Side Roads and Dandelions

by W.H. Harrod

  ~~ Chapter Eighteen

  “What was it you said back there?” inquired Ernest as he guided the VW bus west along the interstate highway. ‘The Dandelions are still heading west?’ Sort of has a nice sound to it, doesn’t it?”

  “I like it, too,” replied Bobby from his co-pilot seat.”

  “Bobby, do you still want to stop by the meteor crater?” asked Sam. “If you do, it’s only a few more miles ahead.” Bobby had gone on about not stopping to see the big hole the last time they came through.

  “I don’t think I need to do that,” answered Bobby.

  “I don’t understand. You were so disappointed not to have seen it the last time. What happened?” asked Sam.

  Allison listened in on the conversation eager to see if this refusal was an indication of Bobby’s regressing into his earlier suicidal state of mind. She remembered the fuss he made about not getting to see the crater.

  “I thought about it and it no longer seems to be such a good idea,” was the response.

  Ernest jumped in. “It won’t be a problem this time, Bobby, I assure you. We want you to see the crater.”

  “Really, it’s no big deal any longer,” Bobby replied with conviction.

  Now Allison showed her concern. “Please, Bobby, we want you to do this.”

  Bobby frowned. “Did any of you happen to pick up any of the brochures and look at them back at the restaurant checkout counter? If you did you would know that they want to charge people more than the cost of a decent work shirt to get inside the place. I’m not going to pay that kind of money to get in there.”

  “Hey man, money’s no problem,” offered Sam to no one’s surprise.

  Bobby leaned forward looking puzzled as to why his friends did not understand his position. “Look up ahead on the skyline and tell me what you see,” he said as he raised his head and looked through the windshield. His friends did as requested and scanned the horizon.

  “Now, tell me what you see,” said Bobby.

  “I don’t see anything special,” responded Sam, again to no one’s surprise.

  “I see a beautiful sunset,” said Allison with a smile.

  “I see a big mountain over there,” added Ernest.

  “Good,” said Bobby. “How much would you guys pay to see that sunset, or how much would you pay to see that mountain over there?”

  “Nothing,” all three of them said in unison.

  “You aren’t willing to pay a cent to see a sunset that’s coming from almost a hundred million miles away or a mountain that’s thirteen thousand feet high, and yet, you seem surprised that I don’t want to pay a significant amount of money to see a hole in the ground that’s only several hundred feet deep. Seems like you guys ought to be the ones going broke instead of me. Go figure.”

  Allison spoke first. “Bobby, you have wonderful insight. I’ve never looked at it from that particular perspective, but you are right. We seem to ascribe value to something in relation to someone else’s ability to keep us away from it. The only monetary value it has is because they can keep people from getting to it. All along the route there are signs telling us to stop and see something someone has put behind a fence or covered with a building. It may have been there for a million years but now they’ve been given the right to erect a barrier, and then they charge you for seeing something nature created. It seems kind of stupid now that I think about it. Wonder why we let them do that? It’s one thing to build something with your own money and energy and charge to see it, but simply fencing off one of nature’s creations and demanding a fee makes no sense.”

  Allison appeared transformed. “To think that we go along every day taking for granted the wonders all around us only to jump in a car and head out to see a two-hundred year old tree someone’s enclosed behind a fence in a back pasture or some fossilized bones they found down by the creek. There ought to be laws against that kind of activity!”

  “Well, actually,” said Bobby, “I just thought they charged too much.”

  Sam started to giggle. Then Ernest started to snicker. Eventually, Allison gave in and began to shake her head from side to side indicating she should have known better.

  “Bobby, thank you,” she said. “In the future I’ll try not to complicate everything. If I could spend more time around you it would help. Sometimes it is just the fact they want too damn much money! As for you other two goofs, I don’t want to hear a word, especially you, Ernest. I saw how nasty you were to that lady who came up and wanted your autograph. How could you be so rude?”

