There's a Man With a Gun Over There

by R. M. Ryan

  “No,” I say. Somehow this isn’t going the way it should. I don’t have anything to write down.

  “Yes, you do, Baby Blue. It’s your Social Security number. They’ve just changed the system—made it easy for you. In the old cradle to grave services of the government, the grave’s just coming a little sooner than you thought.”

  He grabs SSS Form 150 out of my hands.

  “What am I thinking? It’s too late to fill out Form 150. Once you get SSS Form 223, it’s a whole new ball game. That changes everything. You had your chance to get out and you threw it away, Baby Blue. Threw it away, you dumb fucking shit.”

  At that moment in that dark house on that lovely day I felt this strange jerk in my vision, as if a slide changed somewhere, though I wrote down Form 223 in my notebook and then beside it “Changes everything.”

  “Of course you didn’t think anything would happen, did you? You thought if you just lay low, they’d overlook you somehow. You’re mama’s special little boy, right? Besides, it was too embarrassing to apply for conscientious objector status, wasn’t it? You’d been out there in the bushes with your cap gun and your Roy Rogers hat playing cowboys. You were a red-blooded American boy. Didn’t want anyone to think you were a coward. Well, they’re not dummies, those Selective Service people. They’ve got the mid-American psyche of yours all figured out.”

  “What’s Form 223?”

  “Order to Report For Armed Forces Examination, Bucko. It might as well be your induction notice. It ain’t called a Pre-Induction Physical for nothing. They take pretty much everyone.”

  And now the temperature dropped. It suddenly seemed cold in that room.

  “You got medical problems, Baby Blue?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have a catch in my back. Had it the other day. Took my breath away.”

  He laughed—threw his head back and slapped his thighs.

  “Vague back problems. I can already see the stamp, Baby Blue. The doctor hits the inkpad and then raises it up a little for dramatic effect. Whap, he hits Form 88. 1-A, Baby Blue, in slightly smeared black ink. 1-A. Ready to go. Old Form 88. Rocket 88, Baby Blue. You’re taking off; you’re on your way. Now the forms say DD. Know what that is?”

  I shake my head. I’m slowly writing “Baby Blue” in my college-ruled notebook and drawing stars around the words.

  “Department of Defense. The first of those is DD Form 62, the Certificate of Acceptability. You’ve made it then. You’re in Club Death. He’s got another stamp for that. Major Fucker, MD, it’ll say, and then he’ll sign it. You’re on Cemetery Road at last.”

  A voice I didn’t recognize, from somewhere deep inside of me.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “They’re smart—take a couple of deer from the herd, and the others just stand there like they think they got a magic wall around them.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Here are your choices . . .”

  “Wait, let me write them down.”

  “Such a student. Here they are: Canada or jail. Of course you could injure yourself. Here take a copy of AR 40-501.”

  “What’s that?” I’m writing the title down. It’s like some kind of strange Bingo game. Letters and numbers being called off.

  “It’s got a couple of titles. The one I like best is PROCURE-MENT MEDICAL FITNESS STANDARDS, like you’re some kind of part they’ve ordered, a vehicle they’ve procured.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Just what it says over and over. ‘The causes for rejection are . . .’ It gives you a nice list of how to mutilate yourself. Here, see paragraph 2-9, item 2.1: ‘Absence (or loss) of distal and middle phalanx of an index, middle, or ring finger of either hand . . .’ There you go. Just cut off the two joints, though be sure you cut two. One’s not enough. You don’t want to screw that one up—cut part of your finger off and still get drafted.

  “That’s the way I would go, Baby Blue. Shake two of those index finger joints loose. You’ll be free, thank God Almighty, free at last, Baby Blue.”

  He smiled and handed me a copy of the army regulations.

  “Take this, too.”

  He gave me a copy of the Manual for Draft-Age Emigrants to Canada.

  “I’m sorry, Ryan. You’re probably a nice, straight American kid. Not like me—got a couple of drug busts, and I think the FBI is on my tail for draft dodging. But I just keep moving around from New York to Madison. Pretty soon I’m headed to Berkeley.”

  He went over and looked out the window. I wrote down FBI in my notebook.

  “You didn’t park out there, did you?”

  “I’m a few blocks down the street. Why?”

  “They’re out there.”

  “Where?”

  “They’re everywhere.”

