“‘Ain’t lettin’ nuffin’ go.’
“‘Webby’s a good guy,’ I say. ‘Ain’t some gangbanger killing tourists in Florida because they’re white! A word ain’t nothing but a fucking word!’
“‘Telling you, I own it! Do not be using it! Cut your throat is what I do!”
“‘Truth is, you love it!’ I tell him. ‘Love hearing a white guy using it! Turns you on! Sets your dumb ass free! Let’s you be the hate-filled moron you really are! Motivates, mobilizes, militarizes your fucking soul! You don’t fool me for a second! YOU LOVE THE WORD BECAUSE IT GIVES YOU A LICENSE TO HATE! THE WORD’S A DRUG TO YOU…YOU IGNORANT ASSHOLE!!’
“‘Oddly enough, things all at once turn funny. Webby, who’s skinny…has big eyes like Sugar Ray…he says, ‘Man, I know what youse sayin’. Ain’t nothin to say on the street, ’cept maybe in Southie, but I know what youse sayin’.’
“‘Thank you, Webby,’ I say. ‘Webby’s a friend,’ I say to Leon. ‘Webby’s a stablemate.’
“‘Leon, he says, ‘You two goin’ steady now?’ and me and Webby can’t help it, we break up.
“‘We take this occasion to announce we is going steady,’ I say, which gets still more laughs while washing over some of the ill will.
“‘Got yo steady right here,’ Leon says, flagging a handful of crotch six, eight times…too many times, like he’s all but jerking off. ‘Givin’ me a hard-on,’ he says. As I can see, he’s worked up enough to kill…if not over a white guy using the word, over something. It’s crazy. I like my stablemates, but it’s crazy at times.”
Jimmy stopped talking then and we sat in silence, as I said, “Wow,” in astonishment with what he said. “That’s how stablemates talk to each other?” I ask “Those are fighting words…aren’t they…outside the locker room? Using the word?”
“You don’t think Leon is like trying to blackmail me? Threatening to cut my throat for using a word he says he owns? How can a word be owned?”
“Going crazy over a word may not be smart, but words do have meaning,” is my reply. “It’s established that the N-word, used by a white guy, is like spitting in a black guy’s face. Firing a bullet that may not kill, but is wounding all the same.”
“You believe that? Using a word gives somebody a license to cut somebody’s throat? Isn’t it dumb to get all bent out of shape over a word just because the person using the word is white? I think there are a lot of black guys who get off on hearing white guys use it. Gives them a license to do their hating.”
This kid. My thought is that he has a mind of his own. “You may be on to something about some black guys loving the word for that reason,” I admit. “That’s interesting. Still, it isn’t smart for you to be unaware that words do provoke and don’t have to be used.”
He was grinning. “Is that the lesson for today?”
“Today’s lesson,” I said, acknowledging that we had had enough racial talk for one day.
“I like Dahlia all the same,” he said.
This time I did the grinning. “Gotcha,” I said. “Liking Dahlia is what it should be about.”
“They tell us at school to never to use the N-word. What I think is they should tell black guys if they hear the word it doesn’t mean they’re free to hate and cut throats! That’s what’s dumb to me…black guys thinking they can go crazy if some white guy uses the word. That’s where injuries come from, not from the word itself. Black guy hears it, he should call a cop…a teacher. File a complaint. Has no right getting murderous. What pisses me off is black guys thinking they have the right! N-word stuff is stupid to my mind. It’s just not a big enough deal to say, yeah, let’s shoot up the hood and kill some white people because somebody used the word.”
“Wow…thought we’d covered today’s lesson,” I tried, knowing that Jimmy had me in a logic box from which there was no easy escape.
He smiled. “Whatever,” he said, to let it go. “I don’t dislike black guys. But I hate anybody thinking a word gives them a right to go cutting throats.”
Time passed, during which I continued my casual friendship with Jimmy Murphy. On the occasion of his graduation from high school I attended the ceremony with his mother, who said to me, when we were in the bleachers apart from the students in their caps and gowns: “I’d like to thank you for being here. Jimmy likes you a lot… though he may not say so. He calls you his teacher, like you’re the only one who teaches him anything that’s important. He says he learns more from you than from his classes… which isn’t to say he hasn’t come around to liking school all the more, because he has. Thank goodness for that.”
Caught up in his enlistment, turning eighteen in June, Jimmy questioned me about his decision, seeming to seek my approval while pressing me to appreciate his thinking. Finally I said, “I think it’s an okay thing to do. Going into college right out of high school can be dumb. All that drinking and wasting of time. Most kids that age don’t have any idea who they are, while they’re making decisions on who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives. Get some experience under your belt. Sow your wild oats. Make some mistakes. Then, when you mature…when you have a real idea about what to do with yourself…that’s the time to go college. That’s what college is for…not for drinking like an idiot, but for developing your strengths.”
“Will it be okay to write to you?”
“You better write to me,” I told him.
“You’ll write back?”
“Of course I will.”
“Thanks for the hundred bucks. And the notebook. It’s great.”
“I figured you could keep a record of where you go…what you see.”
“I’m happy I got to know you,” Jimmy said. “That we became friends.”
