The Best American Essays 2018
Page 7
Mama, Mama can’t you see,
what the army’s done for me?
After first light the song changed.
I should say now part of what I am calling cadence is only rhythm—our days were planned. Sectioned into smaller parts: run, chow, marching. First class, marching, chow. Marching, second class, marching, third class, marching, chow. More marching. More cadences called through the long white afternoons, and finally, as night came, another run, this one with the heat of the day still on us but the weight of the day gone. We had survived once again, and we ran with night falling, clapping our hands, happy with our place in the world, at least for this moment. After the run we would wash our clothing and write letters and hopefully receive them. We would lie on our bunks and feel the exhaustion of a day’s work and still hear the songs thrumming through our heads about the soldier on the hill, about the early morning rain. About Mama, and what the army had done for us.
But we’re not there yet. When first light fell and our run ended, we double-timed back to the barracks, still steaming, to wipe ourselves with towels—no time for a shower—and dress. After the run the aches and pains were gone but for a stitch in our sides that would fade on its own. The blood was pumping and adrenaline flowing and there was only this day to get through, only this day to worry about. Whatever cadence we had called was still in our heads—a C-130, an airborne ranger, an unnamed enemy—so that any worries seemed unimportant, any aches easily forgotten.
From the barracks we ran back to the drill pad, where we assembled, and then marched to chow. Our cadences here took on a different tone, one I’ve tried to figure out since the years I left the army and have watched the world explode in war, most of those explosions from bombs of our making, our missiles and men always in the forefront, our technology always ready to shock and awe. If our morning runs needed some motivation, our marches in the daylight must have needed to teach some lesson. We knew we were being broken down and then built back up in the army way, but it only occurred to me years later that the songs might have had something to do with that as well. That songs stick in the head and filter down to the heart. That a rhythm moves on its own, and the words can become lodged like a bullet in the brain.
We marched to chow calling cadence through the open corridors. In the mess hall even our eating took on a rhythm. We shuffled down the line, speaking only to point out what food we wanted, then ate in silence. We had four minutes to finish, and then we were out again, marching toward our first class of the day, where we would learn to treat sucking chest wounds or what to do in case of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack, and it seems logical now that our cadences took on a different tone.
Gonna kill some dirty commies,
Turn around and burn their mommies,
stab their babies in the back,
put ’em on a roast and rack,
place ’em in a barbecue,
it makes them very soft to chew,
pick ’em clean down to the bone,
and back to the jungle I will roam.
We called this cadence on the way to the rifle range or the grenade course or hand-to-hand training. To the bayonet course or the pugil-stick ring. Anytime we held a weapon in our hands, anytime we were about to simulate killing.
We loved this cadence. Called by a drill sergeant named Kuykendall, whose big booming voice made us think he really wanted to kill commies, that he missed roaming the jungle in search of them. Drill Sergeant Adams carried seventy-five pounds of extra weight in his rucksack when we went on long marches, because, he said, if war ever came, he would not fall behind—he was conditioning himself for battle. Drill Sergeant Camacho had arms the size of missiles. Jackson was a Golden Gloves boxer. First Sergeant Pemberton’s favorite phrase was “Fuck ’em and feed ’em fish heads,” and we thought all the drill sergeants were only biding their time until another war broke out and they could be released from garrison duty and go kill something.
This might be a good time to mention that when we fired our M-16s, the targets were painted to look like Soviet soldiers, complete with hammer and sickle, so that when we were firing or punching or throwing grenades we were imagining commies, and burning and eating their children. Kuykendall’s “Commie” cadence must have been a holdover from Vietnam, because by my time in the military the Cold War had ended and the Berlin Wall had fallen, but we did not yet (soon, very soon, I promise) have another enemy to hate in the world, so we called this cadence, which, I must repeat, I loved. I say this first to hold to truthfulness, and second so that I will not be able to absolve or exonerate myself, to set myself apart from the other soldiers I served with or give myself special treatment. I loved it. We all did. We thought it funny. We sang louder when this one came—about killing commies, about stabbing mommies. Burning babies. Barbecuing them. We were only eighteen and had never heard of the My Lai massacre. Or the Siege of Stalingrad. We might have read Slaughterhouse-Five but didn’t know about the firebombing of Dresden. Nor Nagasaki nor Hiroshima except in the distant way of history books. We hadn’t seen that little girl running down the road with napalm on her skin. But this is what I want you to know, because this is important—we fucking loved it.
Don’t bludgeon a seal,
just to make a meal,
do it ’cause you want to hear
that little fucker squeal,
and stomp them in the head,
until you get your kicks,
then poke them in the eye with
your eye-pokin’ sticks.
We sang this one in the mornings as well. Before first light and after night fell were the times for emotional cadences, full of heartache and loneliness, that soldier on the hill again. But mornings were for killing. “We kill more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day,” the drill sergeants said, and we sent up a cheer. Remember now we’ve only been here a few weeks. Our morale is still shaky. We still miss our mothers, our girlfriends. We cry at night and everyone else ignores it. For those in on the long haul, those who enlisted for six years, there’s no going home, not for a long, long time, and the days seem longer.
