Barb was perfect. She was the personification of tenderness; long, soft, dark hair and soft brown eyes that cried soft and salty tears. Extreme emotions from rage to joy were portrayed as a ripple on the glassy surface of a tranquil mill pond. She lived in a world of chess and books and Beethoven. I was 400 horsepower at 400 decibels on a collision course with everything.
She let me in and held me in teary silence. It would have been so wonderful to have been able to accept her love and have a moment of peace in her tender arms. I really tried, but it was too late for me, I was already gone.
I passed out sometime before we finished making love. Some secret trap door in Heaven opened up and I fell helplessly through to ugly earth.
They were all there waiting for me. Pasty, white faces in smoky white dreams. People begging to live and begging to die. Friends who knew they were almost out of blood, enemies, wide-eyed, staring at my smoking gun, tiny amber children with screaming mothers and less than whole bodies. Holy men rest in heaven, killers don't rest.
In the morning Barb went to work and I went home. My Dad asked me to call if I wouldn't be coming in at night. "I know you're a man now," he said, "but your mother worries about you."
I wasn't a man, I'd spent two years going backward from being a boy. I was a twenty-one year-old body with an eighteen-year-old brain. My peers were people who collected Viet Cong ears in a jar and pulled gold teeth from dead gooks in order to pay their disrespect. Our heros were gunfighters like Lt. Gonzales, a Cuban mercenary who'd killed a policeman when he was nine and went on to fight in every bush war in Africa. War never made a man out of anybody. War only makes monsters and corpses.
The six o'clock news was my downfall. I sat on the sofa in my parent's living room watching a helicopter assault like it was Monday night football. All the players looked familiar. The sincere news guy, the brave young lieutenant, the frantic medics and their bloody subjects.
Everything spun right out of control. The guilt of all those who survive welled up in my chest. My heart raced and angry blood pounded against my temples. How could we be here, having dinner, taking showers, making love and living our lives in the usual way. "Don't look at that," my mother said changing the channel, "it'll make you feel bad."
I wanted to scream at her, 'can't you see that's me that's dying on your damned tv'. Nickerson and Smith and Fadley and Alpheri waited in their graves for me to take their part, for me to voice their rage at having died for nothing in a nowhere place for a country that didn't even have the guts to watch.
I couldn't talk. I held my head in my hands as the first tears came then stormed through the house and out the back door which failed to withstand the force of my anger. Her call to me was covered by the sound of breaking glass and the silent screams I couldn't leave behind.

In high school some one inadvertently stabbed Greg Allaire in the eye with a pencil. It cost him the chance to serve his country which, at this particular juncture in history, was the kind of misfortune dreams were made of. Greg was tall, skinny, pale, freckled and quiet. He'd always had a different set of priorities than the rest of us; like a car that would burn less gas rather than burn more rubber. He was a good listener while the rest of us had been so great at not hearing anything except the thunder from our own egos.
We talked about girls and cars and friends from high school. Drew Fiedler and Johnny Lee Blount, two of the absolutely nicest, most decent human beings in my class were already dead. Both had been leaders and heros as was their way.
Some little switch clicked inside my twisted psyche. What cowardly, selfish thing had I done that had allowed me to live. Why wasn't the entire country screaming with rage at this unthinkable loss. Who could I kill to make this right?
Greg had his own apartment and said he needed a roommate. It seemed like the perfect setup. I could go back to my life as it was before the war; working, racing my car and only taking Barb out when I could find nothing or no one better to do. All the spoiled, selfish, post adolescence I felt I had missed would be mine for the taking. Before Nam, the last time I'd paid attention to the news was when John Kennedy got killed. It was a life of blissful ignorance to which I had longed to return.
Greg helped me move my stuff in and showed me what tricks there were to operating the antiquated shower and the coat hanger antennae for the tv. We cooked some cheeseburgers and called every girl of questionable repute we could think of. It started to feel a little like what soldiers in Nam referred to as being back in the world.'
It got late. Greg went to his room and I to mine. Taking a hot shower then sleeping in a real bed without my boots on or my gun strap wrapped around my arm was a treat of monumental proportions. After a year of listening every night for the distant, hollow thumps that signaled incoming mortar fire I took comfort in the muted growl of garbage truck machinery and the nearly constant E-flat moan generated by tractor trailers out on the interstate. After training myself to spend the last few minutes of consciousness each night rehearsing what to do if I woke up to some hellish fire fight or a steady rain of 60 millimeter mortars, I found it almost impossible to just not to give a damn anymore.

I had been an artillery forward observer. My job was to crawl around with the ground pounders till we got into deep shit then call in and direct long range artillery fire to get us out. The big guns can deliver groups of 200 pound projectiles to targets miles away with amazing accuracy. They are only as good, however, as the people that aim them.
Joe Johnson died without ever seeing his son. The child was born while we were on the troop ship to Nam. Johnson had shown me photographs and even had a tape of the kid making baby noises. "He doesn't sound like you Johnson. You sure you're the father?"
I called in an artillery strike on a squad of gooks about 400 meters away in the Michelin rubber plantation. A battery of self propelled 155 millimeter Howitzers responded with 12 rounds right on top of our forward platoon. Some of the shells exploded when they hit the tops of the rubber trees raining down huge chunks of jagged shrapnel vicious enough to cut a phone pole right in half.
After the thunderous explosions ceased I ran forward through the dust and confusion. Johnson was lying on his side amid the shattered trees and frightened soldiers. He was covered with white dust and powder from the blast. A huge hole extended through his torso from side to side. Pieces of broken rifle were sticking out the opening in his body. The dead GI's eyes were open and his teeth were biting down on his lower lip. I saw him almost every night from that point on.

I fell asleep in Greg's apartment to the sound of garbage trucks and distant semis. Ten thousand miles passed with the close of an eye and I found myself standing next to Joe Johnson's broken body. It all looked the same, the awful wounds, the twisted limbs and rumpled clothes. But the face was Greg Allaire's.
In combat the combination of unthinkable events and total exhaustion made it difficult at times to separate dreams from reality. I'd awakened more than once in the jungle, after stealing 45 minutes of fitful sleep, to find what I thought had been a hideous nightmare was actually in yesterday's body bags.
The image of Joe Johnson always woke me up. Greg's apartment was dark and unfamiliar which hampered my efforts to climb back out of the dream. Even as I turned on the light it was impossible to shake the image of my friend lying in his bed with his heart and lungs torn out.
The door to his room squeaked as I opened it. I could barely make out his form in the muted street light that came through the window. "Greg," I said quietly.
He was sleeping as only a civilian could. I switched on the bedroom light hoping he'd stay that way. He didn't. "Hi," I said, sort of smiling.
Greg looked frightened. "What's the matter?," he asked, shading his eyes from the light.
I was happy. Greg was ok. "I had a nightmare, I just wanted to see if you were all right."
He wasn't awake enough to question the logic in that statement.
The next day I apologized. "You really freaked me out," Greg said, smiling.
Night number two was a repeat performance. I just had to see if he was ok. Greg was not amused. "Look Joe, you really can't keep doing this. I gotta get some sleep."
Night number three. The shattered body, my roommates face, I stood in complete anguish outside Greg's bedroom door, afraid to disturb him and dreading what waited for me if I tried to sleep. There was an all night diner across town. I drove there and drank coffee till the eastern sky showed the first glow of dawn.

