There's a Man With a Gun Over There (25 page)

We held out our hands, and Drill Sergeant Yankovic slapped a red and yellow National Defense Service Medal ribbon in each of them. He hit my hand so hard, the edge of the medal cut my skin.

“Fucking colonels,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic said after the ceremony, “always making morals. Shit, everybody gets this medal.”

I was rubbing the scratch in my hand as I stood by Pudgy's bed that evening. Someone had sneaked beer into the barrack. We unrolled the mattress and set Phil Danzig's little record player there.

Come on, all of you big, strong men,

Uncle Sam needs your help again.

He's got himself in a terrible jam

Way down yonder in Vietnam

So put down your books and pick up a gun

We're gonna have a whole lot of fun.

It was just then, in early September 1969, when I first heard Country Joe and the Fish sing the “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag.” The other guys and I raised our beer bottles and toasted it. It was funny. We stood around Pudgy's bed with the little rectangles of our National Defense medals centered over the left-hand shirt pockets of our khaki uniforms. They looked like little stains of blood and viscera.

The second time we played the song, no one laughed. No one said a word.

The evening was cool, the first touch of fall. The sun had just gone down. I was a brand-new PFC with a silver duffel bag whose color was already beginning to crack.

There ain't no time to wonder why

Whoopee, we're all gonna die

37.

“
A
ll those pockets of crazies,” my friend Tom Bamberger says, “but so what? The world is full of crazies.”

That's true, I think, so why don't I get over those days? So what if I wound up in the military? It's happened to tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of men over the years.

“Armies have been around so long no one even notices them anymore,” the ghost of Albert Speer says, putting his bony fingers together. “It isn't prostitution that's the oldest business in the world; it's war. Mother Battle and her bloody babies.”

But I wasn't really bloodied, was I?

“Let's just wait and see if you tell the truth, Ryan; see if you're willing to tell what really happened to you.”

38.

I
t's a blur, a carnival in the dark. All of us on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Circling and circling.

I can feel the wind on my face as I spin around. Every so often a lurid green and purple light comes on, framing a face across from me.

“Hi yah, kiddies, hi yah, hi yah, hi yah,” Pudgy Peterson says and then down he spins around, his head snapping back in his seat. Drill Sergeant Yankovic appears. He's smiling. “I still own you, Ryan. Your soft, civilian ass is mine,” and there, look, smiling is Jerry Donenfelter. “Oh, my little solder boy,” he sings as he spins around. And then, oh, face after face: Walt Rostow, Albert Speer, Lance B. Edwards, and Sergeant Perkins. Face after face comes into view, in the lurid light, and goes away, round and round.

And then I have this order to obey. Order Number 56, signed by Stanley P. Arthur, Major. SUBJECT: Basic German Course, Defense Language Institute, West Coast. REPORTING DATE: 24 SEP 1969. I don't have time to think about what's going on. I just have to do what I'm told.

“Once you get things figured out, the military's easy,” Rex Harrison explained to me at that party back in Fayetteville. “Life will slide along. The military solves all those big identity questions for you. You know who you are. They give you a rank and a job and a place to sleep. They feed you; they clothe you.”

“You've got to draw a line somewhere.”

Lance B. Edwards's face suddenly appears from the dark.

“If you don't, then where are you, Ryan, where are you?”

He holds up a blank pad.

“You see, Ryan. It should be perfectly clear.”

I lost twenty pounds in basic training. My clothes didn't fit anymore. I was a new person; I didn't even look the same. When I got back to Jenny's house in Saint Louis, she handed me a copy of Emerson.

“He's been waiting for you,” she said and smiled.

But I didn't have time for Emerson anymore. I wanted to make sure I got to the army's language school on time. I was terrified of making a mistake.

“If you miss that September date,” the recruiting sergeant in Little Rock had told me, “you'll be one sorry sack of shit, Ryan. Then it's the army's choice. They'll send you to Vietnam.”

Jenny insisted on coming with me to Monterey.

“We're married, you know,” she said, and it took me a moment to remember that. I had been so busy folding my uniforms for the trip that I'd forgotten about her.

We loaded the car with our clothes and some household goods. Our baggage weighed so much that the car collapsed the shock absorbers and sat on its frame. We drove across the country on Interstate 80. I have pictures of myself from that time with my butch-cut army hair. I look tentative and baffled. One thing's for sure: I was scared. Those were dangerous days. One wrong move, and I would have ended up in Vietnam.

