Drafted

by Andrew Atherton

  “And that is?”

  “You don’t see it? He violates his own humanity by mindlessly killing other human beings.”

  “And that makes him an asshole? That’s not the connotation of ‘asshole’ used around here. Besides, it’s not even relevant to—”

  “Will you let me finish?” Jerry put his hands on his hips and raised his eyebrows like a peevish school teacher. “If you don’t mind?”

  “Point taken.” I crossed my arms and waited.

  Jerry resumed in a tone of exasperation, but he quickly focused his full attention on his exposition. “As I was saying, when the truth dawns on our soldier that he’s killing people without good reason for doing so—except for fear of incarceration by his own government—his compassion and concern for others drains away. Thus, a soldier in Vietnam who foolishly causes his own death has destroyed the one thing his fellow soldiers know he values above everything else, including women and children and moral principle of any kind.”

  “Himself!”

  “Exactly. So they judge him a dumb fuck.”

  “Which is loosely synonymous with ‘asshole’.”

  “Indeed.” Jerry looked at me as pleased as if he were Plato parsing the meaning of justice.

  We began a leisurely walk down the path toward our hooches.

  Jerry suddenly turned and asked, “You ever smoke anything other than pipe tobacco?”

  “Cigarettes, occasionally. But I love my briars. And Hayward Pipe Tobacco. Nothing fancy. Basic Virginias and burleys laced with latakia and perique. A good smoke.”

  Jerry grinned as though I said something funny. He swaggered and swung his shoulders as we walked, which was uncharacteristic of Jerry.

  “Okay, what’s so funny?” I asked.

  “You wanna get out of here for a few hours? Fly away on R & R?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll bet you never did any drugs when you were back in the States, did you?”

  “I never had the opportunity. Nor the desire.” I paused and considered what I’d just said. “No, that’s not entirely true. I was intrigued by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and his other book Heaven and Hell. And I read a few essays by Timothy Leary. Oh, and I read Confessions of an Opium Eater. But nobody I knew used drugs, so far as I know.”

  “Would you smoke a little grass if you had the chance?”

  “I’d give it a try. But I’d worry about having a bad trip.”

  “People don’t have bad trips smoking grass. LSD or mushrooms, but not grass. Of course, some people don’t like being high. But you enjoy booze, so…?” He shrugged his shoulders and looked at me.

  “You’ve smoked pot?”

  “A few times.” Jerry smiled.

  “And you haven’t had bad experiences with it?”

  “Not once.”

  “Well, maybe someday I’ll give it a try.” I lit my pipe with my Zippo lighter.

  “Would you like to give it a try right now?”

  I turned and looked at him. He was grinning at me. “You have pot?” I was incredulous. Stunned. “Here? In Vietnam? On a military base camp?”

  “Better than anything I smoked in the States.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “The Vietnamese sell it at fruit juice stands along the road. Men on the paving crew buy it any day of the week. A couple truck drivers I know occasionally buy for me. You can buy a Kools pack of ready rolls for two dollars.”

  “What’s a ready-roll?”

  “It’s a joint. You get twenty of them in a Kools pack. The Vietnamese roll an ordinary Kools cigarette between their hands until the tobacco falls out. That leaves a paper tube with a filter at one end. Then they fill the tube with finely cleaned pot and twist the end shut. You wanna try one?”

  “What’s it like being high?”

  “You can hear counterpoint in Mozart you haven’t heard before.” Jerry raised and lowered his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

  “You listen to Mozart stoned?”

  “When you’re stoned you hear Mozart the way musicians hear Mozart. Same with colors. Seeing a landscape while stoned is seeing it like Van Gogh saw it.”

  “Sounds incredible.”

  “It could take you away from this place for a while.”

  “I’m all for that.” I knocked out my pipe. “Let’s give it a try.”

  We walked beyond the hooches to a dirt road between two heavy equipment yards. Jerry lit one of the ready rolls, inhaled, held the smoke for a moment, and released it with a cough.

