Tim Ohr
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An Excerpt from Under the Gun, an upcoming novel by Tim Ohr

 UNDER THE GUN           A Novel by Tim Ohr

Phu Bai, February 7, 1968

Please. I do not

wish to hear

anything

anymore

and I

have nothing

to say

to anyone

            Actual letter home written by Chester ("Buck") McMullen.

The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

            James Baldwin, from "Strangers in the Village," Notes of a Native Son

__________________

Chicago (August, 1968)

1

            Major Taylor asked Lenny to accompany him on the notification, a request Lenny had no real way of turning down. Notification duty was rotated after hours between the officers in the unit when a soldier was killed or severely wounded.

            "I would appreciate it," the major told Lenny, "I don't want to do it alone, and I think it helps that you've been in Vietnam." Lenny worked for Major Taylor in the operations section of the unit in Chicago.

            Lenny was singled out for this duty because of the medals on his chest. Three rows, nine medals, some adorned with clusters, none of which he ever wanted, most of which he did not feel he deserved, and now that he had them, they were like a curse.

            Only two months before, when Lenny first arrived in Chicago, a specialist named Joe had approached Lenny in the NCO Club. Joe wore the patch of the Big Red One, the First Infantry Division, a red number one on a field of green. Although Joe did not have all the medals Lenny did, he was a grunt who did his time, and probably he had a much worse tour of duty than Lenny.

            "Hey, Sarge," Joe said. "I see you were in the Nam. Let me buy you a beer." Joe's fingers tapped on Lenny's medals. "How did you get all those?"

            "Don't mean shit," Lenny said, which was true. They meant less than shit, for Lenny was no hero, but a man who drank and whored his way through a war and was luckily assigned.

            Not really wanting to talk to Joe, Lenny declined a drink, but the short, dark man bought a beer for Lenny anyway, the same kind sitting on the bar before Lenny.

            When he drank, Joe talked about fucking up gooks real good. He wanted to go back to Vietnam so he could fuck up some more gooks. He really liked fucking them up good. Did Lenny like fucking up gooks? I mean fucking them up really good. Joe liked fucking them up better than anything. Joe said Lenny should see some of the things Joe did to gooks. After Joe killed gooks, he carved a one on their forehead and left the enemy to retrieve their dead marked by Joe's division number.

            Feeling sickened at the talk, the way he would feel also when Major Taylor asked him to come for the notification, Lenny grunted and didn't answer. When would this fucking war go away? Lenny wondered, while feeling sure it would trudge after him all his days. Lenny did not want to encourage the conversation with Joe, and Lenny drank the beer down and wished Joe would go somewhere else. When Joe showed no sign of leaving, Lenny started to leave, but Joe rose with him.

            "Leaving?" Joe asked. "Then stop by my car. I've got something to show you. You'll really like it."

            When Lenny arrived at Joe's car, he stood waiting by the driver's door. Joe said, "Go to the passenger door. Get inside."

            Lenny thought Joe might have a pair of human ears, like some soldiers did, or maybe a good bottle of whiskey. He thought it would be the whiskey when Joe opened the glove compartment. Instead Joe brought out a forty-five, loaded it, and put the cold muzzle squarely against Lenny's forehead. The safety was clearly off.

            "You're either crazy or I'm dead," Lenny said.

            "What do you think?"

            "Go ahead and shoot me," Lenny said. "I feel like I'm dead anyway."

            Joe lowered the gun and handed it to Lenny.

            "What do you think of it?" Joe asked.

            "It's a gun. What's there to think of it?"

            "I want to fuck up the captain. I can't stand the captain. Do you want to fuck him up with me?"

            Joe's eyes were open wide, and he was anxious.

            "I figured since you were in the Nam, you wouldn't mind fucking up the captain with me."

            It so happened that Lenny liked the captain, an educated man who treated everyone fairly, but even if he had not, he was against doing anyone violence. He hoped he was done with violence, which was like a circle, so that once you got it rolling, it just kept going like some crazy wheel rolling downhill, like this war which was never done with him. 

            "Sure, Joe," Lenny said, and the next morning the military police seized Joe's pistol.

            Lenny wasn't hiding from Joe the next morning when the MPs and captain took him. He was there both when Joe was charged and when he received light non-judicial punishment. "You need help, Joe," Lenny said, and the captain had to give Joe the Article Fifteen in order to send him to mandatory psychiatric care.

2

            It was a sunny afternoon when Lenny drove Major Taylor to the address of the dead boy. Major Taylor expressed hopes that no one was home. In that case, notification would fall to the next officer on call.

            When Lenny located the house with the truck in the pebble driveway, Major Taylor told Lenny to drive by in case it was the wrong address. Lenny pulled the sedan into the driveway, as it was the right address, and he told the major it was the right place.

            Born to a working family and sprung from Officer's Candidate School some years before, Major Taylor could be tough. He conducted inspections for the mating of missiles with nuclear warheads and the simulated firing of the armed missiles. All the men in the operations section both respected him and feared him, not for the same reasons. He had great technical knowledge, but a sharp tongue, and he suffered no fools, and if he found a fool, he let the fool know just how big a fool he was. But at the home of the parents of the dead boy, Major Taylor, who had children of his own, could not get himself out of the sedan. The major just sat there smoking a cigarette, his reserve of sarcasm of no use.

            Lenny went around the sedan and opened the door, saying, "Please hurry. I saw a woman at the window, and she must be his mother."

            The officer stood, hands shaking, and the yellow paper between his hands grew wet with perspiration. Lenny and the major walked side by side, their boots crunching on the pebbles.

            A woman opened the door. She called to her husband to "hurry quick." She asked, "What's happened to my boy? Is he dead?" to which Lenny answered, "Yes," because Major Taylor was speechless. The woman looked like Georgia Walton, Todd's mother.

            "Come quick," the woman called to her husband again, and screamed it was something about her boy.

            The highways about Chicago were filled with traffic, lots of it stopped or crawling. WGN probably had the Cubs on. It was a good year for the Cubbies, who would blow it in the end to the Mets. Ernie Banks and Billy Williams still hit home runs.

            Grace Woods, out in Palantine, returned from work and was making dinner for her husband Tom. Grace would be listening to the Cubs game while she made dinner. Lenny had driven by her house several times, never stopping in, not meaning to, just trying to fathom what happened between them. When in Chapacola, he often drove by June's house in Westpoint too, for exactly the same reason.

            Maureen was in the air somewhere for United Airlines, her apartment empty. Lenny should never have seen her again, as she did not act like the woman on the plane who was kind to him and kissed him at the bus station. He was out of her league, a classless soldier with no future, and she did not believe him when he told her the army kept him without discharging him. She thought he was a career soldier in favor of the war and a liar to boot. Maureen and Lenny went to the Hungry Eye once, where he ran out of money over dinner and drinks, and that was their only date. 

            The woman he now lived with sometimes in Franklin Park was Karen, who was likely breast feeding her baby or writing her husband in the service a letter while Lenny walked up to the dead boy's house. Karen had no furniture in her apartment until Lenny rented it. At night, Karen burned aromatic candles in the windows of her apartment. Kids from the neighborhood came to smoke dope with her, and some, Lenny suspected, slept with her. Karen wore red-and-blue bandannas over her short black hair. She was always dressed in jeans with a sweater, even in summer. Karen never watched the Cubbies, but Lenny did. Over Lenny's protests, Karen would leave her baby in the car when they went to eat. The boy who was killed in Vietnam was never left in a car, Lenny was sure of that.

 3

            The father yanked his front door wide open. The mother screamed again, "What's happened to my boy?"

            Major Taylor stuttered. He could not read the telex. His head hung, and Lenny thought he was crying.

            Lenny took the yellow paper, wet from Major Taylor's sweat and tears, into his hands. He read it precisely, pronouncing each word, starting with "We regret to inform you." It was like he felt when flying in the helicopters above the treetops of the jungle. He was cold and machine-like, because someone had to do it, and it was Lenny.

            "Bastards!" the father roared forth.

            Then: "Sons of bitches."

            His face was red, veins stuck out on his forehead, his fists were clenched at his side into giant wrecking balls that wanted to hit something. He was a man who worked with his hands. Lenny though him a simple man of simple beliefs. He was the apple pie of all American beliefs - God, honor, duty, country, family - a man like Lenny's father.

            "We have to elect Wallace!" he said. "Goddamn Johnson and the generals. They should have died. Not my son."

            "Hit me," Lenny said. "Hit me."

            The middle finger of the father's right hand began tapping Lenny's medals.

            "You've been there," he said. "What are we doing there?"

            "I don't know," Lenny said.

            Lenny thought how this was like it may have been at Reb Willard's house, when they told his parents Yo Yo was killed. Lenny wondered if they came to the house while Reb was at the filling station. If so, Yo's mother may have been told without her husband's support.

            This was also how it might have been at Lenny's house if he had been killed. At this hour of the day, his mother was home with Catherine, but his father would still be at the builder's supply. She or those making the notification would call Len and say his son was dead.

            Lenny thought how it might be better if he had been killed in Vietnam, and in a way maybe he was right. He was not what he used to be, a jovial Chapacola youth, and his life was not as he wanted it, with June Esterhazy engaged a second time and his dreams full of blood. He had survived the war, and in surviving it, the things he did to survive it made him into someone else, someone he was not sure he liked; and his emotions and feelings were deeply repressed in a metal box in his head that leaked dreams coming straight from hell.   

            The father poked and poked at the medals on Lenny's chest, while his wife sort of crumpled against the doorjamb. Lenny took partial hold of her in his right arm, and said, "I'm sorry," while the father continued poking Lenny's medals. Lenny still wanted the father to strike him if it would help.

            "No, honey," the wife said. "Take it easy. It's not their fault." She indicated Major Taylor and Lenny.

            Still the middle finger drummed on Lenny's chest.

            Then, within seconds, the father stopped poking, and his anger left him.

            "Hell," he said, "you're just about his age."

            "No, sir," Lenny said. "I'm twenty-one."

            "Nineteen, twenty-one, what's the difference?" he said.

            Lenny did not remember most of the remaining afternoon. Something happened to the afternoon like a shift in time. Lenny faded out. Time left him, and he was timeless, he hovered outside time, while in another world time ticked on. He was insubstantial, formless. Major Taylor drove back, and Lenny sat beside him because he couldn't drive and didn't want to sit in the back like some officer. Major Taylor took Lenny to the officers club where he bought Lenny big glasses of scotch. When the officer went to the restroom, Lenny walked to the jukebox, thinking to play a song, but the machine contained only country-and-western.

            Lenny was thinking of the boy who died and other young men who died. In his division in Vietnam, they didn't call the dead men by their names any longer, like Butch or Lavon. They were no longer private so and so. They were called giants. Giants were put into body bags and placed on the floor of a helicopter, sometimes lashed into a vacant stretcher. Before landing, the helicopter pilots would radio that they had giants aboard so someone would come take them off their hands. The presence of a giant aboard quieted the crew for hours. Before rigor mortis set in, the bodies in the bags would roll a little on the helicopter floor. After a while, the giants didn't move. Lenny got off the helicopter and the giants flew on. They flew on to graves registration where military morticians did whatever they did to bodies before they went into coffins. They flew on to America.   

                                  Trainees (August, 1966) 

 1

            He was underwater, unable to breath, his face down in a small, muddy, flash-flooded stream. The taste of foamy red clay was in his mouth, the smell of it in his nostrils, and he thought: I am going to die.

            Each time he tried to rise up, a man stepped on his spine driving him hard back underwater. Dark, uncontrolled panic flooded Lenny Rothe's mind as he realized he could drown, just a training accident on the first day of basic training as an infantryman in the US Army - a letter to his parents, a mere blip of an article in The Chapacola Sun, then into a plot of lined earth near the grave of Ham Bone Taylor, fellow band member. Who would come to his funeral? June and maybe Grace, his mother, father, and grandmother Catherine, cousins and aunts and uncles perhaps.

            That day at 4 a.m., a cross-eyed drill sergeant shouted in Lenny's face so vehemently his spittle landed on Lenny's nose and hands. The sergeant called Lenny a lazy shithead and tore apart the bed he made, ordering him to make the bunk again.

            Before the sun was up, the men were in formation for roll call and calisthenics, called "the daily dozen." When Lenny answered the roll call, the sergeant said he sounded like a girl. "Speak up, lady. You got a cock and balls down there, missy?"

            Because Lenny did not seem sufficiently enthusiastic doing the daily dozen, he was told to "get down and give me twenty, faggot," meaning pushups, not just once, but several times.

            The sun broke through the morning clouds when the men were eating a hurried breakfast in the mess hall. The coffee was bitter, everything turned Lenny's stomach, and he did not eat. He sweetened the coffee and drank and smoked.

            Next the platoon was marched by the sergeant to the medical clinic where they lined up before two medics. A dozen or so innoculations were shot from a gun-like machine at the same time into both arms. It didn't hurt much at first, this being shot full of medicines, protecting him from cholera and plague and tetanus and pneumonia, but it left Lenny's arms aching later.

            It took longer than anticipated for the training platoon to be innoculated, causing the day's schedule to fall behind, so the sergeant double-timed the men to old, wooden classrooms.

            The buildings on the base Lenny had thus far seen were all the same - two-story barracks painted white on the outside and green within. The floors were linoleum, which required constant mopping, waxing, and buffing. On the lower story, there were showers and latrines, also requiring constant cleansing, mopping, scrubbing.    

            Leaving the medics behind, Lenny was under an overcast of dripping clouds that gave way to a morning summer thunderstorm. A cold rain fell, mighty gusting sheets of it, soaking his uniform.

