Drafted

by Andrew Atherton

  Landers flushed. “Our air support came in and the VC stopped firing.”

  Nitro said, “The medic worked on the guys in the forward APC. They were pretty messed up. Then he checked the woman. We already had a compress on her leg, but she’d lost a lot of blood. The dust-off took all four of them.”

  Simmons was chuckling. “Tha’s not the story what Nitro tol’ me couple nights ago.”

  Nitro waved “no” with both hands to quiet Simmons, but Nitro was laughing, too.

  “What’d he tell you?” Landers swiveled to Nitro. “What bullshit you passing around?”

  “Come on, Ray, other guys were out there too, okay? It’s no secret.”

  “You son-of-a-bitch! Some fucking friend!”

  “Shit, man, we jus’ havin’ fun wit’ you, tha’s all.” Simmons was laughing out loud now.

  Landers got up from his lawn chair, his face flushed. “You guys think you’re so fucking funny.” He stalked into the aisle, poked his finger at us, and yelled, “I don’t give no goddamn rat’s ass about no medal.”

  Everybody in the hooch looked up at Landers. He swept his arm in dismissal. “All you fuckers can go to hell!” He stomped down the aisle to the end of the hooch, hit the screen door with the palm of his hand, and walked out.

  I shook my head. “What’d you guys say that worked him up like that?”

  Nitro looked at Simmons. “Why’d you have to go and do that with this clerk here and everything?”

  Simmons shrugged his shoulders. “Listen, I got somethin’ comin’ down with a bro in Delta.” Simmons turned to me. “You write that shit good so our man get his medal.” He stood up, raised his fist in a casual belt-level salute, and walked down the aisle and out the door.

  I sat with Nitro and nursed my beer.

  Finally I said, “Would you mind telling me what’s going on here?”

  “Nothing, really.” He looked down the aisle and then leaned in toward me. “After Ray dragged the woman back to the ditch and we patched her up, we were on our knees watching the choppers take out the hooches. Mini-gun fire. Rockets. All that good shit. And all of a sudden Ray fell on his face. Just like that. Fell over and laid there. Scared the shit out of me. I thought a sniper hit him. I yelled ‘Incoming! Incoming!’ and everybody flattened down in the ditch again. But when I rolled him over to look for a wound, he woke up.” Nitro grinned. “He’d fainted. Don’t make what he did any less amazing, but that’s what happened, and some of the guys won’t let him forget it.”

  ****

  Three weeks later I received in the courier’s satchel Raymond Landers’ Bronze Star for Valor. I was pleased. I double-checked the citation, inspected the medal, returned it to its presentation case and stacked it with the others.

  ****

  Monday, Apr. 21, 1969 - Cu Chi Base Camp

  Dear Janice:

  Guess what! I can call you on the phone!

  There’s a special phoning service at Long Binh that uses ham radio operators who work with the military so we can phone home from Vietnam. It’s called MARS (an acronym for Military Affiliate Radio System).

  The way it’s been described to me, I stand in line waiting my turn for an hour or two. Then I enter a plywood booth. I pick up a phone receiver and give the operator the phone number I want called. I wait two or three minutes. When I’m given the go-ahead, I talk for a short time and say “over.” That cues a technician to flip a switch that reverses the transmission from “send” to “receive.” After a five second delay I hear your reply and then you say “over” and wait five seconds to hear me talk again. Back and forth.

  I’ll tell you when I can get to Long Binh so you’ll be home when I call. I’ll work out time differences so I don’t call you in what for you would be the middle of the night.

  By the way, be thinking about where and when you’d like to meet me for R & R. I can spend one week in Thailand or Hong Kong or Australia or a few other places including Hawaii. The Army pays my travel expenses, but not yours. Hawaii is probably the best choice, unless we want to rack up a big debt.

  Love you, Andrew

  DE-DRUMMING

  “The other man is up there hacking drums,” Staff Sergeant Brogan growled at me, “and you meander in here like you’re going to a goddamned Sunday school picnic.”

