Almost Midnight (4 page)

One thing’s for sure: no one made more appearances in the senior yearbook than Darrell. Looking at it today, the 1964 Reeds Spring High School annual has a somber, Sunday-schoolish cast to it: no cutesy photo captions, no “voted most likely to” goofiness—behave yourselves now kids, this is serious business. Nevertheless, turn the page and there’s Darrell again, Darrell in black-and-white: Darrell helping two other kids solve a math problem on the blackboard (mathematics was always his best subject); Darrell, gawky and grinning, in his Wolf Pack basketball uniform (he played varsity hoops
his senior year); Darrell in his number seventy-four football jersey (he played the line, going both ways and hardly ever missing a down); Darrell as a cast member in the senior class production of
Hillbilly Weddin’;
Darrell with the track team; Darrell at homecoming; Darrell, Darrell everywhere. And, of course, there’s also the photograph of Darrell the honor student, neatly combed hair, thin lips, weak chin, wearing a jacket and tie he’d borrowed from his football coach, not exactly handsome but not homely either, looking like a kid you might expect to grow up and sell insurance or—who knows?—maybe even preach the Gospel in some roadside church.

The truth is, Darrell had no idea what he wanted to do with himself after high school. College? No, there was no serious thought given to that. Hillbilly kids from Stone County didn’t generally go to college back then. Bible school perhaps? Well, maybe later, but not now; at eighteen he wasn’t even close to making a serious commitment to becoming a preacher. What Darrell dreamed of doing, though he didn’t actually get around to exploring the possibility, was becoming a trick shooter for a gun company. No one could have honestly suggested he lacked the talent. He’d always loved shooting, and now, after high school, he was developing a bit of a reputation. He carried an automatic pistol around with him, a .22 Ruger with a wooden handle which his Uncle Gerry had given him, the barrel stuck inside the front of his pants. He’d entertain friends by flicking quarters into the air and then drawing the pistol and shooting them in midair. People were starting to talk. You might be able to outshoot Darrell with a rifle or shotgun, they’d say, but no way with a pistol. Forget about it: you’d be a fool even to think of trying.

Darrell was proud of his shooting, he didn’t mind showing off occasionally, but he was never really boastful about it. Actually, he was a shy kid—a bit cocky on the surface maybe, but shy and insecure underneath. There was a vulnerability about Darrell that he didn’t always succeed in covering up with his devil-may-care, backwoods-boy manner. He could be touchy at times; he was thin-skinned,
easily bruised. He took insults hard; friendly ribbing, if carried past a certain point, could cause him to smolder inside. He had difficulty shrugging it off. He sometimes took offhand remarks, casual gibes, as a personal attack. Lacking confidence, unsure of where he stood in the world, he was acutely sensitive to how others responded to him. If he felt pushed, or challenged, he’d want to push back. He was determined, he once told a friend, “never to allow anyone to run over me.” He’d always been this way. When he was just seven or eight, one of his uncles came over for a visit and started teasing him pretty hard. (The Mease clan was famous for rough kidding and teasing.) The uncle had been drinking, and he apparently went too far. Darrell had been taught to respect his elders, but now, wounded, aggrieved, he stood up and told his uncle to be quiet. No more, he said, that was it, no more abuse. The entire room fell quiet. The uncle turned red and soon left. R.J. was mortified. If he was waiting for Darrell to apologize, however, he could have waited forever. Darrell had dug in. He had right on his side, and he wasn’t about to retreat. He’d done what he felt needed to be done; he’d shut his abusive uncle down.

His friends didn’t often see this side of Darrell; he was usually pretty good at covering it up. What they mostly saw was a sweet-natured, easygoing kid who rarely had a bad word for anybody. It would be an exaggeration to say that Darrell was popular—he was, after all, something of a loner—but he was genuinely liked and respected by just about everyone who knew him.

Lefa Johnson, a striking brunette, was one year ahead of Darrell in high school, but she got to know him quite well, especially after she started dating his best friend Mike Langston. Years later, Lefa would remember Darrell as “absolutely one of the nicest kids” in their entire circle. “You want to talk about Darrell? Pull up a chair—I could say nice things about Darrell all evening,” she said. “Ask anybody who knew him back then, Darrell was just a wonderful kid, a model kid, always smiling and joking, and so honest, so humble. I think the girls liked him even better than the guys did because he was so polite and respectful. He’d never try to take advantage
of anyone, he was never fast or crude. He was the most decent boy around. Even our high-school teachers thought so.”