  “That’s the way you smoke a joint,” Jerry said. “You take a deep drag and hold it as long as you can.”

  Jerry handed me the joint. I sucked down a chest full of smoke and held it for a few moments but expelled it in a spasm of coughing. Jerry chuckled. We continued walking down the dirt road.

  “Take another hit and pass it back to me,” Jerry said. “Always keep a joint moving. Don’t jones the joint. It’s considered bad manners.”

  I took another drag. This time I held the smoke down and handed the joint back to Jerry. I tried speaking while expelling the least amount of smoke possible. “Sorry,” I wheezed. “I didn’t know I was jonesing anything.” I watched Jerry take a deep inhalation and wave the joint under his nose, sniffing up more smoke. I exhaled just as Jerry passed the joint back to me. I took a deep hit and wheezed, “You sure this stuff isn’t ground up pine cone?” A curl of smoke drifted from my mouth.

  Jerry laughed and choked on his smoke. “That’s the Kools filter you’re tasting.”

  We passed the joint back and forth and ambled along the road between equipment yards.

  I looked around and checked inside myself, trying to detect the effects of the smoke. Vision. Thoughts. Perception of the environment.

  We were walking on a deeply rutted dirt road. The full moon was golden and large on the horizon ahead of us. Trucks and bulldozers and earthmovers rested heavily in yards adjacent to the road, their upper edges glowing yellow from the moon.

  Suddenly Jerry waived hello to a guard who appeared in the middle of the yard on our right. I quickly pulled the joint from my mouth and tried to hide it in my palm, but Jerry said, “Don’t worry, he’s cool.”

  We continued walking and sharing the smoke.

  “So when does this stuff start working? Maybe it isn’t any good.”

  Jerry laughed. “Trust me, this is good reefer. Here, finish this. I’ll fire up another one.”

  We stopped while he fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out the Kools pack and tapped out another ready-roll. I took a hit on the joint he told me to finish and flipped the filtered end to the side of the road. Jerry handed me number two. We passed it back and forth, and inhaled deeply each time it returned to us.

  “Notice anything yet?” Jerry asked.

  I did another internal check of my thoughts and sensations. The back of my head felt peculiar. And there was something faintly ominous about the black shadows along the road. I wasn’t worried about yard guards or VC. It was something else. Something lurking behind the scenes. Maybe it was just my head. I felt light-headed.

  “I’m a little woozy from sucking in so much smoke,” I said. But now my voice sounded strange to me. “It’s like I’m listening to somebody else. Is that the marijuana kicking in?”

  “Could be.” Jerry sounded pleased with himself.

  “Oh, wow,” I exclaimed. “The ruts in the road look like mountains. It’s like we’re ten miles tall and walking over mountains!”

  I started taking giant steps to clear the tops of the mountains.

  Then I looked ahead of us at the moon on the horizon we were walking toward. “Oh my God. I feel like I’m flying toward the moon. This is incredible.”

  Jerry said, “Hey, look at me.”

  I stopped taking giant steps and began turning toward Jerry. As I turned—feeling a little unsteady—I looked at the dirt road directly in front of my boots.

  My attention locke
d on a palm-size flat white stone. It was pressed level with the ground at the bottom of a tire rut. It twinkled with reflected moonlight.

  That rock astounded me. It was inexplicable. Not just as a rock, but its very existence, its physical stuff. Why does this rock exist rather than not exist? Why does anything exist? Do causal links from everything else create and sustain this rock? Wouldn't that make this rock the center of the world? Or is each thing the center?

  I was sure no one had ever noticed this rock before—no one had really seen it—until now. It had existed unobserved for thousands and thousands, maybe millions of years. Without reason, without explanation. A lump of opaque beingness that defies rational understanding.

  I completed my turn toward Jerry.

  His face looked like a grinning mask.

  Jerry laid his open right hand on his mask and pulled his hand straight out while bringing his fingers together. It looked like he pulled his rubbery nose and face to a point. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I bent double laughing.

  “Any of that joint left?” Jerry asked.