Barb had grown up without me. She'd known it from the moment I came home and it was breaking her heart. She worked in a research laboratory full of educated, mature adults while trying to carry on a relationship with a relative subhuman, whose development had been arrested somewhere between juvenile delinquent and homicidal maniac. On the best days I would stay out street racing my car till 1 AM then come to her place for sex. The worst days found me watching the six o'clock news on her tv then putting my fist through the door to her kitchen cabinet.
She was slowly and reluctantly letting someone else into her life and I was too immature and too crazy to see it. I was losing that one love in a lifetime that will never come again.
By the first day of 1968 I had alienated just about everyone. Watching the civilians enjoy themselves in seeming blithe unawareness of what horror was being endured on their behalf left me alternating from barely contained rage to dark and helpless frustration. I was advised to 'forget that Viet Nam crap' and to smoke a little dope for the purpose of mellowing my intractable nature. As I withdrew and looked out at the world around me my mixed and turbulent emotions started to jell into one unrelenting theme, hatred.
January 5th, 1968. I had purchased a 1965 Mustang convertible with a 271 horsepower engine and a 4 speed transmission. The temperature in Connecticut was neither plus nor minus as I threw my few possessions in the car and drove away....







chapter two: A RUSH AND A SMOKE

I'd never been to Miami Beach. The name fostered an image of warm weather and friendly people with southern accents. I had no way of knowing it was really an island populated by Cubans and New Yorkers that would turn out to be the coldest place on earth.
The Mustang and I took Interstate 95 west along the Connecticut shore and through New York City. It felt great to be moving. The 'greener pastures' concept is obviously derived from an individual's inclination to allow himself to be victimized by his own built-in optimism. i.e. any unpredictable change will result in an improvement. Actually, it's probably most always best to stay put and tough it out rather than to expend one's finite resources in relocation for relocation's sake. I was happy to leave the consideration of that colorless logic to bean counter types and mature people as I sped across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey.
I picked up a toll ticket at the beginning of the New Jersey Turnpike right behind some pampered looking blond driving a white Porsche 911. She left the toll booth like someone who had money for speeding tickets and power to spare. I fell in love before we got to ninety.
Adrenalin is a drug. We all get little hits of it from time to time when some unexpected stimulus crosses swords with one of our basic instincts. We like the stuff, that's why we go to horror films and ride on roller coasters. Like nicotine in cigarettes, we live comfortably with these frequent, but small doses which don't generally perpetrate any abrupt changes in our physical or psychological make up. Being a grunt in Nam consisted of tedium, boredom, drudgery and loneliness interspersed with not infrequent episodes in which one's adrenal glands were voided, squeezed, twisted, wrung and stomped out of every available drop in the time it would take to, hopefully, generate one more heartbeat. The result is, plain and simple, addiction.
Let me paint a little picture for you.
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It was hot as usual. C 130 cargo planes had carried us to some too short, make shift air strip outside a little village called Soui Tre just east of the Cambodian border. About 100 of us, laden with every kind of lethal instrument known to man, had been seated on the floor when the four engine turbo-prop hit the "runway" then roared, screeched, shuddered and finally lurched to an abrupt halt. After months of countless such landings the stoic infantrymen were neither shaken nor amused.
Our mission was to helicopter into a huge field several kilometers away and secure it so an artillery unit could come in and establish what was known as a fire support base. That's a place out in the hostile boonies where they set up a bunch of cannons to help out my grunt associates and me when the murderous array of hardware we generally carried was just not enough.
After deplaning, we sat on our field packs bitching and smoking cigarettes while awaiting the arrival of UH1D "slick" troop carrying helicopters. The slicks would take us to a large opening in the thick jungle about five kilometers away. Hopefully, no one would be waiting.
A couple of Viet Namese guys on a small motorcycle had materialized from the village to hawk bottles of Pepsi and Viet Namese beer. Two hours of baking in the Asian sun, dressed in full battle gear and breathing red laterite clay dust, encouraged some of the thirsty grunts to overlook the rumor that the local brew was made with embalming fluid. Several guys got Pepsis. They contained battery acid.
Oswicki and I watched a medivac chopper haul the vomiting GIs away. "Why do I get the feeling Charlie knows were coming?" Os asked me rhetorically.
Some of us had discovered that it was possible to fit 21 rounds into the 20 round magazines for our M16 rifles. Doing it, however, seemed to increase the risk of jamming for a gun that was totally unreliable in the first place. I put out my cigarette and began checking each of my fifteen magazines by pushing my thumb down on the top cartridge to see if there was room for one more.
A wave of slicks came in and picked up a unit near us. They were just black dots in the sky as we boarded the second group of choppers.
The ship I was in lifted slightly off the ground and started to move steadily forward across the air strip. It was necessary to pick up speed at ground level then translate that momentum into lift. My pulse elevated slightly as the overloaded bird tilted further forward and the urgent whine from the jet turbine engine reached it's maximum pitch. Gradually the base drum tempo of the rotor blades rose to a relentless hammering and we jumped into the cool blue sky.
Lt. Willenbring and I went through our usual routine. He handed me his rifle then braced himself in the canvas seat at the center of the cargo area. I sat on the floor facing outward with my feet hanging out the open door. The lieutenant wrapped his powerful, wiry fingers around the back of my web gear to keep me in while leaving my hands free to fire both weapons in the event that Charlie was waiting. We were traveling at 105 knots about 1200 feet above the sweltering jungle. It was cool and fast with a view of Nam we ground pounders got only for the briefest of moments. I could see straight down through the muddy, stagnant water in the huge B-52 bomb craters. I just wanted to ride forever.
Suddenly the chopper banked right and dropped abruptly. Huge columns of smoke rose from the field where the first wave had landed. "What the fuck?" I shouted to the door gunner manning one of the belt-fed 30 caliber machine guns mounted on each side of the slick. He didn't have to hear my question to know what it was.
"Mines," he shouted back, "there were mines in the LZ."
We had dropped to just above the jungle canopy, zig zagging through the taller trees at 100 Knots. I locked and loaded one M 16 then the other. Lt. Willenbring secured his grip on my pack straps as I turned and looked him in the eye for reassurance. The fun was over.
Four choppers in the first wave had been completely disintegrated. The gooks had apparently found unexploded bombs dropped by the B52s and buried them in the landing zone. Wreckage was visible everywhere in the smoke filled clearing as the nervous pilot skirted the perimeter looking for a spot to kick us out.
Riflemen appeared in the open to our left front. I couldn't tell whose they were till two loud pinging noises rattled the underbelly of the slick. Both door gunners returned fire as we sped over a small group of dark figures in the medium high grass. Several more emerged from the tree line and I flipped one M16 to semi-automatic. Doing my best to pick targets through the intermittent layers of smoke I became suddenly weightless as the machine banked violently to the left. Willenbring's bony fingers held me momentarily in complete suspension. In a blinding instant I reswallowed my heart and willed myself to just keep pulling the trigger.
Both door gunners were firing almost constantly. An ear-splitting rattle from the two overheated machine guns filled the vibrating aluminum can and rendered all vocal communication useless. The side of each gun ejected a steady stream of spent shell casings which ricocheted crazily through the cargo area and off the side of my steel helmet. I went to full auto and emptied Willenbring's rifle at shadowy targets through burning jungle grass. I needed the power of God and all I had was this little piece of plastic.
The chopper slowed then spun around and hovered with the skids six feet off the ground. "Get out, get out, get out." the pilot was shouting. He didn't want to join the first wave in purgatory.
I passed Willenbring his weapon and pushed off with 65 pounds on my back. Both my ankles turned to spaghetti when I hit the ground, but it didn't matter. The ace of terror beats a pair of painful injuries in anybody's game. I ran like hell.
In minutes it was over. The VC just vanished as usual, leaving us to gather the pieces of our brothers in arms. I came upon a slightly charred helicopter pilot's helmet lying in the grass. I wondered why it hadn't been on his head till realizing that what looked like an inner lining was actually part of the man's skull.
Gradually my hammering heart slowed and my wide and unblinking eyes returned to their natural, cynical squint. Like the smoke and chaotic sounds of battle, the last traces of superchemicals in my blood faded away. After every gunfight there came a period of blissful, almost spiritual, calm. I sat with my back against a tree taking slow pulls on what had to be the best cigarette in the world. The orgasm of violence had ended. I felt no urge to kill or conquer or even survive, only a surrealistic peacefulness and uncommon comfort.
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The Porsche and I were at just over 100, passing cars on the right and left and not using the breakdown lane unless it was absolutely necessary. At the first little hint of nature's wonder drug I'd started craving a full load. All those practical considerations like cops, the cost of car insurance, harm to my engine and quadraplegia got effectively blindsided by the rapidly progressing change in my body chemistry. There was no time for fear or guilt or sadness; no pain, no grieving for the dead, only a racing pulse and total concentration.
Between the groups of 70 mph traffic I ran the Mustang at full throttle and watched the Porsche steadily pull away. This lady was either the best or the dumbest. She had better brakes, better steering, better suspension and better tires, but at double the speed limit things could still tend to get out of hand. Maybe she was still fighting some war of her own.
We tore past opposite sides of tractor-trailers, punched through not-big-enough holes between cars and drafted each other at heart stopping speeds through long, ever tightening freeway curves. I never thought once of harm to the other drivers. Things were going too fast and too crazy for time to care about collateral damage. Innocent people get hurt, it was a fact of my life.
Somewhere far down the road she slowed to take an exit. I came by on her left side and she looked at me for the first time. I gave her the thumbs up and she smiled. It had been the perfect romance and now it was over. The chemical tide began washing away. I stopped for some fuel and a cigarette. The best cigarette in the whole world.









