by Doug Bradley
He was her baby. And he belonged there, if not inside her, then beside her, not in the car with his father, on the way to the airport and California and, all too soon, Vietnam.
What would they talk about in the car? she wondered. Or would they talk at all? She shook her head. How was it that these two, so much alike that it was sometimes painful to watch, had become prisoners of this Oedipal dance? And why did she, who knew each of their hurts and their fears, why did she have to mother both of them? Why did she have to mediate their anger and navigate their distance?
Would she ever see him again?
Which one, her mind quickly countered. As emotional as her husband was, he could easily succumb to a crying jag on the way home and drive right off the Schuylkill Expressway. And her son …
She paused as the aching in her womb struck back, pulling her stomach and her head and her heart with it.
DEROS? Was that the term he used? She envisioned the word in her head, storing it in her mind for a future crossword puzzle as she did with most new words she heard. But this one was made up, just another of those silly Army acronyms.
“What’s a five letter word for the Greek God of …?” Of what? she thought. Deliverance? Salvation? Reunion?
DEROS had something to do with return from overseas, but she couldn’t remember the rest of it. The return from overseas was the important part. When would that be? When could they start counting down from 365? When would the pain go away?
As she reflected on “going away” she realized she was standing in front of the door to his bedroom. “Walk On By,” she said aloud, pulling her hand back from the doorknob. She couldn’t go in because she didn’t want to face the disappointment of his not being there.
For a moment, she could still hear the music that he played so loud, especially the album that had the song “Walk On By” which so unnerved her. The voice of the black man in that song, his pleading, his hurt, all the longing in his voice, the female singers in the background, the electric guitar demanding to be heard.
Now she was inside his bedroom, fingering through the wooden crate next to his desk where he kept his record albums. She gasped, staring at what looked like a black baby’s head emerging from the womb before she saw the sunglasses and the beads around the neck and realized it was the head of the black man who sang the song that took her son away and broke her heart.
She grabbed the copy of Hot Buttered Soul and tried first to break it, then bend it, with no success. There was only one thing left to do.
She opened the turntable, placed the album on the spindle, raised the needle and turned up the volume. Loud. Louder. An orchestra, violins—had they always been there? The guitar and then that deep, painful resonant voice, reminding her that she’d lost someone she loved.
Standing there, listening and crying, she knew what DEROS meant.
Malaria
The last order Master Sergeant Billy Taylor snapped as I left Fort Benning was: “Make sure y’all take these malaria pills 48 hours BEFORE you leave for ‘Nam. Do you read me? If you don’t do as I say, you’ll get malaria and die ‘fore you get sick of the fucking place.”
Sgt. Taylor’s words hovered above the dashboard as my dad maneuvered his VW bug through the rain and the Philadelphia rush-hour traffic. If it hadn’t been for Sgt. Taylor’s warning, my dad and I would be headed south toward the airport and my flights heading to the West coast and Southeast Asia. Instead, we were driving north—back home to fetch my forgotten malaria pills.
We approached my parents’ apartment in silence. My dad pulled into the small circle in front of their building and turned off the ignition. I got out.
“I forgot my malaria pills,” I told my mother as I returned to re-swell her puffy eyes and nose. Neither of us was up to a repeat of our previous, painful goodbyes. I grabbed the pills, pocketed them in the raincoat my dad gave me for protection, and kissed her between petrified tears.
Back on the road, my dad and I again sat in silence. Under normal circumstances, a hostile, damp night with tons of traffic and skittish drivers would throw him into a rage. Not tonight. He simply steered, coping with the demands of the highway, and my departure. As I watched him, I thought about how much we were alike, and how far we’d come in just 48 hours.
* * *
My parents were hosting a festive, pre, pre-Thanksgiving going-away dinner for me, accompanied by my girlfriend Emily.
“The Last Supper,” I whispered to Emily, trying to explain all the familial hoopla.
