There's a Man With a Gun Over There

by R. M. Ryan

  I sat at my desk and smoked Winstons (“Taste good, like a cigarette should”) and memorized the difference between Italian and Shakespearean sonnets.

  “Walter, this may be one of the worst days in this Vietnamese conflict.”

  Here is the black steamer trunk with its brass rivets. I remember that night. I remember the piece of meat halfway to my mouth as I saw the United States military use a jeep to ram the gates of our own military compound, to retake the place from the Viet Cong. I remember being careful not to set my glass of milk down on the black surface of that trunk. I remember the way the CBS camera scanned the scene, catching images of dead Americans, of bullet holes, and of the fallen embassy seal. I remember sitting frozen there, as if something had changed. I remember looking over at my books, the neat rows of novels and books of poetry in the bookshelf I’d made out of boards and cinder-block brick.

  This was different, somehow. Nineteen sixty-eight wasn’t going to be like the other years, but I went on with my pork chop, my glass of milk. I went on studying the poetry of William Butler Yeats for my seminar with Professor Ben Kimpel.

  The next week we saw Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, shoot a man through the head. Just like that. Poof. A little smoke. The man winces, as though he might have a toothache on his right side. Then he topples over. The moment of the shot is also in newspapers, and so the image reverberates from television to newspapers back to television again.

  But the war was a long way away, wasn’t it, even though every noon a little cluster of demonstrators stood at the intersection of North Garland and West Maple.

  I stood on the other side of the street, watching them, as I sipped from a Coke I just bought at the student union.

  “Those fools think the president wants their opinion?” someone in the crowd behind me said.

  For Bill Ayers—who was a leader of the Weather Underground, a group that performed all kinds of violent pranks in the late 1960s, including setting off a bomb in a restroom of the Pentagon—“Nineteen sixty-eight began with staccato bursts and gunfire from all sides, the rat-tat-tat of everyday events tattooing the air. I was twenty-three. It was the year of wonder and miracle.”

  Me, I turned twenty-three that year, too, but there wasn’t the rat-tat-tat of much of anything for me, except on television. I was still grieving for the loss of my father, living inside the gauze of that grief, getting fatter from all the heavy meals Jenny prepared.

  “Rickie, what are you going to do about the army?” my mother asked in one of her weekly phone calls.

  For reasons I can’t really explain, I wasn’t worried. My fellow students didn’t seem too concerned. When I talked to John Freeman and Larry Johnson, they generally said something like, “The army isn’t going to want us.”

  Here’s John Laurence on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite: “Walter, death is everywhere in the ancient city of Hue—in the mass graves of South Vietnamese soldiers, in the open holes where the bodies of North Vietnamese sprawl, in the women who sit and grieve beside the bodies.”

  I stayed up late, until one or two in the morning, learning the metrics of poetry, how to scan lines for iambs and trochees and the lovely hoofbeats of those anapests. “I spring to the stirrup, and Joris and he. Dirck galloped, I galloped. We galloped all three.”

  Tea and cigarettes, a little daytime television, lots of literature—all punctuated by the rat-tat-tat of the war narrated by Walter Cronkite every evening at five thirty.

  “Walter, death is everywhere in the ancient city of Hue.”

  As the days drifted along, the story I missed was this one, from February 17: “Most draft deferments for graduate study and critical jobs were ended by the National Security Council. All graduating seniors at colleges, all first-year graduate students and all men who will receive master’s degrees in June will be eligible for the draft.”

  This was probably Walt Rostow’s idea; he was the president’s National Security Adviser then.

  A few years ago, before he died, I called him in Texas. I wanted to know why he drafted me.

  I called the institute where he worked in Austin. He answered his own phone.

  “This is Rick Ryan, Mr. Rostow. I want to know why you wanted to draft me in 1968. Why was I so important to you?”

  I could hear a scratchy sound. He had put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. I could hear a murmured question, probably to his secretary. I guessed he was wondering how my call got through.

  But then he couldn’t resist, I guess.

  “Is this a joke? How can you expect me to remember a single draftee? We had a war to fight.”

  “Did you really call him?” Carol asks me.

  “Look. Those days are over,” Walt Rostow says. “You need to get over it. I certainly don’t spend much time worrying about that period.”

  Then the click of the phone hanging up, and the moan of the dial tone.

  In April of 1968, my mother calls.

  “Oh, Rickie,” my mother says, crying. “Your number’s up.”

  “What?”

  “You have to go.”

  “To Vietnam?” When I say the three syllables of that country’s name, I feel as though a steel hand is squeezing my heart.

  “Mom, tell me what happened.”

  “It’s all over for me.”

  “Mom, come on. Tell me what happened.”

  “You got this letter from the government, so I opened it. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Here. ‘Selective Service System Order to Report for Armed Forces Examination.’ ”

  “Shit. When do I go?”

  “June 19th. In Milwaukee. It’s a Wednesday.”

  Time was slowing down for me. Slowing and slowing, like an episode from Days of Our Lives. “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” The film running at half or even quarter speed. I could hear my heart beating, as if it were now in my head, filling it with sound. I suddenly remembered the sound of those bullets going off in the basement.