chapter three: ONE MAN'S COMMUNISM



I had never been an easy kid. Fist fights, auto theft and teacher conferences marked my childhood. I was a moody, unpredictable, bratty loner. The world at large soon found it prudent to keep me at arms length. The world, but not my sister, Sue.
Sue lived in Fairfax, Virginia with her husband and two small girls. I rolled in there in the wee hours of the morning grateful that there was one person in the world whose perception of me wasn't totally colored by who I'd killed or why. Whether it was a fist fight at the Catholic Youth Organization or the time I stole her car from a shopping center parking lot, she'd always listened to my side of the story and had made it clear that, while I might not be perfect, she loved me anyway.
In the morning she made me waffles and let me talk. I still wanted to win the war in Viet Nam, but had quickly discovered that saying so was almost invariably greeted by, at best, a polite but frigid silence and, at worst, unmitigated ridicule. I told her I felt I'd done the right thing and that the much maligned domino theory didn't seem all that far fetched to me. Any damn fool could see that the fundamental precepts of communism ran exactly counter to the dictates of human nature. I did my best to explain that to Sue in my awkward and angry way. She actually listened.
Sue didn't pretend to agree or disagree. She appeared to carefully weigh the merits of my haltingly presented treatise, asking intelligent questions and making carefully considered remarks. It had occurred to me, and no doubt to her, that after you'd stabbed someone through the throat with a bayonet and then been stripped of the reason why, it might be quite natural to seize upon any defendable rationalization. I was careful to explain to her that I had gone to Viet Nam and come back with basically the same beliefs. Even a crazy nineteen-year-old doesn't look death in the face without asking himself, "Why."
She asked me to stay around for a while and I gratefully accepted. Nearly terminal restlessness would soon get the best of me, but for the moment it was great to be in place where I didn't feel like I was being pitied or excused for just having been too dumb to have gone to Canada.
In less than a week I had found a job as a rod man on a land surveying crew. A more accurate nomenclature for the type of work I was doing would have been "rod utensil." A special-ed chimp could have held down this job and had intellect to spare.
A survey crew usually consists of three people, a crew chief, an instrument person, who operates the telescope thing on the tripod, and a rod utensil. My job consisted of whacking my way through underbrush with a machete and slogging around in muddy Virginia clay with equipment strapped on my back. It had a familiar feel to it.
Our somewhat less than esteemed crew chief was a fat guy whose movements and thought processes could be measured in the Arctic with a sun dial. He walked slow, he drove slow, he worked slow and he talked like each word was being shipped to him via Antwerp. He was carrying on an extramarital affair with some equally round and inanimate love mountain in a house near the project we were working on. Every day at mid-afternoon the instrument guy and I would spend an hour, or so, waiting in the survey truck while Elmer and Bossy attempted to make time stand still.
Zoren Mijyk was not an instrument person by trade. He had come to the USA from Yugoslavia on a scholarship visa to play soccer for some college in the Washington DC area. He was 27 years old, tall and narrow with dark brown hair and worried eyes. I had tried a variety of juvenile antics and anecdotes in an effort to make him laugh out loud, with no response except polite curiosity and a distant smile. I got the feeling that he knew secrets about the world that I didn't and that maybe I didn't want to.
He displayed not the slightest interest in things like high powered cars or my puerile recollections about oversexed high school girls or of how many fist fights I'd lost. My insatiable curiosity about what motivates people around me bounced off this guy like a pit bull off a concrete mail man.
Finally, on one cold and rain washed January day, as we sat playing cards and fighting off any imaginary visualization of the Pillsbury dough boy in the throws of passion, Mijyk asked me about Nam. "What were you fighting for? Do Americans think that their way is the only way.?"
"Yeah," I said feeling a flash of temper and the distinct urge not to get crapped on about Viet Nam even one more time. "If communism is so fucking great why aren't you back in Yugoslavia?"
"Communism isn't the problem," he told me, his sad eyes looking beyond the dirty window and the rain swept Virginia forest to some place and time I could only guess at. "The problem is people."
That debate went on in the cluttered survey truck, on muddy construction sites, in small town diners and through the hapless course of the crew chief's love affair. It was a heated, but honest tug of war between two scarred and insignificant pawns in the clumsy struggle to make government suit the people or the reverse.
In the process Mijyk and I developed a sometimes awkward friendship, constructed less of what we had in common with each other than what we failed to have in common with others. The fact that we passionately disagreed about the politics of life and death was overridden by the realization that we were, at least, passionately concerned.
I picked him up one Saturday and we went for a Mijyk guided tour of Washington. We drove my high powered Ford through the manicured suburbs, past beautiful homes and along smoothly paved avenues. Shiny faced children played on litter free playgrounds in a place where the only high fences kept tennis balls from bouncing off wood paneled station wagons. It looked like America to me.
We got a couple of 7-11 hot dogs and some coffee then headed into the city. "Let's go see how the poor people live," Mijyk said.
It was a perfect winter day, 50 degrees and clear. It was the kind of perfect afternoon when anything that could look good, did.
DC didn't. Abandoned cars, peeling paint, fences that collected abundant litter driven by a winter wind that always blew a little colder here. It was a place of dull red and cold gray, cut out and pasted against a backdrop of cheerful blue sky. "Is this what you were fighting for?" Mijyk asked as we rolled slowly through a stickball game on the rutted pavement.
The radical Mustang engine ran unevenly at low speeds. Its throaty exhaust noise came and went in steady rhythmic surges that marked the time as I sipped my coffee and pondered the darker side of capitalism. "So, Zoren, instead of some of us living like this you think we all should live like this?"
"Do you believe that's the choice?"
I thought about all the different personalities I'd seen, the lazy slugs, the human dynamos and everyone in between. What would happen if we tried to make them all work at the same pace and settle for the same compensation? "Yeah," I said.
In DC there is an Embassy and a restaurant for every nationality. We went for dinner at a Yugoslav place where Mijyk read the menu and I fell in love with the waitress. "Zoren, don't order me anything that has human blood in it."
"You Americans are too fussy."
I spent a half hour hammering Mijyk about how hard my parents had struggled to succeed. My dad had come to the US from Scotland as a boy with his mother. He ended up working in a rock quarry after she died of a brain hemorrhage on one Christmas Eve.
I told him how my folks had built the house they were still living in with their own hands. They'd dug the cellar out with picks and shovels and scrounged wood from ships that were wrecked in the hurricane of 1938. The point was that some people will try harder than others; that industry and determination should be integrally connected to some tangible reward.
Somewhere in the midst of my self righteous diatribe I lost him. His politely attentive gaze grew distant and quietly unnerved. I'd managed to put both my muddy jungle boots down hard right in the middle of his soft spot. It was time for a tactical retreat. "What about your parents, Zoren?"
A long, silent moment passed. The waitress came and went. I stared into my coffee cup, he looked warily into his past. "My father was a lawyer," he said finally.
Our food came as Mijyk talked about his childhood in Yugoslavia after World War Two. I was hungry, but couldn't get past the feeling that eating might seem callus or disrespectful.
Apparently Mijyk's father didn't like communism any better than I did and was actively involved in disseminating some sort of anti-government literature. Over time, because of his political activity, he was gradually frozen out of the country's legal system. Rather than capitulate, the senior Mijyk supported his family with menial jobs and continued to express his opinions political.
Zoren recalled the first police search of their apartment. They left nothing in its place nor unbroken. He'd tried, in vain, to comfort his mother who'd sobbed for hours and then had stopped eating for days afterward. Zoren's father was not swayed from his efforts.
There were several more searches in the following months after which his father would be taken to the police station for questioning. On the last such occasion, his father never returned.
Zoren spent long miserable days looking out the window, waiting. His mother had taken his father's place in the anti-government network. Strangers came and went in the middle of the night. The searches started again, after which she would be taken away by the police. The last few times, Zoren and his two older sisters had found her on the doorstep in the morning badly bruised and unable to get up.
"She never talks about it now," he said, "she never talks about anything."
I spent the next half hour shoveling in food and trying to find some gentle way to ask 'why the hell don't you hate communism more than anybody?' I couldn't so I just did.
"Communism didn't do that to my family, Joe, people did. How did the Viet Namese woman feel when you went into her village and took away her husband and burned down her home?"
In one sickening moment, about a dozen different colors of rage, regret, guilt and sadness collided inside my head. I was the guy who'd taken his father away and brutalized his mother. I was the empty-eyed killer, the unfeeling bully, the vicious cur of "1984."
I drove Mijyk home and then spent many dark hours trying to sort out my feelings. Images of bloody children and burning villages filled my mind. Was I the point man for some grand and complex political scheme that was far beyond my comprehension? Did I bite off a little piece of hell so that some day the world would be a better place? Or was I just some callus and unsophisticated trigger man whose only justification was that he didn't know any better. I felt like screaming for someone to give me the answer.
I left. Maybe it was the 'greener pastures' syndrome or maybe the cold and sticky Virginia mud, maybe it was the need for that morphine-like softness and comfort of a droning engine on an empty highway that would lead me to where I'd never been and far away from whence I'd come. I needed to be one step ahead of my memories just for a moment, just for a moment of peace.










