There's a Man With a Gun Over There (33 page)

I worked for nine days followed by three days off.

My working colleague was a man named Dmitri Halter— Corporal Halter. Now Corporal Kravitz had, as the army liked to say, more time in grade as a corporal, so he slightly out-ranked Corporal Halter and me, but Corporal Halter's favorite book was a paperback copy of the Constitution of the United States. When he disagreed with Corporal Kravitz, he would quote from the Constitution. Corporal Kravitz didn't know much of anything except what his own opinions were, so the Constitution-quoting made him nervous, and he usually dropped any complaint he had against Dmitri and went on to harass someone else. Since Dmitri and I worked together, Dmitri's umbrella of protection included me as well. I kept my mouth shut.

One time, during one of Corporal Kravitz's needless and harassing barrack inspections, Dmitri pulled out his thumb-worn Constitution and said, a man's home is free of unreasonable search and seizures.

“That's in there, in the laws of the United States?” Corporal Kravitz asked. He seemed stunned. The whole moral underpinning of tearing somebody's footlocker apart had just been called into question. “You mean, I'm not supposed to go through your stuff?”

“Not if you want to obey the fundamental laws of the land.”

“Then how can the army exist, if high-ranking people can't harass low-ranking people? Explain that to me.”

For a moment there, Corporal Kravitz thought he had an edge.

“That's a very good question, Leon. You might want to think it over. In the meantime, I've got to go. I have errands to run. Come on, Ryan. You've got errands, too.”

“I hate it when people call me Leon. It just doesn't sound tough enough, you know?”

I looked back just as we left the area, and there was Corporal Kravitz carefully putting the items in Dmitri's footlocker back in order.

“Now I've got the army where I want it,” Dmitri said as we walked outside.

With most of my savings, I bought a white Volvo 122-S with a four-speed. On my days off, I drove it around the countryside, delighting as I shifted its gears. The days were warm and sunny. The nights were crisp. I found a small apartment in Mörfelden not too far from the air base. I was getting ready for Jenny's arrival.

An attic apartment: its walls were the roof, and the only windows were skylights filled with blue. When I first moved in with the few pieces of furniture I'd bought at a house sale, I felt as though I were floating through space.

I was so lucky, I told myself.

At Rhein-Main, the passengers from incoming flights were processed through a giant hangar big enough to hold several airplanes. Offices were built inside the hangar, and they resembled one-room, slat-sided houses, complete with windows and venetian blinds. There was one house for the Twenty-Second MP Group and one for various air force offices.

When the door to the giant hangar was closed (as it mostly was), the interior was dark and lit virtually around the clock by rows of flickering, blue-tinted bulbs in fixtures hanging high overhead. The lights left deep shadows in the corners, and the ambience of the lighted areas was gray, even when it was sunny outside. Day or night, it never really changed. The place seemed darkly hallucinogenic. Because the nine-day shifts were slowly destroying my sense of ordinary time, the days and nights in that hangar seemed the same, the only difference being the feel of the air temperature, as winter came on. What made matters even worse was the division of the nineday workweek into blocks of three days, so I worked three days of day shifts, three days of swing shifts, and three days of night shifts. I soon was always tired because I couldn't get used to the shifting sleep schedule. Worse, I lost sense of what a normal day was.

Day after day, night after night, in the flickering gray-blue light, the incoming passengers went through two rooms created by walls made of heavy drapes. They were meant to intimidate people. One by one they came into Room One, where we had the amnesty barrel. CONTRABAND HERE. NO QUESTIONS ASKED, the crude sign read. In the next room Halter and I waited, standing before the inspection table, our MP white hats down low over our eyes, our thumbs stuck in our Sam Browne belts.

“Anything I should know about?” I asked.

“Next!” Halter yelled.

And so it went, one passenger at a time, day after day, night after night. We sorted through luggage; we poked our fingers into uniforms and underwear; we squirted out bits of toothpaste and tasted them.

“You want to tell me something?”

“Next!”

“What's in there?”

“Next!”

“Why are you so nervous?”

“Next!”

And then one night, this sergeant pulled out a mortar from his duffel bag and set it up on my table. He lit something and threw it in the barrel and stepped back and cupped his hands over his ears and yelled, “Fire in the hole,” and it all happened so fast and something exploded except the explosion was like a firecracker and not a weapon and the man laughed and said that war is one comedy show after another and I got Halter, who said, “So what?” and “Who wants to fill out the arrest paperwork?” and we sent the soldier on his way and there was Corporal Kravitz standing in front of us.

