Deros Vietnam (15 page)

“It broke my mother's heart when I went into the service,” he recalled softly, almost privately. The hostility was gone from his voice. Emily and I stopped our own musings and listened to his whispered memories.

“But it wasn't my mother, or yours, who was hurt the most, or frightened the most, by what I had to do,” he continued, “it was me. Did I ever tell you what an unheroic fellow your father was? It was late 1943, almost 1944—Nineteen Forty-Four!—before I joined the Army! Did I enlist? Did I run down to my local recruiting station and sign up to kick Hitler and Hirohito's butts? No. I had to be drafted. The end of 1943 and the world was going to hell and I had to be drafted.”

None of us moved. We were floating through space and time on a bed in a bedroom in an apartment in a city somewhere between Pearl Harbor and Saigon.

“They had to come and get me,” my dad admitted. “Sure, I wanted to beat the Japs and the Nazis. But I was scared to death. I didn't want to die. I didn't want to have to kill someone. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to fight. And now,” he paused, nearly choking on his words. “And now, twenty-five years later, my son has to do the same goddamn thing—only this time it's worse. He's gotta do something that nobody in his right mind wants to do for a country that's not sure whether he should be doing it, in a place that nobody can pronounce the same way.

“And …” he hesitated. “And … it's all my fault.”

Was Emily listening? My mother? My father's mother?

“It's all my fault because I got mad and I got lazy,” my dad's voice seemed stronger. “I got mad at my son because he was telling me things I didn't want to hear. And I got lazy because I believed everything my country was telling me. I believed in every damn thing we were doing everywhere. I believed. And now—in return—I have to give them my son.”

He stopped, drawing a deep breath that pulled me and Emily and the darkness in with it.

* * *

I'm not sure how long we three silently lay there. Maybe an hour. Or a lifetime. But that moment has given way to this, the one that finds us on the way to the airport, and my eventual arrival in Vietnam.

Driving in the same confessional silence that we'd shared two nights before, I knew I loved my father and always would. But in our new communion, I forgot about the malaria pills I'd tucked inside his raincoat.

Insubordination Nation

Their morning ritual. Her paper. His paper. Her news. His sports.

Maybe this is what Simon & Garfunkel meant by the “sounds of silence?” Her tsks, a-hems and phews; his head shaking from side to side.

As with every news nugget she uncovered daily, his wife broke the quiet.

“How come an Army reserve officer is facing insubordination charges?” Her question wrenched him away from his daily homage to Seattle Mariners' statistics. Any time there was the slightest article or mention of military justice, she turned to him as the ultimate authority. Little did she know that he had left all that behind, far far behind and that he could care less about the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“It says here,” she continued, her gray hair falling over her eyes and diving into her bowl of Special K, “that Captain Steve McAlpin of the 401st Civil Affairs Battalion questioned the legality of a waiver that his battalion was asked to sign allowing their third deployment to a war zone since January.”

“Waiver?” she directs the question squarely at him, and then returns to the Associated Press article. “He was then notified in a memorandum Wednesday that he was being removed from the unit's battle roster and that he could face additional punishment, including a court-martial and losing rank, over the charges.”

She swept her hair from her eyes for the umpteenth time.

“I mean, can they really do this to a guy who's a citizen soldier?” she begged. “If they're receiving memos and signing waivers, then aren't reservists different than common soldiers?”

More annoyed with the fact his beloved Mariners were 20 games above .500 but still eight games behind the first place Athletics, he reached over and grabbed the article.

“A spokesman for the 401st,” he read as if he were delivering a commencement address, mainly to piss off his wife, “said Friday that McAlpin's questioning of the waiver was one reason why he was being disciplined. Individual members of the 401st are allowed to refuse to sign the waiver, but the spokesman said McAlpin was ‘butting in' for other soldiers.”

Now his voice was sing-songing. “There's lots of soldiers we're not sending because they have one issue or another,” the spokesman added. “It's important we put together a solid team. Not all soldiers are ready, even though they think they are, to deploy.