            The drenched men ran as ordered, not taking shelter, while thunder boomed and lightning flashed, electrifying the world around them. The running men came to the narrow torrent where Lenny tripped on a submerged rock and sprawled forward on his face. The men in formation ran over him, perhaps gleefully, inspired perhaps by the man that Lenny now thought of both as a former friend and that son-of-a-bitch, Yo Yo Willard. One foot after another drove Lenny's submerged head to the clay bottom.

            Behind Lenny, Walter Moody stood waving his hands wildly, trying to divert the line of running men from stomping on Lenny's back. Walter saw that the situation was serious, that Lenny could drown.     

            An elbow struck Walter on his left cheek just below the eye. Walter never saw whether it was a white or black elbow. The pain from the blow dropped him to his knees in the stream behind Lenny.

            By the time Walter stood, an outraged Lenny was on his feet, running furiously after the platoon. Each time Lenny reached a man in the platoon, Lenny grabbed him by the neck of his fatigue shirt and tripped him by extending a leg. It didn't matter what the man's race was or if he stomped on Lenny or not.

            One man said to Lenny, "I didn't do anything," but Lenny tripped him anyway, saying, "That's for doing nothing!"

            Anguished, Walter watched as another man, whom Lenny  tripped, in turn charged at Lenny and was struck in the nose by Lenny's fist. Blood ran from the man's nose as two hands sprang up to hold it. Lenny, a non-fighter and coward, had broken the man's nose.

            "Lenny!" Walter called from his knees in the stream. "Please stop that!"

            An avenging Lenny paid no attention to Walter.

            "Stop that!"

            Walter was on his feet after Lenny, whose hands were around the neck of another soldier. By the time Walter caught up with him, Lenny had assaulted eleven men in the platoon and wanted to assault more. Walter's arms went around Lenny and restrained him.

            "Turn the other cheek, Lenny!" Walter said. "This is no way to act."    

            "Let me go, Wally!"

            "You can't fight the entire platoon."

            "I can try!" Lenny said.

            "Let it go, Lenny."

            "Motherfuckers!" Lenny shouted after the disappearing platoon, which had crossed and started down the far side of a hill.

            "You have to live with these guys."

            "Cocksuckers!" Lenny shouted.

            Walter bear-gripped Lenny and lifted him from the ground. Lenny struggled in Walter's steel-band grasp. Lenny was held helpless in the air until his feet stopped kicking and a degree of calm returned.

            "OK, let me down, Wally," Lenny said. "Jesus, I didn't know you were so fucking strong."

            "And I didn't know you were so crazy."

            Walter and Lenny ran to catch up with the platoon, now halted in front of a building where they would be shown films on heat stroke, heat exhaustion, tooth-and-gum care, and the venereal diseases of syphilis and gonorrhea. The platoon waited, all the soldiers smoking cigarettes.        

            Most of the men in the platoon looked ashamed when Lenny glared at them, even Curtis Marsh, a black man who had described Walter the night before as Lenny's bitch. However a man named Donatello, who had told Lenny, "You better to stick to your own kind, or you'll get yours," had a wide, happy grin on his face. Donatello bunked upstairs with Yo Yo Willard.

            "I'll knock that fucking grin off your face, you hairy bastard," Lenny said, unsure if he could sustain this outraged anger, for he was not a fighter, not known for bloodying noses with one punch. This morning was an aberration inspired by overwhelming rage and adrenaline.

            "Yeah, give it a try sometime, you little bastard," Donatello said. His muscular arms, hidden within the fatigue shirt, were covered with tattoos. He claimed to be a member of Hell's Angels, but Lenny didn't believe him. Men lied in training to gain stature they otherwise lacked, and Donatello was dumber than Willard. Donatello's arms looked like those of the bricklayers who once worked for Lenny's father.

            Yo Yo, grinning maliciously at Donatello's side, said, "That's just a start, Rothe."

            The drill sergeant, a cross-eyed man named Moore, had ignored the commotion out of a general belief that fighting was good for soldiers and because the platoon was in an empty field where no one could see what happened.

            "Who destroyed government property?" the drill sergeant asked.

            No one answered, not quite sure what government property was destroyed.

            "You heard me," the drill sergeant said. "Who broke this man's nose?"

            "I did, sergeant," Lenny said.

            "Good punch, Rothe. Now get down and give me twenty, you dumb shit."

            The man with the broken nose was sent to the medic's station.

2

            A month before the day he was almost drowned, Lenny Rothe waited on a curb for the bus to military induction, violence, and the war. He didn't know then that he would languish in various barracks for a month before training began, the Florida men apparently lost by the army.

            He was neither happy nor resigned; rather he was scared and sick to his stomach and angry at his world being permanently altered and disturbed. He was still looking for a way out, hoping Grace would drive by in her blue Mustang convertible and swing open her passenger door; then he would spring into her car, they would embrace and kiss sharing tongues and race away across America and away from Vietnam. Not that this was likely.

            He waited with two other men, whose fate was likewise determined, but who were more resigned to what was coming: his friend, Yo Yo Willard from Chapacola High School, and Walter Moody, a black youth from Westpoint. Like all the Willards, Yo Yo was an athlete and a baritone.

            While Lenny and Yo Yo sat side by side, sharing cigarettes and speculating on how bad it was going to be in training, Walter stayed to himself. The three men had small bags containing a few days' worth of clothing and toilet articles and special items: books for Lenny, decks of playing cards with photos of naked women and a Playboy for Yo Yo. Walter removed one of his own items and read from Matthew. You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. In addition, Walter carried a sketch pad, drawing pencils, and a picture frame containing the photographs of his mother and father. 

            Walter vaguely knew Yo Yo, since the man who had raised Walter worked for Willard's father. Like his father, Yo Willard was thick and hard and broad. A cowlick of blond-red hair whisked straight up and stood there like cement. Next to his height and girth, Lenny (of average size) seemed small. Walter was the tallest, although thin.

            There were many connections between these three young men,  some known to Lenny, others suspected, but many not known at all by any of the men. These connections hung about them like fine tethers no one could see, yet if one of the strands were tweaked, all three men would have felt it jiggling.

            Unknown to the three waiting youngsters, a spinning of future threads in a vaster net continued, a process that would unwillingly unite them further within their community for the rest of their lives. If told this, they would not have believed it.  

            Yo Yo's father, Reb Willard, owned Chapacola Shell. On the wall behind the counter hung two portraits of determined-looking privates in dress uniforms. These were Reb's brothers, Robert "Zip" and William "Zap" Willard, former high school football players and star athletes and baritones in the chorus, killed in Europe by Germans. Under the bothers' portraits in a glass case were their trophies from a sporting life and medals from the end of it. Lenny was familiar with their black-and-white photographs; he took them for granted, as the Rothes' all filled gas tanks at Reb's station and brought their cars and lawn mowers to Willard's mechanic, Eddie Hotch. When Zip and Zap Willard played football, they played both offense and defense in a leather helmet, unlike Yo Yo, who was an offensive lineman with a head covered in hard plastic, through which the coaches wondered if he could hear instructions.

            Lenny suspected Reb Willard missed becoming a war fatality like his brothers only by virtue of his absent thumb, severed as a child while playfully putting a match to old photographic flash powder and a cap found in a trash can (the thumb was reattached within a hour of being severed from the boy in 1936, but the graft failed to take). Lenny knew nothing of how Reb's mother, a French teacher, cried and beat the walls when told within a few days in 1944 that first one then another son was buried in the land of Maupassant and Zola, who wrote The Debacle. Nor of how it broke the heart of Reb's father, who died within a few months of the news.

            Besides dead brothers, Reb Willard was also known for leading his beloved, evening sing-alongs in the auditorium at the high school twice a year, but mostly he was known for the family tragedy and gasoline. His son sang at the sing-alongs, as did his wife, joined by the chorus of Chapacola High School and the choir of the First Baptist Church of Chapacola.

            Yo Willard, who graduated with Lenny, held too unimportant a job as gas-station attendant and future gas-station owner to avoid the Vietnam War draft, and he (unlike his dad) had all ten fingers. Yo was also blessed with good health, strong as a mule, ox, or any other dumb beast, but he possessed a pugilistic and prejudiced heart. Yo Yo was pimpled, with angry red welts like hives all over his body. He had a tendency to misbehave, tempered by a great fear of his father, who could wield a strap. When drafted, Yo decided to enlist for three years to become a military policemen, in hopes of avoiding future gasoline and grease. Like his father had hated farming and cow manure, Yo disliked filling stations and oil.

            About Yo Yo, Lenny knew all this, but of Walter, Lenny knew nothing, other than he was a young black man who lived on the other side of the bridge over the Chapacola River, much more mysterious than Reb, who sang, or Yo Yo Willard, who sang-along. Living in Westpoint meant the black youth was bused over the bridge to attend the black school in Chapacola because Westpoint was considered too small to have schools for black kids although it had a school system for whites. Lenny knew Eddie Hotch, but did not know that Hotch had raised Walter, or that he had been an airplane mechanic in the Army Air Corps in England during World War II. Nor did Lenny know that Walter's surrogate father's opinion of the war that ended German fascism and Japanese imperialism was that it was a war of white and yellow people, and any poor black son of a bitch who was drafted into it or caught up in it was a victim of sorts.

            The mail going to the Willard brothers and Eddie Hotch in Europe during World War II passed through the army post office where Lenny's father rose through the ranks to be the ranking non-commissioned officer. Through the army mail system, the Willards, Eddie Hotch, and Len Rothe were all connected at one time, only a single, thin, breakable thread and not the most significant of all the threads of the web of their lives and times.     

3

            The bus, spun from plans in the nation's capital, came from the west through Westpoint and over the bridge to get to Chapacola, but it had not stopped in Westpoint to pick up Walter Moody because the smaller town lacked a draft board of its own, depending on Chapacola as it did in many things. The bus was silver and shiny and old and moved slowly along Avenue B on taut shocks as if it were gliding. A steady stream of nauseating exhaust flowed out of the bus and followed it and hung over it when it stopped. Inside the silver container were other young men from rural communities to the west who were collected in twos or threes to be inducted and trained and sent to the war. The door opened for the three waiting young men from Chapacola, as it had for their neighbors to the west.

            How the three men boarded the bus was indicative of how they felt. Yo Willard stood and rushed up the steps, happy for the adventure to begin. His boots tramped loudly up the steps. Although his father wanted Yo Yo to work at Chapacola Shell now and forever, Yo wanted someday to zoom down the roadways of Florida in a highway patrol cruiser. To Yo, the war was a rite of passage he looked forward to, and he was patriotic, eager to do his duty. "After all," he had said, a familiar refrain, "there's only one war in your lifetime, and you might as well experience it." In Yo's mind's eye, he saw himself fighting brave battles, winning the heart of a woman in a sarong (or whatever native dresses were worn by slant-eyed people), whose previously virgin heart was broken when the brave young Yank went home victorious (or died). Only Yo didn't expect to die; he expected to return a decorated hero. They would have a parade for him; Chapacola was fond of patriotic parades.

            Walter was second on the bus and moved more deliberately, competent and cautious in all things. While Yo Yo grabbed the pole and yanked himself aboard the bus in a manly, determined way, as if to show he was ready, Walter took one steady, measured step after another, taking hold of nothing. Walter was determined to be the best soldier he could be and resisted the pleas of Eddie and his Aunt Stella Mae not to go. Walter believed that his induction was God's will, and that He moved in mysterious ways, which Walter had to accept, so that the war was part of his God-intended path through life. Walter saw the divine hand in everything in his life, a life in which everything happened for a purpose, nothing happenstance, while Lenny saw life as helter-skelter. These were the feelings of the three young, half-formed men, and no one showed anguish and confusion more than Lenny, who hesitated at the open door, looking up and down the street again for any sign of Grace and her fast Mustang. Lenny was ready to run from state to state in Eva's trailer while living in sin with her daughter. Just a few days ago, he declined such a gracious offer, but now he would accept it. He realized Grace was in college today, sitting in a room with young men and women, perhaps thinking of him, perhaps not thinking of him, but he secretly hoped she would show up to rescue him, and she did not. Lenny thought of bolting, walking away to the public library, or hitch-hiking to Grace's trailer. His other girlfriend, June Esterhazy, wasn't even located that close to Lenny; she was several hundred miles away in another state going to college, and she wouldn't have rescued him if she could. Then Lenny stepped onto the bus and up three steps, halting and looking outside until the bus driver closed the door behind him.

            "Sit down," the driver said. Lenny considered slowly where to sit.

            By this time, Yo Yo had taken a seat on the half-full bus, motioning Lenny to come sit next to him. Because Yo Yo, whom Lenny so far still considered a swell fellow, had the brains of a shovel, Lenny sat beside Walter Moody, mysterious black man, who held some promise of being more interesting on a long trip that would take most of the day. So it was that Lenny set in motion a change in their lives and threw new filaments into the web.

            The bus surged forward like a giant ship at sea going up and down a wave. 

            Walter had dropped on a seat in the rear by the window. He liked to look out at things he might want to sketch and hoped to sit alone. He also preferred the back of the bus, where he assumed he would be ignored. If someone had to sit next to him and Walter had a chance to pick who it would be, he would have wanted a black man sitting next to him. Half the men on the bus were black. However the short blond youth smelling of cigarettes, who had waited on the curb with him, sat in the aisle seat next to Walter and smiled as if they were old friends.

            Disconcerted, Walter half-heartedly returned the smile, took the extended soft, pink hand, and shook it in return.

            "I'm Lenny," the white boy said. "Lenny Rothe."

            "Wally," Walter croaked back. "Wally Moody."

            "Where are you from?" Lenny asked, although he already knew.

            "Westpoint."

            "No kidding. I'm from Chapacola," Lenny said, as if this formed a bond. It seemed very unlikely any connections existed between the two of them, but many did, for their lives were intertwined by those invisible webs, Eddie Hotch, and the tangle of being black and white in the South.

