered into a hold along with other supplies bound for Vietnam.

     All the ship’s cargo was materiel for the war. Those NCO’s among us who, like me, had had extended excursions aboard troop ships of the “gator navy,” the fleet of vessels designed and built specifically to deliver American troops and equipment to enemy-held beaches, were flabbergasted by the difference. The ship was crowded with cargo, but not with men. Lieutenant O’Neill was the only military officer aboard, and he wasn’t one of the frenetic martinet types who could make such a hell of a two-week crossing. So passage was, to me, startlingly different from the two Pacific crossings I’d made before.

     The evening of our first day at sea we were led into a small but rather nicely appointed dining room. Not mess hall: dining room. A waiter with a white jacket and quiet manner approached our tables and asked what we’d like for dinner.

    Those of us who’d been at sea at all were used to lining up with dozens, or hundreds, of other young sailors and Marines, grabbing a steel tray off a stack as we moved quickly through the line, and eating what was slopped onto it.

     “Tonight we have a choice of two entrées, roast duck or filet mignon.” The guy said that, and still had a straight face.

      Hunh?

     We had stumbled into a situation which none of us had encountered before, and which I personally had never heard of happening among enlisted men of the US military at sea, in all my three years in the Marine Corps. Our detachment consisted of a handful of men put aboard to accompany our gear, some of which – the TPQ-10 radar, specifically - was Top Secret. The equipment had to be watched over by someone with the proper clearance, which some few of us had, Lieutenant O’Neill and I among them. 

     They had to feed us on the way over, and the only facility for doing that was the crew’s mess. The crew’s mess was run according to the rules of their union, which included a choice of two entrées for each dinner. Apparently union rules also stipulated that such meals be prepared not just by whichever crew member might be on duty as cook that day, but by a trained chef. We shut our mouths, ate, and grinned. We knew things would be different where we were going.

     After a Cinderella liberty in Honolulu, with no destination before us but Vietnam, the mood changed. There would be no more port calls. Though O’Neill wasn’t anything like a brand-new Second Lieutenant trying simultaneously to establish his authority and his manhood, he still had the responsibility of preparing us to do our jobs as Marines when we went ashore. We had the occasional rifle inspection, to make sure we weren’t letting the salt air rust our weapons, and even did calisthenics in the limited space available among the room-sized crates that were packed with the stuff that war requires and chained or strapped to the decks.

     A couple of days out of Hawaii, Lieutenant O’Neill called us together for a lecture which didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but which I would have cause to remember the rest of my life. He gathered us in one of the cargo holds where the crates weren’t stacked all the way to the deck above, and picked a space where he could sit on one crate and the rest of us could spread out on others, being sure that we were all close enough to hear him clearly. This was important.     

     His lecture was about SEATO, the South East Asia Treaty Organization. It was the reason we were going, he said. About all we’d heard to that point was that Communists controlled North Vietnam, and our allies controlled South Vietnam. SEATO, the Lieutenant told us, was a multinational organization of countries in the area organized for mutual security. Australia belonged, he said, and Thailand and the Philippines.The United States was also a signatory, along with Britain and France. When one of us raised the obvious question of how the United States fit into a group of nations so distant from our own (by now even the least educated among us knew that Vietnam was half a world away; after all, they’d already told us it would take two weeks to get there), O’Neill replied that the situation we were entering was especially important because South Vietnam was a small democratic country with a small and weak army, and they were threatened with being overrun by their Communist neighbor to the North, who was being supported with weapons and money by the Soviets. The South Vietnamese were fragile at present, but they were our friends, and had asked for our help. Our country had signed that treaty, and a deal’s a deal. He also said that the agreement specifically stated that an attack on any signatory would be considered an attack on all. (Actually, that wasn’t true, though we weren’t told so at the time.) What SEATO meant in practice was that the United States had a legal justification to intervene as our leadership saw fit. This was bolstered by the 533-2 vote in the U.S. Congress in support of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed on August 7 the previous year, about three days after my Naval Gunfire section sailed for the same Gulf.      