chapter four: THE GHOUL

Fog is the worst. After you've driven 400 miles, when midnight has come and gone, in the dark hours between the last moonlight and the first glow of morning, fog is the worst.
I had a dream that I was driving. I was driving. Some, just barely conscious, hand deep inside my sleeping brain reached out in one last gasp effort and hit the panic button. Waking up at 70 mph is only slightly less unpleasant than not waking up. It was definitely past time to shut this iron horse down and let exhaustion have its way.
It was probably South Carolina. I was on a recently completed section of I-95 lined with tall dark trees and blanketed with layers of drifting fog. Bad memories in villainous collusion with an unchecked imagination tended to make nighttime unpleasant for me. In little kid vernacular I was "scared of the dark."
Changing gears, 4-3-2-1, slowed the speeding yellow muscle car to a crawl. I pulled off onto the grass on the right side of the roadway and sat for a minute with the engine idling and the headlights on. Gray streaks of transparent mist gathered around me in the gloomy darkness. My hand lingered for a long moment on the ignition switch. I wasn't anxious to be without that comforting rumble or my artificially illuminated sphere in the thickening fog.
Locking the doors in a convertible feels somewhat foolish. I did it anyway then shut everything off and lay across the front bucket seats expecting to literally drop into slumber. No way.
Noises don't make themselves. Right? "Things" made crunching sounds near the door at my back. I thought I felt the car move a little. The hairs on my neck and the ends of all my nerves were vibrating like the tail on a welcome home Cocker Spaniel. Sleep, after nearly killing me for attention, was now playing hard to get.
Ten minutes took an hour to go by amid noises, feelings, movements and scary shapes formed from hanging mist. Every damn thing, but sleep. My bladder was asking me, politely at first, to get out and take care of business. Soon it would be insisting and whatever was waiting out there probably knew it. The survival instinct does not override the wizzle instinct.
I cranked up the engine, put it in gear, flipped on the headlights and blasted off in one rapid and unbroken movement. There had to be people and lights and urinals out on this highway somewhere. For the moment there was only the hypnotic passing of broken white lines out of thick, unrelenting gray.
"REST AREA TWO MILES" When I was a less than perfect soldier, my old drill instructor, Sgt. Leroy Strain, would make me hold my M-14 rifle out at arms length till my shoulder muscles felt like Jimi Hendrix had used them to play the National Anthem. Out on this foggy highway my eye lids had gotten to the part about 'the rockets red glare' and were about to give up.
Finally it came into view, an entrance, one long strip of angle parking, then an exit. I idled slowly by the only other car in the place. It was an old four-door sedan, maybe a Buick. The driver's door was wide open and the overhead light was on. No one was inside. I looked toward the little brick building that housed the rest rooms, maybe the guy had to go worse than I do, I thought.
Just past the building I parked the Mustang and got out. It felt great to stand up and stretch. I could hear some crunching noises coming from the black woods to the rear of the rest rooms, but here in this lighted area with another car around it just wasn't all that scary.
I was about halfway to the building when he materialized from the shadows. Giving credit for the fact that it was foggy and creepy and that I'm not a hard guy to frighten anyway, I'll subtract a foot from this weirdo's height and one hundred pounds from his weight. So let's say he was only 6'8" and 300 pounds.
He was sort of, well, deformed, but not really. He had tremendous width and height, his shoulders weren't the normal horizontal then squared off when they got to his arms, they just started at his massive neck and then sloped down at a severe angle; his long, drooping arms continuing in the same grotesque direction. What little hair he had was cropped very short on a huge bony head with sunken eyes and several well rotted teeth. He looked at me, then turned slowly toward the woods, then back to me again. "Hi," I said.
The absolutely most valuable lesson to learn in Nam was to control your own fear. At night, in the jungle, if you couldn't stay calm enough to save yourself, you just plain died.
I told myself he was most likely just some local mutant whose parents were first cousins, and that he probably wouldn't hurt a cockroach. My bladder was getting very close to 'the bombs bursting in air' so I turned gingerly away and headed for the head. I assumed it was his car at the end of the lot and hoped he'd just get in it and go.
The men's room had one door, several stand up urinals and a couple of stalls. I stepped up to one of the urinals and looked over my right shoulder at the door as it swung open. Most guys find it difficult to pee when some one is watching, when that some one is a hulking cross between an Ozark love child and the missing link it becomes damned near impossible.
I waited for him to either come in or say something or let the door close again. He just stared at me. Dear Ann Landers, is there some socially acceptable mechanism for persuading a giant, boneheaded weirdo, sporting fresh Carolina dirt on his pants from the knees down, to stop looking at one so that one may urinate. Fresh dirt? Did I say, fresh dirt?
I can sound tough even when my knees are turning to Silly Putty. "What the hell do you want?" I growled
No comment.
It took all my willpower and a mental image of Angel Falls in the rainy season, but I finally accomplished my mission. After the "friendly weapon" had been secured I turned to the creep in the doorway and began wishing for something a little less congenial, like maybe a flame thrower. If this guy really was harmless he needed to do a better job of showing it.
"Where you goin'?" he asked without introduction.
Fear is very uncomfortable for me and very quickly turns to rage. I could feel my face redden with overheated blood as my mind thumbed angrily through its ample collection of summary ultimatums. One side of each involved a colorfully defined negative experience for the recipient, who was invariably addressed by some course generic nick-name built around everybody's favorite F-word. "Florida," I stated flatly.
"I could go," he said
We were now face to face. His huge body leaned against the side of the doorway on my left. One ugly arm stretched across the opening, holding the spring-loaded door wide and effectively blocking my passage. "Isn't that your car?" I asked, pointing through the brick wall in the direction of the old Buick.
"I can't drive."
It wasn't his car. The door had been wide open. Nobody else was around. His lower legs were covered with dirt. My mind did a complete U-turn from rage right straight back to stark terror.
The only way out was to move this guy or at least his arm. My knees were shaking and I was trying to calm down enough to make a plan. The long seconds were dragging by, two heartbeats at a time.
Plan "A", I use just enough force to knock his hand away from the door and then slip gingerly past, being careful not to give the impression that it was an act of open war.
Plan "B", if "A" doesn't work and his massive mitt won't budge I use a maneuver that my dead-eyed marshal arts instructor simply referred to as a "finger jab" and try to poke out one of his dark and unblinking eyes. Just the thought of having to touch this guy's face caused me to put considerably more force into plan "A" than I'd intended.
"A" worked. I slid quickly past him with my back against the door and my eyes glued to his. He made no effort to respond, either because he was just a big helpless Teddy Bear or because his neurological processes operated slower than the Italian Post Office.
I set a deliberate, but not panicky pace for the car. I could hear his footsteps close behind me. "I could go," he said again.
As I strode past the front of the Mustang I looked back at him and pointed to the locked passenger door. He went for it while I jumped in the driver's side then lit up the tires in reverse. One hundred yards away at 50 mph I let out a ten minute breath and spoke in profound relief to my rubber and steel traveling companion, "Shit!"