“McAlpin, a twenty-five-year military veteran, told the
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
that instead of signing the reprimand document, he attached a note of protest, stating his performance evaluations have been excellent and that his record shows ‘no pattern of incompetence.' He also plans to meet with a military attorney.”

His wife sat, waiting for his explanation, for his insight into the intricacies of military justice. It never came.

His eyes locked on that last line: “He also plans to meet with a military attorney,” and he vaguely recalled a similar plea from a platoon of soldiers stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in early 1970. Something to do with a protest and a Beatles song?

Happiness is a Warm Gun?
he wondered.

He never did get involved with that case, but he couldn't recall why he didn't. Besides, his participation wouldn't have changed a fucking thing. Some guys got court-martialed, some went to the brig, some went AWOL, and some got killed. McAlpin had better realize that the Army held all the cards and his ass was theirs.

Now, what was Ichiro's batting average again?

Basic Choices

Dear Lamont:

Man, I hate like hell to lay this on you, but I've been drafted by the rest of the guys to write and ask your advice. Even though I'm crunched for time and we aren't even sure this letter will reach you at home before you head off to Fort Lee and your legal specialist training, I'm going to give it a try. As our resident b-ball star Robinson likes to say “Son, you miss all the shots you never take!”

I can't remember exactly when you came down with mono and they moved you out. Four, five weeks ago? I know you were here for Easter Sunday dinner because my parents drove up from Pottstown, and I remember their saying nice things about the “charming Negro” from Newark. At that point, I'm pretty sure we hadn't started “weapons familiarization.” Yeah, that's about when you left, before the firing started.

Anyway, when this shit storm hit, everybody said, “Go tell Lamont what went down and he'll figure out how to deal with all this.” So, Lamont Dozier, you've been selected by a jury of your peers to be our eyes, our ears, and, we're hoping, our brains.

What we did the other night is related, I'm not sure just how, to the fact that we were minus Sgt. Cannon, our DI, the final few weeks of basic training. That's my view at least—too much fucking freedom of choice. Jesus, the Army's calling what happened an “organized mutiny” or “planned insurrection” if you can believe that. I'll just lay out the facts and let you be the judge.

A few days after Easter, Sgt. Cannon got his orders to return to Vietnam. Can you believe that? The goddamn guy had been there twice already, owns a wall full of medals and a Purple Heart, not to mention having a wife and two kids. And he volunteered to go back to fucking ‘Nam. He told us it had something do to with “repaying debts” and giving the South Vietnamese the “freedom to choose.” You remember his rap about democracy and loyalty and commitment? Christ, I'll bet a guy with your smarts could repeat that speech of his word for word.

The day Sgt. Cannon got his orders, he was on our floor in the barracks, consoling my bunkmate Collins (remember Collins from Aliquippa?) about picking up a gun. Collins had been fretting about this for weeks and had sought advice and counsel from just about everybody at Fort Dix, including the company chaplain—and even the local rabbi—about his not wanting to carry, or fire, a weapon.

The weird thing was that it was Cannon, the highly-decorated, gung-ho, “grab ‘em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow” soldier who was the most sympathetic to Collins. We don't know what he said or how he did it, but Cannon helped Collins to deal with the gun thing and to get through that part of basic training. We all can use a guy like Cannon in our corner.

So, here we were, “50 characters without an author” as Doc O'Brien called us (not that any of us knew what he meant by that), waist-deep in weapons familiarization and without Sgt. Cannon or any other assigned drill instructor! I mean, the Army was breaking its own rules by not having someone bunk with us and ride herd, but I guess they were short-handed because we went through the next few weeks—everything from shot grouping to zeroing to hand grenades to initial tactical training—on our own. Sure, the other company DIs kicked our butts when we were training and what have you, but nobody was with us non-stop from reveille to lights out.

We were into the last phase of the Field Exercises, and you just knew the whole fucking schedule was off because of all the rain and mud and Cannon's leaving and how uptight all the DIs and brass were. They needed more cannon fodder for their fucking war and here we were stuck in the mud in New Jersey!