My mother invited her sisters, Mae and Stella, and Stella’s husband Joe, to join in the celebration. The seven of us dined on turkey and all the trimmings in front of the TV in the living room of my parents’ tiny, two-bedroom apartment, watching the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs play football.
Between first and second helpings, as I passed the gravy boat to Aunt Mae and joked about Thanksgiving in Vietnam, Aunt Stella and my dad leaped from their chairs and ran toward the TV. A skirmish had broken out between opposing linemen. Aunt Stella screamed: “Get the nigger! Get that nigger!” My father hollered, “Kill that black bastard!”
I exchanged a painful expression with Emily whose body visibly tightened. She was embarrassed for me, and I was angry with my family. In fact, on the 28th day of a 30-day, pre-Vietnam leave, I was pissed off about everything—my parents, Aunt Stella, racism, genocide, Nixon, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kent State, the draft—everything.
“What’s your problem?” My father baited us, looking past me at Emily whom I suspected he already disliked. She hadn’t responded to his good old boy flirting and hadn’t laughed at one of his stupid jokes since she’d arrived.
“Back off, will you please, Dad?”
“It’s my house; I can do as I please.”
“Then try showing some consideration for people who don’t share your prejudices.”
Battle lines drawn, Emily quietly excused herself from the table while the rest of my relatives pretended to watch the football game.
“Don’t hand me that high and mighty horseshit,” my dad snarled. “I’ve had it up to here with your college-boy crap. You’re no better than any of the rest of us. I was hoping the Army might change your attitude, but it hasn’t. I’ll guarantee you Vietnam will.”
I glanced at my mom at the mention of “Vietnam.” Her eyes moistened. I hated my father for upsetting her. I hated him for embarrassing me in front of Emily. I hated him for the war.
“Vietnam will straighten you out,” he continued. “You mark my words. Do you good to defend this great country.”
“TOUCHDOWN!” Aunt Stella shrieked. I shook my head, swallowed my words and left to look for Emily. She wasn’t in the guest bedroom. She wasn’t on the balcony either.
I walked down the narrow hallway to my parents’ bedroom. Even though they always turned the heat in their apartment up way too high, my folks usually kept the large windows in their back bedroom wide open. The pitch-black room was cool, almost cold, like a cave hidden away among the nearby Pocono Mountains.
I thought I heard something when I entered the room, but I was so exhausted that I collapsed on my parents’ firm, queen-sized bed. It was then that I detected the sound of another person’s breathing. The rhythm of the barely audible sighs told me that it was Emily. We didn’t talk about what had just happened, or what was going to happen in less than 48 hours.
“Do you remember that turkey dinner I cooked for you and your Army buddies last summer in your apartment?” mused Emily. “Not nearly as good as your mom’s food. I worked all day on that meal and then that asshole roommate of yours—Frank—joked about how he couldn’t eat a turkey dinner if it wasn’t Thanksgiving and hadn’t been made by a family member of his—he kept rubbing it in all night—you didn’t stop him. What a jerk he was. I never liked that guy.”
Emily kept going on like that, never pausing to ask me for an answer. She needed to let down, and the cool, dark quiet was helping her to do that.
After
a while I started to talk to the darkness myself.
“I’ve been looking for an answer to why I’m bound for Vietnam,” I began. “First, I thought I was some sort of innocent victim, a casualty of life’s unfairness. Then I decided it was fate. But that didn’t make any sense either, especially for a good Catholic boy like me.
“Next, I thought it was punishment for something bad I’d done—a sin I’d forgotten to confess, some wrong that I didn’t bother to right. Later, I turned to astrology, then Tarot cards, marijuana, meditation, more dope, the Grateful Dead—none of it worked.
“Then it hit me—it was my parents’ fault!”
Was Emily listening? She seemed to still be breathing in the cool night air and breathing out her anxiety.
