Drafted

by Andrew Atherton

  So a legal investigator was assigned the task of finding out how the boy’s case should be handled to assure our Army doctors they would not be embroiled in additional violations of our host country’s laws and religious beliefs. In the meantime, the boy’s body was stuck in a freezer somewhere in Long Binh until matters could be clarified.

  Several weeks later, Jimmy confessed to his crime. Once he confessed, the prosecution didn’t need the bullets from the boy’s body, and the body could be returned to the father. But when we sent men looking for Mr. Mai, we discovered he had quit his job at the base camp and nobody knew where he was. He apparently moved away from Lai Khe.

  Case closed.

  What happened to the boy’s body? What happened to Jimmy Beamis? I don’t know. I assume the boy was buried and Jimmy went to jail. But quite honestly, they've ceased to be topics of conversation around the office and nobody has made an effort to follow up on the story because it isn't unique. Every week battalion headquarters receives reports of civilian injuries we cause while paving the roads, or reports of medics treating civilians for burns and bombing and ambush injuries our combat units inflict.

  I showed a bit more interest, initially, because I’d met and talked to Jimmy several times, and I prided myself on being a little more sensitive than the average engineer or grunt in the field. So I tried to go the extra mile and be humane, but I got turned off real quick.

  I walked out to the jeep to say good-bye to Jimmy, but he wouldn’t talk to me. I even bowed to Mr. Mai when he left our headquarters office after his final visit, but three bows for the adjutant that day was apparently enough bowing for Mr. Mai and he didn’t bow back.

  So I said, “Fuck it.”

  I had work to do. I was the awards clerk. I was the writer of articles Major Roberts reviewed for negative attitudes before being approved for the battalion newspaper. And sometimes I was a courier of important documents between base camps.

  We all say “Fuck it,” at least all the soldiers I know. We get drunk or stoned so we don't feel the cynicism cutting away at our hearts in a war without moral, political, or military direction.

  We know what's happening to us. The veil is being pulled aside. We're seeing our country and our world as they really are. Without mercy, without justice, without compassion. Evil and corruption, we've realized, are systematic and monolithic.

  We can't cope with it. We've risked our lives and gone to war, and then we stay at war after we see the sham it is. We don't want to disobey orders and be thrown in jail, so we acquiesce. We do all this for the approval of our loved ones and our superiors so we can return to the Land of the Giant PX and resume our lives as contented consumers.

  “No evil happens to a good man,” Socrates said. But we are not good men. We are the men we’ve read about in history books.

  The bottom line is this. Jimmy Beamis may have pulled the trigger, but he was not the only one who killed that eleven-year-old boy and ushered that boy’s father into a lower level of hell.

  ****

  Friday, Feb 6, 1970 - Lai Khe Base Camp

  Dear Janice:

  I took your advice and met with Chaplain Sebastian yesterday.

  I asked him how he got his name. He said his father, a career soldier, was killed in WWII at Anzio, Italy. In honor of his father, the Captain took the name Sebastian at his ordination and joined the Army’s Chaplaincy Corp. Turns out St. Sebastian is the patron saint of soldiers and most often depicted tied to a post and shot with arrows.

  I asked Father Sebastian how a man can napalm a village or riddle other human beings with shrapnel and bullets—or arrows for that matter—and not be doing something fundamentally evil.

  “God sometimes makes allowances for what ordinarily would be mortal sin,” he said. “In times of war against an unholy enemy, God sanctions violence if there’s no other way of defeating them. But since men don’t retain love for the enemy while doing the terrible things they do in war, they must confess the resulting sin—what you’ve identified as evil—that arises in their hearts.”

  Live and learn. If you retain love for the villagers while napalming them you’ll be okay. The good chaplain is a brainwashed idiot.

  Love, Andrew

  SNAPSHOT

  Sergeant George Garrett has a long face on a big head. His face has the hollows and ridges of a character actor whose larger-than-life features can be seen from anywhere in the auditorium. The rest of him is thin and taunt with corded muscle, as if his body is a stalk for showing off his head. When you first see Sergeant Garrett you keep looking at him to convince yourself he’s real, that a person can look like that. He’s not ugly. He’s unique. Everybody does a double-take when they first see Garrett.