    We were going to Vietnam to honor a solemn commitment.          

     Most of us thought the Lieutenant wasn’t such a bad guy, for an officer. He did his job and made us do ours, but for the most part didn’t hassle us just to flaunt his rank, like some officers did. So we were a little surprised at his seriousness as he gave us that history lesson in the hold of the AMERICAN CHARGER. But we listened. At least I did. It was good enough for me: let’s go; let’s get the job done. It would be many years before I learned that SEATO, and even the specific leadership of the South Vietnamese Government itself, were creations of the U.S. Government, under President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The reason for the very existence of SEATO, and for the leadership put in place in the South Vietnamese government, was to ratchet up U.S. presence in Southeast Asia. 

     I’m pretty sure O’Neill knew little or nothing besides what they’d told him, which he passed on to us. That’s how it all works.

     We had good weather most of the way across: tropical sun on blue water punctuated by the occasional whitecap. As we approached the Orient, flying fish with four pectoral fin/wings could be seen staging their takeoffs in the clear water, accelerating into a wave as it crested, surfing on its energy, then at just the right moment, bursting from its side to set its wings and glide on the trough of air also being lifted by the wave. They could coast on the air currents between crests of waves, like an albatross, for a hundred yards or more. I never tired of watching them.          

     We were bored. Not long after Hawaii but days before the end of our voyage, our incessant prowling of the ship produced a revelation. The same hold which contained our precious communications van also carried beer: pallets upon pallets of canned beer. Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon are the ones I remember. “Wonder where all this beer’s goin’?” “Same place we are, I guess.”

     “So it’s beer for the troops, right?”

     “Hey! That’s us!”

     “Right... this is our beer!”

     “Y’know, I’m not sure it’s safe, out here in the open, all by itself. What if that deck leaks, seawater gets in here, gets everything soakin’ wet? Seawater’s bad for metal, like beer cans, gets it all rusted ‘n’ corroded ‘n’ shit.”

     “We can’t allow that to happen. That’d be dereliction of duty.”

     Our communications van was always locked. One NCO among us always had the key, in order to unlock it, go inside, make sure nobody had picked the lock and entered to pilfer or vandalize, then lock it again.

     Sometimes that NCO was me. I’ve always had a knack for organizing people to move quantities of things; it had come in handy aboard the CAVALIER and the PICKAWAY the year before in the Tonkin Gulf and the South China Sea. 

     We formed a chain gang, standing four or five feet apart with every other man facing the opposite direction, from our chosen pallet to the door of the van. Two men attacked the designated pallet, alternating as first one then the other slid a case of beer off the top course on the pallet and handed/tossed it to the first man in the chain. Our technique of facing opposite directions meant that no one had to turn completely to the side to pass a case of beer to the next man in line.      

     I unlocked the door. Two men went inside, one to catch the most recent case arriving from the last man in the chain, and one to stack, with specific instructions on how to do that so the stack would fit in the narrow aisle between rows of electronic equipment, with the cases interlocked in a modified version of how they’d been stacked on the pallet. We were done in a few minutes, the van door was re-locked, and we’d all disappeared above decks and were diligently cleaning our rifles, or feigning sleep in the sun, so as to appear the same as we would on any other day.

     A couple of days later, with Hawaii now a distant memory and Asia still invisible, we plowed the seas in a world which contained nothing but ocean, horizon, and sky. A few us were lounging around in the hold near our van, conjecturing about a future filled with combat and beer.

     “I wouldn’t mind a wound or two, nothin’ serious, just enough to make me look salty.” 

     “Maybe one right on the face, so the chicks could all see it...”

     “But not enough to make you ugly.”

     “Or right here, on the arm, a real nasty-lookin’ one, but it just peeks out from under the sleeve o’ your t-shirt, but looks real impressive when you take your shirt off.”

     “Right, I hear women go crazy for a wounded guy...”

     “Y’know, this beer’ll go down mighty good when we come in off a patrol.”               