So mornings are for killing cadences, dirty commies and baby seals and yellow birds on the windowsill. We loved this one even more than eating babies. Because although there’s a rhyme, there’s no reason. Or rather there is a reason—there’s joy in killing. Delight in destruction, pleasure in causing pain. We don’t kill for any honest reasons—not to feed or clothe ourselves, but to satisfy the craving for killing inside all of us.
So the song says. Do it ’cause you want to hear that little fucker squeal. And who can deny there is a fascination with death inside us, at seventeen or eighteen, carrying an M-16 on the way to the rifle range, artillery exploding in the distance, low rumbles like distant thunder, the earth shaking in response. We packed inside what were called cattle cars, all of us standing like cattle, and perhaps there were those among us who thought we might be headed for the slaughterhouse, but instead of thinking, we sang of baby seals, and stomping and bludgeoning and eye-poking them.
At the rifle range we fell out of the cattle cars and into formation, where we were told to keep our rifles pointed downrange and always on safety, but we were thinking of killing. We fell out of formation and lay prone on the shaking earth and zeroed our rifles in, some of us drawing baby seals and baby communists on our zero targets and trying to put their eyes out, some of us calling our M-16s “eye-poking sticks” because they seemed so. We sat in the ungodly heat and slipped cartridges into our clips, and after we had zeroed our weapons in, we went to the line and opened them up on rock-n-roll, another cadence here, this one of three-round bursts, of the bullhorned drill sergeant’s voice asking if there is anyone downrange is there anyone downrange is there anyone downrange. The heat stabbed down like a sword and the distant targets shimmered and the rifle reports echoed to the far hills and back, and inside our heads was the song of it all, the cadence of these hot days.
Ain’t no need in
calling home,
Jody’s on your telephone.
Ain’t no need in going home,
Jody’s got your girl and gone.
Jody is a recurring character in army cadences, a lazy shiftless bum, but one who has the power to attract females formerly attracted to us. Absence, it seems, does not make the heart grow fonder, at least according to our cadence calls, and Jody, in verse, took over everything we once had. While we were marching, and firing our weapons and tossing hand grenades in the direction of America’s enemies, while we were learning to be soldiers, Jody was sleeping with our girlfriends. He was driving our cars, eating our food, using our telephone—all the things we didn’t get to do. He lived a luxurious lifestyle, one we no longer had. He took over our houses for himself, threw our clothes out the window, and we believed this could happen because we had left our homes and had our clothes taken away and did not know when we would see our girlfriends.
Jody in cadence became an instrument, a tool to shape men into soldiers. He served to detach soldiers from home life, and all the things they could no longer have. He was a mark at which to aim aggression. When mail time rolled around every night, someone—Buist or Talley or Sykes—got a letter from home and learned his girlfriend had left him, his fiancée had called off the marriage, his wife had slept with another man.
“I’ll kill that motherfucker,” Sykes, who was from the South Side of Chicago, said, and sometimes on the rifle range you could see in a man’s eyes the need to kill. The anger and aggression, the hurt that comes out as hate. Then the disconnect, for after a few days Sykes or Talley or Buist would say he didn’t need that fucking bitch anyway, and we’d all agree he was better off without a woman who slept around on him, which was another thing the Jody cadences taught us, that women were never to be trusted, for they had no control over themselves and were often swept away by someone as sorry as Jody.
Jody then served also as a symbol of civilian life. The world will take your girlfriends, your wives, your house, your car, your respect. But here, in this man’s army, none of those things will happen. The army is your wife, your lover. The army will feed and clothe you, will give you shelter. What else, the idea is, do you need?
My girl’s a vegetable,
she’s in the hospital.
And I would do anything,
to keep her alive.
She’s got no arms or legs,
that’s why I call her peg,
but I would do anything,
to keep her alive.
She’s got a new TV,
it’s called an EKG,
and I would do anything,
to keep her alive.
One night I played a joke,
pulled the plug and watched her choke,
but I would do anything,
to keep her alive.
There was another version of this cadence titled “My Girl’s a Chorus Girl,” a Chicago girl, and the unnamed narrator would buy anything to keep her in style, the unspoken argument here that the girl is a prostitute, but we liked the vegetable version best. Like the clubbing of baby seals or eating of barbecued children, we found it funny. I would say we didn’t take it seriously, but there must have been something in our dark hearts it spoke to, some suggestion of the tragedy we might have been looking for.
Despite the narrator’s repeated claim that he loves this girl, and would do anything to keep her alive, he makes fun of her plight. He calls her names. He makes fun of her life-support system (he is, obviously, not her life-support system). He plays a joke by watching her die a little. As if she is an embarrassment, or a thing which holds little value.
This one was only ever called by the male drill sergeants when the female commander wasn’t around. Which brings up several questions about its intention, about women in the military and how they are viewed, about how men are supposed to view them. As a motivational tool, then, quadriplegic girlfriends rank evenly with the burning of communist babies or bludgeoning baby seals—a joke, a thing to lift morale.
