by W.H. Harrod
The diner parking lot looked full the following Monday morning. Upon my arrival, I overheard the customary sounds of chatter coming from the busy dining area. All the usual faces looked to be present along with a few new ones. From her lookout spot behind the counter, I saw Flo holding a half empty coffee pot while observing every single movement made by each customer. Whether they came, went, needed a refill, or advice, Flo stayed on top of it. Junior Junior stood at the front register ready to take the money or, if needed, amble outside to fill up a gas tank. All credit card payments required him to come back inside, as he was too cheap install a pay-at-the-pump option. Junior Junior operated an independent station, and no one told him he had to bring his pumps into the twenty-first century.
Finding the diner firing on all cylinders and not requiring my immediate attention to any of a hundred potential problems gave me a sense of relief. Other matters clamored for my attention this morning. I’d spent most of the previous night reading, then rereading, and afterwards making notes on the new documents presented to me by the Mayor. What I now hid away in my second story redoubt amounted to nothing less than a huge pile of potentially incriminating evidence relating to, what I suspected to be, the illegal activities of the Buford brothers whom I noticed were not in attendance at the diner. Councilman Buford stopped in occasionally, but Big Bob came in daily. His unexpected absence brought to the surface my penchant for paranoid thinking. Maybe he is on to us. Maybe he— Oh, shut up! How could he be on to us? The Mayor only gave me the documents a few days ago. But remember what Mary June said, “If it happens outside your small apartment, then the town knows about it.”I’d planned to call the Mayor’s office as soon as it opened and set up a meeting after the diner closed that afternoon, preferably at a private location. In the future, I planned to meet with the Mayor somewhere other than the diner. I intended to take Mary June’s lack of privacy warning to heart, and I knew I could use Junior Junior’s truck since he always went home in the afternoon to drink beer and look at old photos of his long gone wife. Until that time, it was business as usual for me at the diner.
That notion lasted all of about five minutes. No sooner had I started busing tables than the first shift of customers started moving out to head to work at jobs located all over the county. That’s when I overheard crude language coming from a table full of workers who drove daily over to Justice City to toil in the tractor rear attachment equipment manufacturing plant. One of the group members told his co-workers he had reliable information that their jobs were being off-shored. The co-workers argued he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. According to the doubters, the entire plant only recently received raises, including a cost of living adjustment. It didn’t make any sense for a business to do something like that if they intended to close the plant. The disagreement continued as the group paid their checks and departed the diner for their, hopefully yet secure, place of employment.
I stood for a moment imagining what hearing information like this must feel like to a young family burdened with a mortgage, car payments, grocery bills, and medical bills. The lack of a universal comprehensive medical insurance plan for all was another point of contention with me. Our country stood alone as the only major industrialized country in the world to not provide health insurance as a right of citizenship. Another example of how corporate America controlled legislation.
Corporate America expended millions of dollars influencing elections and congressional members to ensure the useless existence of bloated, corporate-owned health insurance providers. Simply eliminating the middleman saved untold billions of dollars yearly. The great irony being that most of the outspoken opponents of government sponsored health care systems for all citizens were old people already benefiting from socialized medicine in the form of Medicare with a prescription drug benefit. They were all for denying adequate medical coverage for younger Americans including their own children along with their children’s children.
I might have stood right there hyperventilating over what I perceived to be one of many insane activities perpetrated on the public by our incompetent government every single day, but fortunately, Flo’s hefty vocal cords brought me back to the present and to my real job, bussing tables.
“Hey Will, are you going to just stand there holding that tub of dishes or are you going to take them to the kitchen and wash’em?”
I laughed at myself, realizing I may be the official manager of this eating establishment, but Flo didn’t stand on rank or title. She only knew that more and more customers came in each morning and we damn sure better have some clean dishes when they did.
“I’m a comin` boss! I’m a comin`”! I said to her as I intentionally shuffled past her on my way to the kitchen. A couple of old regulars tried hard to restrain their laughter, as they knew well what I implied. Flo’s stern look in their direction cut their merriment short.
“So you think that was kind of funny, do you Henry?” remarked Flo as she glared at the giggling oldsters. “Same with you, Mervin, huh?”
As I turned to watch through the swinging doors separating the dining room from the back kitchen area, both old timers hastily proclaimed their dear wives eagerly awaited their presence at home and abruptly left leaving five dollar bills on the counter without waiting for change. Flo glared at them all the way to the front entrance. Finished with those two, she turned back to the dining area to find the rest of the customers putting forth every effort to ensure they did not get caught looking towards where she stood defiantly as if daring someone to meet her steely glare. Not one person did.