“Me, too. Thank you for saying so.”
This was as close as we came to expressing any affection. Of course I loved Jimmy by then like a younger brother or a son, as I knew he loved me like a father or uncle. At the same time we knew that saying so was not in our DNA. He could see me as a fond teacher, and I could see him as a top student, while the glue that bonded us was the underprivileged lives we had lived, the obstacles we had overcome, the achievements after which we continued to aspire as accidental comrades departing the wrong side of the tracks.
Herman Roth
Writer in Residence
Massachusetts State University
CHAPTER ONE
Front Line Experience
The ‘front line’ for me was the forest of growing up, the taking of first steps into awareness. For Jimmy Murphy it was experience of the kind I knew at his age on entering the world under similar circumstances. Jimmy was honest. I found him likable, enjoyed visiting myself through him…though I must admit that while I was careful and painstaking, he was smart and brash. Where I was introverted, he was able to confront others as he had me with his crack about the Celtics beating the Pistons. If not for his aggressiveness, I wouldn’t have taken any interest in him.
Logic, to him, was leverage. When his African American stablemate lost his cool over a white kid using a word he claimed to be his alone, Jimmy challenged his logic. I thought he might be on to something in his charge of the stablemate using anger as a means of asserting control. His observation that certain African Americans loved hearing the word for the license it gave to hate was an insight worthy of analysis. At the same time I thought he underestimated the offense the word could inflict when used by a white person in anything close to a denigrating way. In the locker room incident, I thought the boxer Leon gave an honest response, if he did so in an irrational and ignorant way.
For a good six or eight weeks Jimmy failed to write with his address, and I must admit that I began to forget he existed. As I went along in my daily life (my daughter and son, thirty-somethings, living in New York and D.C.), I assumed Jimmy was also gone, too preoccupied (like most youngsters) to write from boot camp. When he finally did write, I was confused by his letter’s appearance in my mailbox. Oh yes, Jimmy Murphy,
I thought, absorbing the Fort Knox return address. The smart ass kid I mentored and befriended down through his last years of high school. The kid to whom, for several years, I served as writing and reading coach and big brother. His letter was handwritten and half a page long.
“Dear Friend,” he opened, at an apparent loss for how to address me. “Insanely busy getting through basic,” he noted, adding that it was his first chance, in a transfer company after basic, to sit down and write.
“You’d like this place because it’s full of the discipline you think is the berries,” he added as a slight dig.
The line made me grin, Jimmy ragging me as he had in the past and doing so with enough affection to say he cared. “Just finished the infantry phase of basic,” he said. “Physically tough. Mentally, too. On the way to armor school right here at Knox. Hope to become a gunner in an M1A1 Abrams! Enuf for now. All tired out and here comes the end of the page,” he added by way of signing off. “Jimmy.”
My impression was that it was his first occasion of ever writing to anyone aside from his mother. (Who teaches letter-writing if not a mother, a father, a big sister or brother, by example?) I envisioned him lining up at the PX to buy stationary, gearing up, finding a time, place, and frame of mind within which to take on the task of putting words on paper in expression of his feelings. In calling me “Dear Friend” he indicated that he had never composed any missives of the kind before, least of all to the teacher and big brother I represented.
Writing back, I said, “By the way, call me Bro, or Prof,” to encourage him to feel at ease and even creative in any additional letters he might send my way. A brother teaching by example, I told myself. Thus did I also try to be light and funny, including a self-mocking account of a faculty meeting I had had to attend to vote to retain or oust the departmental chair. (“Not the thing the boss sits in but the boss who does the sitting,” I noted, hoping to make him smile in response to the playful language.)
Challenge him with a modest writing task he’ll enjoy, was my thought. Get him to describe a buddy or training sergeant. “Enjoy yourself when you write,” I added. “Have fun picking out words. Look to be clever and funny while constructing sentences. Use figurative language! Do you know how much more enjoyable it is to read that a sergeant ‘snarls like a mad dog’ than it is to be told that a sergeant is ‘severe’?”
Truth is, given the months that had passed before Jimmy wrote with his address and the anxiety his letter-writing seemed to make him suffer, I didn’t expect anything to follow–not, at least, for another stretch of months. Our friendship, I assumed, would go the way of most every teacher-student relationship I had ever known. Soon upon graduation, that is, there would occur a single exchange followed by nothing ever again, the student in his or her moves putting off writing until a certain mentor died or the student-teacher relationship simply ceased to exist.
Imagine my surprise when, within two weeks, I received an envelope stuffed with a thickness of pages of freed-up penmanship!
“Thanks for the letter writing tips and cool style tips,” Jimmy said on the first page. “All at once I feel at ease writing to a prof who won’t be correcting my grammar and making me feel like a toad.’
Toad? It was a telling image that had me smiling. This kid, I thought. He’s never stopped surprising me.
In the body of his letter Jimmy used ‘toad’ again, remarking that the NCOs in armor school were not like “mad dogs or toads but more like brainy NFL linebackers who, contrary to convention, shout and curse less often than they speak one-on-one to boots to explain why something has to be done this way and not that.”
