by R. M. Ryan
The next room was huge—the size of a couple of basket-ball courts—with a series of tables arranged in a U-shape. Numbers were affixed to ten-foot poles at each table. Each was a station on the route of the army physical. The pathway started, appropriately enough, with blood. At Station One, four of us at a time sat and had blood drawn. The syringes emptied into tubes that were then racked in neat rows with our names on pieces of masking tape. The deep red of Worley and Adashek and Emory and Ryan. The communion wine of death.
At the next station, the same four were ushered into a room where we put our chests against cold stainless-steel squares on the wall.
“Suck in your chest. Hold your breath for fifteen seconds. We want to make sure there’s room for bullets in there. Thank you. Next four step in.”
And so the morning went. They examined our eyes, took our blood pressure and looked up our butt holes. Around noon, the line slowed down in front of a table at the last station. A man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck studied the paperwork of each man who came up to him.
“Ryan, huh?” he said to me. “That’s my wife’s maiden name. Let’s see. You put down Recurrent Back Pain on this form.”
“Yes, it’s right back here.” I turned to show him.
He got up, came around the table, and began poking my lower back.
“Ouch, yes, that’s the pain. Oh, and I’ve got high blood sugar, too.”
“Well, what am I going to do here?” he asked as he sat back down. He rubbed his forehead.
He scribbled on some forms, signed them, and stamped them.
“Here. Hand this in to the clerk after you put on your clothes. Next.”
“Am I out?”
“You’re done, my friend. You’re on your way.”
I sat down on the bench in the changing room. Yes, I thought to myself, he liked me; he agreed about my back pain. Can’t have any bad backs in the heavy work of war. He did me a favor. Thank you. Thank you. I looked through my paper work, which now was covered by various stamps and initials, and tried to figure out my status, but couldn’t make sense of it.
After I changed into my clothes, I handed my envelope to a clerk.
“Am I out?”
“What?” he asked.
“You know—out.” I didn’t know how to ask the question. “You’re done now. You can go home. Your draft board will get in touch with you.”
“Out of the way here. Clear a space.” A chubby air force captain followed by a marine corps sergeant came down the hallway.
“You’re not going home just yet. We need to have everyone line up here, on the red line.”
“We’re not finished processing them,” the clerk said.
“You can get back to that. No one’s going anywhere. Get everyone in here on the red line.”
Five or ten minutes later we all stood there, some of us still in our baggy underpants and falling-down socks.
“I want you!” the barrel-chested marine sergeant said to the third man as he came down the line behind the air force officer. “And you!” he said to the sixth man. “And you! And you!”
He was picking men who looked to be in good shape.
“Ain’t you something,” the marine said to our naked man. “That thing of yours already looks like an M-16. I’ll take you, that’s for sure.”
The air force officer was now standing next to me.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“The marines are drafting. Too many casualties at Khe Sanh. They need men,” he whispered. Then in a louder voice: “Straighten up the line, men, so Sergeant O’Brian can see you.”
“I’ll take you! And you!” the red-faced sergeant said in a gruff voice to the men on either side of me.
After the marine sergeant had taken his conscripts down the hall with him, I went to find the clerk with our paperwork. I was shaking with fear that the marines might take me next.
“What’s my classification?” I asked the clerk.
“Let’s see.” He went through some folders until he found my file. “Here. Item 76. Your P-U-L-H-E-S rating.”
“What does that mean?”
“Beats me,” the clerk said. “What matters is that you got a 1 in all six categories. You’re healthy as a horse. See Item 77. Dr. Medford checked Box A. The ‘is qualified box.’ Unless you convince them otherwise, your draft board’s going to call you I-A, my friend. Ready for the army of the old US of A.”
“There’s got to be a mistake here. The doctor felt my back. He talked to me. He liked me. He let me out.”
The clerk gave me an indifferent smile.