Not headed anywhere fast after high school, Darrell started in full-time at the garment factory in town. It was tough and sweaty work, operating the heavy steam presses, but he enjoyed having lunch with his dad most days and the sense of responsibility that came with paying his own way. He knew the job wasn’t going to make him rich, but he hoped he’d be able to save some money and eventually take a trip to Colorado, maybe even Alaska, for some biggame hunting. Still, at eighteen there was nothing Darrell liked better than hunting.

But now there was something else going on in his life. Toward the end of his senior year, Darrell had started dating a cute, petite girl named Joyce Barnes, and the relationship was getting serious. Joyce was two years younger than Darrell and just in the tenth grade when they started going together. Her father, Roy, ran a general store at the junction of Y Highway and Route 76, on the way to Cape Fair. Roy Barnes was a strict, old-style Pentecostal with strict, old-style ideas about raising kids. Joyce and her sisters weren’t allowed to play basketball at school because Roy didn’t want them wearing shorts. They weren’t allowed to watch movies or put on lipstick or go to dances. It’s as if old Roy saw almost everything in the outside world as a gigantic sin just waiting to happen. A lot of local folks thought he was making a big mistake. Try and raise your kids that strict, it would surely backfire. You were just asking for rebellion. Even before she’d started dating Darrell, there were stories about Joyce. One time, apparently, she’d kicked her father in the crotch and then hidden in the brush while he looked for her with a rifle. Most people who knew her said Joyce was too high-spirited to abide by Roy’s rules. Joyce was a rebellion waiting to happen.

So Darrell was working at the garment factory in town and getting in deeper and deeper with Joyce Barnes. It was a big adventure for both of them. They’d get together evenings and take off in Darrell’s Chevy, cruising and listening to the radio, visiting nearby towns and grabbing something to eat at roadside burger joints.
Some nights they had sex in the Chevy’s backseat, two Pentecostal kids who knew they were supposed to wait until they got married, and they began to think that maybe they were made for each other.

Finally, in August of 1965, they did get married. Darrell was nineteen; Joyce was just out of the eleventh grade.

CHAPTER TWO

D
ARRELL RECEIVED HIS
“greetings” letter from the draft board on January 10, 1966. It was waiting for him when he got home from work. The action was really starting to heat up in Southeast Asia, and it was poor kids like Darrell, kids without college prospects or political connections, who were first in line for patriotic duty. There weren’t very many middle-class college students protesting the war in Vietnam back in 1966.

Of the thirteen boys from Darrell’s senior high-school class, four received their draft notices the same week. There was Darrell, his first cousin Ronnie Mease, his best friend Mike Langston, and another boy who ran with a different crowd. That’s four boys from Reeds Spring, whose population in a good year didn’t amount to much more than four hundred.

At first Darrell wasn’t sure what to make of it. He sat down on the front porch of the little frame house he and Joyce were living in, just across the creek from his mom and dad’s, and read and reread the letter until his eyes glazed. The war in Vietnam was a complete mystery to him. He had no idea what the stakes were, which side was in the right, or whether the United States had legitimate business being involved. Not only that, he couldn’t even begin picturing himself in the military. The uniforms, the compulsory subservience, the batch living: all of this was alien to him. He’d been raised in the hills and was accustomed to having his freedom. No way, he thought, was he cut out for the regimented life of a soldier.

What’s more, the timing couldn’t have been worse. He and Joyce had been married just over four months, and so far it hadn’t been the smoothest of rides. It was tough putting a finger on it, but something was obviously misfiring. The fun, the easy times they’d enjoyed before getting married seemed almost to have vanished, and there was a constant tension in the air. But they were still just newlyweds, and Darrell wasn’t even thinking of packing it in. He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t entirely unhappy either. He liked the idea of being married, the idea of trying to make a life with somebody else. He was hoping to give it his best shot and get the marriage on course, but the letter changed everything. What chance did he and Joyce have if he was sent overseas for an extended stint in Vietnam? How could they get things on track if he was thousands of miles away fighting in a war nobody at home knew anything about?