4

            The sign. Lenny Rothe thought of the sign while sitting beside Wally. The sign had haunted Lenny for several years. What did it signify?

            It was a crudely-constructed sign, carved on a partial sheet of knotty, deteriorating plywood and nailed to the trunk of a mighty, ancient, moss-draped live oak overhanging and shading Bulow's Bubble, a small North Florida spring. Square-head concrete nails had been used to secure the sign and were rusting a blossom of dull, red leakage like blood under each one. It looked as if someone had been crucified on the sign on the oak.

            It was seven years before the silver bus to the war when Lenny Rothe had slowly deciphered the words on the sign. Many of the words were badly misspelled, perhaps written by a child or an uneducated adult. The word "remember," for example, was truncated to "member." The word "got" was rendered as "got's." The writer, or rather the maker of the sign, confused the words "whole" and "hole." If spelled correctly, it would read, "Remember how Nigger Hole got the name," a racist message and warning as ugly as the crude lettering and ill-educated spelling. The words made young Lenny wince. The words were carved into the hunk of wood, then blackened somehow, maybe with charcoal.

            Below the sign, the spring's clear waters filled with bream mingling above the green-black grasses swaying in the force of the flow from inside the planet Earth.

            Lenny Rothe, about to be thirteen, was on a fishing expedition with his father, who was lowering a small boat from its trailer into Bulow's Bubble on Big Chapahatchee River, a tributary of the Chapacola River. At that stage of his life, Lenny liked nothing finer than fishing with his father.

            Reading the sign, Lenny was puzzled, so he said to his father, who Lenny believed knew everything: "I can read the words, but what does that sign mean, dad?"

            His father's gaze went down toward the spring like a sinker. Len had heard the general story about Julius Darby from Alex Sunnydale, his lodge brother, although only five men, only one of whom Len liked, were sure of the particulars. Len also heard the lame explanation from Deputy Eddie Taylor: it was an accident, never meant to happen.

            Usually quick on the verbal draw, Len pondered and failed to conjure up words, his pursed lips a sure sign he was considering what answer to give or whether to just say, "Never mind." Len looked at the large bass and smaller bream swimming over the green-black grasses at the bottom of the sun-blessed spring. At length he spoke slowly and carefully, but the answer did not merit such deliberation.

            "I really don't know what that sign means," Len lied.

5

            By the time the Army inducted him, Walter was very tall and underweight. His spurting growth was something he wished he could have stopped at six feet. The sudden rise in his height started when he was thirteen, then stopped when he broke four inches above the six-foot mark. Despite the height, he looked thin, spindly, and weak, yet he was strong from working at a grocery afternoons, where he had unloaded trucks and stocked shelves since he was fourteen, but he did not look strong. His appearance was rendered more vulnerable by the Coke bottle-like glasses, capable of enlarging his sad brown pupils as if seen through a magnifying glass. His hands, often stuck into his pants to hide them, were callused and large, as were his feet. Sometimes Walter himself marveled at the very size of his hands, capable of enwrapping a basketball, a sport he should have played with his height, and might have played, if he possessed the necessary coordination, or perhaps enough confidence in the coordination he had.

            Leaving his good clothes at home, Walter wore worn, olive-green slacks on the bus. Unlike Lenny, his checked shirt was tucked in, neatly belted, while Lenny's shirttails flapped in the breeze before boarding the bus, and Lenny wore no belt. Above Walter's fleshy upper lip was the faint outline of a newly-grown mustache for the conscious purpose of making him look older, while Lenny could manage only blond fuzz. Next to Lenny's red tan and mop of blond hair, Walter was very dark, his hair neatly and freshly barbered. He was shy, unassuming, and very quiet among the young Florida men on the bus, not one of whom he knew, and none of whom he wanted to disturb. Even when he spoke to Lenny, Wally's voice was soft and subdued.

            Walter had very little experience with people of the white race; usually, he hoped white people would not notice him and would leave him alone. It was true that three young white men from Chapacola High School marched to protest the Birmingham church bombing, a protest march Wally participated in, but Wally had never spoken before to a white boy his age and rarely to a grown white man or woman, then only "Yes, sir," and "No, ma'm."

            Lenny Rothe was one of the newcomers' fortunate sons. Before people from the north came to the Chapacola area, the population was divided into the rich aristocracy, like the Feeneys, and poor whites and blacks, like the aspiring Willards and hard-working Johnsons, Walter's maternal ancestors. The ever-growing ranks of the alien, white, northern, middle class pushed a large wedge into the schism between the rich and the poor, as well as between the white and black, and the established and respected race-and-class system was lost, washed away by the human tidal wave, invited by development and greed, although the divide between the races continued in an altered form.    

            Yo Yo Willard, who was raised a solid racist, had more in common in some ways with Wally than with Lenny. The Rothe kid was born in the cold country, but Yo and Walter were both born under twirling ceiling fans in the same sweltering hospital, only not the same parts of the building. Yo Yo Willard was born high and mighty on the third floor of Chapacola Hospital, his mother attended to by Doctor Bennett in a room with bay windows, a view of the water, and lots of sunshine. Walter Moody was delivered by  Doris Smith, a registered midwife, in the dungeon-like basement of the moldy-smelling hospital near the laundry, where the small windows in the block allowed in much less light and the washing of loads of white sheets nearby filled the cavernous corridors with the additional odor of Clorox. The Willards went back generations in the area, felling lumber and hauling it, harvesting and selling oysters, killing gators and any other game standing still, and eternally farming the land and raising cattle, until Reb Willard acquired a gas station, while the Rothes were Chapacolans only a little more than a decade. Back four generations, Wally's great-grandmother Johnson was a slave in Alabama, separated from her husband when sent to work cotton near Westpoint in Florida, a place from which she never departed. Bones of Willards and Johnsons were buried in Westpoint and Chapacola, but not yet Rothe bones. Unlike Lenny, whose voice was neutralized between northern and southern, a gray voice, Yo Yo and Walter spoke with the same accent and slang, only Willard spoke louder, and Wally possessed another verb tense Willard never used but understood. Yo Yo and Wally had each other's number, whereas neither one of them knew what number Lenny Rothe wore. Actually, Lenny Rothe didn't understand himself.

6

            Behind the slowly-moving silver bus, traffic backed up on the two-lane road. Impatient motorists swung into the left lane to peer ahead, judging the safety of passing. Frustrated by on-rushing traffic, they veered back in more often than they passed, while the more reckless or brave passed multiple cars to get behind the bus and then to pass it. When the opportunity presented itself, the aggressive drivers smashed accelerators to the floor, four-barrels kicked in, eight-cylinder engines roared, tires squealed, and automobiles of the free swung around the obstacle of the enslaved, before shooting forward into independence on the open highway. If the windows were down on a passing car, there was a momentary blast of music, probably the Rolling Stones or the Beatles or the Animals or the Supremes or the Lovin' Spoonful, all of which were currently popular. The cars of the more patient or timid drivers formed an unwilling caravan behind the war bus.

            "Would you like a smoke?" Lenny asked, extending a green-and-white pack of Salems.

            Wally did not smoke, had only experimented with cigarettes with his two cousins twice, however he accepted a cigarette anyway. He hesitated because of his aunt's hatred of smoking, but he wanted to smoke to look older on the bus, and he wanted this young man beside him to be friendly.

            Lenny then produced a Zippo lighter, which he flipped open with a snap and struck the wheel that ground against the flint producing both a sizable flame and the smell of lighter fluid. Wally leaned down to the lighter and drew in mentholated smoke.

            "Thanks," Wally said.

            "My dad owns the builder supply," Lenny said. Lenny was proud of this fact, although he now recalled that his father did not employ one black, not even a janitor. His father did, however, supply block and wood and nails and cement to black contractors.

            "I've seen the trucks," Wally said. It was hard not to see them with the name Rothe painted so large in black-and-yellow on the side panel and with construction rampant everywhere about Chapacola and Westpoint, except the streets where Wally lived.

            "We moved here in fifty-one," Lenny said.

            Although Wally hoped Lenny would not ask it, the question came anyway. "What's your dad do?"

            "I live with my aunt," Wally said softly. His feet shifted, and he looked down. He didn't like to talk about his father or his mother. They were gone.

            "Oh," Lenny said, uncertain what more to say. Lenny certainly didn't want to live with his Uncle Michael.

            Wally's father left Westpoint when Wally was a toddler, leaving only a photograph behind held in a frame behind broken glass. Wally's mother broke the glass when she slammed the photograph against the wall. His father went to the city to make money and never returned. Later, his mother went to the city to find his father and to make money too, and she came home several times a year. She often asked Wally to move to the city with her, where she lived with a new man, but Wally didn't think she meant it. Sometimes she sent money at Christmas or for his birthday; at other times, there wasn't even a card. 

            "Stella Mae Johnson is my aunt," Wally said. He looked up and his feet did not move. He was proud of his aunt, if not his aunt's younger sister, his mother, who had left him.

            "She works for the Feeneys," Lenny said. "Miss" Stella was of medium height, slender and strong, an attractive woman whose head was covered by a scarf while she worked six days each week in the Feeney household. 

            "Yes. She has worked for the family for years," all the years in fact of Wally's life.

             It pleased Wally that Lenny recalled his aunt.

            "I know her," Lenny said. "I've been to the Feeney's house several times. Mary Feeney is my friend, although I don't care much for David."

            Wally smiled, not willing to say anything negative of a Feeney in the presence of witnesses, especially of a Fenney destined to be the next male leader of the family. Also, a good deal of David Feeney's clothing passed through his aunt's house on the backs and legs of his two cousins. The same was true of clothing once possessed by Yo Yo Willard, but Walter was too tall to benefit from these hand-me-downs.

            "You're tall," Lenny observed, not so astutely. "Did you play basketball? Were you on the team?"

            "No," Wally said, "I was never very good at basketball. My cousins Jay and Fergie, now they played."

            "I was in the band," Lenny said. "Were you in the band or chorus?"

            "My girlfriend, Irma," Wally said, "she was in the band."

            "What did she play?" Lenny asked.

            "Clarinet," Wally said. "What did you play?"

            "Horns, brass," Lenny said. "I could play trumpet, trombone, baritone, French horn, tuba, before I quit."

            "Why did you quit?" Wally seemed sincerely troubled, for surely no one would want to quit the band. His high-school band was a source of pride for the community, as was the band at Florida A&M University. The black bands could clearly march better and out-play the bands from the white schools. 

            "I was in trouble," Lenny said. "I was always getting in trouble."

            "Trouble?"

            "Yeah, drinking and girls and general misbehavior."

            Wally was never in trouble, as he always acted properly. Once or twice he tasted some of Eddie Hotch's bourbon; it made him hot and stupid. He and Irma Jean Kraft had barely made love, if that was what it was called, and it left him troubled. Wally was the perfect young man, so it concerned him that Lenny might be a delinquent, and that he might be tainted by association. Yet the two men continued to talk and established some additional connecting threads, showed each other photographs of Irma and June. The conversation lagged after they discussed football, but by then the men became so comfortable with each other that Wally soon fell asleep, and Lenny opened a book. By this point it was established that Eddie Hotch, Walter's surrogate father, was known personally by Lenny, a surprise to Wally, who had never heard one word about Lenny.       

7

            Yo Yo Willard, who exited the bus first, waited until Lenny stepped onto the ground of the naval air station. Just as Lenny's two feet touched the ground, Yo Yo rushed at Lenny from the blind side, butting Lenny with a football block that would have earned a penalty flag in a game. The blow knocked Lenny off balance and sent him staggering and flailing the air with his hands as he fought to regain his footing. Only a desperate grasp on the side of the silver bus saved Lenny from falling on his face on the asphalt.

            Lenny whipped about and said angrily, "Why the fuck did you do that, Yo Yo?"

            "You'd rather sit beside some stinking nigger instead of me," Yo Yo said. He snarled this vehemently and loud, and certainly Walter Moody heard it, although he gave no sign he had.

            "Oh, shove it, Willard," Lenny said. "You can't be serious. Don't be such an asshole. You're going to be in the army with black people for three years."

            "I've got your number, Rothe, and it says 'nigger lover,'" Yo spat back.

            "Nouns are not a number," Lenny said.

            "Wise ass," Willard said. "Homo."

            It felt safer losing Yo Yo in the crowd of men moving into the building, and Lenny imagined it felt even better to Walter Moody.             Much later in the day, Lenny took the oath of allegiance in a small room with ten other men who were not Yo Yo Willard and half of whom were black. There were flags of Florida and United States on stands in the room. Lenny and Wally and nine other men promised to defend America against foes, foreign and domestic. Then then they were shuffled out of the room and onto another bus. Twelve more men came into the room to take the oath administered by a lieutenant, and those men were placed on the bus until it was full and then it moved.

God's Soldiers (September and October, 1966)

1

            One slate-blue evening above the military post of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, planes flew low overhead and dropped one hundred and twenty men from green, steel machines at an altitude a little over six hundred feet. Into the cloudless, darkening sky, popped parachutes like corn bursting in a popper. The sky soon filled with white, rippling silk below which dangled men headed toward the hard earth. The sound of wind whipping the fabric was audible to the soldiers watching from the ground.

            One parachute did not open. The man under it fell like a stone with a white sheet trailing behind. This accident was of a type nicknamed "a Roman candle," for a form of fireworks. Men on the ground were whispering the words: "Roman candle."