I ran back into the giant room with all the stations. Some of the medics were standing around smoking. Piles of trash were stacked in the corner, including a half-open, blood-smeared box where someone had thrown out the test tubes of our blood, which now was all mixed together with broken glass. It looked like the aftermath of an explosion. The doctor was gone.
“What happened to that doctor who was here?” I asked one of the medics.
“Went home. Gets $200 for a half-day’s work and goes home. Not a bad deal.”
“There’s been a mistake,” I said. “I’ve got a bad back.”
“Can’t help you here,” one of the medics said, stubbing out his cigarette in a coffee cup. “You better see a doctor.”
I ran back through the changing room and down the hallway along the red line. The only open office was that of an army recruiter. I stood in the doorway, puffing. I was so scared I could hardly breathe.
“There’s been a mistake,” I said to the lanky sergeant, who sat at his desk clipping his fingernails.
“Of course there has, son,” he said, pulling a chair out for me to sit in. “Of course there has. You’re not just a number, are you? You’re a human being. Here. Sit down. You got any college, son?”
33.
But why do I worry? The war’s long over, isn’t it? They can’t come and get me again, can they? It’s not dangerous anymore, is it?
Right now, it’s a Saturday evening in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Not a sergeant anywhere. It’s May. I’ve mowed the lawn and pulled some dandelions. My wife is out of town, and I turn on the television to find a little company, and there it is, of all programs, a rerun of the ancient Lawrence Welk Show on public television.
“Here’s our chorus now to sing a song made popular by Rudy Vallee,” Lawrence says. His powder-blue suit is a little too bright, like someone working overtime to stay cheerful. “A-one, an-a-two, an-a-three.”
He turns, holding his hand out, and the TV screen cuts to a row of singers. They are elbow to elbow, arrayed in a V, like a chevron, with the tip at the back of the stage. The women are on the left side of the V, the men on the right. Their clothes are all a matching orange, a color that seems vaguely familiar—and then I remember. Of course. Tang. That bright orange, awful-tasting breakfast drink. Tang. It went on the first manned space flight. Ahh, the footprints of the sixties, like the footprints on the moon—they never seem to go away.
How startling is the shift from Lawrence Welk’s baby-blue suit to the glowing orange of the chorus. The women’s skirts puff out with taffeta. They sway slightly back and forth with the rhythm of their song. The men have middle America’s version of the British Mod look, with page-boy haircuts and wide, orange ties and orange shirts with oversized collars. Since most of the men are forty or fifty years old, they look awkward in their costumes, as if they’d drunk from a diluted fountain of youth.
We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way
Baa, baa, baa.
How mournful their singing is, how solemn, in spite of all that orange. As if something unspoken has gone wrong that even accordions and bouncy rhythms cannot cure.
We’re little black sheep who have gone astray
Baa, baa, baa.
The singers raise their hands ever so slightly, as if pleading with us for understanding. The lovely Lennon Sisters on the left—Dianne, Peggy, Kathy, Janet
. There, on the right, is the man with the deep bass voice. Larry Hooper.
Gentlemen songsters off on a spree
Doomed from here to eternity
How odd to see this show nearly forty years after the fact, but I think it was the one my mother and I watched the night before I went in the army.
Yes, that day was also a Saturday. It had been hot. I mowed the lawn that day, too.
It’s Saturday evening. I am to leave for the army in the morning.
After I mow the lawn, I grill two steaks. My mother and I eat them on TV trays I bring outside. Afterward, we set the trays aside, sitting there in the backyard on East Memorial Drive, in the webbed lawn chairs, smoking Lark cigarettes.
It is still light. The sky has that sudden clarity you get just before the sun goes down, and I think, I’ve got to get in shape. My God, I’ve put this off long enough. I’m going in the army tomorrow, and I’ve got to get ready. So I stand up, flick away my Lark, do some deep knee bends, and begin running around the backyard in my loafers. I go first along the side of the garage, then north past the sandbox. I turn west by the raspberry bushes and then turn again by the grape arbor and come back along the picket fence. I’ve run maybe a tenth of a city block.
