by R. M. Ryan
“Halt! About face! Forward, march!”
Yes, he was doing it—or no, he did it about halfway back, and then his feet took on a spastic life of their own, wiggling suddenly and changing step and causing Pudgy to trip and then awkwardly right himself. He was sweating and breathing hard.
“You dumb fucker,” the Drill Sergeant screamed and walked toward him with the gun out. He pulled the top back, chambering a round. The room was quiet except for the metallic slide and click of the gun. “I should put you out of your misery.”
He pointed the gun at Pudgy, who simply bowed his head as if he’d been expecting this for years.
Drill Sergeant Yankovic dropped the gun to his side, and I felt sudden relief. Maybe now he’d quit, but no—no, he fired. And again he fired—into the floor. The sound of the shots rico-cheted back and forth through the barrack. A puff of smoke drifted among us.
“They’re blanks, right?” someone asked.
Drill Sergeant Yankovic’s head snapped toward the speaker, and he briefly pointed the .45 at him.
“You want to find out?”
Kailas dropped the grenade, and we all stood frozen there as it spun on the waxed red floor, which suddenly looked bloody.
A moment later a little smoke oozed from it. I held my face tight, waiting for the concussion from an explosion, but that puff of smoke was it.
“Kailas, if that had been a live grenade, you would have vaporized your buddies. You want to think about that?”
“Drill Sergeant, I’m sorry if I handled your hat. I’m sorry if I mess up your formations.”
It was Pudgy speaking in a clear, adult voice.
“I know I’m not much of a soldier, but you can’t kill me for being awkward.”
I wished we were all sitting around chanting, “Hi yah, kiddies. Hi yah, hi yah, hi yah.”
Drill Sergeant Yankovic looked at Pudgy and then walked over to him. He put the muzzle of the gun right under Pudgy’s chin and forced him to walk back to his room. He slammed the door. A moment later we heard crashing noises and whimpered yells and a series of commands. “Forward, march. In place, march. Left turn, march.”
One of the other drill sergeants marched the rest of us over to post headquarters, where we got our guard-duty assignments.
“Where’s Private Peterson?” the NCO in charge asked.
“On sick leave, Sergeant,” one of us said.
“Fucking shirker is more like it.”
The next morning, after staying up all night, we stumbled back into our barrack. Pudgy’s bed was stripped of its sheets and blankets, and his gear was stacked on the floor. When we returned from classes that afternoon, all his stuff was gone. I never saw him or his silver duffel bag again.
“To the moon, Alice!” Pudgy used to scream, running down the aisle in the middle of the barrack with his silver duffel bag as if he were going to hurl it into outer space. He sounded just like Jackie Gleason playing Ralph Kramden on the old Honeymooners television show. “To the moon!”
Pudgy’s bed, down at the end of the row, stayed empty for the rest of our time in basic training, its striped mattress rolled up and tied, sitting on top of the mattress springs.
We used it once more the day of graduation.
That day, a sinewy colonel, with so many ribbons on his chest they seemed like they climbed over his shoulder and down his back, spoke to us while we stood at attention. How easy this is, I realized. I didn’t even have to think about how to stand anymore.
“Men, in life, your first battle is with yourselves. The fact that you’re here today means you’ve given yourself fiber by taking on discipline. You’ve tasted your first military victory, and your drill sergeants will give you your first medal. Wear it with pride.”
We held out our hands, and Drill Sergeant Yankovic slapped a red and yellow National Defense Service Medal ribbon in each of them. He hit my hand so hard, the edge of the medal cut my skin.
“Fucking colonels,” Drill Sergeant Yankovic said after the ceremony, “always making morals. Shit, everybody gets this medal.”
I was rubbing the scratch in my hand as I stood by Pudgy’s bed that evening. Someone had sneaked beer into the barrack. We unrolled the mattress and set Phil Danzig’s little record player there.
Come on, all of you big, strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He’s got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun
We’re gonna have a whole lot of fun.
It was just then, in early September 1969, when I first heard Country Joe and the Fish sing the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” The other guys and I raised our beer bottles and toasted it. It was funny. We stood around Pudgy’s bed with the little rectangles of our National Defense medals centered over the left-hand shirt pockets of our khaki uniforms. They looked like little stains of blood and viscera.
The second time we played the song, no one laughed. No one said a word.
The evening was cool, the first touch of fall. The sun had just gone down. I was a brand-new PFC with a silver duffel bag whose color was already beginning to crack.
There ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee, we’re all gonna die
37.
“All those pockets of crazies,” my friend Tom Bamberger says, “but so what? The world is full of crazies.”
That’s true, I think, so why don’t I get over those days? So what if I wound up in the military? It’s happened to tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of men over the years.
“Armies have been around so long no one even notices them anymore,” the ghost of Albert Speer says, putting his bony fingers together. “It isn’t prostitution that’s the oldest business in the world; it’s war. Mother Battle and her bloody babies.”
But I wasn’t really bloodied, was I?
“Let’s just wait and see if you tell the truth, Ryan; see if you’re willing to tell what really happened to you.”