            Walter and Lenny were on bivouac, a protracted stay in the woods, camping as if in combat. It was late in the training cycle; next would come advanced individual training as infantrymen, then at least thirty days of leave, assuming Lenny graduated from the present training cycle, which was still in doubt. Lenny and Walter shared a muddy, green tent pitched in the dark woods under trees that had lost their leaves. It rained constantly during their bivouac,  rain tap tap tapping on the canvas and the fallen leaves; everything the soldiers had to wear or sleep on or in was wet and covered with red Kentucky mud. Walter had made the tent secure and sturdy against the rain and wind, something Lenny apparently did not know how to do. The last time Lenny had been in a tent he was in Boy Scouts, but then the tent was erected by his competent father. Lenny's stakes were not driven deep enough, nor were the ropes connected to them sufficiently taunt, and the tent almost collapsed before Walter pounded Lenny's stakes firmly into the ground and tightened the stays. Walter concluded that Lenny knew nothing about tents, except how to sleep inside them while snoring so loudly he kept Wally awake.

            "What in the world are you good at?" Walter asked Lenny the second night in the tent. This question was based on Wally's observation of Lenny for most of a training cycle. "Can you do anything military? You are really something else, Lenny," Walter said, with a laugh, for it was true; Lenny was something else. Lenny brought to soldiering a new level of disobedience and incompetence. At first Walter thought Lenny was trying to fail basic training so he would be discharged and sent home, but it wasn't so. Lenny was terrified of failing basic training, of being sent home in humiliation to his father.

             Inside the tent beside Walter, Lenny was fully enclosed and stretched out in his green sleeping bag, toasty and warm, while Walter's bag was not zipped but just folded over him. Walter's feet protruded, when his legs were stretched fully, into the cold rain outside.

            Later on the night the man fell from the sky and died, Lenny and Walter separately crawled from the tent and took two-hour turns on guard, standing under a cloud-filled, moon-less sky. They challenged their drill sergeant, who snuck up on them to insure they were guarding the nothing they guarded as ordered.

            The parachute not opening was attached to a man whose legs ran in the air as if he were on a bicycle. He was frantically fooling with the main and emergency chutes, but it was a low-altitude jump, and he lacked sufficient time and perhaps skill. First his body struck tree limbs in explosive cracks, then the airborne trainee struck the earth with a loud smash near the camp where the men were on bivouac. Trainees ran to see the man who smacked, broken and mangled, onto God's planet and some of His trees. The trainees did not run to rescue the man, for he was first doomed then absolutely dead beyond doubt. It was like a car accident Lenny witnessed where a man died, his brain an orange smear on the asphalt, when passing gawkers stopped to look. The onlookers experienced vicarious death, which could happen suddenly to any one of them; there was fear it could be them and relief it was not.

            At the grenade range a few weeks earlier, a sergeant and a recruit were severely injured. They were in a concrete bunker from which the trainee, another incompetent soldier like Lenny, was to toss a grenade. The grenade slipped from the trainee's hand and fell into the bottom of the concrete bunker, where it landed heavily and rolled. The sergeant frantically tried to grab the grenade and toss it out the bunker. Then the grenade exploded, and training soldiers rushed to the pit to look at the bloody sergeant with the bleeding torso and mangled hand and the young enlistee who was screaming. Other sergeants jumped into the hole, administering first-aid, while an ambulance was summoned. A day or two later, the training men thought the sergeant died, but they weren't sure.

            Neither Wally or Lenny went to see the body of the parachutist who died falling onto the surface of his formerly-friendly planet, nor did they rush to see the men injured in the grenade accident. This, too, Lenny and Walter had in common: that they did not want to look at damaged and suffering and bloody beings, another knot in a complicated tangle of evolving friendship.

            Voices:

            "Man, did you see the way his head was cracked open?" 

            "Did you ever think a man could have so much blood inside him?" 

            "His arms and legs were backwards."

            "Couldn't guess his age or even what he might have looked like."

            "Couldn't get me to jump."

            "Not out of a perfectly good airplane."

            "Poor fucking bastard."

            "Some asshole probably rigged his chute wrong."

            "Poor son of a bitch."

2

            It happened without effort; Lenny quickly established his position as the second-worst soldier in the platoon, a potential failure who might have to take basic training a second time. This status was cheered by most of his fellow soldiers, because it kept them from being on the bottom rung of the platoon ladder.

            The distinction of being the worst soldier in the platoon fell on BJ Dalton, a large farm boy from a Florida-Alabama border town. Moon-faced and only twenty, BJ was already partially bald, with a outer circle of fine hair the military shaved off. He arrived on the bus to the war in bib overalls with a white t-shirt and heavy boots still caked with mud. He traveled on the bus smoking Pall Malls one after the other when he wasn't asleep. BJ reminded Lenny of his friend from elementary school, Bish Foggarty, and it was impossible to doubt that BJ was southern when he spoke. Like Bish, BJ was a very large man, overweight, but very kind and soft and gentle, so the target of people like Donatello and drill sergeants. Lenny learned that BJ could not kill the rabbits for dinner at home and tried to save his annual agricultural projects from the state fair; that is, enormously fat pigs and cows.  

            Wally saw nothing askance about the military nonsense, jumping to shout loudly, "Yes, sergeant!" at just the right moments; understanding when the correct answer instead was "No, sergeant!" or screaming "To kill, sergeant!" Wally was adroitly succeeding at pleasing the perverse drill sergeant. Lenny lacked this military sense. When a question was demanded of him in a shout, he had difficulty understanding the question. He could not say, "Would you repeat that?" Instead, he tried to baffle out the meaning and reason the question held, evaluating it to make sure he wasn't being tricked, before spitting out invariably the wrong answer. It seemed Lenny couldn't get anything right.   

            Take his boots which consistently failed to shine. Lenny hated polishing what he called the fucking boots. Not only did he hate polishing them, he disliked wearing them. For one thing, he had no idea how to shine boots or shoes or anything else. Here the fucking Army paid him a shitty ninety-two dollars a month then made him spend two fucking dollars of it on boot polish, cloths, and a brush.       

            "They should give me that shit," Lenny, the profane, told Walter, the religious.

            "Nobody," Wally said, "gives anybody nothing. You got to earn it." Adding: "My aunt always told me that a man who swears demonstrates his limited vocabulary."

            No matter how long or hard Lenny polished the black boots, they looked unpolished and slightly brown. Lenny had never owned or needed or wanted boots before and didn't want them now. Rednecks like Yo Yo Willard owned boots and went tromping off in the woods to shoot things with rifles and shotguns and bows and arrows. Lenny owned penny loafers he wore to class and on dates and sock-less to the beach, and he had a single pair of black shoes with shoestrings he wore to church, when June could get him to go. Perhaps Lenny polished the church shoes, which housed his precious feet when he danced with June at the Chapacola and Westpoint high- school proms, but he didn't think so. More likely his mother polished his "good" shoes, for Lenny never noticed shoes that needed polishing. Sometimes his father Len would come angrily into Lenny's room demanding to know why Lenny left polishing shoes to his mother; then Lenny got the polish and the brush and the rags and attempted to shine his shoes, but his mother did a much better job.

            What was he now that he was in the army?  Lenny asked Walter, answering a fucking shoeshine boy.  

            "Look," Walter said, spitting on the boots, rubbing the spit in for a good shine. "See how to spit shine your boots?"

            "That's fucking disgusting, Wally," Lenny said. "Why don't you piss on them too?"

            "Look at my boots, Lenny, and then look at yours," Walter said amused. "You are so dainty, Lenny, it's just spit."           

            Lenny looked at the bright, shiny finish on Walter's boot toes. It was like looking into a black mirror in which Lenny could see his own, slightly-distorted face. The walls of the barracks and the windows were clearly visible in the black mirror on Wally's boots. You could even see the branches of trees through the windows on Wally's shoes and the clouds floating in the sky. The only thing reflected in Lenny's boots was murk. Lenny's boots looked as if they were smeared with un-buffed black polish on top of which a little dust was ground in.

            "You are sure dainty," Walter said. "Spit on them. It's just spit."

            "I'm not going to spit on my shoes," Lenny said.

            "Tell you what, Lenny," Walter suggested. "You don't have to spit. Get some water from the tap and use it like I do with the rag when I spit."

            It was the same thing about the goddamn gold brass belt buckle the fucking army has me scrub every day with Brasso. I even had to buy the fucking Brasso. Lenny had never heard of Brasso in his civilian life, although it smelled like something his mother used to shine fine silverware. Lenny's civilian belts were black or brown and had no brass buckles to shine. He hated the smell, look, and feel of Brasso when he touched the rag he used to apply it. Let the damn thing turn green with oxidation.

            Making the bed. Lenny, when he made his bed at home, did it casually, and in the military sense, he could not make his bunk. The brown blanket, the one he thought of as a fucking horse blanket for its rough itchiness, was not taut when he was done. Instead, the blanket sagged in the middle with an invisible weight called the soldierly incompetence of Private Rothe.

            Sergeant Moore each morning ripped the blanket, sheets, and pillow off Lenny's bunk and demanded he remake the bed military style.

            "I want to see that bed stract," the sergeant said. Lenny had no idea what stract was, but whatever it was, he was sure he was the opposite of it.

            At home, Lenny just kind of tossed the covers back on his bed when he got up in the morning. There were more important things to do. He tossed his clothes on the floor too until his mother claimed them the next morning, but not here, where his dirty clothes went into a laundry bag.

            Changing the bed with freshly washed, scented, and ironed sheets was something his mother did, woman's work. All Lenny did was sleep in the bed each night to rise each morning, enthused with whatever disobedience he planned for that day.

            "Watch me, Lenny," Walter said, as he carefully smoothed the wrinkles from the bed sheets, fluffed his pillow, attached the sheet with hospital folds, and lastly applied the olive-drab blanket tightly, tucking its edges forcefully under the mattress. Gravity did not take hold of the center of the itchy blanket under which Wally Moody slept. The blanket wasn't even itchy to Walter, just something that kept him warm.

            When Lenny tried to imitate Wally, he did better at making a bunk, but not good enough, as Sergeant Moore again ripped the blanket, sheets, and pillow off, threw them on the barracks floor, telling Lenny he was a sorry excuse for soldier, something Lenny already knew.

            "Try again, Lenny," Walter said patiently. "I'll do it with you." 
            It took Lenny four weeks and two days before Sergeant Moore stopped tearing his bed apart each morning.

            On the fourth weekend of training, the good soldiers, like Wally and Yo Yo Willard, went on pass into Nashville, while the bad soldiers, like Lenny and BJ, stayed on post mopping, waxing, buffing, cleansing.  

3

         Lenny's feet flamed red with blisters. There were very few areas of his feet unscathed, from the bottom of his toes to the tops, even his ankles and heels. Up until the military boots went on them, they were well-treated feet, previously encased in leather and wrapped in delicate socks and never abused. His soft skin, the spoiled skin of a pampered middle-class child, were not used to stiff boots or the rough, woolen socks. The bubbled skin ripped into shreds or erupted into even more enormous white blisters. The blisters burst, oozed, and became infected, while he hobbled all day, grimacing in pain. He wasn't used to pain either; a toothache was the most pain he ever dealt with. It was as if his boots had glass in them, and when he removed the boots, bloody green socks stuck to his feet, pried painfully from his skin. His feet, despite being bathed twice a day, stank, and he was disgusted with his own feet. He fell behind marching and couldn't keep up with the soldiers when they ran.

            Lenny emerged for a morning formation sans boots, his feet socked in green but in shower shoes.

            The drill instructor, the cross-eyed man with a bellow for a voice, proclaimed, "You're out of uniform, soldier! What do you think you're doing, you shithead? I have never seen something so sorry ass in my life, Rothe. Who gave you permission for this shit?"            Sergeant Moore ordered Lenny back into the barracks to put on his boots and then to proceed to the medical station on sick call. The word "Dud" followed Lenny, not only from the voice of the sergeant, but from Yo Yo Willard, who was laughing, even if it did cost him having to get down and give the sergeant twenty and being called a dick-less wonder.

            "Way to go, homo," Willard called to Lenny, even though it cost him having to get down and give his sergeant twenty more pushups.

            The stern, tall doctor, who appeared to be middle-aged, called Lenny a sorry-ass malingerer and said he believed Lenny was bucking for a discharge. Lenny wondered why a doctor would remain in the military for life when there was so much money to be made as a civilian doctor. Lenny decided the doctor was incompetent, like Lenny.

            The doctor said Lenny couldn't take it and was too soft to be a real soldier, he was a candy ass and a sorry ass and poor excuse for a military man. The chisel-faced doctor, who was a career major, said he would amputate Lenny's toes and give him the discharge he was bucking for if he came back again over such nonsense. He'd send his fucking toes home with him too.

            Wally, who had worn boots hunting and when he worked in the grocery store, did what the Army could not do for Lenny. At Wally's suggestion, Lenny bought extra socks at the post exchange, as well as mercurochrome, alcohol, and band-aids. Using pins, bubbled blisters of blood and clear fluid were drained and disinfected with mercurochrome. The socks were changed several times a day, whenever there was sufficient halt in activities. Morning and night, Lenny bathed his burning feet in cool rubbing alcohol.

            "Out of the ninety-two dollars a month the Army is paying me," Lenny said, "ten fucking dollars are now going to my feet. Figure in cigarettes, shoe polish, Brasso, and haircuts, and I'm fucking losing money to be treated like shit."

4

            Lenny was perhaps the worst shot Wally had ever seen. The idea of leading a target was at first incomprehensible. Hitting moving targets or targets in the distance was impossible for someone who shot like Lenny. Wally had to explain windage to Lenny, who apparently thought a bullet could travel three feet above the ground forever.

            "Don't put me in a foxhole with you," Wally said.

            "Thanks a lot, Wally," Lenny said, his feelings hurt.

            "Lenny, you can't even take care of your rifle. Let me show you again."

            The task of taking apart a rifle, cleaning it with machine oil, and putting it back together was a mystery to Lenny. Once he  disassembled his rifle, Lenny stared hopelessly at the bolt, springs, trigger mechanism, and various parts whose functions he was unsure of, not certain what piece to start with to put the weapon back together. This mess reminded Lenny of a mechanical alarm clock he once took apart and failed to reassemble.

