There's a Man With a Gun Over There (23 page)

Drill Sergeant Yankovic sensed Jerry's talent and made him a squad leader. Squad leaders wore these black felt arm-bands with corporal stripes pinned around the sleeves of their left arms. They looked like they were in mourning.

Jerry, however, saw his stripes as the first step on a ladder of greatness, and he picked twelve men (“The number Jesus would choose if he went to war,” Jerry said) for a close-order drill routine. They rehearsed in the laundry room, and we could hear the muffled cadences of drill commands and the sounds of clumping feet and rifle butts hitting the floor between the washers and the dryers. I think Jerry intended to be the Busby Berkeley of Company B, Fifth Battalion, First Training Brigade.

Jerry, in fact, figured out the customs of the military much faster than the rest of us.

The very first day of our arrival at Company B, First Sergeant Clyde Toler took Jerry along on a trip for supplies. They left in the company jeep. When they came back, they had both the jeep and a deuce-and-a-half truck filled with about a hundred cans of reflective silver paint.

“The man's a genius at scrounging,” Toler told Drill Sergeant Yankovic. “A blooming genius.”

“Why would anyone want a hundred cans of reflective silver paint?” my friend Joe Kennedy wonders as he listens to my story.

Because real scroungers in the army understood that you should always stockpile any items that come along—you never know when you might need them. And guess what? That paint gave Captain Van Hook an idea about how to impress the colonel.

“Men,” Captain Van Hook said to us as we stood in formation on the morning of July 20, 1969. “This is a great day for Company B. This is the day I start to become Major Van Hook. We are going to paint all of the duffel bags with that reflective silver paint Donenfelter found. I'm going to tell the colonel that we plan to shine for our country.”

The details of this operation were left to the drill sergeants, who had to figure out a way to get the silver paint on the bags and still have the army-required stenciling of our names and army serial numbers.

While we had plenty of paint, Company B owned but a single paintbrush, which was the size used for house painting, so the drill sergeants set up this duffel-bag painting project the way they set up everything else—by the numbers.

First we stacked all of our empty duffel bags on the parade ground. Then we roughly divided our 200-man company into thirds—one group taking turns painting with the single brush, one group carrying the bags to and from the painters, and one group delivering the paint from Jerry's deuce-and-a-half truck to the painters. We flattened each bag on the ground, painted the top halves, and set the bags in the sun to dry. A few hours later, we turned them over and painted the other halves. Some of the bags had twigs and pieces of gravel stuck in the paint, but removing those imperfections caused the paint to smear, so we left them alone.

Drill Sergeant Yankovic collected a quarter from each of us and went to Leesville, the town next to Fort Polk, where he bought cans of black spray paint. (I've often wondered why no one thought to buy some paintbrushes. Life in the army was filled with these little box canyons of failure.)

Company B had several stencil kits, so in the late afternoon, we divided up again: one group readied the stencils for each bag, one group spray-painted our personal information on the bags, and one group set them out to dry. By seven that night, we were done, though some of the names and serial numbers were wrong. When the men complained, Drill Sergeant Yankovic just laughed.

“Nobody cares about shit like that,” he said. “Just make sure your dog tags are in order. Don't want the wrong name on your tombstone.”

The night our company did its final preparations for the inspection—late the night of July 20, 1969, the night America landed on the moon—was also to be the dress rehearsal of the close-order drill routine Jerry and his men had been practicing.

Around midnight, we finished cleaning up the company area. Captain Van Hook yelled, “Fall in!” We gathered by platoon and stood at parade rest with our rifles at our sides in the dim light of a cloud-covered moon.

That didn't go very well. It was hard to see by the light of that night's half-moon, and we kept stepping on the heels of the men in front of us. Captain Van Hook then ordered that the company trucks and jeeps be placed around the parade area—motors running, lights on. We could see, sort of, and the marching went better, though now we became a shadowy army of the night—the black shapes of helmets and arms and rifles passing back and forth in front of the flickering headlights. Exhaust fumes and the mist from the damp night air made us appear and disappear.

After an hour of this, Captain Van Hook commanded, “In place, march!”

Our boots drummed on the ground, and soon the commands of Jerry Donenfelter rang in time with the cadences of our boots rising and falling and not going anywhere.

What's the future hold in store?

The answer from his squad came back—

Beat the Cong at their own war!

Since I was an
R
and always near the end of the column, it took a minute to see what was happening.

What's the future hold in store?

Jerry repeated the question, and his men answered again with the army's predictable rhetoric—

Beat the Cong at their own war!

To the cadence created by the rise and fall of our boots, Jerry's squad marched along in front of us—dark figures in the blinding light, passing in and out of the fog and the exhaust fumes.