  You begin a triangulation from a known point.

  “Send me the notice, OK?” I said.

  “OK. Rickie?”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t get killed, will you? You’re all I have.”

  What is the known point?

  26.

  Decades later, when, for the first time, I’m watching the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination on the Internet, it occurs to me that I am seeing my era, frame by grainy frame, come apart, just as John Kennedy’s head seems to explode when the bullet hits it: yes, that’s it. That was the beginning of the end. That was the real “Fable of the Final Hour”—not 1959; not that poem I was reading to my roommates on that Friday in 1963—but here, on Elm Street in Dallas.

  I sit there at my desk, in the terrible dark of two A.M. on a day in the twenty-first century, and feel lost and alone as Kennedy slumps over, and I’m frightened and I think I’m wandering around the back of the tapestry, where this piece of yarn connects to that one over there and I hold them and run my fingers along their coarse texture and wonder what the story on the other side is—the story I can’t see, the story I probably don’t want to know.

  27.

  “What’s the matter?” It’s Jenny, and she comes over to me. “Is something wrong with your mother?”

  “No. They got me. I’m a goner.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have to report for my draft physical.”

  “What’s wrong, Ryan? Ain’t life agreeing with you?” White-head asks me at one of the writing program parties that seem to be held every weekend.

  “I’m getting drafted.”

  “What’s wrong with you, man? You don’t see anyone else here getting drafted.”

  What’s happened to me, I wonder. Someone has picked me out, I think. I’m standing in a kind of howling tunnel, being sucked somewhere I don’t want to go. Why
is this happening to me alone? What have I done?

  “What’s the matter, man? You don’t look so good.” It’s Rex Harrison. A neat, older guy with carefully ironed button-down collar shirts and an improbable name.

  “I’m getting drafted.”

  “That’s too bad. Happened to me once. Once was enough.”

  “Really.”

  “I ended up enlisted in the air force. Pushed papers around for four years. It wasn’t a bad life, actually. I traveled all over the world.”

  This is like a shaft of light in the howling tunnel. An escape hatch. A ladder dangling down.

  “The only trouble,” Rex Harrison tells me, “is that they sometimes ask you to die for them. What a drag that is. You know what, Ryan?”

  “No,” I say, a little desperate for a clever angle on this.

  “I’d be careful if I were you.”

  He tips his beer bottle toward me, a kind of salute. Then he takes a sip and walks away.

  “Yeah, I’d be real careful.”

  The days passed in the slurry of that cold around me. I went to a draft board in Fayetteville and filled out a form to transfer my physical to Arkansas. That change delayed the date of my physical. It bought me a few more weeks of freedom.

  The clerk was about five feet tall and almost as round as he was tall. He had henna-dyed hair and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He could cough and puff on that cigarette at the same time.

  “Going to serve your country, eh, boy?” he said through coughing puffs of smoke. “Not like those hippies out there. Good for you.”

  My new date was September eleventh. 9/11. It wasn’t such an important number back then. Just another Wednesday.

  That April, in an announcement I never saw back then, the Defense Department said that 48,000 men would be drafted for military service in April. “Of those drafted, approximately 4,000 will go to the marines corps, which has not been able to fill a higher quota with volunteers.”

  Once more, I realize that I’m sitting before my computer no longer writing this. No, I’ve got my elbows on the desk, and my forehead rests on my clasped hands, as if I’m praying again. Sometimes my eyes are closed as I try to remember what happened, sometimes I stare into the slightly flickering white-blue of the computer screen, into some middle distance out there over the heads of Judy Stryker, John Rogers, Ron Moriarty, and little Rickie Ryan. Sometimes I wonder if any of it happened. I’m also looking for another way out of this. Even now, decades later, I don’t want to go into the army. Even now, I’m praying that I won’t have to go.

  “Have you heard any way to get out of this?”

  That’s me calling my old high school friend Steve Agard in Madison. I didn’t know who else to call. When I told my fellow students about the notice for my physical, they looked at their shoes, and John Edwards started crying.

  “Aren’t you a little late?” Agard asked. “I mean, shouldn’t you have done something about this before you got the notice for your physical?”

  He was right, of course.

  “Look, Ryan. Contact these people. Just a minute.”

  I could hear him shuffling through papers.

  “The Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union. They’ll tell you what to do. When’s your physical?”

  “September.”

  “You better get on this.”

  But I didn’t get on it, no. The country buried another Kennedy, and Jenny and I drove to her family cottage in Minnesota, outside of Brainerd, on North Long Lake, where I hoped to forget about my pending army physical. Jenny wanted to see her childhood friend John Breitbart. John had dropped out of college and just been drafted into the army, but he seemed almost excited in a strange way, happy that his life would have focus and physical training.

  “I’ll get in shape and learn to finish things.”

  We water-skied behind John’s red and white speedboat, making circular arcs through the flat and reflective dark water in the hour before sunset. The lake had a glass-like calm. It was perfect skiing water. When I wasn’t skiing, I sat in the back of the boat, suddenly noticing the beautiful little pearls of spray thrown up by the boat. It was all a kind of paradise. At night, Jenny and I snuggled away from the chill down under the old cotton blankets that smelled of soap and mildew. Jenny decorated a canoe paddle for me that hung beside the door, and I joined this family tradition of summers at the lake.