            Onto his rifle parts, Lenny applied too much oil, sure to clog with ensuing dust, or he put on so little it did no good. His rifle might not have made it through many inspections by the drill sergeant, who yanked it angrily from Lenny's hands, if Wally had not cleaned it for him.

            There was nothing Wally couldn't do with his hands, while Lenny was unhandy. Wally could fix broken things, like Eddie Hotch had taught him. He amazed Lenny with sketches in a pad of the faces of the men in the platoon and a black Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Wally sketched Lenny in uniform, and despite the fact that Lenny felt he looked small and tiny in the sketch, he mailed it home to his parents. Lenny thought Wally drew better than Grace, who liked to do white Madonnas with a white Christ child. Grace and Wally would like each other, Lenny thought, and he planned on introducing them when training was over and the men went home on leave.

            Wally was the marksman of his platoon, a perfect shot, every bullet going through the heart of the bulls-eye. It took Lenny two tries to qualify at the rifle range, and he barely qualified the second time.

5

            It was close to lights-out, and the order of the day was shattered. Sergeant Moore ordered Lenny and BJ to dress in  uniform and come with him.

            Drill Sergeant Moore always made the men more edgy than other drill sergeants, even more self-conscious than the captain who was the company commander freshly back from Vietnam. The captain said the soldiers had to get it right in training or die in Vietnam, so Lenny thought he would die, since he couldn't get it right.

            The crossed eyes made Sergeant Moore seem more fierce in appearance. They were also unnerving, because Lenny never knew when he was watching him or not.

            Tonight Lenny was truly afraid of Moore, because he was drunk. Drunkenness showed in his glassy eyes and steamed from his nostrils and mouth when he breathed.            

            It was on the assault course that day when Lenny had fired bullets over Sergeant Moore's head. It was a mistake on his part, but it looked like Lenny was trying to kill the sergeant who had tormented him for six weeks.

            Two shots rang out, two bullets shot forward, one a tracer round, passing over the drill instructor's head so close they might have shaved fabric from the brown Smoky Bear hat, each bullet emphasizing Lenny's inaptitude as a combat soldier.

            The assault course existed for practice assaulting entrenched enemy, that is moving forward while firing from positions with cover. 

            Just a few dark nights before, Lenny had crawled behind Wally's boots under barb-wire while live fifty caliber machine-gun rounds flashed overhead at the infiltration course. There was only one thing to do on the infiltration course: keep your head down, or you died, from panic, from jumping up, and the drill sergeants were careful to explain that other men had done something so stupid.

            On the assault course, soldiers didn't have to crawl like like they had done at the infiltration course. They ran forward to posts or sandbags or foxholes, some of which they fired from as they hid behind them, while at other positions, they held fire.

            Lenny never understood the instructions regarding which position he fired from or from which he withheld fire.  Moving forward at the assault course on his first try, Lenny repeatedly fired from every position where he was supposed to hold fire and did not fire from each spot he was supposed to shoot. Like everything military, Lenny learned slowly, if he learned at all.

            His drill sergeant grabbed the collar on Lenny's fatigue jacket when Lenny finished the assault course. Sergeant Moore dragged him down the length of the course, at each position yelling, "Fire!" or "Hold fire!" Despite such clear instructions, Lenny misfired once and another time had to be told three times to fire. 

            After being so humiliated by Sergeant Moore when he was dragged the length of the assault course, Lenny made his offense worse by mistakenly calling his rifle a gun when answering a question, and his sergeant made him repeat for ten minutes or so the long-traditional rhyme: "This is my weapon, this is my gun. This is for shooting, this is for fun." The weapon was the rifle, whereas the gun was Lenny's penis. Moore had Lenny perform this catchy jingle, while pointing alternately at his rifle and his crotch. The men in the platoon laughed, encouraged by Yo Yo Willard's booming voice, known for singing in the shower songs learned at his father's sing-alongs. Even puritanical Wally, who objected to off-color jokes and taking the Lord's name in vain, cracked a smile that he could not repress and that just got broader, while Lenny pointed at his rifle or his penis.

            Sergeant Moore then took Lenny on the assault course a third time, standing in front of Lenny when he was not to fire and behind him when we was to shoot.

            "Let's see if you've got it this time, soldier," Moore said, but of  course Lenny had not gotten it at all. Lenny wasn't good at getting it.

            At the first post of the assault course, where Lenny was signaled to hold fire by Sergeant Moore's presence in front of him, Lenny took careful aim and fired the two infamous shots over his drill instructor's head. The astonished, on-looking platoon was immediately silenced.

            Curtis Marsh, Yo Yo Willard, and Donatello would not think of taunting Lenny again, none of the men would, for Lenny was clearly a madman.

            The shots sounded exceptionally loud because of the stillness following them.

            A smile floated across the troubled sea of Sergeant Moore's face as if he understood Lenny fired intentionally and was glad to find the killing anger in Lenny as it would make him a better soldier.             Moore said, "That was both the bravest and stupidest thing you ever did, Rothe, you sorry piece of shit." 

            "It was a mistake, sergeant," Lenny said.          

            Wally expected an all-out assault on Lenny by Moore, angry, practiced fists driving his inept friend to the ground. Wally was prepared to pull Moore off, if he could, even if it meant being dragged with Lenny before the company commander for non-judicial punishment or taken away by the military police and put in the stockade awaiting court martial. Those things would not happen to Lenny or Wally as Sergeant Moore just smiled and smiled, a broad smile with the corners of his mouth turned up, while he shook his head. The smiling was perhaps more frightening than if Moore had beat Lenny unconscious.

6

            The scum of Sergeant Moore's platoon, Lenny and BJ, were ordered to dress quickly. Outside the barracks, the gathered enlisted scum were placed into a formation with other scum from other platoons and marched off into the cold snowy night, as if headed for a mass execution.

            The men from the other platoons included Phillips, who was not a homosexual, but had said he was in order to be discharged. Phillips had been moved nights into the company orderly room to sleep, a place where he was perhaps (he never said) gang raped by soldiers who believed him. Phillips recanted his stated sexual preference, but was now grouped with the troubled soldiers to be punished instead of the queer ones to be discharged.

            The gentle giant BJ Dalton, with soft, brown eyes and the accent of Bernice Rothe, broke into tears; shortly he was sobbing as he marched. In a few days, he would cut his wrists in the shower on a late night, where the fire guard would find him, white and pale. In the silent night, BJ would be taken from the barracks to the hospital. No one knew if he lived or died. It was incomprehensible to Lenny that a man as big and strong as Dalton could break. Dalton looked like he could wrestle a horse to the ground. If anyone should be breaking, it should have been Lenny, not Dalton.

            Yet another of the group was a soldier caught trying to go out the gate of the military installation without a pass, a potential deserter. Pierce was a small, dark, furtive man, with a nervous twitch, who appeared to be losing his mind too. Lenny could understand this desire to flee or how you could lose your mind, because training was a prison with tormentors.

            Like captives, the men were taken in the dark night to the physical-training course and positioned in front of low-crawl lanes. They had learned the low crawl previously, a maneuver to avoid machine-gun fire while moving forward or to sneak up on enemy soldiers they intended to kill. The low-crawl lanes were not much more than hard ruts in the earth. On this particularly night, it had first rained, and the rain had turned to snow, and in the low-crawl lanes was a cold mush.

            The Kentucky hillside and the low-crawl lanes were covered with soft, white, wet snow. The men were told to get on their knees and crawl in the lanes like the pigs they were and to keep crawling in the icy-cold, muddy slop until they were told to stop. They crawled what seemed a long time before one of the drill sergeant spoke again.

            "You are crawling because you are sorry soldiers," the drill sergeant said. Perhaps he was inspired by the nearby chapel with the neon cross atop it for he went on to say, "If you want to stop crawling in the mud like the pigs you are, come up here before me, drop on your knees, and thank God for making you an American fighting man."

            Lenny thought this requirement must be some kind of joke, but soon one man, then another, then another, went to kneel before the drill sergeant, praying loudly to thank God for making him an American fighting man. On the chapel, the neon cross cast a strange light on the kneeling men with their arms upraised.

            "Louder!" the drill sergeant roared. "I still can't hear you!" he  screamed at each praying man so that they had to repeat as loud shouts several times their thanks for being American fighting men.

            Pierce, BJ, and Phillips thanked God for making them American fighting men and were allowed to return to warm barracks where they would take a hot shower to get the mud off and heat up their numbed body. Other men did the same, men Lenny did not know by name, but men much like him.

             Just play the game, his father had told Lenny, advice that meant Lenny should so humiliate himself. Just go along with them, and it will be fine.

            What would his father or Wally do? Lenny wondered. Silly questions, Lenny rationalized, because neither of them would be here crawling in a rut.

            If by some mistake Len Rothe were crawling on the ground, he would probably play the game; much easier to fit in and move on. Lenny was sure, however, that Wally, whose religious beliefs were hard-shell primitive, would never commit what he would think of as sacrilege. Lenny's own religious views were vague, his church going inspired by June Esterhazy, not Jesus Christ. Wally rushed to chapel eagerly every Sunday morning, carrying a Bible, adding fifty cents to the collection plate, while Lenny lounged about with a book or the newspaper. Wally knelt and prayed each morning upon rising and each night before lights out by his military bunk. 

            Sergeant Moore said. "Come on up here and say your prayers, Rothe. I'm tired of your shit, and it's cold."

            Lenny crawled on without replying. He had no prayers to say, and he certainly wasn't going to say them for this man. Soon Lenny was crawling alone on the hard ground in the cold mud. All the privates and drill sergeants were gone, except Sergeant Moore, who stood over his one solitary, resisting soldier.       

            "You are a stubborn son of a bitch, Rothe," Moore said, lighting a cigarette.

            Moore smoked the cigarette and watched Lenny crawl. He lit and smoked another cigarette, then another. At length he said, "I ought to just kick the crap out of you, Rothe."

            Sergeant Moore stood above him smoking while Lenny continued crawling. More time went by, the snow clouds cleared, stars twinkled on a clear, moon-less night, when Sergeant Moore spat into the rut Lenny was crawling in. Later he spat again. Lenny expected his sergeant to unzip his trousers and piss into the lane. A little later Moore tossed a burning cigarette butt into the rut, where it sizzled out. Then Moore left Lenny alone without any instructions whether to stop or to crawl until the dawn and Moore's return. After continuing to crawl for a few more minutes, Lenny stood and walked back to barracks. His hands were sore and bleeding, reminding him that he had beaten the ground with his fists in anger while he crawled. The knees and elbows were worn out of his uniform, and where they were worn, his skin was scraped away, and in the morning his legs and arms were sore and large scabs were on his elbows and knees.       

Homecoming (November and December, 1966)

1

            "Wally, you can't want to go to the Grand Ole Opry," Lenny said, while preparing for their first weekend pass together. The pass came at the end of basic training and before advanced individual training.

            "And why can't I go to the Grand Ole Opry?" Walter asked.

            "It's country-and-western, Wally. Country-and-western isn't cool. It ain't rock-and-roll. It's not James Brown - 'It's a man's world!' - or Motown - "My life is empty without you, babe.' It's cracker music - 'She broke my heart and now I'm blue, she's gone and took the cows too.' Don't black people hate crackers? Even I hate cracker music."

            "I've been surrounded by crackers my whole life. All I know is rednecks. For all I know you're a cracker. Your mother's a cracker for sure, from Waycross, Georgia. The Opry's a famous place. I've heard it on the radio. Now I'll see it, and I'll write Eddie about it. I'll sketch it too."

            "Just don't expect me to go see Minnie whatever her name is with you and say 'Howdy!' I can't stand country music."

            "So what will you do in Nashville, Lenny?" Walter asked.

            Lenny didn't answer.

            "Your family would be ashamed of you. Do you ever think about that? What about your girlfriends? Aren't you promised to one or the other of them? What would she think? You should come to church with me Sunday." Wally attended church service every Sunday, one of the few soldiers to do so.

            "You should apply to be a chaplain's assistant, Wally."

            "Aren't you worried about losing your soul, Lenny?" Wally asked, but Lenny was more worried about not finding a woman.

 2

            They rode a bus carrying only military men and their families to Nashville. From the bus station in Nashville, they went from hotel to hotel, unable to rent a hotel room, repeatedly told there was no vacancy. Then Wally suggested Lenny change into civilian clothes and try renting the room on his own. Lenny promptly rented a hotel room at the first place he tried. Lenny then met Wally on the street and gave him the room number and a room key.         

            It was Saturday, and Wally went to the hotel, left his bag, and went on his own to find the great country-and-western music hall. On Sunday morning, he would participate in a large Baptist church service. His voice would soar with words from the hymnal, while he was lost in the emotion of the chorus. His voice, a little off key, would praise the Lord.

            Lenny made a collect call to his parents. His father wasn't home, so he had a short conversation with his mother, and then he called the university for June, reversing the charges to his home phone. It was a Saturday afternoon, but she was not in the sorority house, possibly she was at a football game, and if so, she was on a date with someone else. He called for Grace, who answered, and with whom he talked for almost an hour. She said she loved him and to come home safe to her at Christmas time.

            Leaving his bags in the room, Lenny walked the streets looking at women, hoping for one to look back. It was mid-afternoon, and it was over three months since he slept with Grace Woods, more than a year since he made love to June Esterhazy, and perhaps he looked at the women with too obvious a need. Lenny smiled and waved at pretty young women in cars who ignored him. He saw pretty women, but they saw something else and looked the other way. He was a burr-headed soldier on leave, a loser, who had no car, and was likely gone the next day, and probably had little money.