“It is their fault, goddamn it. I mean, shit, I made it to the draft lottery, which was going to save my ass. But the day before my birthday was picked out of the fucking fishbowl as number two-fifty something. And the day after was three sixty-six! Are you shitting me? But my birthday! Number nine! Fuck, I might as well have packed my bags for Vietnam the day I was born.”
We both lay there, Emily replaying the weeks we’d spent together before tonight, our final night, while I continued to make a case against my parents for their lousy family planning. I needed so bad for someone, for Emily, to hold me right then. But I didn’t reach across the bed. I wanted her to find me, to caress me, to comfort me.
Lost in our respective monologues, Emily and I were unaware that the bedroom door had opened and a crack of light from the hallway reaffirmed how dark it was.
Someone had entered the room. Neither of us moved. I wasn’t frightened because I knew it was my dad. And when he lay down on the bed between us, it seemed inexplicably natural.
“It broke my mother’s heart when I went into the service,” he recalled softly, almost privately. The hostility was gone from his voice. Emily and I stopped our own musings and listened to his whispered memories.
“But it wasn’t my mother, or yours, who was hurt the most, or frightened the most, by what I had to do,” he continued, “it was me. Did I ever tell you what an unheroic fellow your father was? It was late 1943, almost 1944—Nineteen Forty-Four!—before I joined the Army! Did I enlist? Did I run down to my local recruiting station and sign up to kick Hitler and Hirohito’s butts? No. I had to be drafted. The end of 1943 and the world was going to hell and I had to be drafted.”
None of us moved. We were floating through space and time on a bed in a bedroom in an apartment in a city somewhere between Pearl Harbor and Saigon.
“They had to come and get me,” my dad admitted. “Sure, I wanted to beat the Japs and the Nazis. But I was scared to death. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to have to kill someone. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to fight. And now,” he paused, nearly choking on his words. “And now, twenty-five years later, my son has to do the same goddamn thing—only this time it’s worse. He’s gotta do something that nobody in his right mind wants to do for a country that’s not sure whether he should be doing it, in a place that nobody can pronounce the same way.
“And …” he hesitated. “And … it’s all my fault.”
Was Emily listening? My mother? My father’s mother?
“It’s all my fault because I got mad and I got lazy,” my dad’s voice seemed stronger. “I got mad at my son because he was telling me things I didn’t want to hear. And I got lazy because I believed everything my country was telling me. I believed in every damn thing we were doing everywhere. I believed. And now—in return—I have to give them my son.”
He stopped, drawing a deep breath that pulled me and Emily and the darkness in with it.
* * *
I’m not sure how long we three silently lay there. Maybe an hour. Or a lifetime. But that moment has given way to this, the one that finds us on the way to the airport, and my eventual arrival in Vietnam.
Driving in the same confessional silence that we’d shared two nights before, I knew I loved my father and always would. But in our new communion, I forgot about the malaria pills I’d tucked inside his raincoat.
Insubordination Nation
Their morning ritual. Her paper. His paper. Her news. His sports.
Maybe this is what Simon & Garfunkel meant by the “sounds of silence?” Her tsks, a-hems and phews; his head shaking from side to side.
As with every news nugget she uncovered daily, his wife broke the quiet.
“How come an Army reserve officer is facing insubordination charges?” Her question wrenched him away from his daily homage to Seattle Mariners’ statistics. Any time there was the slightest article or mention of military justice, she turned to him as the ultimate authority. Little did she know that he had left all that behind, far far behind and that he could care less about the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
“It says here,” she continued, her gray hair falling over her eyes and diving into her bowl of Special K, “that Captain Steve McAlpin of the 401st Civil Affairs Battalion questioned the legality of a waiver that his battalion was asked to sign allowing their third deployment to a war zone since January.”
“Waiver?” she directs the question squarely at him, and then returns to the Associated Press article. “He was then notified in a memorandum Wednesday that he was being removed from the unit’s battle roster and that he could face additional punishment, including a court-martial and losing rank, over the charges.”