In 1969, the Defense Language Institute was a series of old wooden buildings and newer cinder-block structures sitting on some hilltop acreage between Monterey and Pacific Grove, California. The site has beautiful views of Monterey Bay. The day I arrived there was warm and sunny. The scenery was so beautiful that I felt as though I were walking through a travel poster.

“Ryan, yup, right here. German class,” the charge-of-quarters corporal in the orderly room told me as he looked at a sheet of paper. “We've got you on our list. You're safe from Vietnam right now, buddy. You start next Monday. You got to show up here at seven thirty for formation. Captain Pfloeger likes to start on time.”

“What do I do between now and then?”

Corporal Matson looked puzzled.

“Let's see. It's Wednesday. I'd eat some abalone at Fisherman's Wharf. I'd drive down to Big Sur. I don't know.”

“Isn't there some kind of duty roster?”

“Please, Ryan. This is about as far from the real army as you can get, and we want to keep it that way. All right? Don't say words like ‘duty roster.' You might give somebody ideas.”

“My wife's with me. Can I live with her?”

He stared at me.

“Absolutely, unless you want me to move in with her.” He paused. “You kind of lost it in basic training, didn't you, buddy? Of course. Just fill out these forms.”

An hour later, after completing the paperwork, I was a registered married man, looking for off-post housing.

“Just call me, or whoever's CQ and give them an address and a phone number when you find an apartment.”

Maybe my luck was changing. I drove back to the Holiday Inn in Seaside, where Jenny and I were staying. I put on civilian clothes, and Jenny and I stood there in front of the picture window looking at the ocean.

“Can you believe this?” I asked myself. It's all so beautiful. Yes, maybe my luck really was changing. Maybe the dark gods who took my father and put me in the army will leave me alone. I squeezed Jenny's hand.

The only apartment we could afford was a dreary little two-room place at 1075 Third Street. But it was close to the ocean and an inland lagoon. Those seemed like good omens, though the constant
ar
,
ar
,
ar
of the sea lions barking at night got a little wearing. In the mornings, fog rolled into the apartment through its uninsulated walls. The first morning I woke up feeling that I was inside a cloudy dream, going from one sleep to another, and I held on to Jenny, terrified.

Then I began sobbing: air-gulping, breath-taking sobs.

“What's the matter, baby?” Jenny asked.

“Maybe I'm not going to die after all,” I said between sobs. “Maybe I'll live.”

“
Guten Tag
!” Herr Schefke, the civilian teacher said that first Monday after the welcoming speeches were over.

I was assigned to Room 250, Nisei Hall. I was so excited to begin. This will be my ticket to Europe, I thought. A foreign language! I was learning a foreign language!

“
Guten Tag
!” our little class of six students said back to Herr Schefke—or tried to.

“
Ja, ja
,” Herr Schefke said, rubbing his hands together as if he were about to begin a gourmet meal.

I still have my notes from that day. We were supposed to memorize the sound of the language. We had no reading material at all, just a bunch of seven-inch, reel-to-reel tapes. Those of us who lived off the base also got our own Wollensak portable tape recorders and a set of green Koss earphones.

I arranged the recorder and my study materials on a wobbly table in a corner of the living room on Third Street. The controls on the tape recorder looked like the keys on an accordion. I went back and forth between PLAY, STOP, REWIND, and PLAY as I listened to the strange syllables and tried to memorize them, repeating the sentences over and over.

Guten Tag! Ist daß hier die Deutschklasse?
Ja, daß ist die Deutschklasse.

That was how the program worked. We had to learn the lines of a spoken dialogue, going by sound alone, and repeat the lines the next morning in Room 250.

In pairs, we would come to the front of the classroom. Each one of us in the duo took first one side in the dialogue and then the other. We did this over and over. The theory of this learning was based on the notion that children learn language this way, by hearing others speak and responding to that.

Amazing. In the midst of the terrible war in Vietnam, the US Army taught me to learn like a child.

Of course there was also the unstated threat that I'd be sent to Vietnam if I didn't do my homework.

On the surface, though, it was all good fun.

“
Bitte, machen Sie Fehler
!” Herr Scheffke said, waving his hand at us. A blessing from a benevolent spirit. He didn't want us to be nervous. Please, he told us, make all the mistakes you want.

I still have some of the tapes, and I've located an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. The voice comes on a little off-key. The tape is stiff and sticky from a lack of use.

Wer ist der Lehrer?

Herr Neumann ist der Lehrer

Wo ist der Lehrer?

Der Lehrer ist dort.