            While Walter was hiking the busy streets of Nashville in uniform, Lenny in civilian clothes stopped for a drink in a bar where country-and-western music played, the music Lenny said he hated. Everyone smoked in the bar, including Lenny. A number of seedy-looking men and several woman of equally-worn appearance smoked and drank. Lenny, who was below the legal age to drink, sat in a cloud of smoke beside a woman who looked attractive in the dark bar. She told him to go somewhere else. He sat beside another woman, who looked attractive, but who would not look so good outside in the sun. The woman was perhaps thirty, ten years older, Lenny figured. He said hello to her, told her she was looking mighty fine. She smiled at him and turned to face him.

            "Oh, come on," she said.

            "What?" he said.

            He thought he would have to try a third woman in the bar, maybe even go to another bar, but she continued talking to him. 

            "You're a baby," she said, with a slight laugh following "baby."

            "Twenty-one," he lied.

            "A baby," she said again.

            "Can I buy you a drink?"

            "Should I let a baby buy me a drink?" she said to the bartender, a large man with a beard.

            "It's a free drink," the bartender said.

            "Rum and Coke," the woman said. "Double."

            Lenny bought her that drink and, with mixed feelings, examined her closely. She was dark haired, called herself Sue, and was friendly now, although he thought Sue probably wasn't her name. Later he looked at her driver's license and found out her name was Debbie. She was a woman who was certainly big trouble for some man other than Lenny.

            "You a soldier?" she said, touching the short stubble on his skull. There was a wedding ring on her left hand, not a particularly large or impressive one.

            Lenny said he was stationed at Fort Campbell.

            "Airborne?"

            No, Lenny said, he had just finished basic training. Could he buy her another rum-and-Coke?

            Would he like to shoot some pool?

            He bought her the second rum-and-Coke, and they shot pool. She was very good at shooting pool, beating Lenny three straight games. Lenny was inexperienced with pool. He thought, at least she's good at something.

            She asked where he was from; he replied Chapacola, Florida. Where the hell was that? she asked. He roughly described the location of the city on the Gulf beside the mighty river. She asked where he was staying, did he have his own room? He had a roommate, but he had gone to the Grand Ole Opry. How about a girl back home? He said he had two girls back home. She called him a stud. The baby was a stud, she laughed. Did he give his girlfriends a good time? Did he have a bottle for a friendly drink at his room? No, he said, but he could get one. Did he have more money? She could perhaps use a little loan, if he didn't mind, to help out with the bills. Not a big loan, maybe twenty dollars.

            They went to a nearby liquor store, bought a bottle of rum and a Coke. They walked the street in the late afternoon sun with their arms about each other; she held him hard as if for stability. If she cared that she might be seen with him, she didn't show it. In the free hand, he carried the paper bag. Their breath was visible from their nostrils; close together their breath gave off rum-and-beer fumes. In the harsh sunlight, he saw that her makeup was smeared, her face wrinkled, her fingernails bitten, her forehead broad. He thought she was thirty years old in the bar light; on the street she looked twenty years older than him. Her driver's license would reveal she was thirty-eight. From years of abuse, she looked as rundown as the town around them; the buildings seemed to need painting and to be covered with soot. Maybe he should have gone to the Grand Ole Opry with Wally, he thought, rather than go through with this. It helped he was drinking, and he would drink more, and he could ignore it that a little too much powder was on her face, because it covered deeper blemishes and what looked like a bruise. The town smelled of auto-and-truck exhausts, she smelled overwhelmingly of perfume. He hoped she was clean, thought perhaps the perfume was because she missed bathing. He thought maybe he should ask her to take a shower, and hoped it would not offend her. She had a good shape, but her clothes were old, with holes in her jeans and a large stain on her peasant blouse, under which there was no bra.

            What did she do for a living? Lenny asked.

            Not much, she said. "I'm a housewife, mother of a boy thirteen years old. In a few more years, the way it's going, they'll send him to Vietnam too." Then she added, "I hate my husband."

            "Is that why you're coming with me?"

            "No," she said, adding, "you don't need to know why I'm coming with you, just that I am." 

3

            After completing advanced individual training, where Lenny at last became a proficient soldier and Walter graduated at the top of his training cycle, Walter and Lenny were allowed leave over Christmas and New Year's Eve, stretching to the end of January 1967. In February, they would be sent to Vietnam from McGuire Air Force Base.

            As a sign that things were not going to go so well, things went quickly astray between Walter and Lenny on the homeward-bound Greyhound Bus. Neither man anticipated what happened, nor would they ever talk about it, although as far as they knew it might have been the last time they ever saw each other.

            The newly-boarded bus was populated by Southern civilians, mostly whites occupying the front of the bus and a few blacks clustered in the rear. Although the leaders of the country declared this was now unacceptable and was always immoral, the tradition of segregation continued in the places where this bus traveled.

            After Lenny plunked himself down without thought in a front seat of the bus, Walter kept walking straight to the very rear of the bus, where he took a seat against a window. Puzzled, Lenny turned and looked over his shoulder at Walter, who was looking away with a sullen and sad gaze.

            As a matter of principle, Lenny never discussed race seriously with Walter, and without Lenny bringing it up, Walter said nothing about it either. They skirted the subject, partially out of fear of saying the wrong thing. A part of Lenny also thought it was tasteless to discuss racial divides and better to live without so much as an acknowledgment of them.

            Thoughtless, Lenny stood and walked to the back of the bus to be with Walter, but before Lenny could sit down, Walter said: "It ain't so wonderful having you sit next to me all the time. Don't do me no favors." A angry look crossed Wally's face; Lenny incorrectly thought the anger was directed at him.

            "What?" Lenny said puzzled, momentarily stopped.

            Lenny walked the aisle to a seat closer to the front of the bus, but when he started to sit down, glancing back, he noticed Wally was still uncomfortable. Lenny walked farther forward in the bus, where he sat directly behind the driver, a man so grossly fat he held onto the steering wheel as if it was stopping his belly from pushing out the cab.

            When Lenny looked up from his book to the back of the bus, Walter was not even looking in Lenny's direction but sketching in a pad. Shortly Wally appeared to be sleeping.

            Lenny read the novel under a tiny little light. Lenny was exploring a moral dilemma in the Congo, and Walter was tilted back, his mouth open "to catch flies," as he said, while the swaying bus ground slowly toward their homes, stopping in small towns Lenny never heard of, like Jasper and Monticello, segregated specks of towns, where there were still separate bathrooms and water fountains and waiting rooms for the races.

            At a stop on the Suwannee River, Lenny left the bus to buy cigarettes, a slice of pie, and coffee. He went into a restaurant occupied by only white people and where pecan logs could be purchased. The blacks remained sitting on the back of the bus or went to a separate waiting area to use the colored bathroom. A few blacks got food from a take-out window. Walter did not get off the bus.

            After the stop, Walter and Lenny remained separated by sixteen rows of seats, a virtual gulf. 

            Agitated both by Wally and the excitement of seeing June and Grace, Lenny barely slept during the night, and when he did, he was quickly awake. The bus pulled into the Chapacola Greyhound Station as the dawn came. Lenny gathered his books and his baggage, looked toward Walter, raising a hand to wave. Lenny's hand wavered then fell, since Wally was sound asleep.

            Standing on the pavement of Chapacola, Lenny looked to the window of the passing bus where Walter's head was slumped against the glass. For a brief minute, Lenny ran after the bus, afraid it would not stop in Westpoint, which lacked a bus station, and would carry Wally far to the west. However, the bus accelerated, and Lenny could not catch it.

Replacements (February, 1967)

1

            There was an awesome, startling explosion in the east. If the voice of God had shouted at puny humanity from the heavens, the noise could not be have been more terrifying to Lenny Rothe.

            An expanding, yellow-red fireball rose into the night sky. A shock wave raced across the dark land between the ammunition dump and the place where Lenny was sitting on guard duty. The shock wave did not stop with Lenny, but continued on like a tidal wave at sea, until somewhere to the west, the energy was dissipated.   

             At first, Private First Class Leonard E. Rothe, standing guard on his first night in Vietnam at the Bien Hoa Replacement Camp, thought a nuclear bomb had exploded. There was a blinding flash of light, an ominous rumble and crackle as the fire rose, much like a nuclear blast, but the fireball rising into the night sky was not mushroom-shaped but circular, with angry red, boiling, smaller clouds inside the yellow-black ball.

            The force of the blast shook two-story wooden barracks like buildings in a hurricane, much like structures Lenny had witnessed coming apart in hundred mile-per-hour winds back home, when walls collapsed and roofs were cast off. There was even a gust of humming wind, sounding like a hurricane gust, a sustained, audible, prolonged whoosh, as the shock wave passed Lenny.

            "Jesus, God, and Mary!" the sergeant of the guard said beside Lenny. It was the sergeant's first night in Vietnam too. The sergeant, a career non-commissioned officer, a lifer, had talked friendly with Lenny most of the night. Lenny liked the sergeant from Toledo, who was an air traffic controller, and Lenny thought it too bad they could not be assigned together. The conversation with the sergeant lagged, and Lenny, manning a radio, was dozing when the tremendous noise of the exploding ammunition dump startled him.

            It was 3 a.m. on the dot, and sleep was ended for that night for every single man on guard, none of whom should have been sleeping.

            Within the replacement camp, awakened soldiers, new arrivals in Vietnam, staggered about exclaiming, exiting their barracks to witness the fireball climbing up and up in the eastern sky, until it reached a sustained limit where it wavered. Some men put on clothes, others wore only underwear. They called to each other, swore, and babbled. They lit cigarettes, scratched their crotches, yawned, all in the glow of the fireball. By consensus they agreed the ammunition depot had exploded, although no one had yet told them.

            The fireball was accompanied by multiple and individual explosions from munitions heated to the right temperature or touched by the fire. Random explosions would go on like that for days, a little more subdued each passing day, until in a week or so there was little left to blow up in the smoldering fire.

            It was later known that the tiny group of guards Lenny kept connected by radio checks, annoying them every half hour, had stood guard on the very area the sappers crawled over (and under in tunnels) on their way to the ammunition depot. Two American guards and several South Vietnamese soldiers could not be found and were presumed dead from the explosion and fire that was gobbling up not only troop armaments and shells but also much larger bombs, stored for the jets and bombers. 

            Earlier in the evening, close to 1 a.m., several of the guard posts had radioed Lenny they heard movement. When the flares, fired by the sergeant of the guard into the sky, burst and hung on their tiny parachutes, lighting the area briefly with a twinkling reddish-white glow, one man fired an M-16 clip at the first thing moving, killing a water buffalo, which made an audible, cow-like protest and fell loudly. The guards then shared a sort of nervous laughter, not because of any joy at killing the water buffalo, but out of relief from discovering their fears were unfounded, and also because half of the guards were asleep, the gunfire jolting them into fearful awareness, followed by a heartfelt relief. To a man, when they went on guard, the soldiers wrongly assumed there was no real threat from the enemy this far in the rear at a replacement camp. Even Lenny thought this guard duty was some form of harassment; surely sane military commanders would not put fresh replacements with no in-country experience on guard their first and second night in country if there were any serious danger.

            A water buffalo was not the only animal victim that night. Lenny was on the north side of the perimeter, while the explosion was to the east. A jungle was on the east side, much closer to the explosion at the ammunition depot. In the jungle lived monkeys, regular foragers into the base camp. The brownish-black primates took anything they found unguarded, from bars of soap to wallets to watches, belts, hats, and clothes. At other times the monkeys tried on clothing to the great amusement of the soldiers, particularly underwear worn on the head. Some GI had once thought it clever to give the monkey tribe cans of Coke, to watch the monkeys throw back their heads and gulp the beverage of democrats everywhere. Ever since, the monkeys were inordinately fond of Coca-cola and would pick up any unguarded can, unopened or not, drinking the open cans and breaking the cans not opened against trees. Jets sometimes cleared their guns and dropped unexpended bombs into the monkeys' jungle before landing at nearby Long Binh; this sometimes killed monkeys, too, but nothing ever killed them on such a mass scale as the shock wave. The holocaust of the monkey jungle, seen the next morning, was a landscape of broken trees littered with the bodies of little, hairy monkeys, looking surprisingly like tiny men.

2

            The first choice the war offered to Lenny was not whether he would be brave or a coward, but would he be a guard or sanitation worker? Disdainful of human wastes, he took guard.         

            The enlisted replacements were offered three types of duty while awaiting their assignments, including working in the mess hall, called KP for Kitchen Patrol. Lenny knew that Walter, when here, likely selected the sanitation detail. If Lenny had found him, rather than lost him, Walter would have tried convincing Lenny to join him on the sanitation patrol, but it was too disgusting a type of duty for Lenny to perform. Lenny, in fact, was sure he would vomit if he worked on the sanitation detail. The air of the base camp carried a daily stench from burning human wastes that was capable of making him retch.

            "You sure are dainty," Walter would say, and he would be right, Lenny was dainty, but Lenny would still decline the sanitation detail.

            "You think your shit don't stink too?" Walter might add. The only coarse word Lenny's Bible-thumping, possible friend used was "shit." Lenny might acknowledge his shit did in fact stink, but he was not ready to be so intimate with other people's shit.

            No plumbing existed for the replacements at the base camp. For showers, soldiers stood under fifty-five gallon drums of freezing cold water in the mornings; the water temperature grew tepid to boiling hot under the sun as the day grew longer, then cooled down over night. A soldier on a water truck refilled the shower cans each morning, inserting a hose through a cap cut in the top of the barrels. Soldiers could turn on or off a faucet inserted into the cans on the bottom, from which gravity dribbled the water.          

            Likewise there were no toilets at the camp, only outhouses, or at least only outhouses for the thousands of replacements who were lower-ranking enlisted men. Some of Lenny's mother Bernice's relatives in Waycross had privies behind their houses when he was young; even then Lenny was too much of a dandy to use them, if he could hold out for porcelain. He was repelled by the accumulated smell of years of human shit, the spider webs below the privy holes, and the drone of the myriad green-bottle flies. Already bitten once on his penis by a spider, an uncomfortable event, he heard that black-widow spiders often inflicted a dangerous sting on the testicles of men using outhouses.    