     “I don’t give a fuck if I get a leg blown off, long as my cock and balls are still intact.”

     “Right, that’s the main thing...”     

     “Whaddaya mean, patrol? We’re wing-wipers. We ain’t goin’ on any goddamned patrols.” “Wingwipers” was a derogatory term used by division Marines, like I had been for most of my hitch, for those in the Marine Air Wing. There was no talk of death, but its shadow had hung a little lower over us as each day brought us closer to the end of our voyage.     

     The ship’s Merchant Marine officers had mostly left us alone. But now one approached. “How are you men doing today?” he asked, a little nervously.

     “Oh, fine, sir... just keepin’ an eagle eye on our equipment, here.”

     “Well, that’s good... say, there seems to be some cargo missing, or... moved. Actually, some beer is missing. Anybody know anything about that?” he searched our faces.

     “No, sir, I haven’t noticed anything... any o’ you guys?” Exchange of innocent looks, shrugs. “No sir.” “Me either.” “Not a thing. Sorry, sir.”

     “Well... I need to see inside that van.” He nodded at ours, the one we were loosely clustered around.

     “You got a Top Secret Clearance, sir?” 

     “Of course not. I’m an officer in the Merchant Marine; we’re not involved in that sort...”         

     “Sorry, sir...” (nodding toward the van) “... the equipment in there...” (nodding again) “...is not only secret. “It’s TOP secret. “Our orders are not to allow anyone without the proper clearance to even SEE inside it.”

     By this time the half dozen or so of us who had quietly been hanging around the van had moved from slouches to more vertical positions. A weapon or two appeared, casually. I turned my left side, with unambiguous Randall fighting knife, toward him.

     “I really must...”

     Softly, but a little sharply: “Sir. We are United States Marines on sentry duty.”(pause) “Nobody..but..us..touches..that..lock.”           

     Nobody did, either.     

          A few days later we pulled into the harbor at Danang. It was a maelstrom: Navy warships, Navy and civilian cargo ships, and Vietnamese sampans all trying to fulfill their obligations without getting run over. We came to a floating stop in the middle of the harbor, as if the ship herself was bewildered. Apparently the skipper was on the radio trying to find out where to park. A U.S. Navy warship – a destroyer escort, as I remember - hove to abreast of us, and began blinking its signal lamp directly at us. 

     Lieutenant O’Neill found me and told me to come with him to the bridge. It turned out that none of the CHARGER’s communicators knew Morse code. O’Neill asked if I could read the naval signaler’s transmission. I knew Morse; my weeks of Radio Telegraph Operator’s Course in 1963 had included intensive training in that, and I’d used it in training with Naval Gunfire on Okinawa, and in the Philippines and Japan. In those situations we’d tapped out Morse on a “knee key,” which was a Morse key attached to a large spring steel clip that slipped over the operator’s leg just above the knee.

     I said I’d give it a try, and pretty soon I was able to tell the Lieutenant that I was missing some that was apparently Navy jargon, but that the guy wanted us to identify ourselves.

     Oops. Up to then my experience with these signal lamps had been watching short scenes in war movies, but that at least had taught me basically how they worked: you grabbed this handle and flicked your wrist – quickly for a dot, a little longer for a dash. 

     With that for starters, I was able to tell the Navy signalman “I am USMC,” thereby letting him understand my relative clumsiness with his native instrument, and “We are SS AMERICAN CHARGER.” We were plenty close enough for them to see that we were an unarmed freighter, not a warship.

     Between my blinking and whatever was transpiring on the ship’s radio, we were allowed to proceed, and to tie up at a dock. We walked down the gangplank with our personal gear, and stood around anxiously watching the unloading process until we saw a dockside crane lift our van, still locked and with our contraband beer safely inside, over the side and into a waiting six-by. We all grinned like the fools we were. Shit. We were geniuses: we’d planned it so well we didn’t even have to offload our own beer. 

     We clambered aboard and drove away, beer and all. We were in Vietnam.