chapter five: SENORITA COCINITA (rough translation: Miss Piggy)



We lost a zillion guys keeping the Germans out of England. We fought the Mexicans for Texas, the Spanish for Florida and the Japanese for Guam. After all that, the Cubans came and took Miami without firing a shot.
In America, the great melting pot, Hispanics don't melt. They are possessed of an enormously powerful ethnic identity that easily overwhelms the Anglos loose collection of cultural eccentricities. John Kennedy probably assumed, when he brought the Cubans here, that they would learn and use English and refrain from settling their political differences with plastic explosives. And even if they didn't, Camelot is a long way from Dade County.
Miami, I had assumed, was populated by people that we Northerners usually referred to as Southerners, generally perceived as a collection of tanned and congenial folks who wore white shirts with perspiration stains and used a rounded off version of the King's English. On the long 400 miles from the Georgia border to the south end of the Sunshine State Parkway I passed the hours by reminding myself that these people might be touchy about losing the Civil War and wondering if there really were such things as grits.
In almost no time I was totally lost in some funky residential area in the city. I'd been raised in a small New England town and the concept of crisscrossed streets and avenues, which were identified by numbers, was completely alien to me. I was looking for Miami Beach which, to my surprise, turned out to be a separate city instead of a beach in Miami.
My plan was to get a cheap room by the week and then find a job after which everything would just turn out great. Totally forgetting, was I, that a 'greener pasture' is only so when viewed from the one previous. After about five blank stares followed by "No habla Ingles," I started to see a few brown spots. While I was away temporarily making a little piece of real estate in western Viet Nam safe for democracy, a foreign power had conquered some of Miami and most of Hialeah.
Miami Beach is actually a long skinny island just offshore, and running parallel to, the southeast coast of Florida. It is connected to the mainland by several causeways and to New York City by a long standing Jewish tradition. If there had, in fact, been any "Southerners" here, they were no longer in evidence. They'd, no doubt, been driven away by the encroachment of someone else's brand of civilization. A fate, I was amused to note, that was probably viewed with a certain measure of bitter satisfaction by the Seminoles.
I grew up in a place where, if some stranger noticed that your pants were on fire, he would point it out to you for no reason other than common courtesy. The fact that said stranger was unlikely to incur any personal gain from the release of this valued information was unlikely to influence his decision. My first day in Miami Beach was about a 440 volt culture shock.
I got a newspaper and looked in the help wanted section. There were basically two types of jobs, brain surgeons or "bilingual preferred," which is a Cuban euphemism for Cuban. I had taken two years of Spanish in school and it seemed logical that they wouldn't hold it against me for being an American so I went to apply for some flunky job at one of the big hotels lined up along Collins Avenue.
It cost five bucks to have some bilingual person burn half the rubber off the tires on my car in the process of parking it, only to be interviewed by a fat guy in a white t-shirt who didn't speak any English at all. Had I been older and wealthier and better educated I might have filed suit in federal court to get this piece of my country back, but I wasn't and it was most likely too late anyway so I just put my tail between my legs and crawled away from this, the war I probably should have been fighting in the first place.
There is nowhere to stop on Miami Beach. There is no empty country road where you can just pull off to the side and sit for awhile till you get your bearings. Whether you're parking or eating or loitering it always cost something. If you stop you pay the price. It's kind of like the tourist version of the Bataan Death March.
It got dark and cold and windy. I finally agreed to pay some bilingual person a ton of money in order to park my car overnight. Sleeping in a Ford Mustang is better than sleeping in a fox hole in Nam, but slightly worse than having sex in an Austin Healy Sprite. I decided to kill some time walking around before bedding down on the bucket seats behind the shifter with the center console against my ribs.
The neon lit street was an uneasy collection of pinkish red tourists, scary-looking tattooed guys with greasy hair and slightly bent elderly Jewish people who moved slowly along the sidewalk whilst radiating a veritable force field of displeasure with the universe in general and their immediate surroundings in particular. Saying "Hi," to them, I quickly discovered, produced roughly the same reaction as pulling a switch blade, they linked arms and scurried away in fear. After a lifetime of working like dogs in New York City, they got put out to pasture in a place where Ghengis Kahn would double bolt his door.
I looked in the window of a small, dimly lit bar. The bartender saw me through the shaded, nicotine covered pane and waved me in, smiling. Having learned a quick lesson in social science from the resident Hebrews, I kept wondering what this guy was after. I figured he had to be either a real Southerner or a fag, and went in to find out.
The place was dark and a little smoky. A few ruddy old guys sat at the bar with cigarettes and a young couple was playing pin ball in one corner. In Nam, between fiascoes, we drank Jack Daniels like water and I had gradually acquired a taste. The Bartender, who just seemed to be a really nice guy, gave me a double because I, "looked like I needed it."
It turned out the congenial mixologist was neither a cracker nor a fruit, he had been some kind of engineer in Pennsylvania till his wife divorced him after which the rest of his life fell apart one brick at a time. Finally he just threw his stuff in the car and left. "What's your story?" he asked.
"Nam."
He rolled his eyes and poured me another double. I put a five dollar bill on the bar, but he pushed it back to me and went to get the pin ball players some change.
I made him take money for the third Jack Daniels and was halfway through it when someone sat down next to me. It was some pretty nice looking lady with black hair, brown eyes and a very low cut blouse. By the time my gaze climbed reluctantly back up to her face she was smiling at me. "Hi," I said, thinking this might be one of those fabled Southerners.
"What is jour name?" she asked
"Joe."
"Yo, I think ju are very handsome, Yo." She put her hand on my thigh. Alcohol and male hormones were staging a pitched battle for control of my cerebral cortex. It was a waste of time, I was already thinking with my other head.
I put my hand up to stop the bartender from pouring me another drink. He looked at my friend then back to me. "Trust me," he said and filled my glass.
"Ju call me Mary," she said and suggested we go back to her apartment. Her hand was in a place that rendered any rational consideration of that proposal highly unlikely. Me, Jack Daniels and Mary began working our way unsteadily toward the door.
At the threshold I turned back to wave goodbye to the bartender. He was looking at me with his eyes squinted and the fingertips of his right hand pressed against the side of his temple. It was the kind of body language we generally associate with discussions about circumcision and root canals.
I spent about eight seconds wondering what his problem was then reverted back to "dog in heat" mode as I followed the lovely Senorita Mary past pawn shops and Jewish delis to a crummy pastel three story apartment building a few blocks from the bar. She tried to swallow my face in the lobby then led me up the stairs to the second floor. I would be extremely wary of putting Jack Daniels, cigarette smoke, hair spray and Mary's perfume together in the same test tube, but then I wasn't a chemist, I was just a very lonely kid wearing an increasingly tight pair of blue jeans.
I don't do well with surprises. At a particularly low ebb in our sex life, Barb had gotten, unbeknownst to me, a copy of some paperback that offered graphic suggestions on ways to put more zing into a couples lackluster sex life. One highly recommended procedure was to set a washcloth full of ice cubes next to the bed and, at the moment of ecstasy, place the frigid parcel firmly against your partner's sex organs. The result of Barb's well intentioned maneuver might best be described as something akin to Olympic trampoline yodeling.
I followed Mary through the door to her apartment envisioning dim lights, soft music and slow deliberate foreplay culminating in unchecked animal passion. I had always associated sex with closeness, love, comfort and acceptance, all of which I had effectively deprived myself of in the recently turmoiled past.
Upon entering she immediately turned toward me with a smile nearly as bright as the cluttered room's unshaded light bulb and pulled up her blouse. Initial discomfort was abruptly replaced by unmitigated shock. The room was suddenly filled with what appeared to my drunken self as either a half dozen small dark children deploying themselves in a kaleidoscope of unrelated groupings or several thousand variously adorned pre-adolescents passing rapidly by in a raucous and ill-managed parade. Having been raised in a reasonably modest New England family, my first thought was to cover their jiggling mother who was now shrieking at them in uninterrupted Spanish.
Upon Mary's request, I sat nervously in a chair while she sheep dogged the bleating ninos into another room and threatened them with some evil Santeria curse should they reappear through the old army blanket that hung in the doorway. My lurid imaginings of wanton depravity had been replaced by embarrassed panic and an increasingly powerful yearning to put several miles of clean night air between myself and this disaster. A haunting image of the bartenders curious expression hung mockingly in my fog shrouded brain.
The worst was yet to come (no pun intended). Amid my awkward excuses and Mary's suggestive pleading the door burst open. A very short, darkly tanned and wrinkled Hispanic man stood glowering in the entrance. His enraged countenance was narrowly focused on the woman and appeared not to be cognizant in the least of my, at present miserable, existence.
They screamed at each other violently as several members of the urchin parade peaked warily around the army blanket. He used variations of the Spanish word "trabajar" on numerous occasions while hitting his open palm against his chest. Trabajar means "to work" which is probably what he was doing while Mary was dallying with some shiny faced gringo who was, at the moment, about to wet his pants.
He slapped her and she slapped him back then spit on him. At age 15 I had chivalrously intervened in a violent domestic dispute between strangers and had suffered minor physical and major verbal abuse from both parties. At 21, in a strange place, with a gut full of JD, I wasn't about to go for a rematch. I left.
The chilly midnight air felt clean and welcome. The thought of curling up on those familiar bucket seats next to my good friend the shift lever comforted me as I strode briskly toward the safety of my tiny home in this puzzling city.