  The afternoon—with its golden glass of beer, its white tufted sailboats, shelves of books, and streets of girls—was gone forever. I could imagine dark-suited men supervising my Chevelle as it was towed away. No more Rolling Stones; no more reverberator.

  “You know what I would do if I were you, Ryan?”

  He came over and grabbed my hand. The gesture so surprised me that I dropped the notebook on the floor. He began to circle around me, as if we were dancing.

  “I’d carve a great big Fuck You in my back and let it fester. Get the letters all filled with green pus and let the doctors see that. Green pus and black blood. Oh, that’ll freak them out.”

  We were spinning together, faster and faster.

  “The other thing you need to do is get your football helmet and come to Chicago. We’re going to have a little jousting match with the Democratic Party. We’re bringing the war to their front steps. Be there, baby. Be there with that bloody Fuck You so America can see what it’s done to you.”

  That said, he spun me toward the door.

  “Yeah, carve a big Fuck You in your back. Let it fester so it turns green. That’ll get you out, I guaran-fucking-tee it.”

  I started out the door.

  “You could also cut the end of your trigger finger off. Cut it off, let it dry, and then mail that stiff fucker to the Pentagon. Attach a tag. Write this on it: ‘One less finger for the war, motherfuckers.’ Now, if you go that route, Baby Blue, be sure you slice the first two joints off. One’s not enough.”

  Then he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and pulled me close. His breath smelled like garlic.

  “One more thing, Baby Blue. When you get to your physical, you’ll have to fill out this security questionnaire. They have lists of Commie organizations. Check a few of those rascals off. That’ll get you an FBI file going. And write on that form I believe that the war in Vietnam is morally wrong. Write that a whole bunch of times. In fact, Baby Blue, write that everywhere there’s space. Then write I’m a homo, too. Whowhee what fun you’ll have. You’ll be too dangerous to draft.”

  He pushed me out the door and slammed it shut. The door opened suddenly, and he stood there in an old top hat. He took it off, slowly bowed, and slammed the door again.

  As I walked back down State Street, the sunshine and the girls and the books seemed meant for someone else. I wanted to scratch my back where I imagined all the letters of “Fuck You” were festering. I kept crossing and recrossing the street and looking over my shoulder to see if someone in a dark suit was following me. As I got in the Chevelle and pulled away from the curb, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a man in round sunglasses, a leather vest, and sandals staring at my car.

  Of course, I thought, the FBI’s incognito these days. They probably followed me the whole way. I turned on the radio.

  The FM station was playing cuts from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I thought the Beatles would cheer me up, but the reverberator got stuck, and final syllables of words sounded like machine-gun fire. Pepper turned into Er-er-er-er. The last syllable of lonely became Le-le-le-le. I turned the radio off.

  That day in August of 1968—why, that was the day my music died.<
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  “What’d he say?” my mother asked when I walked in the door of 863 East Memorial Drive. “Can they get you out?”

  Suddenly that question seemed so funny. I started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  I laughed and I laughed until I was making hoarse, barking noises. My mother got me a glass of water.

  “My three main options seem to be cutting two joints of my index finger off, carving swear words in my back, or going to Canada.”

  Then my mother began to pucker up, and her face turned red.

  “My little boy,” she sobbed. “My precious, little boy. Just like that, they take you away from me. Just like that.”

  “Funny, that’s what Arnie called me. Look, I’ve heard that Toronto is a pretty nice city.”

  “I’ll never see you again if you go there. You can’t do that, Rickie. Can you just tell them I’m a widow? They wouldn’t take a widow’s only boy, would they?”

  She began hiccupping as she sobbed, a pudgy little old lady who’d been a yellow rose in the Rose Parade in Pasadena in 1925.

  29.

  The fabled 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention began on Monday, August 26th. My mother and I sat with pizzas watching it in the slightly overdone colors of the television set at 863 East Memorial Drive.

  Here’s Anita Bryant in a blue dress singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She has thick eyelashes on for her part of the battle. The camera pans across the placards with the names of the states held aloft. Up and down, and back and forth go Iowa, Oregon, Massachusetts, Florida, and Arizona like cards in a board game. Bang, goes the gavel. “The chair recognizes . . .” The man doesn’t so much speak as rattle the syllables out. “The chair recognizes . . .” The camera cuts to a close-up of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, fat lipped as he whispers in the ears of men who scurry off. The men wear suits and narrow ties. The women have lacquered hairdos with stiff flips and walk in their high heels as if they don’t quite touch the ground.