She swept her hair from her eyes for the umpteenth time.
“I mean, can they really do this to a guy who’s a citizen soldier?” she begged. “If they’re receiving memos and signing waivers, then aren’t reservists different than common soldiers?”
More annoyed with the fact his beloved Mariners were 20 games above .500 but still eight games behind the first place Athletics, he reached over and grabbed the article.
“A spokesman for the 401st,” he read as if he were delivering a commencement address, mainly to piss off his wife, “said Friday that McAlpin’s questioning of the waiver was one reason why he was being disciplined. Individual members of the 401st are allowed to refuse to sign the waiver, but the spokesman said McAlpin was ‘butting in’ for other soldiers.”
Now his voice was sing-songing. “There’s lots of soldiers we’re not sending because they have one issue or another,” the spokesman added. “It’s important we put together a solid team. Not all soldiers are ready, even though they think they are, to deploy.
“McAlpin, a twenty-five-year military veteran, told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle that instead of signing the reprimand document, he attached a note of protest, stating his performance evaluations have been excellent and that his record shows ‘no pattern of incompetence.’ He also plans to meet with a military attorney.”
His wife sat, waiting for his explanation, for his insight into the intricacies of military justice. It never came.
His eyes locked on that last line: “He also plans to meet with a military attorney,” and he vaguely recalled a similar plea from a platoon of soldiers stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in early 1970. Something to do with a protest and a Beatles song?
Happiness is a Warm Gun?he wondered.
He never did get involved with that case, but he couldn’t recall why he didn’t. Besides, his participation wouldn’t have changed a fucking thing. Some guys got court-martialed, some went to the brig, some went AWOL, and some got killed. McAlpin had better realize that the Army held all the cards and his ass was theirs.
Now, what was Ichiro’s batting average again?
Basic Choices
Dear Lamont:
Man, I hate like hell to lay this on you, but I’ve been drafted by the rest of the guys to write and ask your advice. Even though I’m crunched for time and we aren’t even sure this letter will reach you at home before you head off to Fort Lee and your legal specialist training, I’m going to give it a try. As our resident b-ball star Robinson likes to say “Son, you miss all the shots you ne
ver take!”
I can’t remember exactly when you came down with mono and they moved you out. Four, five weeks ago? I know you were here for Easter Sunday dinner because my parents drove up from Pottstown, and I remember their saying nice things about the “charming Negro” from Newark. At that point, I’m pretty sure we hadn’t started “weapons familiarization.” Yeah, that’s about when you left, before the firing started.
Anyway, when this shit storm hit, everybody said, “Go tell Lamont what went down and he’ll figure out how to deal with all this.” So, Lamont Dozier, you’ve been selected by a jury of your peers to be our eyes, our ears, and, we’re hoping, our brains.
What we did the other night is related, I’m not sure just how, to the fact that we were minus Sgt. Cannon, our DI, the final few weeks of basic training. That’s my view at least—too much fucking freedom of choice. Jesus, the Army’s calling what happened an “organized mutiny” or “planned insurrection” if you can believe that. I’ll just lay out the facts and let you be the judge.
A few days after Easter, Sgt. Cannon got his orders to return to Vietnam. Can you believe that? The goddamn guy had been there twice already, owns a wall full of medals and a Purple Heart, not to mention having a wife and two kids. And he volunteered to go back to fucking ‘Nam. He told us it had something do to with “repaying debts” and giving the South Vietnamese the “freedom to choose.” You remember his rap about democracy and loyalty and commitment? Christ, I’ll bet a guy with your smarts could repeat that speech of his word for word.
The day Sgt. Cannon got his orders, he was on our floor in the barracks, consoling my bunkmate Collins (remember Collins from Aliquippa?) about picking up a gun. Collins had been fretting about this for weeks and had sought advice and counsel from just about everybody at Fort Dix, including the company chaplain—and even the local rabbi—about his not wanting to carry, or fire, a weapon.