OAKLAND

Oakland

     We were at Oakland Army Terminal, a detachment of about a dozen Marine radio and radar operators under Lieutenant John O’Neill. It was September, 1965. We were getting ready to ship out for Vietnam aboard the commercial freighter S.S. AMERICAN CHARGER, which the Defense Department had chartered to help make up the deficit in military shipping during the buildup.

     We’d had our last Stateside liberty in Oakland the night before, and a friend of mine, Martin Luther Ealy, took a couple of us white boys bar-hopping in a black section of Oakland that was, shall we say, nitty-gritty enough that we’d never have ventured there unescorted. I’d gone upstairs at one of the bars to a prostitute, who’d matter-of-factly and bemusedly received my unschooled motions as her man sat with his back to us a few feet away. When I complained that I hadn’t gotten very much time for that amount of money, she shrugged: "You came, baby. That’s what you paid for; that’s what you got." She began filing her nails. I went back downstairs to approval mingled with jokes about how quickly I’d returned.

     But this story isn’t about that. It’s about tossing Harris his rifle. He was a black PFC a good three years younger than I, an ancient 22-year-old corporal with three years in "The Crotch," headed for my second overseas tour. The only thing Harris took seriously was his reputation for refusing to take seriously anything to do with the Marine Corps, military discipline, or his job. It was all pretty funny to him, an alternately boring and amusing hiatus between parts of his civilian life.

     It was a glaring afternoon. We were hanging out in a paved open area in front of a warehouse, watching military and civilian vehicles pull up to and away from the warehouse’s loading dock, that nexus of commerce and war. Lieutenant O’Neill was off somewhere finding out what we were supposed to do.

     We were engaged in the usual taunts and grab-ass when someone first glanced, then stared, at what a departing military six-by had left behind. We followed his stare and were struck quiet. We’d heard of body bags; even had an idea what they looked like, courtesy of the hyperactive rumor mill that was the source of most of our information and misinformation about what was going on in Vietnam.

     What we hadn’t heard anything about was aluminum caskets. But there they were, three jewels from the Grim Reaper’s trove, radiating sunlight from the loading dock. Our guys. We stood, mesmerized, staring at them wordlessly for I don’t know how long. It was long enough for the odor to reach us from the caskets. Our nostrils flared with it; each of us turned away quickly but as quickly turned back, baby warriors electrified and repelled by our first whiff of death. That was my first awareness that a dead human smells different from a dead animal. I still haven’t sorted out what the difference is, because I’ve never been able to decide how much is physical and how much is emotional.

     Lieutenant O’Neill came up huffing, in a hurry: "Let’s go!" He didn’t notice the caskets until our unwonted slowness in responding to his order jolted him into a barked repetition of it. If what was happening could be said to have a rhythm, O’Neill’s noticing of the caskets interrupted it. He skipped a beat, slowed, lowered his voice: "Get your rifles. Get on the bus." It was his turn to stare at the caskets as we snapped out of our shared reverie and moved to pick up our M14 rifles from where they leaned in a row against the building behind us. I took my rifle in my left hand and stood aside as the others grabbed theirs. That happened quickly, until one rifle leaned alone against the building. Harris was still standing where we’d all been, frozen, staring at the caskets.

     "Harris!" I shouted. He came to, spun around, jogged toward me with an adrenaline-induced bounce to his steps and a wild-eyed look on his face, part grin and part pre-game stage fright. I’d never seen him so alert, so alive. I picked up his rifle in my right hand, gripping it at the balance point just forward of the receiver. I tucked the rifle up under my armpit, threw it out hard, horizontally, in Harris’ direction, with no warning except what passed between our eyes.

     He didn’t break stride. Running straight at the flying rifle, his eyes followed it as a good infielder’s eyes will follow a line drive, reading its flight. Just before the rifle would have smacked him across the chest, he raised his left hand – languidly, it seemed – and snapped it around the rifle, at the same balance point by which I’d thrown it. Our eyes clicked together: here we go. He jogged past me, spun the rifle to vertical, and bounced up the steps into the bus.