“Be careful, son,” my mother says, lighting another Lark. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
I go around again. And again. It’s easy. My body, my heart feel light.
Oh, this is nothing, I think. Nothing at all. I feel bullet proof as I go along the garage again, turning by the raspberry bushes and then back around the apple tree.
“Don’t you think you’ve exercised enough, Son?” my mother yells. “You don’t want to get sick. You shouldn’t be running on a full stomach.”
The army’s probably going to be tough, I think. The army probably won’t care if my stomach is full or not, so I head around a fourth time. I’m starting to sweat, but I do another lap, and then a sixth and a seventh. I’m puffing.
“Do you think I’ve done a mile?” I ask my mother.
In truth, I’ve probably run a small fraction of a real mile.
“Oh, at least,” she says. “Probably more. I lived through World War II, you know, and I never saw anybody run as hard as you have.”
I sit back down in the lawn chair with the webbed covering and light up a Lark. The twilight is darkening. When I finish my cigarette, I flick it into the air, where it glows with the fireflies.
I come inside, and my mother and I fix ourselves a pitcher of iced tea, and then we sit in front of the television to watch The Lawrence Welk Show.
“Oh, mom,” I say. “I hate The Lawrence Welk Show.”
“Do it for me, son. After all, you’re going in the army. These songs will make you feel better.”
And there it is, the chevron of singers arrayed across the stage in their Tang orange outfits, singing “The Whiffenpoof Song.”
Gentleman songsters off on a spree
Doomed from here to eternity
Lord have mercy on such as we
Baa, baa, baa.
“Wait, mom, isn’t that the title of the movie. From Here To Eternity?”
“Oh yes,” she says, “that movie about World War II. It’s too bad—they’re just not making good movies like that anymore.”
34.
“Ryan,” Walt Rostow says to me in a dream, his face coming in close and expanding, as if I’m seeing it in a fun-house mirror. His lips slowly pull back. Cheshire Cat teeth are underneath.
“Ryan,” he says, “what a shitty story you’re telling us. You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t about you or your father or your mother. This isn’t about irony or drawing lines. We don’t care about any of that. We don’t have time for that. Get with the fucking program, man. We’ve got to stop the Commies. It’s the domino theory, man. If Vietnam falls, then Asia goes, and pretty soon the rest of the world goes. It’s containment. Didn’t you pay attention in social studies class?
“Did you really believe that?”
“Oh, Ryan, it’s just a dream. I’m just a figment of your imagination.”
Cackling, he steps into the car of the Tilt-A-Whirl and spins off into the darkness.
“No one cares, Ryan,” he screams at me as he spins back into sight, his Cheshire Cat teeth luminescent. “We took our money and ran. ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,’ baby.”
“Then it was about money?” I yell as he spins this way and that before disappearing back into the dark.
I wait for him to come back into sight, but he doesn’t come, at least not this time he doesn’t.
“Was it just about the money?” I ask over and over and never get an answer.
35.
“Rick, I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” my friend Joe Kennedy tells me. “But no one really cares about what you did during the war in Vietnam.”
“No one cared back then either,” I say. “Look at this Polaroid. See, it says July 20, 1969, on the back. Remember that date?”
Joe thinks a minute, and then he smiles.
“Sure. Of course I do,” he says. “The moon landing. My wife and I had beer and pizza and invited everyone over to . . .”
“A fucking inspection. That’s what I had that day at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Can you believe that? I was in basic training. I’d been a soldier for eleven days. They wouldn’t let us watch the moon landing. We were forbidden from going into the dayroom, where the television was. We couldn’t join the rest of America because of an inspection.
“Here, Joe. Look at this, at this picture of Drill Sergeant Yankovic sitting on the steps of the dayroom. He was guarding it. That morning, the captain told us we hadn’t earned the right to watch men land on the moon.”
“Your drill sergeant looks sick, if you ask me,” Joe says. “Kind of yellow-looking and skinny.”
