by R. M. Ryan
Jerry, in fact, figured out the customs of the military much faster than the rest of us.
The very first day of our arrival at Company B, First Sergeant Clyde Toler took Jerry along on a trip for supplies. They left in the company jeep. When they came back, they had both the jeep and a deuce-and-a-half truck filled with about a hundred cans of reflective silver paint.
“The man’s a genius at scrounging,” Toler told Drill Sergeant Yankovic. “A blooming genius.”
“Why would anyone want a hundred cans of reflective silver paint?” my friend Joe Kennedy wonders as he listens to my story.
Because real scroungers in the army understood that you should always stockpile any items that come along—you never know when you might need them. And guess what? That paint gave Captain Van Hook an idea about how to impress the colonel.
“Men,” Captain Van Hook said to us as we stood in formation on the morning of July 20, 1969. “This is a great day for Company B. This is the day I start to become Major Van Hook. We are going to paint all of the duffel bags with that reflective silver paint Donenfelter found. I’m going to tell the colonel that we plan to shine for our country.”
The details of this operation were left to the drill sergeants, who had to figure out a way to get the silver paint on the bags and still have the army-required stenciling of our names and army serial numbers.
While we had plenty of paint, Company B owned but a single paintbrush, which was the size used for house painting, so the drill sergeants set up this duffel-bag painting project the way they set up everything else—by the numbers.
First we stacked all of our empty duffel bags on the parade ground. Then we roughly divided our 200-man company into thirds—one group taking turns painting with the single brush, one group carrying the bags to and from the painters, and one group delivering the paint from Jerry’s deuce-and-a-half truck to the painters. We flattened each bag on the ground, painted the top halves, and set the bags in the sun to dry. A few hours later, we turned them over and painted the other halves. Some of the bags had twigs and pieces of gravel stuck in the paint, but removing those imperfections caused the paint to smear, so we left them alone.
Drill Sergeant Yankovic collected a quarter from each of us and went to Leesville, the town next to Fort Polk, where he bought cans of black spray paint. (I’ve often wondered why no one thought to buy some paintbrushes. Life in the army was filled with these little box canyons of failure.)
Company B had several stencil kits, so in the late afternoon, we divided up again: one group readied the stencils for each bag, one group spray-painted our personal information on the bags, and one group set them out to dry. By seven that night, we were done, though some of the names and serial numbers were wrong. When the men complained, Drill Sergeant Yankovic just laughed.
“Nobody cares about shit like that,” he said. “Just make sure your dog tags are in order. Don’t want the wrong name on your tombstone.”
The night our company did its final preparations for the inspection—late the night of July 20, 1969, the night America landed on the moon—was also to be the dress rehearsal of the close-order drill routine Jerry and his men had been practicing.
Around midnight, we finished cleaning up the company area. Captain Van Hook yelled, “Fall in!” We gathered by platoon and stood at parade rest with our rifles at our sides in the dim light of a cloud-covered moon.
That didn’t go very well. It was hard to see by the light of that night’s half-moon, and we kept stepping on the heels of the men in front of us. Captain Van Hook then ordered that the company trucks and jeeps be placed around the parade area—motors running, lights on. We could see, sort of, and the marching went better, though now we became a shadowy army of the night—the black shapes of helmets and arms and rifles passing back and forth in front of the flickering headlights. Exhaust fumes and the mist from the damp night air made us appear and disappear.
After an hour of this, Captain Van Hook commanded, “In place, march!”
Our boots drummed on the ground, and soon the commands of Jerry Donenfelter rang in time with the cadences of our boots rising and falling and not going anywhere.
What’s the future hold in store?
The answer from his squad came back—
Beat the Cong at their own war!
Since I was an R and always near the end of the column, it took a minute to see what was happening.
What’s the future hold in store?
Jerry repeated the question, and his men answered again with the army’s predictable rhetoric—
Beat the Cong at their own war!
To the cadence created by the rise and fall of our boots, Jerry’s squad marched along in front of us—dark figures in the blinding light, passing in and out of the fog and the exhaust fumes.