  “I am so tired of white people coming up to me and asking if I’m James Earl Jones! You get portly black guys together, smiling and wearing eyeglasses, and they begin to wonder which one is James Earl Jones. As far as I can tell, white people think all black men resemble one of three people: James Earl Jones, Denzel Washington, or Samuel L. Jackson. It wouldn’t be so bad if every once in awhile they would mistake me for Denzel.”

  The entire bus erupted in laughter. The frank discussion back at the restaurant had taken the burden off of the shoulders of the expedition’s members. They still had good reasons for going to San Francisco.

  Sam used the opportunity to clarify one small matter left unresolved during their recent discussions. “Hey, Bobby, when are you going to get around to telling us about why it’s necessary for you to go back to California? The rest of us have laid our cards on the table. That leaves only you as the mystery traveler.”

  Allison turned to Sam displaying her annoyance at his blunt challenge to Bobby to fess up. She didn’t want to push Bobby. Allison felt he was not out of the danger zone yet.

  “Bobby, don’t listen to -” she started.

  “No, Sam’s right. I owe you an explanation,” interrupted Bobby. “I might as well tell you what happened. I’m pretty certain as to what I need to do, so it wouldn’t hurt to get a feel as to what you guys think.”

  The stage belonged to Bobby until he finished his story.

  “I don’t know if you guys were aware of it but I served more than one tour in ‘Nam. I was halfway through with my second tour when I got hit and was evacuated. I spent several months in a hospital at Oakland Army Base. By the time they put me back together my second tour was almost over, plus I still carried shrapnel they would have to take out later. Anyway, they thanked me for my time and said they would let me know if the fact that my left arm no longer functioned like it was supposed to would earn me any kind of a medical disability. That was in February ‘69. I was supposed to check in with a VA Hospital in Oklahoma City once I got home. I didn’t.”

  “I wandered around the bay area for a few months and slept wherever I could find a place in the parks, around the Haight area, or with some of the head cases who crashed in old buildings. They had given me several months of pay when I left the hospital, so sometimes I even got a room and cleaned up. Mostly, I wandered around and drank and smoked grass. I couldn’t go home because I didn’t want sympathy or thanks. They didn’t know what it was like over there or why this country was letting its young men be killed by the hundreds each week. All they knew was those commies will be coming here if we don’t stop them over there. I actually believed that horseshit during part of my first tour, but by the time I got around to re-upping for a second tour, I pretty much knew the truth. We were in the middle of a civil war, and people who lived in grass huts and ate rice and carried their belongings on their backs weren’t going to be deterred by B-52’s dropping five hundred pound bombs from 35,000 feet into the middle of their muddy fields. Whoever came up with the plan to bomb them back to the Stone Ages would have known if they went there that most of those people had never left the Stone Age.”

  Allison had to know, “Why did you go back a second time?”

  “I had stayed alive and knew things that could help new guys stay alive. With guys rotating out and guys getting wounded and the officers staying in the field only six months, some of the new guys didn’t stand a chance. The non-commissioned offic
er cadre had been decimated, and many of the draftees they were getting in had bad attitudes from day one. When you put that with an officer who only wanted to get his ticket punched and get the back to the rear and a desk job as soon as possible, it’s amazing anyone lived. I wasn’t a military genius, but I knew some things that could help keep a grunt alive when the shit started going bad. Another reason was because everyone knew the war was coming to an end. Nixon promised to bring the troops home, and who wanted to see guys get killed in a cause that was finished. The primary objective of every grunt with a brain was to stay alive. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t fight. It simply meant if it wasn’t necessary then don’t go out looking for trouble.”

  “When I got back to the Nam from leave in April of ‘68 I was almost glad not to be in the states with all the crap going on. Martin Luther’s assassination, the President choosing not to run again, riots in the streets, and protestors everywhere was too much.”

  “My plan worked fairly well until we got a new commanding officer who wanted all the glory he could get before he had to rotate back to the world and spend the next fifteen years behind a desk somewhere waiting for the next war. Headquarters told him there was a large cache of weapons within our area of operations, and that’s all the reason this lifer needed to send our armored cavalry unit firing out into the boonies looking for anything we could find. He would, of course, be standing by on station in his command chopper to come in if we, in fact, found anything worthy of having his picture taken.”