chapter six: DEAD IS DEAD

At a little after 6 AM Miami Beach is quiet. I was cold and cramped and had stored up enough urine to out-pee the Budweiser Beagle. The side of my head was reshaped in what I hoped was not the permanent impression of a Mustang arm rest. Whiskey is its own Karma, it eventually takes however high you got and places a minus sign in front of it.
The parking lot bilingual actually grinned and said "Hi," as I walked past. I gave him a squinty-eyed smile and continued stiffly on while trying to keep my head balanced on top of my neck. Most small cities look sort of quaint and cozy in the early morning sun. Not Miami Beach, it was cold leftovers served on a paper plate at the "Eat It and Like It Deli."
I had learned from watching napalm covered Viet Cong twirling in screamless agony that there is no all gracious deity from whence comes only hope and fairness for this tattered space ship. Who then, I wondered, can be thankfully credited with the miracle of hot coffee? As did the noble Patrick in the land of potatoes and famines, so came Saint Juan Valdez to drive the serpents from my tortured brain.
I had about twenty-five bucks left. Whatever green had appeared to be in this pasture must have come from the shades of my sunglasses. It didn't really matter where to, but it was definitely time to move on.
At a Miami Beach gas station I paid nine dollars to fill up the gas tank and a dollar and a half for a free map. If I could find US 1, I could follow it south to a small town called Homestead then go west into the Everglades on what appeared to be country roads. The Mustang seemed to know we were leaving, it felt like a rumbling Pegasus as we flew effortlessly across the causeway in the early morning sun.
US 1 ran straight south from Miami. On either side were vegetable packing companies, cheap gas stations, trailer parks and Mom and Pop tourist attractions. Even after a second cup of coffee my glassy stare kept turning inward as the Pony Car and I traveled steadily along at about 50 mph, a couple hundred yards behind some big white Chevy four-door sedan. The tar filled expansion joints of the concrete roadway slapped rhythmically against my tires as I filled the miles and the loneliness with memories of Barbara and Joe in better times.
I didn't actually see what happened. Some mental red light started blinking, faintly at first, in the midst of my imaginary love scene. With increasing urgency the focus of my attention became redirected to the road in front of me.
Smoke and dust surrounded the Chevy sedan. It was skidding forward at a slight angle. The figure of a man had emerged from in front of it and was airborne above the sliding car. I slammed down the hatches on soft feelings and vulnerability as the Mustang came to a screeching halt next to the broken body that now lay motionless on the highway.
It was an old man, a migrant worker, probably in his sixties. He'd been headed for the truck stop diner across the street looking, no doubt, for his first cup of coffee. His head was broken open, but there really wasn't all that much blood yet. I checked his wrist first then put my fingers against the side of his neck. No pulse. The patron saint of coffee drinkers was too late to save this guy.
Five or six people were standing around, telling each other to get an ambulance, as I got up. They were on a sunny morning highway in South Florida looking down at a poor old Mexican whose death probably made them feel a little guilty about their relatively affluent lives. I was ten thousand miles away in a steady monsoon rain, praying for a helicopter and listening to a young soldier beg to go on living.