  Personality-wise, he’s edgy and aggressive. I’m not sure why. But the way people look at him, as though he just stepped out of a cartoon, triggers his aggression. That much I know for sure.

  One time in the mess hall I saw Garrett catch a newbie looking at him a moment too long. Garrett walked across the mess hall, pushed that face of his up close to the kid, and said, “You got a problem?”

  Garrett gets into fights all the time. One night he attacked three battalion headquarters clerks at the EM Club. Off-duty sergeants and officers aren’t supposed to socialize with the lower ranks, and that includes going to the EM Club, so Garrett had no business being there. But he likes drinking with his fellow medics, all SPC-4s—which is one rank lower than Garrett’s—and nobody wants to tell Garrett he ought to leave the bar, especially after he’s had a few.

  I suppose you could say it was the clerks’ fault he attacked them. All three of them were drunk, swaying arm-in-arm between the tables, singing the 1966 hit song by the Seekers, “Hey there, Georgy Girl.” Everybody was laughing and looking at Garrett. He sat fuming a minute or two and jumped up and beat all three of them bloody before anybody had a chance to stop him. His fellow medics pulled him off the only guy left standing.

  The medics gave the clerks first aide. Two clerks needed bandages for their cuts and bruises. The third guy got a nose splint, but it turned out his nose wasn’t broken, only gushing blood.

  Nobody reported Garrett. Maybe it was because Garrett was an outstanding medic and we couldn’t get an equally good replacement. Or maybe it’s because everybody was afraid of him.

  So I sat up straight when Garrett walked over to my mess hall table one evening, set his meal tray opposite mine, sat down, and asked, “What are you reading?”

  I often saw Garrett in morning formations and in the mess hall, but we’d never said a word to each other. I hung around S-1 and personnel clerks, and Garrett hung around medics and drinking buddies at the EM Club.

  I had spent my day in the S-1 office doing my usual routine, and at six o’clock, I was off duty. Rather than head for the mess hall with the other men, I hurried back to my hooch—as I always do—and then out to the wash house for a shower before the water tank was drained. That usually makes me late for dinner, but I enjoy the luxury of being freshly showered and eating my dinner at a table by myself in a quiet, nearly empty mess hall, while reading a book.

  While I was eating, Garrett and three other medics had entered the mess hall and walked through the serving line moments before it closed. They sat down two tables away from me. From the corner of my eye, I saw Garrett checking me out, squinting with his large, blue, cartoon eyes. Suddenly he picked up his tray and walked over to my table.

  “It’s a novel by John Updike called Couples,” I said in reply to Garrett’s question. I creased a corner and closed the book.

  “You like that stuff, huh?” He pointed at my book. “Lots of hot sex?” Garrett grinned and made a loose fist with his right hand and bobbed it up and down over his plate of biscuits and chipped beef gravy.

  “Well, yes,” I chuckled to be agreeable, “but Updike doesn’t get too graphic in his sex scenes.”

  Sergeant Garrett nodded his head and shrugged his shoulders. He said nothing for a moment. Then
, accusing more than asking, “You’re the guy who puts out the battalion newspaper. Right?”

  “It’s a poor excuse for a newspaper, but it’s my best shot given the time I have. Aren’t you a medic? Where you from?”

  “California. Near L.A.”

  “You enlisted?” I set the salt shaker upright from where I’d laid it on its side to prop up my book.

  “Yep. Swallowed six years so I’d get the schooling.”

  “Making a career of it?” I brushed salt off the green plastic tablecloth.

  “This is it.” Garrett raised his eyebrows in a half-apologetic, what-you-see-is-what-you-get look, and held his arms out to include everything around us.

  “Good for you,” was the most I could squeeze out.

  “That’s something you should write about in your newspaper.”

  “What’s that? Do an article on you or on lifers in general?”