Contrary to convention? Brainy NFL linebackers? His clear use of language surprised me, and when I wrote back, saying, “I was impressed by your use of language…has you sounding more like a journalist than a recruit in armor school,” he wrote in turn to say that he had been reading magazines at the post library and, besides, “I had a great teacher I try to emulate, a Big Brother who turned me on to how cool it can be to write figuratively and impressionistically (is there such a word?).”
I snickered and thought, again, what a smart ass…but also what a bright kid, feeling admiration for the eighteen-year-old who was learning so much so quickly and who was able to absorb lessons of life that many young people never learn at all. As he proceeded through four months of armor school (again, almost never writing) he learned, like most everyone in his training company, that he had been assigned to what was called the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, in Germany, where he hoped, “on more experience and some promotions, to become a gunner in a sixty-ton M1A1 mud-belly.”
He had also heard, in a fireside talk by a major just returned from Germany, that deployment to Europe could mean redeployment, on additional training, to a nation called Kuwait on the Persian Gulf that Iraq was giving every sign of planning to invade. Spending another Saturday night browsing books and magazines in the post library (“it’s more fun than watching TV in the Day Room or getting bombed in town”) he read the following in a magazine called Foreign Affairs, which, given, he said, that it confirmed what they had heard from the major, might be foretelling his future. (“I copied it down. Tell me, Bro, is it cool to copy a big thing like this in a letter?”)
In an attempt to clarify American policy, reporters asked top State Department spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler whether the U.S. had any commitment to defend Kuwait.
Tutwiler replied, “We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.”
As soon as the report of Tutwiler’s comments arrived in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein summoned U.S. Ambasssador Glaspie for an interview. “I have summoned you today to hold comprehensive political discussions,” he said. “This message is for President Bush.”
Saddam laid out Iraq’s economic plight for Glaspie’s benefit. When he mentioned the price of oil and suggested $25 a barrel, Glaspie replied that many Americans “Would like to see the price go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states.”
Saddam replied, “The price at one stage dropped to $12 a barrel, and a reduction of $6 to $7 billion in the modest Iraqi budget is a disaster.”
Glaspie replied, “We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”
Writing to Jimmy, I applauded him for the clarity and thoughtfulness of his letter. Impressed by his ability to see how political circumstances might relate to him personally, I added, “I liked the inclusion of the background report about what is going on in Kuwait and what you might face if that major is right and you end up being sent there.”
I also praised him for starting a journal, adding that keeping a journal was a good way to order his thinking and to create a record of his moves. “Journals are fascinating to read when some time has gone by. Who knows, maybe you’ll end up writing an article or even a book, in which case firsthand info would be invaluable.”
I applauded him as well for his description not of a buddy or of a training sergeant but of the lieutenant colonel who was his squadron commander, a man “as short and gray as somebody’s grandfather but who had won a Silver Star in Vietnam and was said by his platoon sergeant to fear nothing, no enemy or any senior officer on base or in Washington D.C.”
In my responses I treated Jimmy like the first-rate student he had been, urging him to trust his abilities to see and to broaden his reach. Nor did I mind that I could be opening the door as teacher and sounding board to letters of length in what could become a correspondence course with me serving as an unpaid professor! As a youngster without a father, Jimmy was growing up, writing to me like a son or a student, using me in a big brotherly way…which I did not mind.
His first letter from Germany (written on a steno pad with a curled wire spine) came after he had arrived at a town called Bindlach for assignment to 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment as
the loader in an M1A1 tank with a four-man crew. His tank was nicknamed ‘The Claw,’ he said. Other tanks in his squadron were called ‘Assassin,’ ‘Dracula,’ ‘Arnold,’ ‘Whispering Death,’ ‘The Final Word,’ the names stenciled on bore evacuators–the cylinders mounted halfway along a tank’s main cannon. There were nine M1A1s in his troop, plus thirteen Bradleys, “which look like tanks but are used for probing and scouting,” two M-106 mortar carriers, and two armored command vehicles, ninety-six creepy crawlers altogether in his squadron plus ten Humvees with and without machine guns mounted. One M1A1 in B Troop was called ‘Roseanne,’ he added, though no female soldiers were assigned to the 900-man combat squadron, most of them happy to have beds to sleep in rather than cramping into tanks or on the ground in shelter-halves attached to tank fenders, to have “oil-free jobs doing other things in the dry buildings on base.”
The balance of Jimmy’s initial steno pad entries follow.
June 1990
Have been keeping this journal, Bro, like you advised. Have been wanting to tell you what happened when we landed at Rhein/Main and went through a four-day orientation before loading into trucks, buses, vans for shipment to bases in Germany.
African Americans! The army’s full of them and it’s like the bastards won’t leave me alone! I love them when they’re smart and funny, hate them when they’re criminal and stupid and act all black. Can I say that? Anyway, I ended up having a knock-down drag-out with a gangbanger in the back of a truck driving eight of us to Christensen Barracks in Bindlach. I disliked the brother from the get-go. Before that it’s fair to say that I was wowed by a black female spec five who has to be one of the sharpest babe soldiers anywhere. Goes to show how crazy things can be with African Americans!
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