  “Ah, no. Better light another one.”

  “Maybe not. I’ll have to lead you back to the hooch as it is. Let’s head on back.”

  Jerry led us back to a hooch. I wasn’t sure which hooch it was, but it wasn’t mine and it wasn’t Jerry’s.

  When we walked through the door of the hooch, white spikes sticking out from overhead light bulbs stabbed me in the eyes. I ducked my head and shielded my face with both hands. Moments later, when I cautiously lifted my hands and looked up, the spikes had disintegrated into blue smoke.

  I looked around in the smoke and I was amazed to see a translucent surface inches from my face. It was like a stained glass window constructed of brilliantly colored miniature mosaics. Little army cots. Tiny lawn chairs. Footlockers. Miniature men in T-shirts and fatigues. Each mosaic was colored in glowing yellows, greens, browns, and grays. Some moved and some stood still, but they all fit neatly against each other with razor-sharp precision in a flat, two-dimensional composition. I was stunned by the picture’s crisp artistry. With great pleasure, as if in an art museum, I locked my attention on one mosaic after another. If I moved my eyes too quickly, the images snapped across my visual field like slides in a projector.

  And then, out of nowhere, I heard a woman in cowboy boots in a field of sagebrush singing over a wailing, moaning, electric guitar that made outrageous parody of her stilted delivery and sing-song lyrics of Patsy Cline's “Walking After Midnight.” I chuckled at the delicious send-up of country-western music.

  Then I saw the flat, distorted faces of four or five men staring at us as if we were freaks in a county fair. I knew my face was distorted, too, just like theirs, so I grinned at them to acknowledge our shared condition.

  “Here come a couple more heads,” somebody yelled. The voice was like a slap in the face. It swatted away my pretense of normality. I was exposed. Everything was moving in slow motion. I was teetering, unsteady, in front of these men. I turned to look at Jerry for how I should react. But Jerry was flat as a pancake. No wonder they knew we were stoned.

  I followed Jerry to a cluster of five men sitting on the floor around an electric hot plate. A teapot was on the hot plate. Each man had a porcelain teacup.

  Across the hooch, in a corner, men were drinking beer and playing cards. One man had a bottle of Jim Beam. “Fucking dope heads,” one of them yelled. They pulled at their ears and stuck out their tongues and wagged their heads with wide-open eyes. Their hostility hit me like a physical assault. They were dangerous men.

  “They’re juicers,” Jerry said quietly. “Stay out of their way and they won’t hurt you.”

  “Hey, Jerry,” one of the juicers called, “Come over here. I got a joint you guys can suck on.” All the men in the corner laughed, but the men around the teapot did not laugh. Two of them nodded their heads and smiled. Jerry waved at the juicers. Then he turned his attention to the tea drinkers.

  “You guys have extra tea?”

  “Sure. Always room for two more.” The man closest to the teapot waved his arm for us to sit down and join them. Several men moved over and made space for Jerry and me. We sat cross-legged on a thin straw mat that covered the concrete floor between the cots.

  Somebody handed me a tiny porcelain cup without a handle. Another man picked up the pot and poured tea in my cup. His face was kind, but serious. Beads of red, yellow, and green sparkled with exotic beauty around his neck.

  I moved my gaze from the colored beads and looked to my left. Two men nodded at me and smiled knowingly from behind mirrored aviator sunglasses. They looked like cops.

  I waited for instructions.

  “You ever had jasmine tea?”

  Jerry’s question, whispered in my ear, seemed to come from inside my head. I answered No in my mind.

  I looked down and saw tiny purple flowers floating in my tea.

  “Put your nose to the cup and smell the tea,” the voice whispered.

  I did as the voice suggested.

  An essence of lavender and scented silk garments of oriental women permeated every cell of my body.

  “This is beautiful,” I whispered. “Lovely.”

  Waves of water distorted my vision and I feared I was drowning in jasmine tea. I looked up, out of the cup, and I saw we were all drowning in jasmine tea.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “It’s all so beautiful.”

