Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  I fled.

  §

  Hardware Store at Christmas Time

  I miss my hardware store this time of the year. Christmas keeps creeping up on the local men, closer and closer, as they look nervously about and opt for that bastion of male philosophy that says: if you don’t acknowledge that it’s there, then it isn’t. Really. There is one other belief somewhat similar: maybe, just maybe, it isn’t coming this year.

  As philosophies that guide males go, these two work just about as well as the rest the ones men use, which don’t really work either.

  After all, how can it be Christmas? Wasn’t it just yesterday that the last bale of third-crop hay went into the shed? (Uh, uh. That was September the third, remember? It did in fact take you until November to unload that last bunch, which you just backed in there and left. Maybe that’s what’s throwing off your calendar?)

  After all, how can it be Christmas? My wife’s birthday hasn’t happened yet, and that’s in the third week of Novem…..oh crap! (Uh, huh. You’re in bigger trouble than you thought, aren’t you.)

  It was always this time of year that guys began trickling into the hardware store, talking about needing some half-inch bolts, but nervously eying the kitchen appliances when they thought no one was looking. Truly, the local hardware store is the only store that the prairie husband has any working familiarity with whatsoever, and it’s the first place his Christmas shopping begins.

  He’s been in my hardware store before. He’s been down where the nuts and bolts bins are located—the last time when the grain auger finally refused to run one turn more, and where in heck did that vice-grip pliers that was holding the belt tensioner go to, anyway. Those were good ones, too, really rusty, which meant they usually stuck around. It was the new shiny ones that planted themselves out in the hay field to be found later by a brand new sickle bar on the haybine. Aw, heck. There’s my gopher trap, too. Aw no, after blaming everyone including the Russians for stealing that tool, he remembers now using it to set that gopher trap. Aw man.

  But that was last summer, like yesterday, and here he is feeling like a fish that’s flopped up on the shore. For him, the kitchen appliance aisle is as far from the nuts and bolts as the Mall of America is from the rest of us, but he takes up his determination, realizes he isn’t going to get another better chance, and sneaks over there.

  He’s going to give it a shot, anyway. Once his feet begin to move, he feels better. Surely the answer to all his gift giving is over there. He feels like he’s moving into the sun. (We put extra lights over the toasters.) After all, he’s got almost an hour before he has to go pick up the kids at school. Compared to putting out a combine fire in the middle of a dry field, or delivering a calf when it’s below zero outside, or getting the tractor started when it’s twenty below, heck, this isn’t anything.

  He could pick all his gifts now, maybe, get her a couple of things, after all, more is better, and he’s got that birthday thing to compensate for. His breathing quickens, and he visualizes her opening that new toaster oven he’s going to get her, and how happy she’s going to be with it.

  Watch him. He’s a refugee from the nuts and bolts, over there where the bathroom scales are shelved, and doesn’t she use the one at home a lot, probably got it near worn out, maybe that’s a good idea, especially since she always complains about it weighing heavy. He stops. He looks. Only the most expensive one for her. He tucks it under his arm like a football fullback, and turns up the aisle. Wow. Look at all this stuff. Electric can openers, electric grills, deep fryers, this is going to be a little harder than he thought, these are all the things he’s been giving her for the last Christmases.

  But it ain’t over til it’s over. He grabs a genuine chrome shower rod, and a frilly pink shower curtain, and it’s like he’s crossed some invisible barrier. He looks around. It’s over. He carries his finds up to the counter, and replies, as he is asked if he wants this wrapped: “Nah, just staple the bag shut and tape a nice bow on it or something.”

  What’s this? This is one guy telling another guy who’s the boss at home.

  Mostly, back when I had the hardware store, the customer was always right.

  Except maybe at Christmas.

