There's a Man With a Gun Over There

by R. M. Ryan

  31.

  I got back to Maple Street in the fall of 1968 a few weeks before my draft physical.

  Now that going to Canada and carving FUCK YOU no longer seemed like good options, I read through AR 40-501 again. I remembered what Arnie told me—cutting off part of my finger was the easiest way to go.

  “Though remember,” Arnie had warned me, “one joint’s not enough. You have to cut off two.”

  I walked over to Monroe Laner’s garage. He was my land-lord, and his garage was his woodworking shop. It was filled with flying sawdust and the screech of a saw. Monroe was bent over, pushing a piece of wood into a spinning blade.

  “Mr. Laner,” I yelled.

  He shut off the saw and slid his protective goggles up on his forehead. He smiled.

  “About time you came to your senses and started doing some woodworking.”

  I told him I wanted to even up the legs of my desk chair.

  “Why don’t you just bring it over here, and I’ll do it,” he said.

  “No, let me try it on my own, Mr. Laner. I’ll learn from my mistakes.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he said and handed me a T-square and a portable circular saw made of dull gray steel.

  “Be careful,” he said as I hefted the saw. “It’s old. The blade guard is missing, and it’s a lot heavier than it looks. Sometimes the trigger sticks. Here try it. You’ve got to snap it hard with your finger to get it to shut off, so be careful. This is a dangerous, old saw. It does good work, but it could cut you up pretty bad, you know.”

  I squeezed the trigger. It’s kind of like a gun, I thought. How funny, but I didn’t really feel like laughing.

  “Are you sure you don’t want my help?”

  “I’ll be OK,” I said.

  As I walked back to my little apartment that sunny afternoon in early September, I looked around and started to cry, wishing that I had any life but mine. It all seemed so unfair. Why me?

  I set the saw on the little kitchen table. It seemed enormous, a tool that could cut up the whole apartment. Sterile and menacing and nasty.

  Monroe Laner told me to make sure I braced whatever I cut so the saw wouldn’t slip. I put my left hand on the kitchen table. By positioning my left knee on a chair, I brought the weight of my whole body down on my left arm and hand. I set the face of the saw blade along the table’s edge. Without turning it on, I pushed the saw along that edge until it barely touched my index finger just below the second joint. I practiced that move a couple of times. The blade was so sharp that it drew a little dot of blood.

  The blood surprised me. I hardly felt a thing.

  I was starting to sweat, and I sat back down in the chair. Then I went to the refrigerator and popped open a bottle of Coke to calm down. My shirt was wet, soaked through with fear and self-pity.

  That gray saw seemed enormous sitting on the tiny kitchen table. I started to cry again. Why was this happening to me? I wondered what Emerson would think. I walked around the apartment sobbing and whapping my left index finger against walls and bookcases and furniture to numb it.

  I flipped the silver toggle switch. The saw motor turned on, slowly at first and then faster and faster.

  Its handle was curved and indented with the shapes of fingers. I put my right hand on the handle and my right finger in the trigger guard. One last sob came up from my chest, and I tried to steady my breathing.

  “There, there,” I said aloud, trying to be my own father. “There, there. It’ll be over in a second.”

  I touched the trigger.

  Errrrr, the saw screamed.

  I felt cold and jerked my hands away. Humped there at the edge of the table, the saw looked like an industrial animal.

  “OK, now,” I said, whapping my left index finger against the edge of the table. It was really numb. “OK, now.”

  I set my left index finger on the edge of the table ahead of the saw blade. I put my left knee back on the chair and my weight down, hard, on my left arm and hand.

  “OK, now.”

  I touched the trigger a couple of times with my right hand.

  Errrrr, the saw went. Errrrr.

  I tried to look at what I was doing, but my eyes were filled with sweat and tears. I shook my head to see better.

  I gave the trigger a full squeeze. The saw rose up off the table, as if it were alive. The force surprised me. I tried to control it but couldn’t, and I started to pull my left hand away.

  Rrrrrrrr.

  The trigger was stuck, I realized. I couldn’t stop the blade. Terrified, I dropped the saw. It fell onto the stained carpet of the kitchen floor. With its trigger still stuck, the saw rocked back and forth, an angry little beast getting free. It bounced a couple of times, once with the whirring blade up toward me—grinding teeth, a metal grin of death—then it leaned back toward the carpet, where the blade, propelled by the stuck trigger, got caught in the loops of the old kitchen carpet. The saw began crawling around the kitchen, first away from me toward the wall, but it hit the baseboard a couple of times and turned around, now doing its toothy walk toward my leg, the whine a growl as the carpet slowed the speeding blade and made the whole saw buck like an animal.

  Rrrrrr. Rrrrrr.

  “Oh my God,” I said, fumbling for the heavy rubber plug in the wall socket. “Oh my God.”

  I pulled hard on the cord, and the saw stopped just as it got to my pants leg, ready to tear me to pieces.

  32.

  Streamlined, with ribs of aluminum trim on its side, the chartered bus for my physical looked as though it had driven all the way from the 1940s to collect soldiers for yet another war.

  I was so nervous I was there an hour early the morning of Wednesday, September 11th, 1968. I started to get on the bus.

  “Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a driver with a peaked cap said. “No sense being in a hurry for this trip, buddy. Besides, Mr. Bleney from the draft board likes to check the names off before you get on.”

  He nodded toward a man with a clipboard coming toward us. He had combed over the slick long hairs on one side of his head to mask his baldness on top. When the wind came up, his greasy hair stood straight up, as if a trap door were opening on top of his head.