  ****

  Sunday, May 18, 1969 - Cu Chi Base Camp

  Dear Janice:

  Glad to hear your birthday presents arrived in good condition. I was a bit worried about the china being damaged. I’m happy you’re pleased with it all.

  Thanks for asking about my story writing. I’ve been taking notes, making outlines, writing rough drafts. But writing is in competition with my off-hours reading and the nights I return to the office to finish typing jobs I don’t get done during the day.

  Yesterday I went on a road trip in a jeep with Chaplain O’Donnell. Just the two of us. He wanted to visit a number of firebases and conduct religious services for the men, and he asked me if I’d like to come along and write an article about it. He said the roads we’d be driving were safe.

  Chaplain O’Donnell is a nice guy. He’s about thirty-eight. Warm brown eyes. Easy smile. But he’s convinced our war in Vietnam is sanctioned by God because we’re fighting Godless communism. I asked him which method of killing Jesus would use. O’Donnell just smiled.

  Love, Andrew

  Saturday, May 31, 1969 - Cu Chi Base Camp

  Dear Janice:

  It was wonderful talking with you on the MARS hook-up.

  But I didn’t like having short-wave operators listening to us. And waiting five seconds to hear each other’s replies made conversation stilted and less personal than I thought it would be.

  If it’s okay with you, I’d rather not do the MARS thing again. I love hearing your voice, but not under those conditions. I’d rather get more Tabu perfumed letters with lipstick smooches on them.

  Captain Davis of Alpha Company is the guy I mentioned who took me to Long Binh with him so I could phone you. He had to attend an asphalt conference.

  I wrote a short piece for the paper about “Talking on MARS” and another piece about “Asphalt vs. Concrete” from info Captain Davis gave me.

  Love, Andrew

  PERILOUS FOUNDATIONS

  Three months reporting and writing for the battalion newspaper and it went straight to my head. I started seeing myself as a reporter of facts. A digger for truth. An explainer of issues. A journalist. So I did a story on Buddhism after hearing an NCO call one of the most prevalent religions of Vietnam “a bunch of bullshit.” Then I did an editorial on the protestors back home. I said they aren’t idiots or evil, just misguided.

  The earlier stories came in under the radar, but the protestor story caught Colonel Hackett’s attention. He called me in, cautioned me, and reminded me on which side my bread wa
s being buttered.

  But that warning didn’t hold me back when I thought I was on the road to the biggest story of my Vietnam tour as editor of The Road Paver. Even at its best, The Road Paver is a dozen pages of pure brainwash, but this story would be different. It would be real news. Good God, it would be The Truth. And Hackett couldn’t touch me when Stars and Stripes picked up the story and full national attention was on my side. Why I thought that puzzles me even now. How could I be so blind?

  Well, my big news story, with the “help” of Major Roberts, turned into a two-sentence news release that was rejected by Stars and Stripes for having no merit whatsoever. That dashed my hope of being a “true journalist” then and there.

  So to hell with journalistic integrity. Since Major Roberts robbed me of any chance at a Pulitzer, this time I'll tell the story the way I want. I'll use the techniques of a new kind of journalism and describe the scenes and events I've heard about from reliable witnesses, but I'll describe them as though I saw and heard them myself, like an unseen fly on the wall. If Truman Capote can do it In Cold Blood, then I can do it, too. Here goes.

  ****

  “Hey, Marko, wake up,” Dawson called.

  “Huh? What?” Markowski lifted his sweaty head off his damp pillow. “Wadda ya want?” He looked around. Mid-morning sunlight filtered through window slats and mosquito screening, and colored everything in the hooch muddy yellow.

  “You hear anything?” Dawson asked. “Anything strange?” Dawson sat on the edge of his cot at the far end of the hooch. His beer belly hung over his boxer shorts. His pink skin dripped with perspiration.

  “Do I hear anything?” Markowski raised up on one elbow. “What the hell do you mean, do I hear anything? I hear you, you asshole. Why’d you wake me up?” He plopped his head back on the damp pillow.