Left, left
Left, right, left
Jerry commanded. He strode beside his men, raising and lowering a huge silver baton like the major at the half-time show for the big game. He’d also painted his boots and his helmet with the reflective silver paint, and his baton, boots, and his helmet glowed in the headlights, leaving behind evanescent trails of light as he marched.
Then the question changed.
What is it that we’re fighting for?
The answer—
It’s war baby war baby war baby war!
As Jerry’s twelve-man squad chanted that, they held out their M-14 rifles with both hands and swung them from left to right in rhythm with their answer.
They turned at the end of our column, did an about-face, and hit the butts of their rifles on the ground in the same rhythm—
It’s war baby war baby war baby war!
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I heard Drill Sergeant Yankovic mutter. “Now we’ve really landed on the moon. We own that stony motherfucker.”
At two or three in the morning—after the jeep and the truck lights were turned off, after the vehicles had been driven away, after our rifles had been stored—a few of us sat on the steps to the locked-up dayroom, hoping that now someone would come and let us in so we could watch the moon landing. Even if it was over, we thought, the networks would surely show reruns of it.
Besides we couldn’t go to bed—we weren’t allowed to wrinkle our blankets or get dirt on the barrack floor for fear of getting bad marks in our inspection. We had to stay up all night until the colonel came.
We sat in the dark, half-asleep—smoking and talking.
On the other side of the company parade area—like the baggage for a ghostly journey—200 silver duffel bags filled with our clothes were stacked, their reflective paint glowing in the moonlight. Occasionally a twig or a piece of gravel would come loose from the paint and fall off.
“Ain’t they pretty,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic said from beneath the darkness of his tilted campaign hat when he came up to us. His uniform was dripping wet from his malaria.
We all staggered to our feet.
“Those duffels kind of look like artillery shells, don’t they, boys? Just in case you were wondering what the real ammunition of the moon shot is, boys—there it is. All lined up, ready to go. Shoot the moon. Man, they ain’t just a kidding.”
He walked away, hat tilted, arms out—doing a twirling tap dance across the dark parade field—an imitation of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly.
“Love that war baby war baby war baby war stuff,” he said. “Who’d want to watch television when you can come down here to old Fort Polk and see a real show?”
36.
But it didn’t end there, no. It took eight weeks, Joe. Eight weeks of humiliation. I fought it; I made fun of it; I was superior to it, but you know what? In the end, the army won. It eventually got me. I did what they told me to do.
Look. There I am on my belly and elbows: crawling across a dusty field screaming, “Drill Sergeant Yankovic loves me more than my Mama ever did.” That’s me, over here, rifle in front of me, its bayonet fixed, yelling, “Kill! Kill! Kill!�
� as I attack a target. Now I’m in first-aid class, learning how to close off a sucking chest wound. Look over there: I’m running into a house filled with tear gas, removing my gas mask, and slowly saying my name, rank, and serial number to a training sergeant sitting at a desk with his mask on. The giant plastic eye goggles and twin black canister filters on the mask make him look like an enormous insect in an army uniform. Perhaps this is what really happened to Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis.
Oh, Joe, I was smart. I knew so much. I’d read all these books. None of the sergeants could even begin to explain who Gregor Samsa is. I was smarter than they would ever be, and yet there I was, marching along with the rest of my platoon, following their orders, stepping to Drill Sergeant Yankovic’s cadence into the post library. In all our battle gear, wearing steel helmets and canteens, my platoon clomped and clattered into that library and stood in formation between the shelves of books. Drill Sergeant Yankovic had us yell, at the top of our lungs, “The Dewey Decimal System will help me find my book! The librarian is my special friend!”
Can irony get me out of here, Joe? Can sarcasm save me?
Then there’s Peter Peterson.
“Call me Pudgy. Everyone does,” Peterson told us, ducking as he spoke, used to being the butt of jokes.