  It’s all a great American ritual, sponsored by recessed-filter Parliament cigarettes, Continental Insurance, and Aqua Velva aftershave lotion. “So why be alone?” the announcer asks, and the camera cuts to the minuteman emblem of Continental Insurance. And then: “There’s something,” a husky-voiced lady says, “about an Aqua Velva man.” My mother and I light up cigarettes every time a Parliament commercial comes on.

  Oh yes, we do what we’re told, out here in America, don’t we?

  Do you remember the CBS correspondents who covered the floor of the sixty-eight convention while Walter Cronkite sat up above in his glass-windowed booth overlooking everything? They all wore earphones with these antennas on their heads that looked like bent clothes hangers and these matching, tightly fitted gray suits, as if they were crew members in an early version of Star Trek, as if the floor of the International Amphitheatre in Chicago were some strange planet that the Enterprise had landed on, as if the convention delegates— all those jowly men from Chicago and Mississippi and New York—were aliens from some other planet.

  Once in a while, correspondents Dan Rather and Marvin Kalb put their fingers to the earphones connected to the antennas, bent their heads, and listened, as if receiving instructions from some higher plane, perhaps from the booth where Walter Cronkite, that avuncular Oz in the kingdom of CBS News, sat, watching the proceedings below. Perhaps they were getting word about the frenzied confrontations between the police and the student demonstrators outside.

  On Wednesday night, August 28th, Walter Cronkite hurriedly interrupts Dan Rather.

  “Dan, we have to cut over to Ed Bradley, outside on Michigan Avenue.”

  The screen fills with gray, blurry images.

  “Walter, it’s quite a melee out here, with the Chicago police confronting protesters,” Ed says, ducking down when something flies past the camera.

  The picture is out of focus, as if the cameraman is part of the struggle on the streets. We hear heavy breathing and curses, the thud of nightsticks into bodies, bursts of what sound like gunfire, but the lighting is dim, making the battle something from a hardly seen nightmare. The camera keeps moving around, looking for an image to settle on.

  “Is someone shooting?” a bouffant-haired woman in an A-line skirt asks, clutching her purse to her bosom. She’s at the edge of the camera shot and nervous as a bird.

  “This is Chicago. Chicago for Christ’s sake,” a voice from somewhere says.

  Maybe most frightening is the undigested quality of the film. We’re used to television summarizing things after they happen—not puzzling over scenes as they occur.

  And, look, there—is it possible?—stopping to pose for the camera, my God, it’s Grimes Poznik. He’s blowing “Charge!” on his trumpet, as if signaling that now the real chaos of the sixties is underway. Protesters wearing high school football helmets and carrying baseball bats pass the camera in a dark blur. Cops appear, looking back and forth, many of them wearing white helmets.

  “What’s going on?” my mother asks.

  Ed Bradley is coughing. The shots were tear-gas canisters being launched into the crowds of demonstrators.

  “Walter, it’s chaos out here on Michigan Avenue. It looks more like Vietnam than middle America.”

  “What’s going on?” my mother asks again, her cigarette halfway to her mouth.

  “We’re about talked out,” Roger Mudd says to Walter and to America the last night of the convention.

  Commentator Eric Sevareid nods. “Yes, Walter, we don’t know what else to say.”

  “We thought about leaving,” Walter Cronkite says. “These thugs make it hard to tell America’s story . . .”

  Thugs? Thugs in America?

  How could that be? It must be the war protesters, right? They’re the cause of this trouble, not these soldiers in their brown shirts.

  Esquire magazine hired French novelist Jean Genet, Beat memoirist William Burroughs, and all-around crazy man Terry Southern to cover the Democratic convention.

  Southern picked up this observation when he noticed Genet staring at the dashboard of the Ford they were riding in: “What can be in the mind of someone who names an automobile Galaxie?”

  I’m reading this quotation now, decades after Terry Southern wrote it down. I think, as I read those long-ago words, of how information can rhyme. I now know (as Terry Southern perhaps didn’t) that the overwrought egotism, which put the name Galaxie on an ordinary automobile, took place in the time when none other than Robert McNamara was an executive of the Ford Motor Company.

  Mr. McNamara is, of course, one of the chief architects of the war in Vietnam.

  My first car—my beloved 1961 Ford convertible with the smoky Mileage Maker Six engine and the doors that filled up with water every time it rained—was a Galaxie. I had been living in McNamara’s world for years and didn’t know it. The Galaxie, in fact, was introduced in 1959, the year Buddy Holly died.

