There's a Man With a Gun Over There

by R. M. Ryan

  His hands shook as he put the record on the machine, cranked the handle to get it going, and set the giant needle on the record. First the sound of spinning static.

  “You hear, the way it sounds like the past. Like dust from years ago blowing here into this classroom of our little college.”

  The blare, then, of a long-ago oompah band began playing a march with a chorus of men singing.

  He lifted the needle to pause the playing, and we could still hear a grinding noise as the record went round on its mechanism.

  “I have now an experiment. You will get to participate in the old days. The old days for you, but the new days for me. From a time when I was young. History for me, almost yesterday for me. Come stand up. Ja, come here. All of you.”

  Professor Kleinholder became animated as he showed us how to line up in front of the blackboard.

  “It is a march song, ja. When it plays you will march around in a circle here, to get the feel of it. It is an experiment. We have now a laboratory of history.”

  Once we were all lined up in the space between the blackboard and the first row of seats, he cranked the handle and put the needle back on the spinning record. The static and then the oom-pah music began again, and a chorus of sturdy male voices sang.

  At first awkwardly and then more and more in time to the beat of the music, we marched in a small circle at the front of the classroom. Professor Kleinholder waved his right arm up and down and back and forth as if he were conducting this.

  “Ja,” he said. Actually he yelled over the music, which seemed to get louder. “This is the tune of an old German folk song. We used to sing it in the mountains. It is like the melody of that hymn, ‘How Great Thou Art.’ I was visiting Berlin in 1932. I was your age, and I heard it playing in the distance. It brought tears to my eyes. Reminded me of when I used to hike in the woods with my friends.”

  Professor Kleinholder looked off into space.

  “When I got closer and heard the song clearly, I could tell that they changed the words. Ja. All changed, and these thugs were marching. Alles verendert. Do you understand the words? When I first heard this song coming from the streets of Berlin, I knew my innocent days were over. Vorbei. Here, let me start the record over. I’ll translate for you.”

  The street free for the brown battalions

  The street free for the Storm Troopers

  Millions, full of hope, look up at the swastika

  The day breaks for freedom and for bread.

  We quit marching then and stood there, looking down at our feet, while the scratchy harmonies played themselves out on the cylinder.

  “It breaks your heart, what they did to this song, to the country. The country of Beethoven and Schubert. These were the famous Brown Shirts, the precursors to Hitler. You remember this, ja? You remember how this goes from sentiment to horror. You remember how easily you marched. You be on your guard. Watch out. Man muss immer aufpassen. You must always pay attention. Be careful what you sing, ja?”

  In his fedora and his elegant suits, Professor Kleinholder was at every war protest that I saw at my little college. I thought about joining in myself, but then it all seemed too complicated. I just watched from across the street, afraid to cross over.

  “Has anyone noticed,” I heard someone in basic training ask, “that our uniform shirts are brown? We’re like the Nazis, man. We’re Brown Shirts.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” someone else said. “This is the goddamned American army. We’re not Nazis. We save the world.”

  23.

  As I look at that army uniform I found in the attic of 332 East Acacia Road, the first image that comes to mind is the little army post office where I mailed the box. It’s a single room fronted by a half door with a counter on top.

  It was tucked away in a corner of Turley Barracks. Open from ten to noon in the morning and from two to four in the afternoon. Private First Class Ellert the clerk there. Yes, I recall, so clearly now, his name stenciled over the right-hand pocket of his green fatigue shirt, US Army printed over the left-hand pocket. The little black stripe on a rocker—the PFC emblem—on each of his collar corners.

  He never got promoted in the two years I knew him, and that was odd during the Vietnam War. Even though the combat was a continent away from Germany, promotions fell on us like confetti at a party.

  Yes, PFC Ellert and the APO—at the end of my time in the army . . . I was . . . yes . . . oh, now, I remember . . . I was mailing my uniform home so I would have a souvenir of my time in the army.