TONKIN

     Tonkin

     We spent a lot of time in the Philippines. Luzon, of course, home of Olongapo, favorite liberty port of sailors and Marines for many years. Mindanao, where we had an extended stay in a sprawling tent camp during a SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization(

) exercise. We had an idyllic sojourn there because the senior Marine officers seemed to think we were in the Navy and left us alone. The most important thing we learned was that Australians could drink more beer, and faster, than we could. 

     It was in one of those tents that I operated on Greg Larson’s foot with my fighting knife. For a few days, the higher-ups either forgot about us, or that segment of the training exercise didn’t involve naval gunfire, so we were left pretty much alone with continuous access to San Miguel beer at ten cents a bottle.

     One midnight, in our tent which was dark but for a couple of flashlights, Greg started to complain about his foot. When his ship was crossing the Pacific bound for Okinawa, he’d gone swimming off Honolulu, and had stepped on some coral in the water. He’d gone to see a Navy doctor who had probed the wound, removed something, and sent him on his way. But now, some weeks later on Mindanao, he complained that there was still something in there, and it hurt. Even the tiniest piece of coral tends to infect a wound.

     We were all drunk. Ever the problem solver, I piped up: “Greg, I can take that coral outta your foot.” 

   “How? That goddamned Navy sawbones couldn’t get it.”

     I pulled the Randall out of its sheath on my left hip. All the guys knew about that knife, how sharp I always kept it. I’d had it made by W.D. Randall Jr. of Orlando, Florida(

). His knives for hunting and fighting were world famous. I still remember a testimonial in one of his brochures from a Korean War vet: “Here’s $25. Need another fighting knife. Had to leave my last one in a troublesome Red behind enemy lines.” 

     “All I need is somebody to hold the light, and pour some San Magoo on the blade to sterilize it,” I bragged. Whether beer would actually sterilize the blade was a question we didn’t discuss.

            As I said, we were all drunk.

     Finally, the boredom was relieved. We gathered around Greg’s cot. Somebody – Gene DeMine or Flood or Cianflone – volunteered to hold the flashlight, and surgery began. I stropped the knife on the top of my combat boot – still leather in those days – somebody held Greg’s foot, somebody poured beer over the foot and the knife and the cot and onto the ground below. Greg poured beer into his gullet, to reinforce what was already there. I got down close, made a tiny incision with the double-edged point, and squeezed blood from the wound, spread it thin on my hand, and there it was: a tiny piece of coral. In fairness to the Navy doctor, a small pocket of infection had formed around the piece and isolated it, apparently needing only to be lanced to be spit out.

     We also went to Mindoro, where there was a Naval gunnery range, and we actually got to call in live fire from destroyers and cruisers offshore. One target was Tabones Rock, and we would watch as the high-explosive shells from 5- and 8-inch guns landed in the water near the rock, and Filipino fishermen in their bonca boats, hiding in the lee of the rock, would paddle quickly out after an explosion, pick up the dead fish, and scurry back into the shelter of the rock to await the next volley.

     We were on another exercise in the Philippines, this one only battalion-size. We were saddling up for a forced march with the battalion, which was nothing new; most of us had been doing this sort of thing for the better part of a year. Then a ripple of excitement hit our section: Eddie Kessler and I would lead the entire battalion on the march. Eddie was a wiry kid like me, and we were both runners. We usually came in first in the 3-mile run with packs and rifles that was a regular part of our physical training.

     Then a bigger ripple hit. At first we thought it was more of the same: hurry up, wait, change the gear in our packs, change the marching order, change the time. But no: Pack all your gear. Leave nothing behind. Carry your own gear, load the jeeps to board ship. There is no training march. We are going. Now. – Where we goin’, Sarge? – The North Vietnamese fired on two of our destroyers, the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy. Someplace called the Gulf of Tonkin. Guess we’re goin’ there. Let’s move it. Now.