  §

  Chapter 6

  Vietnam

  Highway 1, Number 1

  Highway 1, Number 2

  Highway 1, Number 3

  Highway 1, Number 4

  Highway 1, Number 5

  Highway 1, Number 6

  Highway 1, Number 7

  Highway 1, Number 8

  Highway 1, Number 9

  Highway 1, Number 10

  Highway 1, Number 11

  Burning Prayer Paper

  The Wrist Rocket

  Although most of these stories are based on fact, time and memory have placed them in a position that I must label “barely true.” Let’s call them fiction based on fact, or maybe fact based on fiction, and hope for the best. Percentage wise, they’re 90 percent true.

  Highway 1, Number 1

  It was July, 1969, in Vietnam, and Tex and I were headed south on Highway 1 with a deuce-and-a-half truck full of shot-up communications equipment and one M-14 with two clips of ammunition. Riding along with us was of course the fear of the unknown: mines, ambush, friendly fire. The unknown. Ten thousand miles from home. Believe me, there was a lot of unknown, and a lot of fear.

  There had been a lot of action up around Quang Tri Combat Base, which was up on the DMZ that divided North and South Vietnam; the LRRP’s (pronounced “lurps” for long range recon patrol) were based on one side of us, and the Marines on the other, and they had things stirred up real good. Hence all the equipment in the back of our truck that our bright shining officers had decided was too good to destroy, yet was beyond the point where they thought we should try and fix it. We were taking it south. Dump it on someone else.

  I didn’t want to leave the base. I’d become rather attached to the false security of a couple of four-foot-diameter culverts with a few layers of sand bags on top. False because nothing stopped the Chi-Com 122-mm rockets that were raining down on us.

  Tex and I had earned the honor of this trip through a plan of mine to make some fourth of July fireworks, a plan that backfired.

  Each of us on the base was allotted two magazines of ammunition for the M-14. Everything else was locked up. Not locked up on bunker duty, you say? Must have been ammunition to provide for our defense, you say? You’d say wrong. Should you find yourself, and the two soldiers with which you pulled 24-hour bunker duty, under attack, you would crank the field phone and call the sergeant of the guard. The sergeant of the guard would call the officer of the guard. The officer of the guard would call the officer of the day, who was lurking in some underground command bunker somewhere. Exactly where, no one knew. There was a point here in 1969 where fragging officers became a national Vietnam sport, so they were a little reluctant to let it be known exactly where they gathered together. But that’s another story.

  The command bunker would then crank up their field phone, after having checked with other officers who had the “big picture,” a concept that, as we all found out years later, turned out to be nonexistent. No one had the big picture. Vietnam turned into Vietnam because everyone only had their own self-designed, self-promoting, self-sustaining, self-honoring, little picture.

  Eventually, with all the field phone glitches and finding all the right officers and the delays involved in all this, the chain of command would eventually trickle back to your bunker. Should Charlie (Viet Cong; VC; Victor Charlie) have been so considerate as to have patiently waited for this process, then you could unlock the machine gun ammo and see if an M-60 that hadn’t likely been either fired or maintained within the last 30 days would work. Remember that, latitude-wise, Vietnam is similar to Belize and Honduras in South America--humidity, heat, the
whole enchilada. Anything left untended for even a week—including the human body, especially its feet—corroded beyond salvation.

  Well, all this is why Vietnam is now the benchmark against which we compare all other military undertakings.

  So I scrounged around, being as it was the Fourth of July and someone should take charge of celebrating it, and collected a dozen or so rifle rounds. I removed the bullets, poured out the powder, and built a fuse out of paper and gunpowder. First the fuse, I figured, then the explosive device. I ended up with a paper fuse that looked more like a two-foot-long hot dog.

  Tex was in the truck with me—we repaired equipment in trucks that were a lot like small bread trucks. The work area was about ten feet long, with a shallow work bench along each side, and just room to walk down the middle. Anyway, it was well toward a hundred degrees outside when Tex and I locked ourselves in and lit that fuse to see how it burned. If I could get the fuse figured out, then the plan was I’d go looking for some better, more explosive stuff to use the fuse on.