It's not like in the movies. Some well aimed rifle bullet strikes the hero's buddy square in the chest. The injured guy takes his last few minutes to say a few noble and courageous things for his family to be proud of and then dies to be remembered fondly at Christmas dinner for untold years. In sick reality, the dogs of war, when loosed, will kill you with a simple footstep or the blink of a fiery eye. You live on in someone else's nightmares, a dreaded visage of useless death, an ugly remembrance of times best forgotten.
We got hit in the dark, raining hours before morning. It was no big deal, five or so minutes of automatic rifle fire exchanged between soaking adversaries in the blinding downpour. A couple of our guys got nicked, the gooks disappeared and all was quiet. Artillery fired illumination flares continued, for a time, to light up the steaming jungle. I stuck a fresh clip in my gun and started reloading the empties, thankful for the artificial light.
Some cannon, miles away, in what direction I would never know, delivered one of the last few parachute flares. Encased in a steel projectile, the phosphorous torch was carried high into the nighttime sky. Then, at a predetermined moment, it popped out the back of its bullet shaped vehicle, burst into a brilliant candle and floated slowly downward. The empty casing, forgotten in the shadow of its luminous offspring, continued on to what should have been the obscure destiny of its predecessors.
It crashed through the branches and hit somewhere behind me. I could hear the blunt impact then the cries of pain. Frightened voices called urgently for a medic. The dragon had flicked its razored tail and another knight had fallen.
Some new kid, I didn't know his name, was thanking the medic and trying hard to be brave. "This looks like a winner," someone told him, "a purple heart and a free trip to Japan."
They only kid you when it's bad, I thought.
The flare casing had hit his leg and ripped open his femoral artery. We made a shelter from plastic ponchos while the medic tried in vain to stop the pulsing flow that turned the rainsoaked bandages dark and colored tiny puddles pink in the glow of flashlights.
It was at least a half hour till daylight. Helicopters didn't come in the dark. The kid's blood was running through those bandages like sand through an hour glass. This endless, pattering rain would forestall the break of dawn. I was wishing it would stop, just this once, just for a while. "I'm getting a little cold," the soldier said.
Between the Mekong Delta and the Cambodian border the terrain is completely flat jungle and rice paddies. In the midst of this great, swampy pool table is one solitary, cone shaped mountain. We called it the Black Virgin.
The mountain belonged to the VC and we were more than happy to leave it that way. Now and then a rumor would circulate that we had to take it by ground assault. We never did.
Dawn came. The kid was sleeping some and crying a lot. He was cold and dizzy and his life was slipping away. "I don't want to die out here," he kept telling the helpless medic, "please don't let me die out here." I closed my eyes and tried desperately to hear the familiar thump of chopper blades through the cursed, hammering rain.
He finally died. In the hour it took afterward, for the first chopper to arrive, I pledged myself to see that every single medivac pilot rotted in endless hell. Was it too much to ask of them to get out of their dry base camp cots to save this poor hapless child? Were their lives worth so much more than ours?
The Company Commander answered my questions.
They'd sent out a regular slick at first light. It had five guys on it, the captain, pilot, two door gunners and a medic. It crashed in the pouring rain on Black Virgin Mountain.

I'd been crowded to the back of all the well meaning citizens. There was no hint of morbid curiosity. It was all genuine concern. They wouldn't accept that this old calloused pauper could get knocked out of his shoes and then just die right here on their highway with two different colored socks on. "Call an ambulance quick!"
"This guy's dead," I said to the well dressed lady who was about to run for the phone, "don't get some ambulance crew killed for nothin'."
They all stared at me in angry disbelief. "What do you think you are? A doctor?"
I didn't belong in their world. They knew it and I knew it. I was an unwelcome outsider, set apart by some ugly flaw they had no desire to understand. It was time to go.
I rolled slowly south to the steady rhythm of engine and tires. A mile down the ambulance passed going north. Lights and siren cleared its way.











chapter seven: SWEETBREADS AND SWEETHEARTS


Self doubt is cancer of the Id. In the constant radiation of acceptance and approval, or at worst acknowledgment and concern, it will stay in hardly noticed remission. In a life which has structure and routine, where almost all the challenges of the day are at least familiar, if not surmountable, those gnawing concerns about self worth and reasons to exist are not pressing enough to ponder. All the tiny rips in the fabric of our lives are mended and covered and pressed closed by the thick atmosphere of family and community that surrounds us.
Loneliness is a vacuum. Ugly questions about what you've done and why come nagging relentlessly for an answer. There is a reason no one smiles at you. In your eyes they can see what you've seen, they can hear the voices in your head. Their total indifference is the empty measure of your worth. At this time and place in my troubled existence one warm smile was worth about two quarts of Jack Daniel's and three hits of medic morphine.
Films about the South, generally produced by New York intellectuals or LA gays, tend to portray working class people in small towns like Homestead, Florida as thick jawed, pot bellied dullards preoccupied with the senseless torment of salt-of-the-earth Negroes. Lacking the intellect to be fashion designers or the chivalry and compassion to drive a big city cab, they are shown to scratch out a meager living as agricultural serfs whose otherwise pointless existence is marginally guaranteed by their contribution to the ingredients in a Julienne salad.
Armed with, and unnerved by, this all too common collection of naive Yankee misperceptions I ventured into a small diner on Main Street, Homestead. A half dozen darkly tanned, refrigerator shaped locals at the counter turned to watch me walk in. I felt like a poodle in a wolf pack.
There was a small table in the corner, I sat with my back to the wall and stared a hole in the menu. A young black soldier from Mississippi had informed me that something called 'sweetbreads', which I had assumed was a pastry, was actually pig's testicles. An uneasy extrapolation of that disarming misnomer left me with no particular desire to know what constituted a steaming plate of hommony grits.
The waitress was about forty. I worked that backward and figured out that she was probably the Homecoming Queen the year I was born. I noticed that the 220 lb, crew cut eighteen-year-old at the end of the counter responded to her questions with a polite "yes maam" or "no maam," as dictated by his upbringing. Politeness is a virtue, I thought, and so is not having one of these ham fisted agri-lunkers make grits out of my sweetbreads.
"Good morning Sweetheart. What can I get for you?"
I thought it best to not order anything particularly Yankee like a bagel with cream cheese or scrambled eggs with two bottles of ketchup. Conversely, the idea of breaking my fast on rodent parts in hickory sauce was one whose time had definitely not yet come. The trick, it seemed, was to order something that wasn't harvested off Route 27 and, at the same time, didn't bring to anyone's mind the burning of Atlanta. "Ham and eggs, please."
"Grits or home fries?"
She got me. Somewhere in the back of my mind a muted drum roll filled the anxious seconds as the smiling waitress awaited my fateful reply.
"Uhhh, hey, uhh, grits, uhh, yeah grits."
My First Sergeant, Sydney Springer, used to take the little cloth bags of rice off dead VC and eat it with his C-rations. "You want some, Kirkup?" he'd ask holding the expired gook's lunch bag out toward me.
"No way First Sarge, that's got blood in it."
"Christ sake man, just eat around the blood."
Everything changes and everything stays the same.
Saw dust would probably taste okay if you mixed it up with enough melted butter and salt. The recipe for good tasting grits is very similar with just a pad more butter and a pinch more salt. In ignorance, I ate mine plain.
The waitress came back twice with more coffee and called me 'honey' both times. She treated me like I'd been in that place every morning for half my life. I gave her a fifty cent tip, she gave me one more day of sanity.
As I was leaving some one came in and said an old man had been killed out on the highway. The waitress looked right into my eyes, past all the guilt and fear and emotional barbed wire. She spoke directly to the lonely little boy who'd come home with a cut on his knee and found that Mom and Dad had moved away. "Listen, Sweetheart, you be careful now."
"Yes Maam."