            A lack of indoor plumbing would not offend Wally, however, as the homes of some of his friends lacked indoor plumbing in 1967 America. If told this, Lenny would have been surprised; he was unacquainted with true poverty. A sizable portion of the world's population might be without indoor plumbing or running water or air-conditioning. This was a fact Lenny had only recently considered.

            The military outhouses in Vietnam were different from those of Wally's friends, however. Instead of a deep pit, closed when too much waste was accumulated, under each privy opening was a rusting, fifty-five gallon can, cut in half to catch human droppings. The sanitation detail dragged cans from under the outhouses each morning and set the human wastes on fire by dousing them with kerosene and tossing on a lighted match. The result was yellow fire and odorous black clouds. Every single man on the base could smell the burning shit. It was becoming a familiar scent hanging in the nostrils to sicken Lenny. The smell of burning human wastes would become as permanent a part of Lenny's Vietnam experience as the bright-red soil, burning heat from the sun, monsoon rains, C-rations, and the strangely-flavored milk in the mess hall.

            "How can you stand to burn that shit?" Lenny would have liked to  ask Walter. In fact, he wished Walter were here, not lost among a half-million men.

            An imaginary Walter shrugged. "It's just shit, and I damn sure don't want to risk my life on some dumb-ass guard detail."

            It had been an unspoken hope on Lenny's part that he and Walter would continue to be assigned together for the remainder of their military service. It was a naive thought, and why it remained unspoken, Lenny could not have said, although he was silent to avoid embarrassing himself. Until Lenny returned home for leave, during his entire time in the military Walter Moody had been a solid part of his daily experience, a sort of rock he could depend on if in need of a rock, and Lenny was frequently in need of a rock.

            They were so different, besides being black and white. Walter never read a book other than what was assigned in school, other than his Bible; he rarely listened to music, believing it to be somewhat sinful, and he had never before left the counties containing Westpoint and Chapacola. Yet Lenny felt Wally's absence in Vietnam like a broken tether, and strangely he felt his presence too, for Wally was here, having changed his plans and arriving two weeks before Lenny. It wasn't just that Lenny was a bad soldier and Walter could help him be better and safer; rather it was that Lenny also had considered Walter his friend, until the puzzling incident on the homeward-bound bus. The incident on the bus haunted Lenny, who hoped he misunderstood what happened, and indeed he had.     

            His leave must not have gone well for Wally, since he left two weeks before his leave was up, beating Lenny to Vietnam. Lenny expected Walter to be on his flight, to be with him at least to the replacement camp, but three days before Lenny left, he showed up at an empty house on Redwood Avenue looking for Wally. Then he drove to the Shell Station where Eddie Hotch said with a shake of the head and a sad expression that "the boy" had left early.

            "Did it have anything to do with me and the bus?" Lenny asked, and Eddie explained what Lenny already imagined and had foretold on a weekend pass from Fort Benning and advanced training. Irma Jean Kraft had gone off to college where she found another young man, one with more of a future, smarter and better looking. Irma Jean herself was transformed. Plain, black, horn-rimmed glasses were replaced with contact lenses, and her brown eyes, no longer magnified like Wally's, sparkled. Her braces, so prominent across the teeth in the photograph Wally kept in his wallet, were no longer an obstruction when Wally tried to kiss her, but they might as well have been, for she would not let him kiss her. She was caught up in the excitement of college and the civil-rights movement, in love with a new man, a junior, while Wally was going to Vietnam. She was barely home for Christmas and New Year's, and then she was gone, like Wally's parents, looking for something better and leaving him behind.

            Nor were Wally's cousins Fergie or Jay around to keep him company; they were off at their third year in college, on to careers in pharmacy and engineering, not destined to go halfway across the world to be a grunt in the war. Probably Wally felt lost even in the familiar church services led by the Very Reverend J. C. Horne, a man Eddie alternately referred to as Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar. Eddie told Wally many years before that he didn't need "none of that mumbo-jumbo crap," and he did not like the airs of the dandified preachers who proclaimed themselves leaders of the African-American community.

            Walter was an innocent, barely above eighteen, who worked hard after school and helped out around his aunt's home willingly, so that he would not be a burden. He had picked up Stella Mae's enthusiasm for Christ and Christianity as part of being a good child in his second family. Eddie Hotch lacked belief, but Wally's beliefs were sincere, if not inspired by life experience, but perhaps God was to Wally the father he did not know and wished he had. Lenny thought how Wally was everything Len Rothe wanted Lenny to be and was not. Walter would have been a fine son for Len if you could change his color, which was easier than changing Len's opinions sometimes. Wally did not drink, rarely smoked, thought it was wrong to have sex, even with himself, or look at photos of women in compromised positions, and Wally barely managed to make love with Irma Jean twice, if you could call it that, while feeling guilty about it, as if by doing what she wanted, he "spoiled my sister in Christ." 

            Perhaps for fun on his leave, Wally had desperately tried fishing, but even fishing wasn't the same alone day after day, and the fish probably weren't biting because of the giant new bridge whose construction muddied the great Chapacola River. Wally expected Lenny to visit, imagined he would, but before Lenny showed up, Wally packed up, too depressed to stay any longer, and left to report for the war. He said good-bye to his petrified aunt and stoic and unofficial step-father. Lenny would and should have tried to visit him sooner, but the events on the bus on the ride from training made Lenny hesitant, and then there was June, who he tried to win back, and Grace, whom he could not give away.

            On his second day at Bien Hoa, Lenny wandered by a tent where a church service was in progress. The newly arrived and soon to be departing were gathered under the canvas to sing and pray and listen to a sermon. The air was oppressively hot and still, reminding Lenny of a church on the beach with a stained-glass window of Jesus through which the sun set at twilight. The worshipping soldiers sat on metal chairs and held red hymnals. Lenny knew that Wally, if he had not yet passed into the field, was in a church service on some dusty mote of earth, being preached at by a white Southern Baptist captain, like the chaplain holding forth that morning. Yes, sir, Lenny thought, Walter would make one fine-and-dandy son for Len Rothe, except of course that Len did not take his religion quite so literally or fervently, and certainly did not believe too heartily in sin. Lenny discovered to his great surprise that he wished he had been a better son and a faithful lover, like Wally. 

 3

            On the morning of his third day in Vietnam, Lenny felt the world swaying around him as unfamiliar hands shook Lenny's bunk. Lenny was soundly asleep after a night of guard duty, with not even a dream penetrating the lethargy. The first waking sound Lenny heard to accompany the vigorous shaking was the continuing exploding ammunition and munitions at the depot to the east; this process was called "boiling off." 

            "You've got your orders," the man said. "They called your name over the loud speaker." The man was named Carter and was from Gastonia, North Carolina; and he had sat on the plane beside Lenny on the flight to Vietnam, a seat that should have belonged to Wally.

            "Are we going together?" Lenny asked.

            "No, man, we're going different ways."

            This was not important. Lenny barely knew the man from the plane, although he was hoping for a connection, any connection, while feeling completely disconnected and alone.

            Each replacement had a duffel bag containing his uniforms, toilet articles, and clothing. Within the duffel bag, the men packed different things besides clothing to ease their year in the war. Lenny had a dozen heavy books, which would not last the first month, and a box of stationary and plenty of stamps so he could write June and Grace, a notebook for a diary so he could not forget, a carton of cigarettes which would not last a week, and two boxes of pens. Wherever Wally Moody had gone, he certainly carried a Bible, sketch pad, drawing pencils, and photographs of his mother and father.

            Lenny went to the building with the loudspeaker where he reported and was gathered by a sergeant with other uniformed, unarmed men next to the personnel building. The soldiers were ordered aboard two-and-a-half ton trucks going to base camps where they would process through other replacement camps. 

            Lenny and Wally had never had the chance to say good-bye, although they would hardly have known what words to say to each other.

            Perhaps, "Good luck, Lenny."

            And in return, "Good luck to you, man."

            A shake of hands, Lenny's hands still soft and delicate compared to Wally's, despite four months of training. 

            Probably, "Take care of yourself, Lenny."

            "You too, man."   

            And surely, "I'll look you up back in the world next year."

            "Don't forget."

            In Lenny's imagination, they shook hands again and were separated. Lenny watched an imaginary Wally climb onto another truck that drove away.

 4

            Lenny's truck was commanded by a sergeant armed with both an M-16 rifle and a pistol. Three other armed enlisted men were in the truck, including the driver. The truck passed through the west gate of Bien Hoa's camp and onto a highway passing through a crowded city of busy Vietnamese. Shops were open, oxen pulled carts, cars honked, motorbikes zipped by driven by reckless young men, sometimes with a young woman behind them (Lenny saw red Mopeds, such as he had once owned), other women walked by wearing a traditional, more formal white dress, peasants passed dressed in black pajamas. People rode bikes, with bells they rang. There were pedicabs and automotive cabs, blowing horns and ringing bells. From shops, the air was filled with the smell of pungent sauces, produce, meats, and fish, and everything smelled of the wet red earth, for it had recently rained - and exhaust.

            On a less populated highway, the truck went rapidly north, picking up speed. Along the roadside were squares of rice paddies, where farmers labored standing in the water with their black pants rolled above their knees, the men often shirt-less. The rice paddies, compartmentalized by earthen dikes, sometimes reinforced with wood and bamboo, trailed far off into the distance.

            Within a few miles, the side of the road was lined with thick jungle growth into which the men peered. The growth was cleared for some distance on both sides of the road in an effort to prevent ambushes. The truck was now traveling very fast for a deuce-and-a-half, probably forty-five miles per hour, and it bounced violently on the rough road, while the engine seemed to strain. From time to time, other military vehicles traveling south flashed rapidly past.

            Lenny tried to talk to the sergeant standing with him in the bed of the truck, but he was non-communicative. The rattling of the truck on the rutted dirt road was loud, and the air ripping by his ears rendered talk into hard-to-decipher shouts. Lenny gave it up and watched the countryside flash by.

            Within an hour, the truck entered a base camp busy with soldiers ("Not our destination!" the sergeant said) and went out the back gate of the same camp minutes later. The red earth to the left and right of the highway was cleared for a considerable distance and cratered by bombs and artillery shells.

            When they entered the next encampment, the sergeant announced, "This one is yours," and the truck slowed. The truck went through the gate guarded by military police and to a nearby row of buildings where most of the men would wait again two or three days for an assignment. But not Lenny.

            That very afternoon Lenny was called to the personnel office, examined by a young specialist who, looking at his personnel records in the brown folder, asked how fast Lenny could type and how far he progressed in college. The specialist administered a typing test, then made a call to a Sergeant Biles and said, "Come tomorrow morning, I think I have a guy who fits your bill." The specialist said to Lenny, "Be ready at 9 a.m." Then Lenny was sent to eat and wait in the barracks.

The Heroes (February, 1967)

 1

            Bullets pelted into the private, who was the point man for the South Vietnamese platoon. The private wore a green uniform and ammunition belt and carried a rifle like everyone else. He was killed instantly by rifle fire coming from the tunnel mouth, which appeared as a hole in the rust-colored ground.

            An enemy soldier (a Vietnamese man in the tunnel mouth) who fired the AK-47, killing the Vietnamese private, was bare chested and black haired.

            Lenny Rothe saw all this clearly. He saw the private die in front of him, threshing the air with his hands, blood and flesh flying from holes blown out his back.        

            Lieutenant Tho's platoon was patrolling around a sizable Vietnamese town, accompanied by an American sergeant and three enlisted men, one of whom was Lenny. The Americans were considered advisors, while Tho was in command, and the Americans were with the platoon to search the tunnels expected to be found. While tunnel searching was said to be volunteer duty, Lenny was volunteered by his sergeant without any option.

            At the first sound of gunfire, every man fell to the earth or crouched behind a tree. Lenny went flat on the ground, placing his weapon in a firing position. Vietnamese soldiers fired toward the hole in the ground, but Lenny never fired. He did not want to fire. He also could not get a clear sight through the heels of the men on the ground in front of him.

            A soldier named Kresky and called Chick lay on the dusty ground beside Lenny in the blinding light of the searing hot afternoon. A wiry man of medium build, Chick said, "Why the fuck is that skinny fool doing that?"

            Chick was referring to Sergeant Biles, who was tall and thin like Walter Moody, only possessed of a protruding belly. Biles was charging the tunnel with a cratering charge on which the fuse was pulled. "He doesn't need to do that," Chick said; it was much easier just to chuck a grenade into the hole.

            Lenny had no idea what anyone needed to do here. He was now ten days in-country with his head pressed on the earth and a helmet over his head. Everything outside the base camp was confusing and terrifying. Sweat was rendering his forehead muddy.

            Biles was from a small town outside Birmingham, Alabama. Kresky was from the suburbs around Atlanta. While Biles was a string bean of a man in his thirties, Chick Kresky was nineteen, short, dark, and with a perfect set of teeth, unlike Biles whose mouth could use some free Army dental work. Neither Chick nor Biles were very smart, but Chick had a good heart, although Lenny didn't know it yet, and Biles probably had quicksilver for a heart.

            The sergeant dropped the cratering charge at the tunnel mouth and ran crashing into the nearby brush. The charge lay beside the hole, its fuse sputtering toward detonation. The Vietnamese man, who killed the Vietnamese platoon point man, stood in the tunnel entrance, raised his hands in surrender, said "Chieu hoi," then the cratering charge Sergeant Biles had dropped exploded, and pieces of man, and things not man, rained down on the surrounding area. The forty-pound charge changed the man's appearance, so that the upper portion was no longer recognizable as any particular man, but more like a recently skinned piece of meat. The dead man slipped back into the tunnel.  