     It was August 4, 1964. We boarded the attack transport USS CAVALIER. The old ship shuddered through the night, heading north. Scuttlebutt had it that the ship’s crew had “turned off steam to everything but the screws, to make better speed.” Daylight showed us to be a flotilla of amphibious warfare ships carrying a battalion of Marine infantry, a battery of artillery, combat cargo, fuel, ammo... exactly what we had always trained for, but never believed we’d be ordered to do outside of exercises.

     We moved close enough to shore to see the green hills inland. If we saw any boats, they were small fishing boats, under sail. No military craft. Nobody shot at us. We wondered if the commanders who ordered the movements of our ships were baiting the North Vietnamese to do so, but anybody who knew the answer to that wasn’t telling us.

     We moved back and forth: port side to the shore, starboard side to the shore. We did calisthenics on deck. We cleaned our rifles and had rifle inspections. Our weapons-cleaning sessions began to draw a few onlookers, swabbies who were off duty or passing by as they chipped paint and repainted, greased machinery and spliced cables, the neverending chores of warding off the attacks of salt air on steel. Part of my ritual was to sharpen and strop the Randall, ending each session by shaving a small patch of hair from my forearm and letting it drift away on the breeze. Nobody laughed.

     Soon after we arrived on station, some of us were put on a detail to unload ammunition from the hold. The hatch covers were opened by cables suspended from the ship’s rigging, and we got burns on our hands manhandling ropes on pulleys and lifting crates of 7.62mm machine gun and rifle ammo; 60mm, 81mm, and 4.2” mortar ammo, and hand grenades: fragmentation, concussion, willy peter (white phosphorus), tear gas, and different colors of smoke grenades. No blanks this time.

     Days became weeks, and being Marines, we started having regular, mandatory haircut sessions on deck. Portable radios appeared, and we heard sounds of what sounded to us like whiny stringed instruments and equally whiny voices coming from stations on shore, and the occasional shortwave broadcast in English. “Hanoi Hannah” made her appearance, a woman who spoke better English than most of us, naming our ships and units and describing our movements and denouncing our imperialist ambitions. Greg Larson pulled out a cheap guitar he’d bought on Taiwan, and, with snatches of the half-dozen tunes he knew parts of, became, to us in Naval Gunfire, the most important man on the ship. 

     Greg knew several bars of the Spanish instrumental tune “La Malagueña,” which attracted a widening circle of sailors and Marines. He would play what he knew, then stop and shrug apologetically and say, in his strong Boston accent which reminded me of President Kennedy’s speech to assembled Marines a year earlier at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at San Diego, “Sorry, boys... that’s all I know.”

     “Then play it again.”

     Another shrug. He’d play it again, and there would be that contemplative silence as each young man reached inside himself for some part of his reality that had nothing to do with rifles or ships or oceans, in a way that perhaps only music can inspire. “Play it again,” and he would, over and over, until a discernible chunk of the day had passed, his fingers would get too sore, or a Sergeant would find something more military for us to do. Greg taught me what he knew of that tune, and it came to mean so much to me that I’ve returned to it over the years to the point that I can still find it on the guitar.

     Although we were never told what to expect, what we would be doing, or what was going on in the world, we could divine, from the nature of orders given us, something of the concerns of our superiors. Sometime in late August, and periodically again after that, “swim call” was announced. Overboard discharge was cut off so we wouldn’t have to swim in our own shit, the ship would come to a dead stop, and a Marine with a loaded rifle would be placed on watch in case any sharks were tempted by all that fresh meat in the water. A cargo net, one of those we had climbed down so many times in training exercises, would be lowered over the side to climb down to the water and climb back up. Pretty soon some were jumping from the main deck, a distance of thirty feet or more. Then some of us, to prove we were Marines, would stand on the rail around that deck and dive. Hey, it was the ocean: we weren’t worried about hitting bottom.

     About the same time we were ordered to wear skivvies to the shower. No explanation. We guessed that the consequences of confining several hundred young men on a single ship for weeks at a time had a history in the Marine Corps, and our leaders must have been trying to ameliorate those consequences. This of course led to endless “faggot” jokes.