The drill sergeants knew, of course, that every night letters came in, Sykes’s girlfriend leaving him, Billings’s wife asking for a divorce. After a long time as military trainers, the drill sergeants knew how men serving longed for the women they had left behind, so they attempted to deconstruct them into parts: a prostitute for sale; a woman with no arms or legs and no hair, just patches of it here and there.
See the soldier on the hill,
he is not afraid to kill.
See the soldier on the hi-i-i-ill,
in the early morning rain.
See the soldier in the sky,
he is not afraid to die.
See the soldier in the sky-y-y-y,
in the early morning rain.
In the evenings we came back to this one again. We sang it so often the refrain echoed in our heads at all times. It’s a sad, slow song. We could hear the rain falling in the drill sergeant’s trembling, hoarse voice. As if this had happened, was happening, would happen. As if there were always a soldier on a hill, and always would be.
We sang this one in the morning and the evening. At the beginning and end of day, as if all our days should end thinking of the soldier. Our days were long and hot and lonely, full of despair, but this soldier on the hill, the one who is not afraid to kill, the one who is not afraid to die, has sacrificed everything, and here we only have a few rough days to get through. That is the lesson of this song—when a man wearing the same uniform as you has given everything, you have no right to complain about a run, or a few push-ups. Or being tired. Or hungry. Or hot or wet or cold or tired or afraid.
We were often all these things. And marching back from the rifle range, sweat-soaked and streaked with dirt, burning in our boots, we sang of the soldier. After a sudden storm soaked us through and our clothes clung sodden to our wet cold skin, we thought of the soldier on the hill. Through long nights with fake artillery flashes going off overhead and real ones in the distance, we hummed to keep ourselves awake, and always our humming was of this make-believe soldier, this creation of cadence that rattled around in our heads at all times.
The soldier dies in the end, of course. This is what soldiers do. They die. While laying here to rest, he caught a bullet in the chest. But he wants his wife not to cry, in the early morning rain.
A yellow bird,
with a yellow bill,
was perched upon,
my windowsill.
I lured him in,
with crumbs of bread,
and then I smashed,
his little head.
Cadences fall into one of a few categories. The soldier on the hill in the early morning rain is meant to motivate, a romantic image of death in a foreign country. There is no defined enemy, only the image: the tireless soldier who has yet grown tired but still stands in the cold rain, who left his wife and left his child, who went off to fight a war, and there is in these words a sense of pride, of selflessness, a sacrifice for some undefined greater good. He will be mourned but also idolized. He is a symbol of a soldier. Freedom, as we will learn, is never mentioned.
Another category is what I’ll call madness. Jody sleeping with a soldier’s wife or girlfriend instills anger. Clubbing baby seals or eating communist children incites aggression, a gleeful delight in killing, in reducing death down to a humorous cadence. A soldier who would barbecue babies is a soldier so caught up in the war he has become mad, but there’s the lingering idea in the lyrics that war can become something he loves, the enemy a thing he hates so much the soldier loses all sense of rightfulness, but in doing his job of killing the enemy, whatever he chooses to do is rightful.
All cadences are designed to help morale. A soldier may laugh at Jody’s antics but they also prepare him for what may one day happen. (Almost half of all military marriages end in less than ten years.) The girl lying in the hospital hooked to her new TV (it’s called an EKG) reduces women to a burden a soldier must bear, and the idea in this one is that wome
n are not worth the trouble they cause. Pulling the plug to watch her choke is an ominous foreshadowing of what a soldier might finally do to rid himself of whatever keeps him from serving the army. The “othering” of groups: women, communists, baby seals, draws men closer together. Us versus them. Good versus evil. You’re either for us or against us, and if you aren’t for us, you must be against us.
One word we never heard in any cadence or calls is freedom. We sang often of death and killing and communism, of the ideal soldier standing in the rain or jumping from a plane, but never freedom. Nor democracy, nor right nor righteousness. Not a force of good in the world. Not peacekeeping or peacekeepers or bringing peace. Soldiers know what their job is, and it has nothing to do with peace.
To soldiers, these are abstract concepts. Freedom is a weekend pass. It’s going home, getting out of the army for a few days or a few weeks or forever. Freedom is sleeping past 4 a.m. It’s seeing a girlfriend, a mother, a father, a brother, a wife. Freedom has nothing to do with foreign countries. There is no freedom in war, just more of the same thing the soldier experiences every day: long hours of waiting, endless drills, bad food, boredom, preparation for what may never occur but must be prepared for anyway, only now the threat of death is thrown in as well. Bombs may fall from the sky. Missiles streak in through the clouds. Land mines stepped on, IEDs hit, snipers striking from the blue hills all around.
Freedom is a word politicians and civilians use, not soldiers.
Here we go again,
Same old shit again.
Marching down the avenue,
I don’t know when we’ll be through,
But I’ll be glad and so will you.
But we sang of death often, for death is a common recurrence in cadences. I suppose now these cadences were in some ways meditations upon death, a glorification of dying in war, a preparation for it. Or, in some of the others, preparation to kill. To create unthinking men, unafraid to stab babies in the back, put ’em on a roast and rack. To see women as jokes, to pull a plug and watch them choke. In war, every death means a kill, and by preparing for one, we must have been preparing for the other.