38.
It’s a blur, a carnival in the dark. All of us on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Circling and circling.
I can feel the wind on my face as I spin around. Every so often a lurid green and purple light comes on, framing a face across from me.
“Hi yah, kiddies, hi yah, hi yah, hi yah,” Pudgy Peterson says and then down he spins around, his head snapping back in his seat. Drill Sergeant Yankovic appears. He’s smiling. “I still own you, Ryan. Your soft, civilian ass is mine,” and there, look, smiling is Jerry Donenfelter. “Oh, my little solder boy,” he sings as he spins around. And then, oh, face after face: Walt Rostow, Albert Speer, Lance B. Edwards, and Sergeant Perkins. Face after face comes into view, in the lurid light, and goes away, round and round.
And then I have this order to obey. Order Number 56, signed by Stanley P. Arthur, Major. SUBJECT: Basic German Course, Defense Language Institute, West Coast. REPORTING DATE: 24 SEP 1969. I don’t have time to think about what’s going on. I just have to do what I’m told.
“Once you get things figured out, the military’s easy,” Rex Harrison explained to me at that party back in Fayetteville. “Life will slide along. The military solves all those big identity questions for you. You know who you are. They give you a rank and a job and a place to sleep. They feed you; they clothe you.”
“You’ve got to draw a line somewhere.”
Lance B. Edwards’s face suddenly appears from the dark.
“If you don’t, then where are you, Ryan, where are you?”
He holds up a blank pad.
“You see, Ryan. It should be perfectly clear.”
I lost twenty pounds in basic training. My clothes didn’t fit anymore. I was a new person; I didn’t even look the same. When I got back to Jenny’s house in Saint Louis, she handed me a copy of Emerson.
“He’s been waiting for you,” she said and smiled.
But I didn’t have time for Emerson anymore. I wanted to m
ake sure I got to the army’s language school on time. I was terrified of making a mistake.
“If you miss that September date,” the recruiting sergeant in Little Rock had told me, “you’ll be one sorry sack of shit, Ryan. Then it’s the army’s choice. They’ll send you to Vietnam.”
Jenny insisted on coming with me to Monterey.
“We’re married, you know,” she said, and it took me a moment to remember that. I had been so busy folding my uniforms for the trip that I’d forgotten about her.
We loaded the car with our clothes and some household goods. Our baggage weighed so much that the car collapsed the shock absorbers and sat on its frame. We drove across the country on Interstate 80. I have pictures of myself from that time with my butch-cut army hair. I look tentative and baffled. One thing’s for sure: I was scared. Those were dangerous days. One wrong move, and I would have ended up in Vietnam.
In 1969, the Defense Language Institute was a series of old wooden buildings and newer cinder-block structures sitting on some hilltop acreage between Monterey and Pacific Grove, California. The site has beautiful views of Monterey Bay. The day I arrived there was warm and sunny. The scenery was so beautiful that I felt as though I were walking through a travel poster.
“Ryan, yup, right here. German class,” the charge-of-quarters corporal in the orderly room told me as he looked at a sheet of paper. “We’ve got you on our list. You’re safe from Vietnam right now, buddy. You start next Monday. You got to show up here at seven thirty for formation. Captain Pfloeger likes to start on time.”
“What do I do between now and then?”
Corporal Matson looked puzzled.
“Let’s see. It’s Wednesday. I’d eat some abalone at Fisherman’s Wharf. I’d drive down to Big Sur. I don’t know.”
“Isn’t there some kind of duty roster?”
“Please, Ryan. This is about as far from the real army as you can get, and we want to keep it that way. All right? Don’t say words like ‘duty roster.’ You might give somebody ideas.”
“My wife’s with me. Can I live with her?”
He stared at me.
“Absolutely, unless you want me to move in with her.” He paused. “You kind of lost it in basic training, didn’t you, buddy? Of course. Just fill out these forms.”
An hour later, after completing the paperwork, I was a registered married man, looking for off-post housing.
“Just call me, or whoever’s CQ and give them an address and a phone number when you find an apartment.”
Maybe my luck was changing. I drove back to the Holiday Inn in Seaside, where Jenny and I were staying. I put on civilian clothes, and Jenny and I stood there in front of the picture window looking at the ocean.
“Can you believe this?” I asked myself. It’s all so beautiful. Yes, maybe my luck really was changing. Maybe the dark gods who took my father and put me in the army will leave me alone. I squeezed Jenny’s hand.
The only apartment we could afford was a dreary little two-room place at 1075 Third Street. But it was close to the ocean and an inland lagoon. Those seemed like good omens, though the constant ar, ar, ar of the sea lions barking at night got a little wearing. In the mornings, fog rolled into the apartment through its uninsulated walls. The first morning I woke up feeling that I was inside a cloudy dream, going from one sleep to another, and I held on to Jenny, terrified.
Then I began sobbing: air-gulping, breath-taking sobs.
“What’s the matter, baby?” Jenny asked.
“Maybe I’m not going to die after all,” I said between sobs. “Maybe I’ll live.”