            When the pieces stopped falling from the sky, Kresky stood, dusting off his fatigues, then said to Lenny, "Do you want a hand, Rothe?"

            Lenny thought Chick was offering to help him rise from the ground after the cratering charge exploded. When Lenny reached out with his hand, Chick held out a severed human hand. When Lenny took it, it was cold and gray, and Lenny was not sure it came from the man who had just died or if Chick had carried it waiting for an opportunity to give it to Lenny. He took the hand because he sensed this was an initiation rite with Chick. The hand did not ooze blood, in fact looked bloodless and felt hard as a rock. It could have been a fake hand purchased in some novelty store. It was as neatly cut as if his butcher grandfather Fritz had whacked it off with a meat clever, and Lenny could see the bones and ligaments. Chick expected Lenny to be sick, perhaps for Chick's amusement, but Lenny refused to be sick, instead tossing the damned thing into the bushes, where ants would quickly strip it.

            Lenny kept thinking that he had just seen two men die, while the rest of them lived. He wondered about the private and the enemy, about whom he knew nothing, and with whom he could not have conversed. It was sickening to Lenny the way some of the soldiers were celebrating the enemy's death; celebrating death seemed inherently wrong. It was like when Yo Yo rushed up to see the parachutist who died during training. Anxious soldiers charged to the tunnel mouth to look and fired their weapons into the darkness accompanied by a sort of gleeful cheering.

            Chick grinned at Lenny. "You'll be all right, Rothe, you old Jew."

            Chick, who was Polish, decided Lenny was Jewish because of his last name. Lenny thought of Chick riding over his head with a horse, like Poles did to Jews buried up to their necks in the earth in pogroms.

            I am black, I am Jewish, I am a soldier a million miles from home, and I held the hand of death, Lenny thought. Lenny had thought of himself as black for a long time, long before he met Wally. He had more in common with Wally, sent God knows where, than these strangers he was now forced to live with.

            Kresky and Biles were two of eight men sharing a barracks with Lenny at a base camp. Bret from Philadelphia would not be there long because he swore he was homosexual so that the Army would discharge him. Lenny thought he had never seen so many homosexuals revealing themselves in his lifetime. He thought it was a smack in the face to those who truly were queer, like Frankie Angle, who was serving in the Air Force. No one believed Bret was a homosexual, but the other men left him alone, unlike Phillips who was possibly raped in basic training. Bret had no work to do, just sat in the barracks reading Lenny's already consumed books from America. Bret was gone in a few days, carrying messages back to the world for families of the men in this strange unit. The other seven men had been in Vietnam from two to seven months, none of them ready to rotate, since a one-year tour of duty was required before going home, unless you died or were severely wounded. These men would not claim to be homosexuals so they could go home now. Some of them were gung-ho for the war, like Farnsworth, who was already eagerly at the tunnel mouth with the South Vietnamese platoon to get a good view of the carnage. Others were like Lenny, unsure what they were doing there, while doing their best to avoid bloodshed. Lenny's optimistic strategy for dealing with the war included not only survival, but not having to kill anyone knowingly if he could help it.    

            While Kresky's Slavic origin was evident, Farnsworth was an ethnic mystery. Although he had olive-colored skin, Farnie's hair was blond, like Lenny, and he looked so average, so all-American, he seemed to have no ethnic heritage at all. His father could have been a cheeseburger, his mother apple pie, his brother a vanilla shake. His sister was a hippie, who wore an American flag and smoked dope and fucked everyone, said Farnsworth, and he was going to set her straight when he got home. Lenny would like to meet Farnie's sister, who sounded just the right speed for him. Chick Kresky never volunteered for duty, but Farnsworth was constantly volunteering, as if the war were great fun and good sport. He volunteered for patrol, to be a door gunner for a day, to be the first into tunnels. He liked to fire his guns. He had a happy look in his eyes when he fired his guns. If they needed an extra man for a night ambush, Farnie could be counted on. He was a hero, and Lenny believed him to be a hero, but he also believed he was crazy to risk his life so often.

            After two fully-integrated training cycles, it seemed odd to Lenny that none of the eight men in the barracks with him was black. In basic training, more than half the soldiers were black. He had asked his sergeant why there were no black soldiers in the unit.        "I picked you," Sergeant Biles said, "because you're white. Also, my buddy in personnel was looking out for me. I needed someone who could type, who was smart, and who was small enough for the tunnels."

            Biles explained that he did not like blacks and would never pick a black for his detachment. Biles did not call them blacks or African Americans but "coons." Biles said that coons were better grunts, and so they went to the front line and got killed. Coons, Biles said, would panic in the tunnels, while white guys held their cool. Biles needed smart guys, and whites were smarter, and short guys for the tunnel work, guys like Lenny. He also needed someone who could type. His small detachment had no one who could type, that was supposed to have been homo-Bret's job.

            There were reports to be filled out, award recommendations requiring preparation, and military correspondence to answer, and the queer man going home was the first pick for Biles' tunnel rat and clerk, and Lenny was his second. No clerk was authorized for their unit, so Biles had to steal an infantryman who could type.

            Instantly, his sergeant calling blacks "coons" made Lenny dislike Biles, and things between them became worse as time went on. Before meeting Wally, what Biles said might be overlooked by a Lenny Rothe willing to get along; but now it was personal, as if Biles were calling Wally a coon to his face, and Lenny wanted to speak up but could not. It wouldn't be long before Lenny would feel like Biles' nigger, and Biles would torture him some. Biles also both resented Lenny's lack of respect and for his being a terrified soldier who hid his fear, not at all like Farnsworth, not even like Chick Kresky.    

2

            Lenny would enter that tunnel when Biles ordered him; he had no choice. He was not afraid at that instant, did not think he would die in this tunnel, now that men had already died, but Lenny didn't want to be in the bloody hole where a dead man remained, and there were perhaps the bodies of others. Eleven days ago he lived in America, a land of television and relative peace, where most people about him died in hospitals, at home, or in auto wrecks. He never before had to deal personally with a dead person, other than in the abstract and at one auto accident, where his primary thought had been to shield June from the horror. But now he was about to handle dead bodies and body parts.

            Lieutenant Tho ordered one of his soldiers, who would not do it, to go into the tunnel. Tho seemed to do this for amusement, quite sure the private would never do such a thing. Tho even smiled at the private, who looked at the officer then shook his head. Tho had a pistol in a gleaming black holster. He removed the pistol and pointed it at the private with a smile, but the private just shook his head. Tho made a gesture to execute the private but did not. Tho's boots, like the holster, were shiny black. Tho spoke to the private in French, not Vietnamese, insulting him, the word "bastard" very clear.

            Unlike the private, Farnsworth was anxious to search the tunnel, to get into the earth with the dead man. "Let me go down there, Sarge," Farnsworth said several times. Sergeant Biles let Farnsworth go first, then said Private Rothe would follow him for the experience.

            Farnsworth and Chick had searched a very long tunnel complex in the Iron Triangle near the Hobo Woods. It took almost three weeks of searching, and still they did not reach the end of the complex. They brought up documents, rifles, medical supplies, and pistols from a tunnel with three levels. One room was as a hospital, another a supply room, still another an armory. They found trucks parked in enormous tunnels. Farnsworth met a Viet Cong face to face in the tunnel and shot him dead with a forty-five blast to the forehead. Farnsworth intended to take home one of the captured pistols and an old rifle as souvenirs. The commanding general decorated Farnsworth with a Bronze Star for valor. Biles and Chick received Bronze Stars also, but for service, not for valor. Both of the men claimed pistols and rifles for trophies to send home.

            "You ready for this, Rothe?" Farnsworth asked, slapping him in the chest with the back of his hand. Farnsworth was smiling, while Lenny's heart was pumping. All these people were smiling. Lenny wondered what the hell was wrong with them. Lenny wasn't ready for this. He would never be ready for this.     

            "They used to hold our legs and lower us in head first," Farnsworth said. "I don't like that much. You watch how I go in." 

            With a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Farnsworth pointed a light into the tunnel for a distance; then, when no one shot back at the light, he gradually inched the light lower. In time both the flashlight and the pistol were an arm's length inside the tunnel mouth, which was enlarged and partially collapsed by the cratering charge.

            Farnsworth dropped into the hole beside the body. He hit the floor in a crouch and shined the flashlight in the sole direction the tunnel ran.

            "There's two dead down here," he shouted up to Biles. "Bring down the rope," he said to Lenny.

            Biles took the rope tied in his ammunition belt and handed it to Lenny, who dropped into the hole beside the man whose body was ripped and rendered, particularly around his guts. Farnsworth pulled the man's legs together, took the rope from Lenny, and tied the legs. He reached into the back pockets of the man's pants and removed a wallet. He gave the end of the rope to Lenny, who handed it up to Chick. Vietnamese soldiers and Biles took hold of the rope behind Chick. Lenny slipped behind the body and beside Farnsworth as the body was pulled up into the tunnel mouth where it hung for a moment, blocking the light, then slid out into the sunlight where the men above cheered the battered corpse.

            The rope was handed down again to Lenny by Biles. It was no longer a clean rope. On it was blood and dust and what felt like fat. Lenny's hands felt greasy from handling the rope. The dry walls of the tunnel smelled musty.

            Farnsworth searched the clothing of the second dead man on the tunnel floor. There was no obvious blood on the body, and Farnsworth said he must have died from the shock of the explosion,  but this was not so, because when they moved the man there was plenty of blood. The man's body had to be turned around in the cramped tunnel, Lenny lifting the dead man under the arms, Farnsworth taking the feet, followed by an awkward period of grunting, as if they were struggling with a heavy piece of furniture while on their knees. Then Farnsworth pulled the legs together and tied them with the rope again. Lenny took the rope to the tunnel mouth, handed the rope above, and the man's body was dragged upwards. Lenny noticed blood on his uniform from moving the second body.

            Something went wrong with how the second dead man exited the tunnel, and one of the man's legs slipped out of the rope. The dangling leg caused the body to stick momentarily in the tunnel entrance, and when it exited after vigorous yanking, the breaking leg made a sharp crack. Again there was cheering and celebration.

            Farnsworth gathered up the loose enemy rifles, and Lenny handed those up to Biles. Grenades were handed above ground too, then the papers Farnsworth took from the dead soldiers.

            "Now we search," Farnsworth said. "You ready?"

            Lenny, who was not ready, said he was.

            It was neither a large nor small tunnel, but something in between. In the not-so-distant future, Lenny would crawl in tunnels where his body barely fit and his head hardly had clearance, while in others he could walk upright. This tunnel was tall enough he did not have to crawl on his belly, but it was not sufficiently tall he could  stand upright. He walked in a crouch or on his knees behind Farnsworth, whom in time he would, like the others, call Farnie. The tunnel was illuminated by Farnsworth's flashlight; beyond that was darkness.

            Farnsworth scampered a few feet at a time, until he found a  mound of dirt or a rise to hide behind, or a curve in the tunnel to lean against. At such stopping points, he held his flashlight out from his body to try to draw possible enemy fire before making another short charge. His breathing was rapid, somewhat joyous, while Lenny followed behind him with his heart beating in his ears like a Conga drum.

            Behind Lenny, Kresky dropped into the tunnel entrance with a pistol and a flashlight. Lenny realized, unaware how it had gotten there, that he held in his hands a pistol; it must have been given to him by Biles, a thirty-eight. Rifles didn't work well in tunnels, he was told, as the sound of rifles was deafening, a potential threat to ear drums; they were also difficult to carry in confined spaces.

            "Hold it," Farnsworth said, raising a hand to stop Lenny.

            "What is it?" Lenny asked.

            Then Lenny heard Vietnamese words from the darkness, "Chieu hoi."

            There was a prisoner who wanted to surrender.

 3

            Their captive was an old man with gray hair and beard. It was hard to tell how old he might be, certainly as old as Lenny's grandfathers, who were dead. Although the old man wore only black shorts and sandals, his appearance somehow was distinguished; maybe it was the thin beard. He was sweating profusely, perspiration streaking his skin covered with white dust and red dirt. It was not clear to Lenny that the man was an enemy, for he carried no rifle nor pistol. He could be a farmer, who worked in a rice paddy, or the older man who translated at the base camp headquarters. He might be the office girl's father. He looked fatherly; possibly he had children and grandchildren nearby.

              "Chieu hoi," the man repeated, "chieu hoi." When Farnsworth tried to get the man to stop repeating "chieu hoi," it was clear the older man could not hear, deafened, perhaps permanently, by the  explosion.   

            Farnsworth pushed the raised hands down, placing them behind the man's back. He put a hand across the prisoner's mouth to make him stop repeating "chieu hoi." The bloody rope was used by Farnsworth to tie the prisoner's hands together. The prisoner was then pushed in a crouch along the tunnel path to the entrance where he was thrust above ground. Once again, a cheer went up from the Vietnamese platoon and Biles.

            Outside the tunnel with his hands tied, the captive struggled to stand. Once erect, he squinted blinded by the sudden light of the sun. Lenny wondered how long the man was underground; he thought it might be half this day, since sunrise. The captive noticed the dead men. These likely were his companions, his brothers in arms. Perhaps he fought and killed with them. Maybe they had saved his life or he had rescued them. Now they were dead, and he was alive to feel the pistol wielded by Lieutenant Tho striking his forehead.

            Tho screamed at the man in Vietnamese, then switched to French when the man didn't respond.

            "He can't hear," Farnsworth screamed at Tho, who either did not hear Farnie or did not care to hear, for the pistol struck the captive a second time on his cheek, felling him to the earth, blood flowing from wounds above the eyes.

            Tho then handed the pistol to the cowardly private who had refused to go into the tunnel. The cowardly private put the pistol against the prisoner's forehead and pulled the trigger. The old man lay on the red earth, blood flowing from the back of his head onto the earth where it left a dark pool like red oil.

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