We'd already completed the 15K foot march after our first trip out to Poorman's Range, so they decide to take us out and back to TT6 Night Infiltration in cattle cars so we'd get back to the base at a reasonable hour. Jesus, those goddamn cattle cars were just that—and we were the friggin cattle. There we were, 50 wet, muddy, and pissed-off newbies crammed into this large, mobile box on wheels, minus a damn drill sergeant.

You and I first met on one of those cattle cars, remember? Fresh out of reception, we gathered all 70 pounds of the finest Government Issue equipment and hustled on so we wouldn't get our asses kicked. You didn't want to be last, or be caught looking lost or sad. I remember there was one guy crying and man did they let that wimp have it!

Yeah, I can still remember them cramming in as many of us as humanely possible and then Senior Drill Sergeant Torres came on board and read us the riot act. All we could do was hang our heads and ride in silence to our new home at Fort Dix.

You figured out right away that we were driving around in circles so that the Army could mess with our heads and let the reality of belonging to them and being in the military sink in. Maybe that's why we acted up like we did later on and sang the song we sang. All of us, every last one of us, had come to own that sinking feeling of being pushed down, down, down by Uncle Sam.

Anyway, what a fucking sight we were after our inglorious night infiltration. A goddamn cattle car full of Charles Schultz's Pigpens but without the dust—we were filthy, wet, and muddy. Tired. Pissed. Doomed. Our fucking driver was obviously pissed off, taking the turns on the route back to the barracks at way more than 40 miles an hour. GIs were being tossed from one side of the car to the other; guys were falling on top of each other, screaming, cursing. I was waiting for some fight to break out. I was especially watching for Murphy, because, as you know, he'd had it in for me from day one, threatening he'd stick me when I least expected it. Lucky for me, he was on the bottom of a pile that included Denny “Haystacks” Calhoun and Myron “Bub-ba” Brown. Needless to say, Murphy wasn't going anywhere.

That's how things looked from my spot in the middle of the car, where I was hanging on for dear life to Collins who was holding on to one of the poles that ran from floor to ceiling. It was probably worse if you were one of the guys on the bottom of the pile, or if you were wetter and muddier than I was. Remember that line of Thoreau's you used to always recite to us about most men living lives of quiet desperation? We had it half right. We were desperate, but loud and angry, too.

We all fucking knew that when we got back to the barracks, even as late as it was, we'd be ordered to formation, then made to clean our weapons and return them before we'd get to bed. Christ, it would be two in the fucking morning before we'd get to sleep. You could just sense that every last “swinging dick,” as Sgt. Cannon used to call us when he came through the barracks to wake us in the morning, had had it with the Army and basic training and Vietnam and everything and was about ready to explode.

That was when Doc and the Professor started singing “Yellow Submarine.” I'm not sure why that song or what it had to do with anything. Maybe it was on account of we were all feeling submerged somehow, both by the rain and the mud, and by the Army and Vietnam, too.

Doc began singing the first line, his voice sounding purer and clearer than I ever remember it being any time during basic training. Man, he had some pipes, and he was sounding so, well, so grown-up.

The Professor joined in on the next line of the song, his voice a little deeper and fuller than Doc's. Funny that it was the two oldest guys in our platoon, and the only two college graduates beside you, who were doing the singing because they'd always kept a low profile.

Suddenly, it got quiet in the cattle car. For all I know we were still careening around corners and banging into one another, but we all started listening to them, as their voices go louder. When they finally got to the chorus, Doc banged the butt of his M-16 on the floor of the cattle car for emphasis. It made a great sound, a perfect thump/clang and, spontaneously, every last one of us was banging our M-16s on the floor to emphasize every “yellow submarine” utterance.

I can't really describe for you what it was like being caught up in that moment. We all felt alive and somehow liberated, as if we weren't any longer in the Army or stuck in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Somehow we'd been transported to some other time, some better place, where bands played and people got along and sang songs and had fun.