  “No, not me!” Garrett grinned and bowed his head almost in his food. “Do an article on medics. Write about one of our MEDCAPS. We’ve been going out to villages near the base camp doing minor injuries, a little dental, stuff like that. We just got back from a MEDCAP at Dong Nho Village.”

  “What does MEDCAP stand for?”

  “Medical Civic Action Program. It’s the Army’s way of maintaining friendly villages.”

  I finished off my last bite of rubbery red Jell-O. “Who goes on a MEDCAP?”

  “Captain Newlin—he’s the battalion surgeon—myself, and the three medics at the table over there.” Garrett turned and gestured with his thumb at the other men. “That’s Calloway, Jablonski, and Tony Alvino.” Garrett turned back to me. “The Vietnamese translator, Phong, goes out, too. And three or four guards in case of trouble.”

  Garrett spooned up some chipped beef gravy. I pushed the bottle of Tabasco sauce to his side of the table.

  “Thanks.” Garrett unscrewed the little cap on the standard-issue, extra-large bottle, and squirted hot sauce on every square inch of his biscuits and gravy. Then he covered his boiled beans with it, too.

  “When are you going out next?” I asked.

  “Two days from now. Heading back to Dong Nho. Five miles east of here. Captain Newlin says a hundred and fifty villagers live out there, but I’d guess more if the men stayed around.”

  “Who gives the okay for me going out with you guys?”

  “Captain Newlin in the dispensary. We leave early Wednesday morning, soon as the mine-sweeps clear the roads.”

  “I’ll have to ask Kellaway about this, but that shouldn’t be a problem. It’s actually a great idea.”

  “Kellaway?”

  “He’s the battalion adjutant. My immediate superior.” I pulled a pen from my pocket and opened the back cover of Updike’s novel. “Long as we’re sitting here, you mind if I ask a few questions?” At the top of the inside back cover I wrote, Sergeant George Garrett. I looked up.

  Garrett glanced over both shoulders, hunched his back, and squinted at me.

  I leaned my head to one side. “You don’t have to tell the truth, you know.”

  Garrett broke into a big smile, as if posing for a snapshot.

  “Your dad in the Army?” I asked.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Guessed. What’d he do?”

  “He was a cook. Stationed all over the world.”

  “Still in the Army?”

  “Hell no. Retired from life.” Garrett smirked.

  I nodded, without smiling, and wrote, Father—Army cook all over—dead.

  “No, seriously,” Garrett waved away the lame attempt at humor. “He retired and moved near L.A. Bought a little restaurant with his savings and married the waitress.” Garrett slid his meal tray, the food half eaten, to the side of the table.

  “Waitress your mom?”

  Garrett nodded.

  “How’d your dad do with the restaurant?”

  “Screwed it up. Too much booze. Couple years later he died. Liver blew out. I was seven. Left Ma with all the bills. Dad’s pension didn’t cover them.”

  I closed my book and looked at Garrett. “Why’d you enlist? And why become a medic?”

  “I thought about college, but I didn’t have the money. And Ma needed help with the bills.” George rolled his eyes and shrugged his shoulders. “So I enlisted and went for something people depend on, something—I don’t know—something that makes a difference if you know what you’re doing.”

  I reopened the back cover of Updike’s novel and wrote down the quote. I looked up at George. “I can use that in the article.”

  ****

  “This is one of the things we’re doing over here that can make you proud,” Garrett yelled at me over the wind and noise in the back of the jeep. Tony Alvino was driving us up Highway 13 toward Dong Nho Village. Captain Newlin was riding shotgun.

  We squinted behind our sunglasses in the fierce morning sunlight glittering off the asphalt road and rice paddy water flashing by on either side. We had wedged our cloth jungle hats under our thighs so the wind wouldn’t blow them away. The rushing air dried the sweat from our hair and faces, and gave us the illusion of a delightfully cool morning that was actually humid and hotter than hell.

  Medics Calloway and Jablonski rode with translator Phong in a medic’s van behind us. And behind the van, four guards filled a jeep that had a M60 machine gun mounted on a post between the seats.