  I actually spent a lot of time with PFC Ellert during the last year of my army service. It began when I started applying to graduate schools. You see, I was trying to get back to where I’d been before the army nabbed me. I was just desperate to be out of the army and go back to studying Emerson and poetry.

  In my dreams, though, the army wouldn’t let me go.

  I was riding in a deuce-and-a-half truck with the rest of my platoon. I could see us—both from an overhead viewpoint and also from inside of the truck. You could smell our fear. We wore our steel combat helmets and rested our rifles on the floor of the truck. It was a moonlit night, and one of us quietly sobbed in the dark. Seen from overhead, our helmets lined up like green-gray eggshells, hardly enough protection against what lay in the dark ahead.

  I would wake up then, afraid to go back to sleep.

  Yes, I wanted out of the army’s clutches. While I’d so far managed to stay out of combat, Vietnam was always out there, like a cancer diagnosis. It could always get you.

  In the fall of 1971, I made almost daily trips to the little post office in Turley Barracks with the applications and the essays required by various graduate school English Departments. I wanted out of the army. Oh how I wanted out.

  “Are you sure,” I asked PFC Ellert the first time, “that my envelope will arrive on time?”

  “Ryan, come on,” he said. “You know better than to ask a question like that. You of all people, Mr. Big Shot Customs Inspector. This is, first of all, the army and, second of all, the Postal Service we’re talking about here, so there really are no absolutes, are there? What I’d recommend is that you slap one of those pale green Registered Mail forms on the envelope. I’d insure it, as well. That’ll make them nervous. They’ll think mistakes will be expensive. That way, no one will fuck with it. It’s easier to fuck with fourth class mail. Come on, man, you of all people should know that.”

  Yes, of course. He knew that Goldberg and I opened and inspected Parcel Post packages at the Heidelberg Military Post Office, where all the army mail from this area went before being shipped overseas. That was one of my jobs, tearing open mail. Snooping. The other two jobs were doing black-market investigations with the German Customs Police and clearing US soldiers and civilians through customs stations at military transfer points.

  Funny, before my army days, I had thought the mail was sacred somehow, untouchable without a search warrant. Part of the castle that was the free man’s home.

  “Forget that chickenshit, good-citizen, social-studies crap, Ryan,” Sergeant Dooley said when he was showing me the various Customs inspector routines of my new job in Detachment A of the Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit. “Fourth class mail belongs to the army, and the army can do what it goddamned well pleases. You and me, Ryan, we scare the shit out of fourth class mail. Besides, we’re detached here in ole Detachment A. We don’t give a howdy goddamn.”

  That said, Sergeant Dooley walked over to a stack of boxes eight or nine feet high and parried at them with a bayonet he carried.

  “Men,” he said, imitating a drill sergeant, “this is hand-to-hand combat. Be sure to yell ‘Kill!’ as you strike your blow for democracy.”

  He slashed several boxes with the bayonet.

  “The poor and dumb have to learn their lesson. This’ll teach those fuckers not to pay up for first class postage.”

  Sergeant Dooley then pulled several of the cut packages out of the stacked pile and shook their conten
ts on the concrete floor of the postal warehouse.

  What fell out were the things low-rent people with torn hopes shipped—stiff, crotchless lace panties bought in sex shops; collections of cocktail swizzle sticks; creased, out-of-focus Polaroids of naked women; collections of twigs and rocks; bottles of beer with those European-styled ceramic caps, their contents now slowly leaking and turning their cardboard packing to mush; cracked Hummel figurines, and souvenir cuckoo clocks, their cheap movements broken on the floor.

  A bird from one of those clocks, with a misaligned spring in his chest, rapidly puffed himself up and then went through a slow deflation like a blown-out tire. He did this over and over again while making muffled, pleading chirps. Sergeant Dooley’s foot flattened him.

  “Who buys this crap?” he asked the air.

