There's a Man With a Gun Over There (5 page)

“We can makes jokes about it,” he says, “but that's the fact of the matter. They taught us how to kill people.”

We did make jokes about it until we got to the Military Police School shooting ranges at Fort Gordon, Georgia. When we heard the click of rounds being chambered, the
pop pop pop
of the firing, and the clatter of the expended shell casings hitting the ground, things weren't so funny anymore.

In the dust of the firing, the arm of the paper-target man goes first, and then his head. The human outline is turned to shreds. The army wasn't joking; the army wasn't joking at all. It tore up those human forms; it turned them into confetti.

As it happens, though, I'm really not a trained killer. Not at all.

“Ryan!” Sergeant Schumacher screams at me. It's a hot August day in 1970 on the pistol range at MP school. He hits me on the top of my steel helmet with his clipboard.

“Fucking A, Ryan, you're not even hitting the target. Get someone else in here wearing your fatigue shirt. I don't want no one flunking this exercise. Ryan, I want you to kill for me!”

“But, Sergeant, I don't know how. I need more training.”

“Get someone else the fuck in here, Ryan, or you'll be on KP for the rest of your natural life.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Right away, Sergeant.”

Pretty soon my friend Peter Everwine, wearing my fatigue shirt, which identifies him as RYAN, easily empties the .45 into the head of the target.

“That's, my boy, Ryan,” Sergeant Schumacher says to Peter Everwine and puts his arm around him.

“See that head. That's how those hippies are supposed to look. Blow their brains to little greasy bits. Just remember, Ryan, it was trainees of mine that shot up those Commie college students in Ohio. You know that song they wrote about it? Well, that's a song about me, Ryan. I trained those troops. ‘Four dead in O-hio.' You betcha, Ryan. I'm a celebrity.”

The next day Drill Sergeant Rodriquez hands me an Expert Pistol Marksman Badge, and my army lies have begun.

7.

I
t's a dream, and in the gray-blue light of the Rhein-Main Air Base hangar I am doing my job. It's November 1970 and I'm wearing the uniform my son found. This is my first assignment with MP Customs.

One by one, soldiers and civilian contractors stop at my table.

“ID card,” I say.

“Show me your orders,” I say.

“Open your bag,” I say.

“Empty your pockets,” I say.

“You can go now,” I say.

“Next,” I say.

One by one they stand in front of me.

“Harm no one,” this black sergeant in the middle of the night says to me.

Diogenes O'Reilly is the name on his ID card. It's two
A.M.
Sometimes it seems like it's always two
A.M.
in the army.

Diogenes O'Reilly has flown in from Vietnam. He's wearing his green fatigue pants and a Hawaiian shirt with bright designs of parrots and palm trees.

“You're out of uniform,” I say.

“You can't hurt me anymore,” Diogenes O'Reilly says. “I've only got three days left to serve.”

Corporal Halter, my late-night colleague in the world of MP Customs inspections, stands beside me in the blue-and-white lighted area inside the general darkness of the giant airplane hangar at Rhein-Main Air Base.

“Cool shirt,” Corporal Halter says to Diogenes O'Reilly.

“Hurt no one,” Diogenes O'Reilly says.

“Go in peace,” Diogenes O'Reilly says.

“Walk softly on the earth,” Diogenes O'Reilly says.

“Bow low to all the creatures that you meet,” Diogenes O'Reilly says.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Corporal Halter says.

“Should we just let him go?” I ask.

“Hurt no one,” Corporal Halter says as we watch Diogenes O'Reilly shoulder his duffel bag and walk off into the general darkness.

8.

B
ut maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

Maybe we should linger in 1959, the year of Mr. Niederman and his Korean War slides.

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year that Don McLean, in his famous song, “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie,” said it all went wrong. According to him, the troubles of us Baby Boomers began the morning Buddy Holly went down in a plane crash.

“A Beech Bonanza, N 3794N, crashed at night approximately five miles northwest of the Mason City Municipal Airport, Mason City, Iowa, at approximately 0100, February 3, 1959. The pilot and three passengers were killed and the aircraft was demolished,” the anonymous author of the official Civil Aeronautics Board report on the crash explains.

The day the music died was a Tuesday, Mr. Niederman. It was just an ordinary Tuesday when the plane carrying Buddy Holly crashed in that frozen Iowa cornfield. Who would figure that Tuesday for an important day?

Ralph E. Smiley, MD, Acting Coroner, lists the personal effects of Charles Holley as “Cash $193.00 less $11.65 coroner's fees—$181.35. 2 cuff links, silver ½ in. balls having jeweled band. Top portion of ballpoint pen.”

Isn't that something, Mr. Niederman, they charged Charles “Buddy” Holley for the coroner's services?

He didn't even spell “Holly” the way Buddy did, but Ralph E. Smiley remembered to charge him $11.65 for . . . for what, Mr. Niederman? Was Ralph E. Smiley poking beneath Buddy's skin looking for the source of “Maybe Baby”?

Is this what remains of genius in the end—the “top portion of ballpoint pen”?

This is what Buddy had to say:

That'll be the day
When you say good-bye
That'll be the day
When you make me cry

In the Civil Aeronautics Board report, we learn that “the airspeed indicator needle was stuck between 165-170 mph.” The anonymous author implies that the pilot, who thought he was climbing out of a dark storm cloud, was actually diving toward the harder darkness of the earth.

He misread the signs and was going down when he thought he was going up. Imagine that.

“A generation lost in space” is how Don McLean's song puts it.

One afternoon in 1959 when I came home from school I could hear howling and whelping noises, as if a dog were begging to be released from his cage.

I came into the kitchen and could only see the backs of my mother and my aunt. They struggled with something in front of them.

“No!” my aunt commanded.

I was sure they'd brought home a dog. I was excited and squeezed between them.

“No!” my mother said. “He'll see.”

“Here,” my aunt said, trying to put her hand over my eyes. I thought they had a surprise for me, and I wiggled loose from her hold. I was too big for her. At fourteen, I wasn't a little boy anymore.

It was my father. They were wrestling with my father. Tears, mixed with dirt and sweat, streaked his face. It looked as though deep scars had torn his face up. His right hand gripped a paring knife, and he kept stabbing it at the kitchen table.

“They took my job away from me. My job,” he cried. “My job, my job.”

“Oh my God,” my aunt said, letting go of me. “Grab his hand, Louise. Make him put it down.”

“A man without a job is nothing, nothing at all,” he sobbed and stabbed the air.

“Get him out of here!” My mother was looking back at me and nodding toward my aunt.

“Get him out of here. I don't want anyone to see this.”

Facts were the guide star of Mr. Bauch, the guidance counselor at Marshall Junior High School in 1959.

A thin man with a pursed smile, Mr. Bauch wore these enormous-looking plaid suits with broad shoulders and wide lapels. The creases in his pants were so sharp they puckered the fabric beneath them. His stiff bow ties were too wide for his skinny neck. His clothes were huge on him, as if he lived in a plaid house.

Yes, facts were Mr. Bauch's mantra. He'd take a yellow number-two Ticonderoga pencil from the neat row in the breast pocket of that suit coat, and point it at you. The tips of that row of pencils in his suit-coat pocket looked like a picket fence in front of his heart.

“You must find the facts of the matter,” he said, aiming the pencil at us. “The facts of the matter.”

How straight the part in his hair was as he nodded, agreeing with himself. The lenses in his wire-rimmed glasses were sometimes opaque in the glare from the fluorescent lighting.

“The facts of the matter. The facts of the matter.”