  Once lit, the fuse took off like a rocket, zipping around inside that truck like a giant angry firefly. We hit the floor and covered our heads, and when it finally burned itself out, we tumbled out the door choking and coughing amidst the thickest, blackest cloud of gun powder smoke imaginable. It was so thick that it stuck to our uniforms. I looked at Tex. His face was black. Smoke hung out of his pockets.

  And there stood Warrant Officer Smith, who had come to deliver some more stuff for me to work on. I looked at him, and in a moment of inspiration, blurted out: “That’s the worst radio fire I’ve ever seen. I think the secondary discriminator is shorted to the high frequency heterodyne raster.” Smith couldn’t even spell electronics, much less understand any of it. I figured out I was safe.

  And he was buying this line of flapdoodle, until a good old southern hillbilly strolled by and said: “Smells lak gunpowder.”

  Which it did, as any idiot would have known.

  Which is why Tex and I were on the road, headed down Highway 1.

  Next week: the rest of the trip.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 2

  So there we were, 19-year-old Tex and me, age 25, driving south down Highway 1 in Vietnam, 1969. It was hot, it was humid, and it was scary. As told last week, we had earned this trip as punishment for a 4th of July firecracker attempt of mine that had gone slightly awry.

  As punishment goes, this wasn’t so bad. Granted, I’d’ve given anything for a truck that would have gone faster. Those deuce-and-a-halfs—this one loaded up with communications equipment that was shot up beyond our repair—were designed to burn either gasoline or diesel fuel, so they weren’t the fastest trucks in the world. A hundred miles an hour wouldn’t have been fast enough for me, though.

  Tex, though, thought this was a blast. Tex was still bullet proof, like the rest of the 19- and 20-year olds that were sent to Vietnam to make certain the domino effect of communism didn’t happen. At 25, though, something had kicked in within me that seemed to remind me every second that there were enough idiots running around just on our side of this military effort to kill me, much less on the enemy’s side, too.

  I’d already seen the domino effect up close. Once off the airplane that brought me to Vietnam and dropped me and 199 other GIs off in Kamh Rahn Bay, I began to make my way north toward Quang Tri Combat Base, where I would be fixing “Special Electronic Equipment.” I was lucky with that. Most of my training comrades went infantry. I was drafted with civilian electronics training, which helped, but what got me this MOS may have been the fact that I had a civilian Secret clearance. Maybe. Maybe I was just plain lucky.

  I found an Air America plane loading on the runway, and got on board. Air America humped around the country in DC-3s, twin-prop tail draggers from which all the seats had been removed. This one sat there on the metal runway, its nose up in the air, oil dripping from its engines, a couple of bullet holes in the rear of the fuselage. “Get in here,” a loadmaster ordered, and as I and other guys climbed up the steps, we were positioned sitting on the floor, legs out, facing uphill, five wide shoulder-to-shoulder, belted to the floor with four-inch nylon come-along straps ratcheted down tight across our laps.

  Lord, it had to be a hundred degrees outside, and inside that tuna can, it felt like double that, the air so stilted and still and full of fear and sweat and strangeness that no one said a word. There wasn’t enough breath in us to try. There must have fifty or so of us strapped to the floor, wet through and through with sweat, when the pilot’s cap came into view up the steps into the fuselage. He had on a Harley Davidson motorcycle cap, a shiny black silk jacket with Valley of Death stenciled on the back. There was a silver plated revolver showing in a shoulder holster. He carried a jug of water in one hand, and a urine container in the other.

  And he looked about 15 years old. So young. By the time I got out of Nam, it occurred to me why pilots were so young: no one with a lick of sense would have flown in the conditions over there. “They’re shooting at us around Hue,” this kid nonchalantly said to us as he clambered over our laps to get into the cockpit, “so we’re flying low and hard.” With that, he was gone into the cockpit, and we heard engines begin to crank.