For the rest of the morning, things went forward as usual. Not until around 10 a.m. did I stop to have a cup of coffee and enjoy one of the last blueberry muffins. I had to admit that working around all that great smelling food became difficult to deal with at times. If I gave in and loaded up a plate full of biscuits, gravy, sausage, and eggs, I might soon be in the market for a completely new and expanded wardrobe. Flo always gabbed about how I ate like a woman. I reminded her of the many adults in the community who dreamed of having a wiry figure like mine. She responded with some smart remark about my diminishing hairline or my crooked nose, the result of several lost fistfights and a bad car wreck during my younger days. I always retorted that if she thought my face looked bad, she ought to see the other guy’s fist.
I felt relieved to be doing something other than getting more and more involved with the business of the city of Jonesboro. I planned to keep myself busy at the diner until I got with the Mayor and gave him my two cents worth relating to the proposal for privatization of the water department and the Buford brothers’ possible kickback issues. I made copious notes and after explaining my thoughts to the Mayor, I intended to put the burden back into his lap until he decided to take action. My plan involved helping, not leading. The leadership needed to be local.
I eventually convinced myself that I needn’t dwell on the matter any longer until the Mayor and I got together. Until that time, much work needed to be completed at the diner. At this point, I had prepared all the vegetables for the salad bar while Flo and Junior Junior got the pizzas, burgers, frankfurters, and side dishes ready for the hot food bar. Throw in a soft ice cream machine, cookies, and a variety of fresh fruit, and our always in a hurry lunch crowd usually headed back to work satisfied and with time to spare. I headed to the kitchen with all this in mind until I spotted the guy with the Vietnam vet baseball cap sitting alone in the farthest corner of the dining room. Recalling telling myself earlier I needed to introduce myself and acknowledge my own Big Red One Vietnam experience, I headed in his direction.
My arrival at his table went unnoticed as the unsuspecting vet perused his paper. When he did finally take notice of my presence he assumed I came to bring him a coffee refill, which he said he wanted. So I went back to the counter and hoisted one of Flo’s always-fresh pots of brew and took care of most of the room’s refill needs on my way back to the vet’s table.
Arriving in due course, I announce
d my presence. “You know, I don’t think I have ever introduced myself. I’m Will Clayton, the new manager here,” I extended my hand in friendship along with the greeting. Diverting his attention away from his paper, he acknowledged my presence.
“Yeah, sure! Glad to meet you. My name’s Jim Handley. Nice place you got going here. Hell of a lot better than it used to be.” With that, he turned back around to pick up where he’d left off with his paper.
“I see you served in Nam in the Big Red One. That’s my old unit. You were there in ‘69?” I stood across from him at the other side of the table while awaiting his response.
He looked up towards me from his paper and seemed to gather his thoughts before responding. “Yeah…I was there in ‘68 and ‘69, mostly ‘69. How about you?”
“Sixty-nine and ‘70. My rotation date back to Oakland was in August of ‘70. When my division rotated back to the states in April, 1969, I got transferred to the 199th Light Infantry to finish out my tour.” Now it was his turn again.
“No shit! Where was your AO?” he asked.
“III Corps, Northwest of Saigon, mostly around Lai Khe. I was with a heavy artillery unit. We were general support, so we didn’t move our big guns while I was there. And that was fine by me.”
“Hey man, I must have rolled through that place in my APC a hundred times! I was with the 16th Infantry Mechanized. We were all over the place: along Highway 13, the Iron Triangle, up in the Michelin. Man, we were always out in the boonies looking for Victor Charley. Man, this is wild; sit down for a minute.”
I looked over to the counter and caught Flo’s eye. She flashed me the thumbs up so I decided to sit for a minute. “Thanks, I probably got a couple minutes before Flo comes over and jerks a knot in my ass and tells me to start getting ready for lunch.”
“Tell me about it!” answered my new friend. “Man, she jumped me good last week when I forgot to leave a tip. I won’t make that mistake again.”
