There's a Man With a Gun Over There (21 page)

“Can't water be a crystal?” someone asked. “Ice, you know. Ice is water, and ice is a crystal.”

“A gas,” someone else offered. “It evaporates.”

The corporal got redder and redder.

“Those aren't the answers the army wants. You got to come up with the answers the army wants. Otherwise you're a dead motherfucker.”

The AFQT took two or three hours. When we finished, we were sent into another room to fill out more forms, which were stacked on the classroom desks, waiting for us. I sat down and started filling out DD Form 98, the Armed Forces Security Questionnaire. It had a long list of subversive organizations, some with evocative names like the Cervantes Society, the Military Art Society of Japan, the Dante Alighieri Society (though only between 1935 and 1940), and Everybody's Committee to Outlaw War. I started filling in the “Remarks” section with the sentence Arnie had taught me: “I believe that the war in Vietnam is morally wrong.”

“Any Commies here?” a sergeant asked as he walked into the room. He had a handlebar moustache and eyebrows that went up and down when he spoke.

“Let me give you a tip here, gents,” the sergeant said. “We can do this easy, or we can do this hard. The hard way is you put down a bunch of Commie organizations and think, oh boy, this'll get me out of Vietnam. What it'll really get you is a lifelong surveillance by the FBI. The government's going to classify you as dangerous. Probably want to kill you off in a firefight. You'll start right here by walking down that blue line to Mr. Rose's FBI office, where you'll get to spend a week getting questioned in one of the little cells he's got in there.”

“Oh, pshaw,” Billy Peeler said, “you're not going to do that.”

“Wanna try me?” the sergeant asked and looked evenly at Billy. “Why don't we look at this form and do things the easy way. No sense in messing up my life, or yours, buddy. You just check the first Yes, meaning you've read the list and then you check all the rest No, meaning you haven't even been in the same town as a Commie. You leave the “Remarks” section empty. Then sign it and you go your way and I'll go mine.”

Did I want to be an outlaw for the rest of my life?

I began erasing what I wrote. I really didn't want to get tangled up with the FBI. I felt small and foolish.

“Sergeant,” I said as I raised my hand. “May I have two more pencils? I've used up the erasers.”

The forms still had the impressionistic outlines of my statement.

“Maybe another form, too. I screwed this one up.”

The next room along the yellow line was a kind of locker room with benches and wire baskets. A weary-looking private sat at a table with paper bags.

“One bag per man,” he said. “One per man. For your valuables. Take it with you. Take your envelope, too, and wear your undershorts, your shoes, and your socks. The rest of your clothes in the wire basket on a shelf over there.”

He was reading
Atlas Shrugged
and didn't look up when he spoke. Every minute or so, he repeated the same message.

“One bag per man.”

Out the door of that room we walked, a little tentatively, each carrying a brown envelope and a paper bag, some of us in stained undershorts, some of us with clean ones, one of us without any undershorts at all. How strange to think that out of this shuffling group of nearly naked men with heavy black and brown shoes and mostly falling-down white tube socks would come the wounded and the dead.

The man without underpants had a giant penis, two or three times the size of the fear-shrunken members owned by the rest of us, but even he, who had literally so much to offer the world, looked as though he'd lost his confidence as he shuffled along, naked except for the tan work boots he wore.

The next room was huge—the size of a couple of basket-ball courts—with a series of tables arranged in a U-shape. Numbers were affixed to ten-foot poles at each table. Each was a station on the route of the army physical. The pathway started, appropriately enough, with blood. At Station One, four of us at a time sat and had blood drawn. The syringes emptied into tubes that were then racked in neat rows with our names on pieces of masking tape. The deep red of Worley and Adashek and Emory and Ryan. The communion wine of death.

At the next station, the same four were ushered into a room where we put our chests against cold stainless-steel squares on the wall.

“Suck in your chest. Hold your breath for fifteen seconds. We want to make sure there's room for bullets in there. Thank you. Next four step in.”

And so the morning went. They examined our eyes, took our blood pressure and looked up our butt holes. Around noon, the line slowed down in front of a table at the last station. A man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck studied the paperwork of each man who came up to him.

“Ryan, huh?” he said to me. “That's my wife's maiden name. Let's see. You put down Recurrent Back Pain on this form.”

“Yes, it's right back here.” I turned to show him.

He got up, came around the table, and began poking my lower back.