Left, left

Left, right, left

Jerry commanded. He strode beside his men, raising and lowering a huge silver baton like the major at the half-time show for the big game. He'd also painted his boots and his helmet with the reflective silver paint, and his baton, boots, and his helmet glowed in the headlights, leaving behind evanescent trails of light as he marched.

Then the question changed.

What is it that we're fighting for?

The answer—

It's war baby war baby war baby war!

As Jerry's twelve-man squad chanted that, they held out their M-14 rifles with both hands and swung them from left to right in rhythm with their answer.

They turned at the end of our column, did an about-face, and hit the butts of their rifles on the ground in the same rhythm—

It's war baby war baby war baby war!

“Now we're getting somewhere,” I heard Drill Sergeant Yankovic mutter. “Now we've really landed on the moon. We own that stony motherfucker.”

At two or three in the morning—after the jeep and the truck lights were turned off, after the vehicles had been driven away, after our rifles had been stored—a few of us sat on the steps to the locked-up dayroom, hoping that now someone would come and let us in so we could watch the moon landing. Even if it was over, we thought, the networks would surely show reruns of it.

Besides we couldn't go to bed—we weren't allowed to wrinkle our blankets or get dirt on the barrack floor for fear of getting bad marks in our inspection. We had to stay up all night until the colonel came.

We sat in the dark, half-asleep—smoking and talking.

On the other side of the company parade area—like the baggage for a ghostly journey—200 silver duffel bags filled with our clothes were stacked, their reflective paint glowing in the moonlight. Occasionally a twig or a piece of gravel would come loose from the paint and fall off.

“Ain't they pretty,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic said from beneath the darkness of his tilted campaign hat when he came up to us. His uniform was dripping wet from his malaria.

We all staggered to our feet.

“Those duffels kind of look like artillery shells, don't they, boys? Just in case you were wondering what the real ammunition of the moon shot is, boys—there it is. All lined up, ready to go. Shoot the moon. Man, they ain't just a kidding.”

He walked away, hat tilted, arms out—doing a twirling tap dance across the dark parade field—an imitation of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly.

“Love that war baby war baby war baby war stuff,” he said. “Who'd want to watch television when you can come down here to old Fort Polk and see a
real
show?”

36.

B
ut it didn't end there, no. It took eight weeks, Joe. Eight weeks of humiliation. I fought it; I made fun of it; I was superior to it, but you know what? In the end, the army won. It eventually got me. I did what they told me to do.

Look. There I am on my belly and elbows: crawling across a dusty field screaming, “Drill Sergeant Yankovic loves me more than my Mama ever did.” That's me, over here, rifle in front of me, its bayonet fixed, yelling, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” as I attack a target. Now I'm in first-aid class, learning how to close off a sucking chest wound. Look over there: I'm running into a house filled with tear gas, removing my gas mask, and slowly saying my name, rank, and serial number to a training sergeant sitting at a desk with his mask on. The giant plastic eye goggles and twin black canister filters on the mask make him look like an enormous insect in an army uniform. Perhaps this is what really happened to Gregor Samsa in Kafka's novella
The Metamorphosis
.

Oh, Joe, I was smart. I knew so much. I'd read all these books. None of the sergeants could even begin to explain who Gregor Samsa is. I was smarter than they would ever be, and yet there I was, marching along with the rest of my platoon, following their orders, stepping to Drill Sergeant Yankovic's cadence into the post library. In all our battle gear, wearing steel helmets and canteens, my platoon clomped and clattered into that library and stood in formation between the shelves of books. Drill Sergeant Yankovic had us yell, at the top of our lungs, “The Dewey Decimal System will help me find my book! The librarian is my special friend!”

Can irony get me out of here, Joe? Can sarcasm save me?

Then there's Peter Peterson.

“Call me Pudgy. Everyone does,” Peterson told us, ducking as he spoke, used to being the butt of jokes.

Pudgy must have weighed in at 250 pounds on a five-foot-eight-inch frame. When he ran, his loose gut and floppy breasts jiggled under his white T-shirt. He had a side-to-side, mincing step when he jogged.

“Peterson,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic yelled. “When the doctor got to you, did he throw away the baby and keep the afterbirth?”

Pudgy had so many sins that the drill sergeant didn't know where to begin. He just shook his head.

We were all puffing and sweating in the Louisiana heat. Pudgy's face had turned a mottled red.

The drill sergeant, for some reason, didn't sweat at all when he ran. He disdained the T-shirts that we troops wore. He stayed in his campaign hat and his heavy cotton fatigues as he loped easily along beside us, counting out a double-time march cadence. His back and his armpits were dry. Nothing but his malaria made him sweat.

“Peterson, you run like a fucking girl!” the drill sergeant screamed. “How can you stand yourself?”