  Sergeant Brogan is a human bulldog well-suited to managing men from every company in the 182nd Engineer Battalion on their one-night-a-month assignment in Alpha Company’s asphalt plant. His bald head is mounted on a thick neck. His bulging chest and beer belly are always covered with a sweat-stained T-shirt torn free of sleeves and streaked with tar and a week’s worth of grime. His upper arms are slabs of flesh that taper to massive forearms and pudgy hands and thick short fingers. A slick of sweat covers his pink scalp and hangs in droplets from black hair protruding from his arm pits.

  Brogan took down a clipboard from a hook on the outside of his aluminum shed. He looked at the name on my fatigues and ran his finger down the roster.

  “What company you from?”

  I looked around as I answered and tried to appear unconcerned. “Headquarters.”

  “That figures.” He checked off my name with a pencil tied by a dirty string to the clipboard. He glared at me with disdain and curiosity. “You one of those hotshots hung over from drinking beer and fucking that Delta Company prostitute all night?”

  “Driver had trouble with his jeep. Otherwise I’d have been here early.”

  “My ass.” Brogan slapped the clipboard back on the wall hook and turned and glared at me. “We got a lot of tar to melt tonight. You done this before?”

  I smiled at Brogan. “I’ve had the pleasure of your company on several occasions.”

  Brogan squinted at me with puzzled contempt. Then he let out a snort. “Get your smart ass up there and get to work.”

  I slung my M16 on my shoulder and climbed the corner ladder of the three-story, open-frame structure that supported the tar furnace and other machinery for making asphalt. When I reached the second floor, I stepped around and off the ladder onto tar-streaked wooden planks. I turned and looked at the equipment yard down below.

  Far to the left, three deuce-and-a-halfs bounced off a dirt road into the yard, their truck beds banging and gate chains jangling as they braked to a stop, one after the other, under the giant mixer. Sparkling black asphalt slid down the chute, smoking hot, into the oily bed of the truck first in line.

  At the far edge of the yard, a front-end loader scooped sand into a truck from a sparkling brown pile as big as a house. Resting next to it was an equally large pile of crushed rock. Off to the right, a forklift weaved between old tires and rusted truck parts toward a wall of fifty-five-gallon drums, neatly stacked four pallets high. In the field behind the wall of drums, a mountain of discarded barrels oozed pools of tar. A plume of black smoke from the tar furnace momentarily obscured my view of the yard’s blinding-white gravel and blistering-hot equipment.

  Then I noticed, underlying the sounds of roaring engines and clanking machinery, a relentless hissing, like a compressor hose but more throaty. It came from the gas burners in the tar furnace. My call to hard labor.

  “Hey, man, the work is over here.”

  I turned around, befuddled, waking from my reverie. I looked to see who yelled.

  He was a nineteen-year-old boy, short and stocky, with fuzz on his chin. His blond hair was pulled back in a stubby pony tail. He stood, legs spread, on top of the nearest of twenty fifty-five gallon drums wedged side-by-side. He held an ax resting on his right shoulder.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you how it’s going.” He swung the head of the ax down and propped it at his feet, and leaned on the handle as though it were a dancing cane. “It’s the hottest season of the year and I’m de-drumming tar with a guy who shows up late for the hottest part of the shift.”

  “Do much work yet?”

  “I hacked a few holes in this drum after Sergeant Nu
mb-Nuts got pushy. This ax ain’t worth shit. But don’t worry. I didn’t soak up your share of the gravy.”

  “Any drums in the furnace?”

  “Nope.” He dropped the ax and jumped to the floor. “Been waiting for you.”

  He hunkered down and lit a cigarette with a one-snap-flourish of his Zippo lighter and blew smoke in an upward stream from the side of his mouth. He looked up at me and nodded his head with a grimace on his face. Apparently I confirmed his worst expectations.

  I hung my cloth jungle hat, my rifle, my bandoleer of M16 magazines, and my web belt with three canteens of water on bolts protruding from a metal I-beam rising to the wooden planks of the third floor overhead. I turned and leaned my backside against a barrel and slid down to a squatting position facing my new companion.