He talked it over with Joyce and his parents, and then the next day with Ronnie and Mike Langston. Everybody tried to put a positive slant on it. Sure the boys had been drafted, but maybe they wouldn’t even be going to Vietnam. They might just be sent up to Fort Leonard Wood, the army base this side of Rolla, where they’d stay until the whole business blew over. Hell, they’d probably even be able to make it home weekends. One thing they never talked about was running. Dodging the draft, maybe fleeing north and laying
low somewhere in Canada—this wasn’t even an option. The boys figured they’d simply report and hope for the best.

They took a Greyhound out of Springfield and checked into the induction center in Kansas City. It was a confusing scene. Two thousand draftees were milling about, getting physicals, trying to get their bearings. Guys in uniforms were barking instructions. Half the time you couldn’t make out what the hell they were saying. Finally some guy up front called out the names of thirteen draftees and told them to follow him to a room off to the side. Darrell, Mike, and Ronnie were among those whose names were called. They had no idea what was up. They were led into a room where there were some guys in marine uniforms sitting behind a table. The one who looked to be in charge said, “Congratulations, men. You’re going into the Marine Corps.” Now Darrell, Mike, and Ronnie were really confused. They’d thought you had to volunteer for the marines. Before it truly had a chance to sink in, they were on a plane for California.

With the war effort picking up, the marines were running new recruits through boot camp quite a bit faster than usual. Darrell and the boys did eight weeks instead of the customary thirteen, then they were hustled off to Camp Pendleton, outside of San Clemente, where they underwent infantry recruit training. Three months of this, and they returned home on a thirty-day leave.

It was a sweet thirty days. Darrell got in some good hunting and did his best to make up for lost time with Joyce. They still weren’t hitting on all cylinders, but there were signs they might be able to get the old romance back in gear. They enjoyed some nice quiet intimate moments, and Joyce seemed proud that her young husband was on his way to becoming a full-fledged marine. Darrell began to think that they might get through this rough patch in pretty good shape after all.

Darrell and Ronnie traveled together from Reeds Spring to the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base in North Carolina. They’d already been told that they’d be serving as combat engineers in Vietnam; Mike Langston had been given a different assignment
and didn’t accompany them. After several months training in heavy equipment, explosives, and other tools of the trade, Darrell was sent cross-country to Camp Pendleton for final preparations.

He shipped out on December 15, 1966, and in Vietnam he was attached to the First Marine Air Wing at the Marble Mountain base near Da Nang. His unit bounced around, primarily trying to hold bases that the Vietcong had been forced to give up. Darrell put down beach matting for chopper landing pads and erected Quonset huts and strung razor wire and helped build pontoon bridges. Sometimes he swept for mines.

The combat engineers had it pretty tough. They’d be hammering and sawing away, doing tasks that the squadron counted on for day-to-day survival, all the while realizing they could come under enemy fire at any time. The risk was always there. You’re out in the open putting down matting, and then one of your buddies, in the blink of an eye, is on the ground dead or wounded. Darrell saw it happen; everybody saw it happen. Sometimes the engineers, fed up with feeling like sitting ducks and bristling for a chance to take fate into their own hands, would volunteer for missions that no one else wanted any part of. Five or six months into his tour, Darrell succeeded in pleading his way onto a six-man team whose mission was to salvage a chopper that had gone down in the jungle. Even the most gung-ho, combat-hardened marines regarded missions of this sort as suicidal. They had a 50 percent survival rate. Chances were the Vietcong would have an ambush set up, or the chopper would be booby-trapped. Everyone figured half the team would be killed. The mission was called off at the last second. Darrell never had an opportunity to volunteer for another one like it.

One night the base came under heavy rocket attack. Darrell woke and ran through the screaming darkness, the concussions from the blasts knocking him to the ground again and again before he finally reached the bunker. The next morning they dug up a rocket that had crashed right beside the hut in which Darrell had been sleeping. It was a dud—the only rocket out of the thirty-three in the attack that hadn’t exploded. Otherwise he almost certainly would
have been killed. He wrote his mom about it, telling her the exact time the rocket had landed. In her return letter, Lexie said this was the same time she had been saying an intercessory prayer on his behalf. Darrell was convinced that his mom’s prayer had saved his life.