     The troop compartments below decks were a hellish place that stank of diesel fuel, salt water, old and new sweat from hundreds of bodies cramped into tight spaces, and old and fresh vomit from seasickness. Some of us elected to sleep topside unless the ship had entered one of the infrequent rain squalls that scooted across the sea. I nearly always slept on deck, and developed a way to configure my body in a modified fetal position so that my hip, ribs, shoulder, elbow and ankle on the side against the steel deck were padded by muscle. Many nights on deck were actually quite pleasant, with a tropical breeze sliding across the surface of the blue-green sea and stars, unobstructed by clouds, clustering low and bright overhead.

     Finally, we had been on station so long that, since we couldn’t go into a port to refuel and re-supply, UNREPs entered our lives. Underway replenishment: our ship and the one resupplying us would steer parallel courses at equal speed, and we could see the faces of the sailors lining the rail of the supply ship. When the two Captains had decided that courses and speeds were sufficiently synchronized, a shot would be fired from one ship to the deck of the other, the small line attached to the projectile would be used to haul over a cable, and bundles would begin to pass from the supply ship to us: food, mail, fuel (through a great black hose suspended from the cable), and once – in the other direction – a man. Rumors said he was a sick sailor who needed hospitalization, or someone going home on emergency leave. He was strapped into a stretcher, and jounced along just above the frothing white seas resulting from the colliding bow-wakes. Reluctantly, we admitted that these deck apes might have some balls after all.

     We left that station and sailed south, until we were off the coast of South Viet Nam. Again, we were close enough to see the green hills inland, and sometimes we could see red machine-gun tracers etching their parabolic arcs in the night sky.

     I was wearing new Corporal’s chevrons (actually, a pair of used ones I’d borrowed from JJ Leath until we got to the next PX) when, after 68 days and nights of never setting foot off the ship, we pulled into Hong Kong for 5 days of R&R. For me, it was revelatory: I got myself purposely lost, alone, and wandered for hours in back streets of Hong Kong Island and took the Star Ferry across to Kowloon and did the same thing there. Some of us from Naval Gunfire went to a fish restaurant where, after being shown to our table, we were invited to a ceramic pool in the center of the room where a variety of fish were swimming, and each asked to choose the fish he wanted to eat, whereupon those people would catch, kill, clean, cook, and serve that fish to us. 

     Then it was back aboard ship, back to the South China Sea, back to the coast of Vietnam. We were off Da Nang for a while, cruising back and forth, back and forth, within sight of the beach, within sight of the war.

     Something happened in Saigon, a coup or an attempted coup. We sailed south, being told that we might be sent ashore there, to “protect American lives and property,” but once on station it was more card games on deck, more weapons cleaning and inspections, more calisthenics, more rumors. Our captivity aboard ship this time was shorter: 45 days and nights.

     The South China Sea was beautiful: clear green close to shore, a clear deep blue farther out. Once, the ship crossed a sharp line delineating green from blue, and we clustered at the rail and stared as the ship broke the line. We saw sea snakes swimming miles offshore, and were told that their venom could kill a man very quickly. We saw flying fish: in the clear water, you could track one as it headed for the surface, exploded out the side of a wave, set its wings (pectoral fins, actually), and glide along on the air currents pushed up by the motion of the waves. I never tired of watching them.

     I cast the first vote in a Presidential Election of my young life from one of the two attack transport ships we were aboard during those months, by absentee ballot. I voted for Barry Goldwater because I thought Lyndon Johnson was a liar (for once I got something right). What I knew absolutely nothing about was the unique significance of the months between August and November in an election year, and of the habit of Americans historically to rally around a president in time of war or national emergency, and of presidential candidates to exploit that tendency.

     We spent Thanksgiving aboard that second ship, USS Pickaway, in the South China Sea, playing Bullshit Poker as we waited for hours in the chow line for our dinner. Ashore, the war was becoming what it would soon be. Most of us would be back. 

     But for now, we were headed for Subic Bay.