  “I wish they’d start this de-drumming shift after sundown instead of in the middle of the afternoon,” I said. “This heat and humidity, and shoving 400-pound drums into that tar furnace, could kill us as easily as— ”

  My companion jabbed his finger toward the ladder I had just climbed. “Heads up,” he said in a loud whisper.

  We stood and turned just as Brogan stepped off the ladder onto our second floor platform. A green towel hung around his neck. He wiped his dripping face and bald head as he walked to where we were standing.

  “You two clowns need to get something very clear,” Brogan said, his hands pulling at the towel around his neck, “because if you don’t, we’re gonna have trouble.”

  “You got my attention,” my fellow de-drummer said. I nodded agreement.

  “Okay, here it is.” Brogan spread his legs like stanchions under his massive body. “If we don’t melt enough tar tonight, we won’t have enough asphalt for the paving crews in the morning. That fucks up the entire battalion, and Colonel Hackett will court-martial me for dereliction of duty. So if I come up here one more time and see an empty furnace without drums draining hot tar while you two are playing kissy-face, I’ll break your legs with a two-by-four and throw you off this scaffolding. That’ll be my excuse. Two clumsy fuck-ups fell and broke their legs. And if you don’t think I’ll do it, then keep your thumbs up your asses until I check on you again.” Brogan turned and walked heavily to the ladder. Floorboards groaned under his feet. He descended to the ground floor without a backward glance.

  I looked at my work companion and rolled my eyes in mock alarm over Brogan’s performance. “So what did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t. My name’s Waller. Derek Waller. You think maybe Sergeant Brogan’s a hard ass?”

  “I think maybe we should get to work. Want me to hack with that ax for a while?”

  “There’s another set of gloves on the ledge by the furnace.”

  I found the gloves and hiked myself up on the drums. Waller handed me the ax and backed off, standing a safe distance away.

  The ax handle was a solid metal bar welded to an ax head half its weight, making the ax unwieldy and slippery to swing. Several layers of black friction tape were wrapped at the handle’s end to prevent the ax from slinging out of our hands with every swing. A wooden handle, apparently, was too easily broken by men frustrated with opening steel drumheads with an ax.

  With my feet spread apart on two adjacent drums, I aimed the ax blade at the nearest end of the chopped line in the drumhead started by Waller. I swung hard, and the ax blade cut another inch in the ragged line along the steel rim. I swung again and again, repositioning my feet each time, building up accuracy and rhythm. The ax hit the rim several times, once springing out of my hands. Another time I overshot the end of the cut and the ax head wedged itself in the drum, two inches deep in tar. I pried out the ax, wiped it with a rag, and continued hacking until I’d hacked a jagged line half way around the barrel’s rim. Then I chopped three holes in the middle of the lid’s uncut side and tossed the ax on the lids of nearby barrels. The hacking was done.

  I jumped off the drums to the floor. Waller helped me tip the 400-pound barrel and balance it on its edge. I rolled it on its edge to the tar-sticky floor in front of the furnace and let the 400-pound barrel fall on its side, pivoting over a wooden fence post Waller had positioned on the floor near the base of the drum. Stepping to the uncut end of the barrel elevated by the post, we stooped shoulder-to-shoulder and lifted up on the drum’s bottom lip. Grunting involuntarily, we heaved the barrel up most of the way—Waller kicked the wooden post to one side—and switched from lifting to pushing during the split second when inertia held the barrel suspended on its edge. The barrel dropped solidly, no rocking, with the hacked end down.

  Speed and efficiency were now crucial, since tar in the drum would sag out the hacked lid within minutes and glue the drum to the floor. We rocked and slid the drum across five feet of tar-blackened floor to the open mouth of the furnace.

  The mouth of the furnace belched flame from the burners and smoke from residue of months of melting tar. The black smoke was oily and thick with greasy soot. Inhaling it was like inhaling glue or gasoline fumes. Many men hallucinated during their night of de-drumming. We all tasted the oily slick at the back of our throats and coughed up brown-streaked phlegm.