“True, but that made him scary to us. He was like stretched steel. Tough and sick at the same time. Just like that—his whole uniform would be soaking wet from his malaria. Even his hat. He dripped sweat, fat drops of it. They splattered on the ground. Then his uniform dried pale white from the salt leached out of his body. The army was killing him, and he thrived on it.”
“This is war, baby. War,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic said to a bunch of us trainees late in the evening of July 20, 1969. We stood around the steps to the dayroom hoping the captain would change his mind and let us watch the moon landing. “They don’t call it that in Washington, but this is about killing people and breaking things. You’re not your mama’s little babies anymore. Your mama can’t save you.”
The sudden flash from Leroy McMaster’s Polaroid made us look like ghosts. Leroy wanted to send pictures of Drill Sergeant Yankovic back to his congressman.
“It’s un-American not to let us watch the moon landing,” Leroy said, waving the pictures he took of the drill sergeant. “Congressman Alsop is a friend of my family. Just wait’ll he gets these.”
“Take all the pictures you want. No one cares, you moron. No one cares who you send your weenie fucking pictures to,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic said. “Send them to Congressman Shit for all I care. Make sure President Turd gets several copies. You dumb fuck—don’t you understand? They’re the reason you’re going to get your asses shot off. They started this war; they don’t care about you. Nobody cares about you.”
Drill Sergeant Yankovic stood up then, and we moved out of his way. He had long hands, with fingernails like talons. They were stained yellow—perhaps by his malaria or by his unfiltered Camel cigarettes.
He carefully put on his Smokey Bear, drill sergeant hat, pulling down the strap at the back to secure it. Campaign hats, these were called. His seemed to float on his head. He tapped its brim with the yellowed fingernail of his right index finger to make sure it angled down his face.
“We’re locking you out of America,” he said. “You have to fight your way back in. That dayroom is just the beginning.”
He drew himself up to the full six feet of his skinny height, stuck his thumbs i
n his web belt, and looked at us, a shadow from the tilt of his hat covering up his eyes.
“It’s war, baby,” he said. “War never goes away. Ole Wernher von Braun shot up the world for the Nazis, and now he’s on our side. He’s aiming for the moon. We’ll start there and then go on to the planets. Shit, the universe is next. You’ve got to love it. Yessir, ole Wernher’s attacking outer space. My man Wernher knows it’s war, baby. Don’t ever forget that. In the meantime, you keep your soft, civilian asses out of that dayroom.”
The army training barrack in those days had this large bathroom at one end of the first floor. The head. It was one big, open room with a drain in the middle. It had four toilets at one end, and eight shower nozzles at the other end. Along one side were six sinks and, across from them, six urinals. No stalls enclosed the toilets, the showers, or the urinals.
I suppose this openness was meant to degrade people, to break down their individuality and grease their slide into the gears of the army’s Big Green Machine.
Maybe—but Jerry Donenfelter saw this washroom as his studio. Jerry had studied music at the University of Alabama. He was also the drum major in the school’s marching band. He loved marching, and he loved choral arrangements.
At first this was a matter of Jerry working up some tight harmonies on “Soldier Boy” while he and some other tenors showered. “Oh, my little soldier boy,” four nude men sang to four other guys squatting on the toilets with their green cotton fatigue pants and white undershorts down around their ankles.
Drill Sergeant Yankovic sensed Jerry’s talent and made him a squad leader. Squad leaders wore these black felt arm-bands with corporal stripes pinned around the sleeves of their left arms. They looked like they were in mourning.
Jerry, however, saw his stripes as the first step on a ladder of greatness, and he picked twelve men (“The number Jesus would choose if he went to war,” Jerry said) for a close-order drill routine. They rehearsed in the laundry room, and we could hear the muffled cadences of drill commands and the sounds of clumping feet and rifle butts hitting the floor between the washers and the dryers. I think Jerry intended to be the Busby Berkeley of Company B, Fifth Battalion, First Training Brigade.