Pudgy must have weighed in at 250 pounds on a five-foot-eight-inch frame. When he ran, his loose gut and floppy breasts jiggled under his white T-shirt. He had a side-to-side, mincing step when he jogged.
“Peterson,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic yelled. “When the doctor got to you, did he throw away the baby and keep the afterbirth?”
Pudgy had so many sins that the drill sergeant didn’t know where to begin. He just shook his head.
We were all puffing and sweating in the Louisiana heat. Pudgy’s face had turned a mottled red.
The drill sergeant, for some reason, didn’t sweat at all when he ran. He disdained the T-shirts that we troops wore. He stayed in his campaign hat and his heavy cotton fatigues as he loped easily along beside us, counting out a double-time march cadence. His back and his armpits were dry. Nothing but his malaria made him sweat.
“Peterson, you run like a fucking girl!” the drill sergeant screamed. “How can you stand yourself?”
The drill sergeant halted our platoon and made us stand at attention in the sun. He culled Pudgy from our little herd and forced him to run alone. After a minute of this, the drill sergeant caught up with him and began screaming at him as they went along together.
“Look at them titties of yours, Peterson. If you’re going to have titties, at least you should have good ones.”
“Suck in that pathetic gut, Peterson.”
“You look like Jell-O on legs, Peterson.”
Pudgy collapsed, and the drill sergeant assigned two men to walk him back to the company area while the rest of us continued our double-time run.
Pudgy couldn’t do anything to please the drill sergeant, but at night, in the barrack, during one of those infrequent half hours of the day when no one was yelling at us, Pudgy was hilarious. He did imitations of Jackie Gleason characters— Reginald Van Gleason III going through the barrack doing a white glove inspection; but the one that always ripped us up was the voice of Andy Devine from a long-ago kiddy show. A character called Froggie greeting us, “Hi yah, hi yah, kiddies. Hi yah, hi yah, hi yah.” The absurdity of this voice left us doubled over in laughter.
While Pudgy’s fat-man humor made us happy, he made Drill Sergeant Yankovic angrier and angrier as the weeks went by. Pudgy was too fat for almost anything requiring physical exertion. He was uncoordinated as well and couldn’t master even the simplest marching orders, turning left when he should go right, always on the wrong foot, stumbling, tripping, falling down.
At first Drill Sergeant Yankovic solved the problem by assigning Peterson to the middle of the formation so no one would see him. But Pudgy was such a force of nature that he got everyone beside him out of step, and Drill Sergeant Yankovic’s precious formation expanded and contracted like a caterpillar. Drill Sergeant Yankovic then put Pudgy on permanent KP, so he spent his days leaning on a mop in the mess hall, snacking, getting even fatter. The fabric around the buttons of his fatigues first puckered and eventually became unbuttonable.
“Peterson, you’re a fucking disgrace to the United States Army. This is a pretty sad lot, but you’re the worst of the worst.”
Drill Sergeant Yankovic had a private room at one end of the barrack. He kept it ready for inspections and seldom used it. Its bed was exactly made to inspection standards. A neat row of spotless uniforms hung there, each hanger the proper two inches from its neighbor. Beneath them, on the floor, was a row of dress shoes and combat boots belonging to some mythic soldier who was always ready for a surprise visit from the battalion commander. The real William Yankovic slept elsewhere—in the woods, we heard; in whorehouses, we heard. He never sleeps, we heard; he crawls the perimeter of Fort Polk all night long, we heard.
One evening, Pudgy discovered that the drill sergeant’s room was unlocked. He went in and came out wearing the dress version of the drill sergeant’s campaign hat.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Phil Danzig said, looking around, but Pudgy was on a roll. He put every stupid officer and sergeant into a single caricature.