chapter eight: DANCES WITH GATORS


The Mustang had a four speed transmission. The shifter was mounted on the floor between the bucket seats. For safety purposes the shifter was equipped with a finger operated reverse lockout mechanism to prevent the driver from unintentionally shifting into reverse instead of first gear.
Life seemed a little brighter after breakfast which is usually a sign that something is about to go backward. It wasn't the Mustang. The internal cable that connected the reverse lockout lever to the transmission had snapped. It wouldn't go into reverse.
I pushed the car out of the parking space then rumbled off in search of a Ford dealer or at least a parts store.
It was midnight by the time I'd bolted the transmission back in place and adjusted the shifter linkage rods so that neutral was where it should be and the third gear position wasn't against the dash.
I took sort of a sponge bath with some gasoline I'd purchased to clean parts. It felt like I'd wasted an entire day so I decided to drive for a while then sleep in the car somewhere down the road.
Route 27 is called Krome Avenue in Homestead. I followed it north to the intersection of route 41 at a bar-restaurant-truckstop called the Green Frog Inn. I washed off most of the gasoline, got a large coffee to go then headed west on 41 into the Everglades.
At sometime after 1AM the road was absolutely dark and deserted. It was about one hundred miles of flat two lane blacktop with only three curves in it. As I continually gained faith in its straightness the Mustang continually picked up speed; speed, the ultimate anti-depressant.
Route 41 was a kind sort of road, kind of narrow and sort of bumpy. At just a little over ninety I kept a tight hand on the wheel and sharp eye focussed at the far reaches of my headlight beams. Endless pavement into endless swamp, I held Barbara in my arms, talked to the dead in my memories and won a few battles that I'd already lost.
Something was in the road. It looked like a log or a lizard. There was no time to think or stop and nowhere to dodge to. I straddled it with the tires and passed over it at about seventy. I had come to abhor death, anybody's, anything's. I hated it, but it seemed to follow me around like a lost puppy from hell.
It was an alligator, three feet long, upside down with its head cocked sharply to one side, not moving. "Goddammit," I shouted at the empty highway. My life seemed like one long unbreakable curse.
Off in the distance headlights appeared. He was probably moving as fast as I'd been. I looked at the inert reptile and decided to move it off the road where at least it’s leathery corpse could rest in peace. The headlights were brighter and rapidly closing.
I slid my foot under the creature and boosted it gingerly toward the edge of the road. My effort caused it to turn upright which brought it to immediate and highly animated life. It snapped at my foot then began moving rapidly down the center of the pavement. After a moment of shock I realized that if it didn't get to the side the next car would do exactly what I'd been lucky enough not to.
I tried to persuade it again with my sneaker, but it spun about with amazing dexterity made a sincere attempt to grab my toe. The rapidly approaching headlights told me I was running out of time.
A friend had given me a cowboy hat some months before. I grabbed it out of the car and began to pummel the gator vigorously, but to no avail. Fortunately the other driver was able to stop his vehicle and sat, no doubt incredulous and amused, at the impromptu reptile rodeo that was unfolding in the light of his high beams.
Finally the belligerent little beast trundled grudgingly into the bushes and the other car pulled slowly past as I waved a sheepish thank you then stood gratefully next to the idling pony car in the thickening darkness.
Something had lived because of me instead of died because of me. It felt really good. I drove slowly on.












chapter nine:KIDS FROM MARS


A carburetor is a device that introduces gasoline into the air that is being pushed into an engine by atmospheric pressure or by some type of fan such as a supercharger or turbocharger.
What happens is this. The air, on its way in to fill the void left by the exhaust which is on its way out, passes rapidly through one or more little tunnels called barrels. In a chamber nearby is located a pool of gasoline. A little tube runs from the pool of gas, through the side of the barrel and stops right in the middle of the rushing air. The gas is sucked through the little tube into the air flow in exactly the same way a bunch of anti-war hippies would be pulled out the side of a speeding jet airplane if someone shot a hole in it with a rocket launcher.
The carburetor on my yellow Mustang had four barrels. The little gasoline tubes, called jets, were not as little as economy might have preferred. On the other hand, more gas means more power. I rest my case.
As the gas is used a vacuum is created in the gas tank which ultimately sucked the last of my money out of my pocked, through a cash register and into the hands of some semi-retard in an old wooden service station guarded by a big German Sheppard who nipped me on the back of the leg as I left the men's room. Not wanting to further antagonize the dull witted attendant or his sharp toothed accomplice, I left without complaint.
I had wandered north on flat, straight two lane byways till the fuel gauge needle lay somewhat steadily against the empty mark. It was time for my first experience with a pawn shop.
In Bartow, at about mid-state, I found such a place. I had decided to sacrifice the almost new Akia reel-to-reel tape recorder I'd purchased while overseas. It had cost me two hundred dollars at a time when I was only making $215 per month which included an extra $55/month called "hostile fire pay." Lemme see, that works out to a little less than eight cents per hour to duck bullets. I guess that means, to America, the cumulative risk to my whole battalion was worth less per day than medical care for one crack baby.
The pawn shop guy was willing to give me fifteen bucks. He told me I'd be better off to drive to Florida Southern College in Lakeland and try to sell the Akia to some student. I took his advice and moved on.
I was expecting the worst. My experience with college kids had been entirely negative. The only Viet Nam vets welcome at the University of Connecticut were the Oliver Stone type, those who had renounced everything their buddies had died for, joined the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War and learned to "smoke a pint of tea a day." I guess I just wasn't smart enough to see the graffiti on the wall.
The Mustang was breathing what gasoline vapor remained in the empty tank as I stopped alongside one of the large brick buildings on the FSC campus. I hated to put myself at the mercy of a collection of what I expected to be long haired, sloppily dressed, self important, spoiled brats. The only time I wanted to see a peace sign was through cross hairs.
Two young men approached me as I stood next to the car wondering what to do. They wore shirts with button down collars, loafers, short hair and smiles. "We really like your car."
"Uh, thanks."
"Are you a student?" They asked politely.
To the casual observer the three of us probably looked much the same; twenty-year-olds standing next to a high powered convertible on a college campus. In fact, the differences were monumental. They were studying for exams and day dreaming of a bright future. I was wandering aimlessly and trying not to think about how hard it is to pull a bayonet out of someone's throat.
I explained that I wasn't a student and about my desire to sell the recorder. They asked to see it.
"Where did you get it?" The question was asked in an informational, not accusatory tone.
"Viet Nam." I waited for the clouds to form in their eyes.
The attitude of polite sincerity with which they had treated me never wavered. One of the students said he and his brother might want to buy the Akia and asked if I could wait while said sibling was located. I agreed.
The brothers and I agreed on a price of one hundred dollars. They apologized profusely when they were only able to scrape together ninety. Meanwhile they and their friends had begun to ask me about my experiences in the war. Their questions were not of the "why did you burn all those innocent babies" variety. They were obviously founded in a genuine desire to obtain some first hand impressions to compare with the torrent of media and government filtered information provided by the newspapers and tv.
Our conversation went on for hours. I ate dinner with and fielded questions from ten or so male students. They asked me if I would like to shower and spend the night in their dorm. Compared to bathing in a pond and sleeping in the Mustang it sounded like a great idea.
Twenty minutes of hot water took away the embarrassment of the alligator rodeo and the sting of the dog bite. But more than the food and the shower, it was absolutely wonderful to talk to people who actually seemed to respect me for what I had done. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the return of that familiar disgust; 'killer, fool, you should have known better.'
The brother's dorm room was crowded with shiny, inquisitive faces. The questions came several at a time, always polite and always well informed. I didn't realize America still had kids like this. I decided they were kids from Mars.
We talked till after midnight. I did my absolute best to be objective and impartial. They were amazed to learn that we were almost never allowed to shoot first. And that to do so could actually result in court martial. They were incredulous when I described going house to house trying to separate the good guys from the bad guys. I told them we did not, as might be said by some supply clerk, embarrassed about his lack of actual combat duty, kill them all and let God sort them out. In America, in 1968, that was news.
They would have grilled me till the sun came up. I finally apologized and begged for some time to sleep. Everyone shook my hand and courteously retreated.
It didn't occur to me then that what I was experiencing was just a brush with what remains of the polite and hospitable culture the South had fought so desperately to preserve a hundred years before. In 1968 the Northeast was rapidly sinking in its own cess pool of political pandering and ill conceived socialism. These young men and their peers were trying their hardest not to be dragged under with it.
They asked me to stay on. But, in the morning I packed up my ghosts and said goodbye.