  That plane left the ground, caught a strong jungle updraft, and accelerated skyward like a home sick angel, leaving most of us with our stomachs down around our ankles. Out the open side door I could see the tops of trees, and they looked higher than we were. Tropical air currents violently lifted us up, and slammed us down, threw us around. The engine noise through the open side door was loud; the wind screaming by sucked at us. We all slammed left. We all jerked right. The overall effect was something like one might assume a trip to hell might be. Three rows up, close to the front, somebody puked.

  That was where I learned about the domino effect. And it wasn’t communism they were talking about. Objectively, I thought about what a mess this plane was going to be for someone to clean out. Subjectively, it didn’t seem to matter whether we were shot down or hit a tree. I didn’t throw up, only because in fact under the pressure of getting to Vietnam, I hadn’t eaten in days

  Highway 1 on a nice hot day was pretty quiet, compared to that. Tex stuck his hand out the window for some reason to wave at some kids when we eased through a village, and they repaid his kind efforts by stripping his watch and ring. “Kind of keep one eye on your rifle, would you please?” I asked him. He gave me a look. The look said, what? You think I’m stupid?

  I grinned at him, and kept driving south.

  We’re headed down Highway 1.

  §

  Highway 1, Number 3

  This is the third in a series that finds a young GI named Tex and me in July 1969 headed down Highway 1 in South Vietnam with a deuce-and-a-half truck full of shot up communications equipment too classified to scrap, yet beyond repair. As we roll along through not-quite-jungle-but-way-past-forest in this subtropical skinny little country, we pass by small villages. Children race out and shout, in their Vietnamese accents: “GI numbah 10.” The ones who have relearned the fact that, in the French-based education they have received, an “A” is a number 10, and in America, it’s number 1, so shout. They learn quickly.

  The kids hope for American chocolate. (Fat chance. The average temperature several months out of the year here is above the melting point of Hershey’s chocolate bars, and they won’t eat the tropical chocolate that we get in C-rations. We won’t either. Nobody will. Chocolate that won’t melt isn’t chocolate. It’s more like sand mixed with cement.)

  Highway 1 is blacktop, and winds down the coastline in a series of s-turns and twists, although the sea is out of sight on the other side of all the growth. Blacktop makes some sense, since it’s harder for Charlie to mine. You have to watch the shoulders, though.

  We’re doing this because I got caught trying to make 4th of July fireworks. I don�
�t want to be on this road. “Don’t worry,” the first sergeant told me, “we haven’t had any reported activity for two weeks now.” Or so we were told. And like he would know. That was the thing about Vietnam: even then I suspected nobody told anybody else anything. This was confirmed years later. Nobody, it appeared, knew what anybody else was up to.

  As we rolled along the highway, the cursed truck missed and choked and seemed near death at somewhere around 25 mph, and I was terrified it was going to quit out here in the middle on nowhere. Tex had an M-14 with 36 rounds of ammo, two magazines full. That was it.

  Wheeled traffic on the road was light; foot traffic almost nonexistent, mostly because even the Ho Chi Minh racing slicks that the Vietnamese wore (pieces of American tires made into sandals) couldn’t keep the heat from that blacktop road off their feet.

  Tex was gawking around as we drove, so I asked him what he’d do if we came under fire.

  “I’d hit out into them there brambles, find me a ten-foot-tall marijuana plant, and start eating.” Tex was 19. I was 25. Nineteen-year-olds seemed to have different priorities. Common sense probably laid somewhere between him and I, with me taking the ultra-anxiety road, and him the fun one.

  Tex had long legs, stood well over six feet. We’d both been in the shower the night before, the shower being a few pieces of corrugated tin nailed up for modesty’s sake, and pipe over our heads with holes in it through which river water from a big steel tank flowed. Dirty river mud frequently plugged up the pipe holes, but, regardless of the mud, you could never get clean anyway. One minute after getting out, you were soaked with sweat, which probably explained the “chicken gumbo” growing in our feet, crotch, and arm pits. A very fertile country, Vietnam.