It surprised me to discover how much I enjoyed talking with another Vietnam vet. It had been a long time. This guy served in the infantry, and he knew better than I did what it felt like to be scared half out of your brain, and for what? Our government brain trust made a decision in ‘69 to bring the troops home. No one wanted to be the last person to die in a war the country had given up on and no longer supported. Yet many lifer officers, wanting to have their personnel files stuffed with combat command experience along with all the citations and medals that went along with it, opted to stay in the field looking for a fight. More than one ambitious officer lamented the fact that when the war ended it might be another twenty years before they got another opportunity to get combat experience on their records.
“So, you ever keep in touch with any of the guys you served with or ever go to any reunions?” I asked to keep the conversation going.
“Naw, I kept in touch with a couple of the guys for a while but that’s about it. Nobody wanted to talk about it or hear about Vietnam. People just wanted the whole mess to just go away. I don’t know how it happened but somehow it got decided we lost. Our kill ratio was about ten to one, and, still, we were called the losers. I know my unit took a lot of casualties, but we never lost any fights. At the end, we couldn’t find anybody to fight. The gooks knew we were leaving so they stayed in their holes until we were gone.”
“Looks like the guys we’re fighting now have learned that lesson also from what I can see going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rag head who is in charge of the fighting over there knows that one of these days we will get tired and leave. The majority of our citizens have forgotten we have troops fighting a war or are against it. About the only support the troops get is one of those little yellow ribbons you see stuck on the cars in all the mall parking lots. What really pisses me off is that after I finally got tired of being angry at my country because it was so eager to forget that fifty-five thousand plus good men lost their lives in that shit-hole Nam for nothing, I began to tell myself that, at least, this country would never do anything stupid like that again, and what did we do? We doubled down and started sending every young soldier, marine, and reservist we can find to the other side of the world to fight and die in more shit holes where we are not wanted, if not hated, for more of the same bullshit. Our government’s lying to us again as to why we are there, and anyone who doesn’t have their brains in their ass knows it.”
My new friend took a break to sip his coffee. I could see that a nerve had been struck by the similarities he drew between the Nam fiasco and our nation’s newest military disasters in the making. I agreed with everything the man said. Something said to me by one of my few old friends came back to me as I watched this aged Nam vet sip his coffee, ‘Those who refuse to remember the past are destined to repeat it.’
“I hear you, brother. I get so angry at times over this newest mess I just want to puke. You probably get little sympathy from the folks around here regarding your ill feelings about our current military misadventures, I would imagine.” He took another sip of his coffee before he answered.
“Actually, it’s better now than it was back in ‘03. I know that a couple of young men from the county have been killed and a few others were badly wounded the last few years. Most were Reservist. They had, or have, families and jobs here. Some are on their second and third tours. Their lives are being destroyed while the country goes on with this insanity. It also gripes me that the politicians are too cowardly to use the draft so our self-imposed burden of policing the world can be distributed more fairly. They know if they have to use the draft, this war is over, tomorrow! A few more people from around here are starting to speak out more often about the bullshit reasons why we’re over there. Hell, if I knew for sure that I could trust a Democrat to bring our troops home, I would strongly consider voting for one.” He then stared into his coffee cup lost in his own thoughts.
This last bit of information about others in the community having second thoughts about our current military misadventures came as a surprise to me, and I wanted to talk to him more about this subject. But at the moment I knew Flo was staring a hole in the back of my head. I needed to get busy with my salad bar duties if I wanted to be ready for the early lunch folks at eleven-thirty.
“Hey Jim, I sure enjoyed talking with a fellow Nam vet. I’d like to visit with you more when I’m not running around here trying to live up to Flo’s lofty food service standards. If you’re not too busy maybe you can stop by sometime during the afternoon when I’m usually here by myself, and we could, without Flo’s interrupting, swap some more of our war stories over a cup of coffee.”
My new acquaintance heartily agreed and promised to do just that. So I left him to get back to his paper and I headed for the kitchen where all the salad bar fixin`s awaited my attention. As I crossed the room and neared the counter, I caught sight of Junior Junior squatting down behind the register. He seemed to be fixated on something going on out front and my curiosity caused me to look in the same direction. I caught sight of what I believed captured his interest. Jasper’s pickup crept past on the street out front. In it, giving the diner a hard look, sat none other than Junior Junior’s nemesis, Jasper himself. I slowed down to watch and felt a slight bit of disappointment when Jasper’s pickup kept right on going down the street. Our brave diner owner promptly resumed his usual upright stance as if nothing happened. I stifled a couple of chuckles as I passed by Junior Junior heading for my important appointment at the vegetable crisper.
Chapter Twelve