  “You there,” the man with the lifted-up hair yelled. “What’s your name?”

  “Ryan,” I said.

  “Wait about there,” he said. “You’re number forty-six. I’m going to line you up alphabetically, make sure you’re all here before you get on the bus. Alphabetically by the number, see what I mean? People in Little Rock like to have everyone in order.”

  As the rest of us arrived, he handed each of us an envelope with a name in the corner and a large number in the middle.

  “Got to stay organized, men. This is almost the army, you know. Now listen up. You got vouchers in those envelopes for your meals and for the hotel.”

  The inside of the bus was dark and smelled vaguely mildewed. The open-faced blond boy sitting next to me said, “Smells like a long time ago, doesn’t it?”

  His name was Billy Peeler.

  Then, a moment later he added, “Is this what it’s like to go to war?”

  Then, after another moment, “I guess it’s always dark when you go to war, right?”

  A sergeant at the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in downtown Little Rock met us when the bus arrived that afternoon and walked us over to our hotel. It was a long, erratic line of boys snaking down the sidewalk—boys going off to play war.

  Billy Peeler was my roommate.

  “You like to party?” Billy asked me after we had thrown our suitcases on our twin beds. “Find some girls. Find some beer.”

  We were each sitting on the end of our respective beds staring at the wall.

  “But I ain’t got the heart,” Billy said. “My Uncle Wilton says I’m gonna die in Vietnam. Go down in a rice paddy. If the bullet don’t get me, the drowning will. Took the starch right out of my pecker, you know.”

  I nodded.
Is this what men talked about before they went to war?

  “Got a plan, though, Ryan. Got a good plan. Want to hear it?”

  It was his Uncle Wilton’s idea, that we could raise our blood sugar level if we skipped supper and drank a six-pack of frozen orange juice concentrate. So we wandered around and bought some Minute Maid at a Piggly Wiggly.

  I got through about one and a half of the cardboard canisters. I peeled the packaging back and slurped and chewed on the icy concentrate as if it were a Popsicle. Its taste unbearably sweet at first, the concoction became acidic in my mouth and made me shiver. Little eruptions of vomit came up my esophagus and made the back of my mouth taste sour.

  “You know, Ryan,” Billy said as he opened his third canister. “I believe I’d rather die in some rice paddy than walk around belching this crap. What a fucking choice you get in America these days, huh. I’m going to bed.”

  The next morning we all gathered in the lobby of the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station. A corporal stood on the stairs waiting for us.

  “The yellow line, men. You stay on this yellow line all day long. That red and that blue line—they’re neither one for you. We designed your line to be the Yellow Brick Road.”

  He was my first real soldier, a harried, rat-faced corporal in a wrinkled tan uniform. It looked as though he’d slept in it.

  “We going to Oz?” someone yelled.

  “All right, then, line up!”

  “You one of those mean little monkeys that belong to the Wicked Witch of the North?”

  “He’s not doing such a good job getting us in line, is he?” Billy Peeler said, turning around to whisper.

  “You there,” the rat-faced corporal said, pointing at Peeler. “Shut up!”

  “What about those other guys?” Billy asked.

  “You heard me. You’re the one that interests me right now. You shut up, or I’ll send you to Vietnam this afternoon.”

  “Can he do that?”

  The yellow line led us to a room set up with school desks, the kind with paddle tops that folded down the side of the chair.

  “All right, now listen up,” the rat-faced corporal said. “Look in your envelope and see if you have DD Form 44. Should have your name on it. Keep it close to you until the end. Lose it, and we’ll just send you off to war without a name. Where the fuck you think the Unknown Soldier came from? He lost his DD 44. Got it?”

  “Boy seems mighty interested in getting everyone on the battlefield,” a tall redneck in a ducktail said.

  “What you think we’re doing here?” the corporal said as he began handing out examination booklets. “This isn’t some kind of college entrance examination, you know.”

  No, it was the Armed Forces Qualification Test. The ole AFQT, as the corporal called it.

  “Your Uncle Sam wants to know if you’re smart enough to die for him. In case anybody here has the idea of flunking this exam on purpose, you better forget that right away. The flunkers are even more likely to die than the high scorers. They’re first in line to die. You want to stay out of combat, you want to get a good score. Maybe they’ll make you a typist.”

  We each got two yellow pencils and a test booklet.

  The corporal pulled down a glassine-coated sheet that was coiled up in a long cylinder fastened to the wall. The apparatus looked like one of those pull-down maps above blackboards in schools.

  “This is a sample question from the test you’re about to take. Read it.”

  Water is an example of a

  O A. crystal.

  O B. solid.

  O C. gas.

  O D. liquid.

  “You take your pencil and you black out the correct circle. Got that?”

  The redneck got up and started walking toward the front of the room.

  “Where you going, troop?”

  “Up there—to mark the right answer.”

  The corporal stared at him.

  “You are one dumb motherfucker, troop. I mean, in the test, you mark the right answer by filling in the circle. In the fucking test booklet. The one on your desk.”

  “Your mama let you talk like that?” the redneck asked as he walked back to his seat.

  “Open your test booklets,” the corporal said. “Break the seal. See the sample question. It’s just like this one. What’s the right answer?”

  “None of the above.”

  “Oh, great. We’ve got college boys here today. I forgot. Funny all right, but the funny boys should fill in the circle for D. D’s the answer. Do you have questions?”

  “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 wounde
d 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.