  “I commanded one of the APCs, and we had been in the area a number of times but never down this particular road before. We were nervous right from the start. After only a few klicks, the bush got real heavy and everything slowed down to a crawl. That’s when the crap began. RPGs started coming at us from everywhere. We were third in line so we weren’t the first targets. The first hit we received didn’t penetrate, but it sure made a lot of noise. I swung my fifty-caliber to the right and started firing in the direction the RPGs were coming from. We had no maneuvering room and with the lead tracks knocked out all we could do was stand and fight. After the Sheridans behind us started opening up with canister rounds filled with fleshetts and the other fifties started banging away at the tree lines, I felt maybe we had a chance. But right then, an RPG hit us broadside and took out everybody except me and the driver, PFC Rodrigo Luis Mendoza. Shrapnel tore up my arm pretty bad, and I couldn’t use it. The entire rear of the APC was on fire from the hydraulic fluids. I kept trying to pull myself out but every time I got part way out a gook machine gunner would open up on me forcing me back inside. This kept going on with me trying to get out and falling back inside to get burned again. I didn’t know what to do. If I stayed inside I would burn to death, and if I went through the hatch I’m dead from the VC machine gunner. Meanwhile, Mendoza had bailed out through the driver’s hatch. I could hear him firing his M-16 and yelling for me to get out. I was about ready to pass out and didn’t think I could pull myself up through the hatch with one arm so I figured I’m a dead man for sure. All of a sudden, Mendoza is back inside the track and he’s picking me up. He pushes me up through the hatch and I fall over the side, away from the line of fire. I waited for Mendoza to hit the ground beside me so we could crawl off before the track exploded, and then I hear the fifty-caliber start firing again. That crazy Mendoza is standing at my position behind the fifty firing at the machine gunner in the tree line. I screamed for him to get the hell out of there before it exploded, but he couldn’t hear me above the noise. The last thing I remember is Mendoza falling to the ground beside me. He was hit but he smiled and told me he got the gook first. Soon after that I lost consciousness. I woke up in a field hospital. When I asked about Mendoza no one could tell me anything. Weeks later after I was back in the states in a hospital, I found out Mendoza died lying there beside me. He saved my life.”

  Allison could see how such a horrific event could scar an individual, but something was missing. Bobby’s sorrow at the great sacrifice his fellow soldier made on his behalf on that fateful day so long ago seemed perfectly normal and appropriate to her even if it had gone on for a long time. What else was there left for him to do? There had to be more to the story.

  “Later, when they got around to putting together a report of the action, somebody got it backwards about what happened during the fight. They thought it was me that went back into the APC to save Mendoza’s life and that it was me who stood in the burning track and fired the fifty until the gook machine gunner was taken out. They gave me a Silver Star Medal for bravery instead of him. I tried to tell them they were wrong, that it was Rodrigo who saved my life. They wouldn’t listen. The official report said differently, and I was told to go on with my life, go to college or something. The war was over for me. I had survived, just be grateful for that.”

  “I tried to get up the courage to go see his family to tell them the truth about their son. Even after I got home I thought about it, but each year it became harder. His family lived in a small town in southern California, out in the desert. I never got the nerve to do it. The kid saved my life, and I owe this to him, and to his family, even if it’s only a relative that’s left alive. Someone in that family has to be told the truth. I don’t know that doing this will change my life, but I’m certain this is the place to start.”

  “What’s the name of the town?” asked Allison as she reached for her map.

  The sound of Allison’s voice surprised Bobby who sat transfixed after concluding his story. “Uh, it’s a town called Rosamond, close to the Mojave Desert. I remember Rodrigo telling me that.”

  “Here it is!” yelled Allison. “We’re going to go right by the place. It’s only fifteen miles off our route. I vote for that being our first stop, if it’s okay with Bobby?”

  Bobby thought about it before answering. “If I’m ever going to do this it’s going to be with the help of you guys. I do want to stop there.”