“You motherfuckers let that guy go!?”

“Well, what was his crime, Leon?”

“Illegal possession of an army weapon to start with.”

“Shit,” Halter said, “you got hundreds of thousands of men walking around with weapons and you're worried about some dumb prankster in the middle of the night. Besides, he was a short-timer. He's probably home by now.”

“Where we're going to read about him killing someone.”

“Leon, you could say that about half the people here, including you. Here, read the Second Amendment of the Constitution, Leon.”

Dmitri handed him the book.

“Read it to us, Leon. It's on page twenty-two.”

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Corporal Kravitz was not used to reading and stumbled on some of the wording.

“See, Leon? It's perfectly legal to carry a mortar or two. Fact is, I'm thinking of getting one for myself.”

Corporal Kravitz stomped off then. He was afraid of Halter.

“Look, Ryan,” Halter told me on another shift. “I've been around dickheads all my life. Remember I grew up in the Bronx. You can't give these fuckers space enough to breathe. You let those bastards get going, pretty soon you won't have a place to live.”

52.

T
his is now November of 1970. I have been in the army for sixteen months. For all these hours and days and weeks I have been able to kid myself—to believe that the boy who writes poetry and reads Ralph Waldo Emerson is still inside my soul. I brought a volume of Emerson with me to Germany and have a new notebook and I sit in the apartment at the used table I bought and try to read and write on one of my days off but I sit there staring up at the skylight and turgid gray sky beyond. I haven't seen a blue sky for weeks. Jenny is coming in December, and I try to get excited about her arrival, but I just can't. Instead I get more and more depressed thinking of the time I'm wasting in the army.

I pace around the apartment, trying to jog my brain out of its funk, but the floor is covered with a rubberized tile that keeps causing me to trip and fall. One night, by accident, I bring my .45 pistol home from work. I take it out of my holster, trying to think of a safe place to store it as I walk into my bedroom. I trip, and the gun goes spinning into the air, and I watch it in slow motion, thinking this might be the end of me if it hits the floor and fires. I close my eyes in terror, but it lands, and the clip of shells pops out, and I fall to the floor weeping.

I go to work and sit in the gray, blue light of the hangar and feel my creative juices leak away. It gets easier and easier to yell at the stupid GIs standing in front of me than write poetry.

“Your duffel bag,” I scream at a PFC in the middle of the night. “Empty your fucking duffel bag on the floor: that's what I want you to do.”

I poke through his dirty clothes with my billy club and scatter them around.

“Now pick up this shit and get out of here. Now. I said. Now.”

I follow him as he walks away, toward the exit. I follow him and scream “Now” over and over at his back. He pulls the duffel bag along by the strap with one hand and holds batches of his clothes with the other hand. He keeps dropping shirts and socks and underwear.

“Get that crap out of my inspection area,” I yell as he walks out of the hangar.

“Be careful,” Halter says to me later. “You're starting to sound like Leon. Relax, Ryan. This isn't your show, buddy. You just want to get out of here alive with your soul intact.”

It seems like the sunshine went away forever that November. Day after day, low-hanging clouds give the world the look of hard iron. I get more depressed. Day after slow-moving day, night after slow-moving night I live in the gray of my work followed by the gray of the apartment, which now depresses me to no end. Gray despair hangs in the chambers of my head the way the smells of boiled cabbage and fried liver linger in the hallways of that Mörfelden apartment building. I keep tripping on the rubberized floor. When I come home from the air base, I sit in the one chair I'd bought and stare at the wall, watching the gray daylight come and go. I don't go anywhere on my days off.

Corporal Leon Kravitz, though, is cheerful, and his good cheer rubs on my psyche like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Corporal Kravitz loves the army. When he isn't threatening us, he tries to sell us on its many benefits. He even likes our nine-on-and-three-off schedule.

“The great thing about the army,” Corporal Kravitz explains, sitting with his shiny boots up on the desk in the Twenty-Second MP house, “is that we make your week nine days long. You go in the army, and you'll live two days longer every week. Think about it. That's a hundred days a year. Two thousand days over a twenty-year career. Shit, you get 2,000 extra days, a pension, and lifetime medical benefits. The army's the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

“I never liked sliced bread all that much,” Halter says. “Sliced bread is way overrated if you ask me.”

“Nobody's asking you Halter,” Corporal Kravitz says. “Even the army can't save you from being an idiot.”

“Well, I might be an idiot, but I can do math. I'm afraid no one can add days to the calendar.”