  Later, when Goldberg and I took over the job, we tried to be more careful with these shabby valuables, but after a while we became as callous as Sergeant Dooley.

  Who cared about this pitiful stuff?

  Goldberg and I were going to graduate school after the army. We were going to be professors: I was English literature, and he was history. We were above this kind of crap, weren’t we? We had bigger things on our minds. Goldberg planned to study the beginnings of American imperialism, and I wanted to write about the slow encroachment of evil in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

  Who cared about these stupid army jobs?

  We were supposed to be looking for contraband or stolen property, but we never once found anything of consequence. While we heard stories about the Top-Secret Decoder supposedly found by one of our predecessors in a parcel post package, the tale sounded like fiction made up to convince a commander to keep the Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit and all its little perks in business. Usually what Goldberg and I found was just some piece of GI clothing, or a tool, or a piece of camping equipment. The thefts were pathetic, but we recorded them in our LOG OF RECOVERED GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. These numbers, like the body counts in Vietnam, proved that we were doing our jobs, though the army often didn’t care if you took your uniforms once your time was up. But we didn’t mention that in our reports. If we found a dress uniform, we valued it at $100 because that’s what a Penney’s suit cost, and Lance B. Edwards, our boss, had a Penney’s catalog tucked in his bottom desk drawer that he used to value stolen property.

  Once we finished with our inspections, we’d lick the backs of these stickers we had and use them to cover the cuts made by our knives in the packages: INSPECTED BY THE TWENTY-SECOND MP CUSTOMS.

  “That way,” Lance B. Edwards said, “we let everyone know that the Big Green Machine is out there, even reading your love letters to Sally Rottencrotch.”

  After all these years, my box is still in good shape. I mailed it first class, so no one from Twenty-Second MP Customs had ripped it open. Instead of turning my uniform in at the end of my time in the army, I stole it. I wanted to have a physical reminder of those years, even though I hardly ever wore that uniform.

  Except for ceremonial occasions, I normally worked in civilian clothes. I was an undercover black-market investigator. Pretty cool, eh? I love to haul that line out at parties.

  “So what did you do in the army?” people ask.

  “Me?” I say. “Oh, just a little police work.”

  I let a beat go by.

  “I was a plainclothes black-market investigator.”

  “Wow!” they say. Or “Cool!” or “No kidding.”

  “I worked with old Nazis.”

  “Really?”

  Doing my army time in civilian clothes.

  Wearing civvies was, all of us in the unit liked to think, one of the great benefits of the job. Of course there were also some significant disadvantages. Like, for instance, those days when we were ordered to burst into someone’s apartment in search of black-market material. With our double-sided credentials held out in front of us as we confronted a startled resident, we’d yell, “Customs Police! Zoll Polizei!”

  Then, an hour or two later, after tearing the drawers and the closets apart, Herr Hellman and Herr Diener of the German Customs Police, along with Goldberg and me, would load up our unmarked Ford with the evidence we’d confiscated—stolen sacks of rice and flour, all marked PROPERTY OF US ARMY—while occupants of the apartment yelled and cried.

  Yes, there was always that, wasn’t there?

  And that pregnant woman, at the end of the tunnel in my conscience, screaming “Nazi!”

  In the army you had what was called a home of record. That was your official hometown address, and I used that of my then-wife Jenny’s. That’s where she’d grown up: 1648 Bluebell Lane, Rock Hill, MO 63119.

  “What a pretty address,” the lady clerk at the Armed Forces Entrance and Examination Station in Little Rock, Arkansas, told me while she processed my paperwork on the day I was inducted into the army. She wore white cotton gloves, as if she wanted to avoid the stain of war on her actual flesh.

  “I love bluebells,” she said, her gloved fingers typing up the papers that took away my civilian rights.

  She was horrified when she came to the line on the form called RELIGION. I’d marked the NONE box.

  “None,” she said. “Don’t be silly. You can’t choose NONE. What if something happens to you? How will you get to heaven?”