“Ouch, yes, that's the pain. Oh, and I've got high blood sugar, too.”

“Well, what am I going to do here?” he asked as he sat back down. He rubbed his forehead.

He scribbled on some forms, signed them, and stamped them.

“Here. Hand this in to the clerk after you put on your clothes. Next.”

“Am I out?”

“You're done, my friend. You're on your way.”

I sat down on the bench in the changing room. Yes, I thought to myself, he liked me; he agreed about my back pain. Can't have any bad backs in the heavy work of war. He did me a favor. Thank you. Thank you. I looked through my paper work, which now was covered by various stamps and initials, and tried to figure out my status, but couldn't make sense of it.

After I changed into my clothes, I handed my envelope to a clerk.

“Am I out?”

“What?” he asked.

“You know—out.” I didn't know how to ask the question. “You're done now. You can go home. Your draft board will get in touch with you.”

“Out of the way here. Clear a space.” A chubby air force captain followed by a marine corps sergeant came down the hallway.

“You're not going home just yet. We need to have everyone line up here, on the red line.”

“We're not finished processing them,” the clerk said.

“You can get back to that. No one's going anywhere. Get everyone in here on the red line.”

Five or ten minutes later we all stood there, some of us still in our baggy underpants and falling-down socks.

“I want you!” the barrel-chested marine sergeant said to the third man as he came down the line behind the air force officer. “And you!” he said to the sixth man. “And you! And you!”

He was picking men who looked to be in good shape.

“Ain't you something,” the marine said to our naked man. “That thing of yours already looks like an M-16. I'll take you, that's for sure.”

The air force officer was now standing next to me.

“What's going on?” I asked him.

“The marines are drafting. Too many casualties at Khe Sanh. They need men,” he whispered. Then in a louder voice: “Straighten up the line, men, so Sergeant O'Brian can see you.”

“I'll take you! And you!” the red-faced sergeant said in a gruff voice to the men on either side of me.

After the marine sergeant had taken his conscripts down the hall with him, I went to find the clerk with our paperwork. I was shaking with fear that the marines might take me next.

“What's my classification?” I asked the clerk.

“Let's see.” He went through some folders until he found my file. “Here. Item 76. Your P-U-L-H-E-S rating.”

“What does that mean?”

“Beats me,” the clerk said. “What matters is that you got a 1 in all six categories. You're healthy as a horse. See Item 77. Dr. Medford checked Box A. The ‘is qualified box.' Unless you convince them otherwise, your draft board's going to call you I-A, my friend. Ready for the army of the old US of A.”

“There's got to be a mistake here. The doctor felt my back. He talked to me. He liked me. He let me out.”

The clerk gave me an indifferent smile.

I ran back into the giant room with all the stations. Some of the medics were standing around smoking. Piles of trash were stacked in the corner, including a half-open, blood-smeared box where someone had thrown out the test tubes of our blood, which now was all mixed together with broken glass. It looked like the aftermath of an explosion. The doctor was gone.

“What happened to that doctor who was here?” I asked one of the medics.

“Went home. Gets $200 for a half-day's work and goes home. Not a bad deal.”

“There's been a mistake,” I said. “I've got a bad back.”

“Can't help you here,” one of the medics said, stubbing out his cigarette in a coffee cup. “You better see a doctor.”

I ran back through the changing room and down the hallway along the red line. The only open office was that of an army recruiter. I stood in the doorway, puffing. I was so scared I could hardly breathe.

“There's been a mistake,” I said to the lanky sergeant, who sat at his desk clipping his fingernails.

“Of course there has, son,” he said, pulling a chair out for me to sit in. “Of course there has. You're not just a number, are you? You're a human being. Here. Sit down. You got any college, son?”

33.

B
ut why do I worry? The war's long over, isn't it? They can't come and get me again, can they? It's not dangerous anymore, is it?

Right now, it's a Saturday evening in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Not a sergeant anywhere. It's May. I've mowed the lawn and pulled some dandelions. My wife is out of town, and I turn on the television to find a little company, and there it is, of all programs, a rerun of the ancient
Lawrence Welk Show
on public television.

“Here's our chorus now to sing a song made popular by Rudy Vallee,” Lawrence says. His powder-blue suit is a little too bright, like someone working overtime to stay cheerful. “A-one, an-a-two, an-a-three.”