  We all had M16s and bandoleers of ammunition, but nobody except the guards wore a flack jacket. We were visiting a friendly village in a friendly sector with no known enemy activity for months.

  From my seat behind the driver, I studied Doctor Newlin. I tried taking a profile shot with my new 35mm camera I bought second-hand from another GI. The background light was intense, so I snapped the picture with the meter needle tight against the top of the viewfinder so Newlin’s face wouldn’t be underexposed.

  Newlin was about thirty-four years old. Soft white skin. Black plastic glasses with clip-on shades. Nose and upper cheeks burnt pink. Forearms pink, too. His black hair was long enough to comb straight back, and was shiny with hairdressing. Garrett told me Newlin would soon DEROS and open a general practice somewhere in Ohio.

  I leaned forward and yelled at Newlin, “You like military life?”

  He turned in his seat, looked at me a moment through his clip-on shades, and yelled, “I’m proud of my men and I’m pleased you’re doing a story about them.”

  I was pleased, too. It gave me the chance to observe Sergeant Garrett doing something I admired. Ministering to the sick and wounded was a noble thing to do, and seeing Garrett in action might improve my negative attitude toward lifers.

  Before I was drafted I hadn’t thought much about career soldiers. A soldier was a soldier. But during and after basic training, I began thinking of lifers as slow-witted goons with polished boots and starched pants who needed someone to tell them what to do. I knew that was unfair and prejudicial. I knew I was wrong to prejudge any man. But it was hard not to prejudge lifers when so many of them revealed themselves to be rule-bound, insensitive thugs.

  Lifers weren’t born that way. The Army trains them that way. Its suppression of questioning, its reliance on authority, its training in violence, and its encouragement of aggression accustom men to think first with their fists and later, if at all, with their brains. This is all summed up in traditional Army advice to new recruits. Don’t ask questions. Don’t disagree with superiors. Don’t show pain. Don’t show sensitivity. Do what you’re told. Be tough and take pride in the arts of killing and destruction.

  There are exceptions, of course, but the majority of lifers I’ve encountered fit this description. Maybe it’s an occupational hazard of being a trained warrior. I don’t know. But it can sure make them unpleasant and difficult to be around.

  Our caravan of two jeeps and a van drove the last mile to Dong Nho Village on a red dirt road. We arrived at the marketplace in a cloud of red dust.

  The marketplace was a roof
on posts over a concrete slab similar to a park pavilion. It was empty, the concrete swept clean.

  Thatched huts surrounded the pavilion, but we saw no villagers. Not one. We knew they were nearby, because the pathways to the huts were freshly swept and the roof thatching was in good condition, but for now, they were hiding.

  I offered to help the medics unload the van, but Garrett told me I’d be in the way. So I stepped back and watched, and took notes on my “reporter’s pocket pad.”

  The medics carted out wooden chests, leather satchels, collapsible tables, and metal folding chairs. Guards Frazer and Kopecky divided the marketplace in half by stretching a rope waist high across the pavilion and tying it to opposing posts. Then they subdivided our end of the marketplace by looping rope between plastic stanchions they pulled out of the van and positioned on the floor.

  While the medics were setting up their equipment, villagers started coming out of the huts and gathering around our end of the marketplace. Most were women and children, but a few disabled men and old papa-sans hobbled out, too.

  Within fifteen minutes our end of the marketplace was transformed into a diagnostic area, a treatment area, and a dentist’s office. By then, sixty or seventy villagers were watching us, most of them wearing rice paddy hats and standing in the hot tropical sun out beyond the shade-line of the tin roof. Captain Newlin, Tony Alvino, and interpreter Phong were the diagnostic and pharmacy team. Garrett and Jablonski were the treatment team, and Calloway was the dentist.

  Each of three guards stationed himself, with a M16, at a different corner of the marketplace. The fourth guard sat in the jeep behind the mounted M60 machine gun.

  I took a few pictures of the assembled villagers with my camera. But since I couldn’t include my photos in our mimeographed newspaper, I let the camera hang from my neck and concentrated on taking notes.