  She patted my hand, the glove cool against my skin. I suddenly realized that I was sweating. I picked up the form again and looked down the list of choices.

  “I don’t see Buddhist or Muslim.”

  “Well, of course not. Those aren’t real religions; they can’t help you.”

  I thought about checking OTHER, but I gave in, the way I always did. It just seemed easier.

  “OK,” I said, and checked METHODIST.

  “I’ll bet you feel better already. Now you’re really in the army.”

  Suit, Man’s, Summer, Model 10-16-4, Size 38, the label reads.

  My uniform is inside the box, neatly folded there, as if waiting for my return to duty. I set it out on the floor, like one of those paper cutout dolls. Cap on top, shirt inside the coat, the skinny black necktie folded on the front of the shirt. I thread the black belt with the brass buckle through the loops of the pants and lay them out below the coat and then tuck the thin black socks under the cuffless pants bottoms. Even the shoes, with their thick coat of polish and the wrinkle across the top of the right one, are here, ready to go.

  Tucked in the pocket of the uniform is a reel of old-time Super 8 film.

  A few weeks later I borrow a neighbor’s ancient Bell and Howell movie projector and play the film. The machine makes a chattering, meshing noise, and there I am, thirty years ago in the same uniform, a few days after I got home, unsteady in the flicker of the images going through the projector. The colors are murky, as if the past eventually turns into mud. I stare at myself in the past, still trying to make sense of what happened.

  I rewind the two or three minutes and watch the scene again. I remember now. I had just gotten out of the army, but my aunt wanted to see me in my uniform.

  “There’s something about a man in uniform,” she’d told me over and over, clinking the ice cubes in her ever-present cocktail glass.

  “There’s something even better about a man out of uniform,” I said to myself, smiling as I remembered what Angelika used to say, but my smile over my little memory went away as I also recalled the day the two German Customs Police and Goldberg and I, all of us wearing civilian clothes, burst into the apartment house at Bruecke Strasse 27 in Weinheim. The pregnant woman stood in the kitchen.

  “Hey da,” she screamed at us. “Was ist?”

  Back there in this filmed slice of 1972, in those minutes rescued from the Heraclitean flux, I’m wearing my medals and my fraudulent marksman badge on my pressed green uniform, and it all fits perfectly. It’s all a little piece of military artwork, and I don’t have to worry about the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe blowing up a Ford Capri in my face.

  Back there, in 1972, I w
anted to get out of that uniform and put the medals away, forget about Bruecke Strasse 27 in Weinheim, but here is my aunt coming over to where I sit in the lawn chair. Her back to the camera (which was held by my uncle), she wobbles a little as she bends over, hands me her glass, grabs my face, and kisses me. It’s as though she wants to take my whole face into her mouth.

  She takes her glass back, turns then to the camera, and speaks, unaware that this is a silent film, that her address to posterity (which, at the moment, consists of my second wife and my two children) will go forever unheard. Hand on her hip, her breasts cocked, she speaks with confidence to the future and sips from her vodka.

  “That’s Aunt Margery?” my daughter says, surprised.

  “How’d she get so thin?” my son asks.

  “By reversing time,” my second wife, Carol, says.

  “You can do that?” My son smiles.

  Don’t I wish, I think to myself. Don’t I wish.

  I go to turn off the projector but put the machine on Pause by mistake, and my thirty-year-old image shimmies there on the screen, as if uncertain what to do next. I sit there vibrating in colors, which are both vivid and smudged, my aunt holding both hands toward me, as if she’s introducing me to the future.

  “Yeah, you were a poet,” Dennis Martin says when I call him. “I remember that.”

  Dennis and I were in graduate school together in 1967 and 1968, right before I went in the army.

  “Yeah, I also remember you were crazy about Emerson. Went around quoting him all the time. ‘The poet is the sayer, the namer, represents beauty.’ I always liked that quote, but then you wrote that poem, and all the Emerson stuff came to an end.”