“Mens,” Pudgy commanded, “listen up. Drop down and gimme ten! Mens, if your brains were paper, there wouldn’t be enough to make a Kotex for a flea. Mens, gimme another ten. Mens, I want you to get your hands off your cocks and put on your socks and gimme another ten and tell me who’s the commander of your battalion. Gimme ten more. Mens, we’re gonna win that war in Vietnam if we have to kill everyone to do it. All at once now, with Drill Sergeant Froggie, ‘Hi yah, kiddies, hi yah, hi yah, hi yah.’ Drop down and give Drill Sergeant Froggie ten, mens.”
No one laughed. No one said a word.
So busy chuckling over his own routine, Pudgy hadn’t noticed the silence.
“On a count of three, now—all together, one, two, three. ‘Hi yah, kiddies, hi yah, hi yah, hi yah.’ ”
Then, after another moment of silence, “You so much as get dust on that hat, Peterson, you’ll wish you’d never been born.”
Pudgy lifted his right hand to his ear, Reginald Van Gleason III listening to the dulcet tones of his girlfriend.
Drill Sergeant Yankovic elbowed his way through the circle gathered around Pudgy. He was wearing a leather gun holster with a .45 inside. A belt holding a couple of grenades went across his chest.
“Here your dumb ole drill sergeant thought he was coming by to give his men a thrill with their cherry guard-duty assignments—up all night long in shacks filled with copperhead snakes, making sure no hippies or other undesirables break into Fort Polk and steal the hearts of your commanding officers. Please. No applause. I have your best interests always in my heart, but what are you doing here? Making fun of poor ole good-hearted Drill Sergeant Yankovic. Wearing Drill Sergeant Yankovic’s hat. Drill Sergeant Yankovic, who answered his country’s call and killed the yellow man to save us from the Russians. Now you think he’s funny.”
Drill Sergeant Yankovic was walking round and round Pudgy, clearing a space.
“You fat fucker,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic said and grabbed the front of Pudgy’s fatigue shirt, ripping the top two buttons off.
“Hey,” Pudgy said, his fat fingers chasing the falling buttons through the air. “You can’t do this, can you?”
The drill sergeant actually lifted the enormous weight of Pudgy off the ground with his left hand. He pulled out the pistol with his right and let Pudgy drop to the floor, where he tried to pick up his fallen buttons.
“You fat fucker, we got demerits from the post commander because of you. He saw that little dance step you call a march. Do you know what that means? We don’t win the Best-Platoon Award. Now Drill Sergeant Yankovic always wins the Best-Platoon Award. Get that, Peterson?”
He knelt down beside him and hel
d the .45 to Pudgy’s head.
“Come on,” Pudgy pleaded. “Quit kidding around. Can’t one of you guys help me here? I’m in real trouble.”
I looked at my feet.
“Hey!” Art Kailas yelled. “That’s a gun.”
“No, you dumb fucking Greek. That’s not a gun. It’s a piece. A sidearm. It’s a Colt automatic. Designed to quell the yellow man in the Boxer Rebellion.”
He stood up and holstered the .45.
“You’re so fucking smart, you hold one of these.”
Drill Sergeant Yankovic yanked one of the grenades from the strap across his chest and pulled the pin out. The grenade began to hiss. I tried to remember the class we’d had in grenades and what the hiss meant. I closed my eyes and squeezed them shut. I prayed to be transported out of there. When I opened them, we were all still there, and Art Kailas was holding the grenade.
“Here, Kailas, as long as you keep squeezing this handle closed, the grenade’s like your hometown softball. You let go of it, though, you’re gonna take the whole barrack out. We’ll go up like a wet spray of flesh-tinted blood. The wind will give us life’s last blow job. Got it, Kailas? You’re a strong guy. You should be able to hang on.”
Drill Sergeant Yankovic grabbed Pudgy by the fabric of his fatigue shirt.
“Ten, hut, Peterson. We’ll start with the basics.”
Pudgy pulled himself up and stared off into the middle distance with that blank look all at-attention soldiers had.
“Right face, Peterson.”
It was a beat too slow, but he did it. I began to smile. Maybe Pudgy would make it.
“Forward, march, Peterson.”
He did that, too. A space opened up, and he marched down toward the other end of the barrack.