  The furnace accommodated two drums at a time, the mouth being as wide and high as the front of a jeep. The floor of the furnace mouth was an iron grating on which we slid the upended drums the remaining few feet by sitting on the floor and pushing the drums with our boots, the gas-fed burners throwing a yellow glow on our boots and ankles. Tar from the drums would melt in thirty minutes and drain through the grating into a heated vat.

  Four hours later, the sun sinking on the horizon, we had passed Brogan’s inspection several times. We felt safe. We took a break after working extra hard and loading the furnace and rolling two lid-hacked drums next in line.

  I had cottonmouth. Everything shimmered with a luminescent glow around the edges. My head was a balloon floating above the hands and legs that moved the drums. I drank half a canteen of warm water. I chewed two salt tablets from a bottle near the furnace and took another slug of water and collapsed to the floor with my back against a drum. My fatigues were soaked with perspiration and black with tar. I wiped away the sweat dripping from my face and hair. I looked at Waller. He was sitting on the floor opposite me, his head tilted back, resting against a drum. His moist white face looked like a grime-smeared ball of Ivory soap gone soft in a tub of bath water.

  “Makes me appreciate my 290 earthmover,” Waller said.

  I massaged my sore arms. “You operate heavy equipment for Bravo Company?”

  “Best job I ever had. I love it.” He was silent a few moments, his head resting against the drum. “Aren’t you some kind of clerk? I think I saw you in a ceremony handing medals to the colonel.”

  “I do what they tell me to do. Mostly typing in the S-1 office. Where you from?”

  “Ohio. My dad works in a steel mill at Steubenville. My older brother works in a coal mine.” He tipped his head forward and looked at me. “They work like this all the time. Hell, I’d kill myself. I’m gonna get me a job with the state highway department operating a 290 earthmover. Then I’ll buy a house with a big yard.”

  “You married?”

  “Draft notice came three weeks after the ceremony.” Waller looked at me from the corners of his eyes without moving his head. “How ’bout you?”

  “I was married two years, then got drafted.”

  We sat without talking for a few minutes. Then I asked, “Did you hear anything about a prostitute in Delta Company last night? I was over there talking to a guy about an award recommendation we’re submitting for him and on my way back I saw men lined up behind a canvas-covered truck. Must have been at least ten of them.”

  “Heard about it.”

  “Somebody told me she was fourteen years old.”

  “How’d you know she was fourteen?”

  “I don’t. That’s what I was told.”

  “We better get back to work,” Waller said. “Those drums mu
st be drained by now.”

  We got up, stiff and aching. We pulled the empty drums out of the furnace with a three-foot metal hook snagged on their bottom edge. We flipped them on their sides and rolled them, still smoking, off the edge of the second floor. They fell, booming and banging, into a disposal truck down below. We upended the two hacked drums next in line and shoved them in the furnace.

  Four or five hours after night fall, exhausted from the work and inebriated from inhaling tar and oil fumes, I looked out at the yard from our well-lit, second-floor work platform and stared in amazement. Heavy clouds had covered the night sky and descended into our work yard as black-mist darkness. I could feel the moist cloud as it nestled against the open framework of the second floor. The mist would drift several feet into our work area where bright lights turned it smoky-white before it dissipated into the air. But the true marvels lay out in the yard.

  Out in the yard’s darkness sat huge yellow cones fifteen feet high and, at their base, at least twenty feet in diameter. The tips of the cones were capped with hooded bug bulbs hanging by electric wires from long wooden arms attached to telephone poles. But none of that structure was visible except the very bottom of each pole. Yellow light from the hoods, shinning down in the fog, made each cone glow like ectoplasm from the spirit world.

  That surreal image launched me into a world of dreams where heat and exhaustion and fumes from the furnace loosed phantoms as real as objects I touched everyday.

  I was hallucinating, and I knew I was hallucinating because I kept hacking and rolling drums, but I saw a fourteen-year-old girl in front of me. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her. I could have touched her if I’d wanted to, but I was hacking drums.

  She was sweeping a path to her thatched-roof hooch. It was early morning. The air was humid, but fresh with the earthy smell of dew on the ground. The sun shone yellow on the tops of nearby trees.