  The only thing strange about those weeks were the big artillery guns at nearby Camp Ripley—their boom, boom, boom echoed all day long. The windows in the cabin vibrated from the shock waves of their explosions. It felt as though a military attack were beginning a few short miles away.

  “Are they triangulating those shots?” I asked.

  “What’s that?” Jenny asked back.

  “Oh, it’s trigonometry, something my father knew about. It’s a way to be accurate. Never mind. I guess I mean those things scare me. It’s like they’re aimed at us.”

  “Don’t worry. They’re just practicing. You’ll get used to them,” she said.

  28.

  It was an unusually cool August morning the day I finally drove to Madison for my meeting with the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union. Puffy clouds, a pale blue sky, the undulating fields broken up by groves of trees.

  I had called the day before to make an appointment.

  “You already have an appointment,” the man’s voice on the phone said.

  “I do?”

  “With death in a rice paddy, my friend. You better get your ass in here if you want to avoid that.” He hung up then.

  Driving north on Interstate-90, I’ve got the Delco FM in the Chevelle blasting “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” through the reverberator, so “satisfaction” comes out satisfaction-tion-tion-tion, the last syllable of the word bouncing up against a wall and coming back. My left arm is out the window, and I pound my hand on the side of the marina blue Chevelle, “Can’t get none, no, no, no.” I’m going to Madison, fucking A, to find out how to avoid the draft from the people who know how it’s done. My buddy Agard has set me up. Madison, oh Madison—Madison will get me out of this.

  I parked down near the student union and had a golden beer out on the terrace and watched the sailboats like white thoughts floating over the green-black deep of Lake Mendota. I looked through the window of Paul’s Books and saw shelf after shelf of the lovely books I promised myself I’ll read once this army business is behind me. I walked up State Street in the sunshine, along with all the lovely, giggling girls in their madras bermuda shorts. The world seemed organized, orderly, and oh so peaceable. Yes, I thought: the Wisconsin Draft Resistance will help me.

  Their office was located at 217 South Hamilton Street, down the hill from the Capitol, on a street that seemed suddenly dark after the bright sunshine of State Street. The pillars of the porch were rotted and looked like uncertain exclamation points. I wanted the place to look better—to be business-like, with crisp cubicles and men in white shirts and narrow ties handing out exemptions to the war—but no, it was a falling-down old house. On its porch was a spongy beige couch without any cushions. Springs stuck out from the seat of its frame.

  “The fuck you want, Baby Blue?”

  He was incredibly skinny with a curly kind of Afro hairdo, though he wasn’t black. Far from it. He was so white he looked like one of those people who spend all their time indoors. He was slug white. He had a hacking, almost tubercular-sounding cough. He stood inside the screened door of the house scratching his stomach under his shirt.

  “I suppose you got a draft notice, and now you want some help.”

  “No, I got my physical notice. I got it moved from Wisconsin to Arkansas. That gave me some extra time. I go in September. Next month.” I was so relieved to talk with someone about this that I rushed through the words.

  “Believe it or not we have calendars here, too. Even anarchists have to know what day it is. Maybe after the revolution we’ll replace calendars with something. Popsicles maybe. Apri
l twelfth will be orange. What do you think?”

  He opened the door, and I walked into this dark-paneled room with a dusty-smelling carpet. Papers, books, and pamphlets in heaving piles.

  “You probably should transfer that physical back to Wisconsin, Baby Blue. They’ll be more lenient here than down there in god-and-country land. Fucking rednecks. Still trying to recoup their losses in the Civil War. Taking on the whole fucking world. Just gonna keep losing wars.”

  I’ve got a brand-new college-ruled notebook under my arm to write down all the solutions he’ll give me to my draft problem. I write down “keep losing wars.”

  He hands me some forms and says: “Here are the keys to the kingdom, my friend, the trustworthy old SSS Form 150, the special form for conscientious objectors. That’s the baby. You fill this out, you’re guaranteed at least a year’s delay with all the appeals you’re going to file, and you might just get out for good.”

  This is good, I think, yes, the Form 150. I write it down and circle it.

  “The SSS on those forms, what does that stand for?”

  “Boy in the front row is going to ask questions—bet all your teachers think that you’re just the best little scholar, don’t they? Selective Service System. Old General Hershey up there in Washington. He always reminds people that it’s not a universal draft. Oh no, it’s a selective system. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that he was cherry-picking the nation’s youth. Taking just a few of mama’s precious little boys.”

  I write that down, too. “Not a universal system. Mama’s precious little boys.”

  “Funny,” I said. “That’s what my mother called me. Her precious little . . .”

  “What’s your name, Baby Blue?”

  “Ryan. Rick Ryan.”

  “Good. They’ll like that in the army, the way you start with your last name. Such a good, healthy American name you got there, Rick. Me, I’m Arnie. Rick . . . that’ll look good on a tombstone with your service number underneath. Do you know your number?”