  Ah, the lovely years of my youth were just another chapter in the Book of War.

  What I didn’t know, what Jean Genet doesn’t know, is that Robert McNamara is a broken man in 1968. The data he collects add up to one unmistakable total: the war in Vietnam can’t be won by the Americans.

  The day after the Democratic convention ended, I went up to the bathroom where my father had sat shitting black, cancerous blood.

  I took off my shirt, studied my back in the mirror, and thought about carving FUCK YOU there. I realized that I would either have to write backward in the reversed image the wall mirror gave me or use a second mirror to guide my hand. It was quite confusing.

  I decided to hold a hand mirror in my left hand to check the work of my right hand in the medicine-cabinet mirror. But it was hard going. In the double mirrors, while the letters were in their proper order, everything was confused: up seemed to be down, and left appeared to be right, out was in, and in was out. I kept making mistakes and washed them off, rubbing hard with a brush to get the ink off my skin. My back turned gray from
the ink and raw from all the washing.

  When I finally had a fairly passable version of FUCK YOU inked on my back, I got a paring knife from the kitchen just to try a cut. I figured healed scars that read FUCK YOU might be even more dramatic than the pus-filled version. I was just drawing blood when I realized that I had no idea if the FUCK YOU I was about to carve was up or down as you actually saw it without the mirrors.

  “Oh my God,” my mother said when I showed her my back. She began sobbing—big, heaving sobs. “What are you doing? What’s happening? What’s going on? Everything’s getting so strange.”

  30.

  Oh, it was hide and seek for me. Running and running: running as fast as I could to get away. Vi-et-nam. Vi-et-nam. Vi-et-nam. Those three awful syllables. In my brain I was running, running, running. No one could help me, not my dear, gone dad, not my dear, sweet pudgy mother. No one, oh, no one, no.

  I think I ran for years and years until it all caught up with me.

  By the early 2000s, I had such prosperity: the BMW; the children in private schools; the perfect yuppie life; and there I was in Washington, DC, visiting an old friend, drinking Pinot Grigio at his mansion in Georgetown and spending the night at the Sheraton near the White House, right where presidents got their hair cut.

  I have everything, and the next morning—Sunday—I take a cab to the Washington National Cathedral for Easter services and there is Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor doing one of the readings and all of us look happy and educated and prosperous and I’m in the cathedral bathroom changing into running gear and putting my dress clothes in a backpack and then jogging down Massachusetts Avenue past the Naval Observatory where the vice president lives.

  Lovely, lovely the spring day. It’s me and mansions and Al Gore and Sandra Day O’Connor. Lovely, lovely the air as I go running, running, running, just as I have two or three times a week since 1968, and then ahead of me is a line of people walking between two ropes on a sidewalk in a park and people are laughing and talking and suddenly I realize I’m in the line to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and people are getting quieter and quieter and I don’t know what to do except move along though I don’t want to be here and it’s kind of like the way I went into the army and then there in the black granite is the first name I see and then the second and the third. Dale R. Buis, the first GI dead in Vietnam, followed by Chester Melvin Ovnard, except I later learn that Chester’s name is misspelled on the wall, that it should be Chester Melvin Ovnand, and then I think they can’t even get the names right and you and I and all the others are wading deeper and deeper into the dead and it’s Maurice Flournoy and Alfons Bankowski and then they’re adding up and I remember the box scores on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite and the United States supposedly winning the World Series of War and I’m walking deeper and deeper into the names of the dead. Frederick Garside and Ralph Magee and Glenn Matteson and why, I wonder, am I here and when will this stop and a homeless man wearing a wool blanket—exactly the kind of blanket we had in the military—is pointing at men and saying, “You. You. You’re a brother, right? You’re my brother aren’t you?” and then he’s pointing at me, as if some secret thread from the back of the tapestry connects us to each other, “You. You. You’re a veteran, right?” and I’m nodding yes and I’m shaking my head no and I’m walking deeper and deeper into the names of the dead. Leslie Sampson and Edgar Weitkamp Jr. and Oscar Weston Jr. and I can see my face reflected in the polished black granite among the names and the homeless veteran pointing at me and there is Mr. Niederman and the pregnant woman and we’re all there in the vast reflected land of the dead, us and them, us and them, reflected back and forth.