“Guten Tag!” Herr Schefke, the civilian teacher said that first Monday after the welcoming speeches were over.
I was assigned to Room 250, Nisei Hall. I was so excited to begin. This will be my ticket to Europe, I thought. A foreign language! I was learning a foreign language!
“Guten Tag!” our little class of six students said back to Herr Schefke—or tried to.
“Ja, ja,” Herr Schefke said, rubbing his hands together as if he were about to begin a gourmet meal.
I still have my notes from that day. We were supposed to memorize the sound of the language. We had no reading material at all, just a bunch of seven-inch, reel-to-reel tapes. Those of us who lived off the base also got our own Wollensak portable tape recorders and a set of green Koss earphones.
I arranged the recorder and my study materials on a wobbly table in a corner of the living room on Third Street. The controls on the tape recorder looked like the keys on an accordion. I went back and forth between PLAY, STOP, REWIND, and PLAY as I listened to the strange syllables and tried to memorize them, repeating the sentences over and over.
Guten Tag! Ist daß hier die Deutschklasse?
Ja, daß ist die Deutschklasse.
That was how the program worked. We had to learn the lines of a spoken dialogue, going by sound alone, and repeat the lines the next morning in Room 250.
In pairs, we would come to the front of the classroom. Each one of us in the duo took first one side in the dialogue and then the other. We did this over and over. The theory of this learning was based on the notion that children learn language this way, by hearing others speak and responding to that.
Amazing. In the midst of the terrible war in Vietnam, the US Army taught me to learn like a child.
Of course there was also the unstated threat that I’d be sent to Vietnam if I didn’t do my homework.
On the surface, though, it was all good fun.
“Bitte, machen Sie Fehler!” Herr Scheffke said, waving his hand at us. A blessing from a benevolent spirit. He didn’t want us to be nervous. Please, he told us, make all the mistakes you want.
I still have some of the tapes, and I’ve located an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. The voice comes on a little off-key. The tape is stiff and sticky from a lack of use.
Wer ist der Lehrer?
Herr Neumann ist der Lehrer
Wo ist der Lehrer?
Der Lehrer ist dort.
Incredible. The US Army handed me the keys to another culture. If I was lucky, I would go to Germany fluent in its language, getting two years abroad courtesy of the American taxpayer. Wonderful.
Wonderful, too, my classmates Peter Everwine, Eric Lundberg, and Art Schmid from Yale. We had students from Stanford, Penn, and the University of Virginia. Steve Goldberg, who sat beside me in classroom 250 of Nisei Hall, had been accepted into the PhD program in history at Harvard. All these certified bright boys—and yes, I kept up with them. Me, little Rickie Ryan, Louise Ryan’s boy from Janesville, smarter than he ever thought.
Guten Tag!
Guten Tag!
Ist daß hier die Deutschklasse?
Ja, daß ist die Deutschklasse.
Those were our first phrases in German. Wonderful. Wunderbar.
“Schönes Wochenende,” everyone says that first Friday. Have a nice weekend.
Even though we’re required to wear our green army suits with their modest little PFC stripes on the sleeves, we were treated like students at an exclusive private college. We were civilized; we discussed restaurants; we went to plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. My assassins poem came out in a Bantam Book anthology. When I felt shaky about my identity, I opened the blue paperback, and there I was, on page 162, a published author.
Jenny got a job at a bakery in Carmel, and that gave us a little financial security. To celebrate, I went to the I. Magnin store and bought a green Harris Tweed sport coat I couldn’t really afford and a couple of button-down collar shirts so I could pretend that I went to an Ivy League school.
In the midst of horrific danger, it was a safe little world. I’d never seen the ocean before I got to Monterey and kept inhaling its brisk air, which seemed as though it had been scrubbed clean of all impurities on its long voyage to us.
Es ist interessant.
Auf Wiedersehen!
Auf Wied
ersehen!
“You have a cagey heart,” my second wife, Carol, says to me when I show her my story. “Did you ever let it out for poor Jenny?”
I don’t think I did. I was frightened and wanted her comfort, but I also wanted the life of my times, which meant sexual freedom. I wasn’t, I don’t think, in love with her. I was in love with me.
I can still see her walking into that Carmel bakery wearing her too-large, white nylon uniform. Her slip often got caught by the static electricity in the nylon and hung at odd angles, exposing her panties beneath the semitransparent uniform. The job was belittling, and I felt so sorry for her, a Phi Beta Kappa college graduate, walking into that bakery with her underwear showing. And for what? A life in the army? What a price in human dignity we paid.
Both of us were belittled by our subservient lives. I was probably making less per hour than she was. Me, with my master’s degree and my published poem. Surely I was worth more than that. I felt sorry for both of us, but you know what: I mostly felt sorry for me. I couldn’t wait to get away from the army life and often drove down to Big Sur on Saturdays after I dropped off Jenny at work. I could walk the beaches there and forget who I was.
Toward the end of October 1969, I sat on a rock and filled my head with sunshine and forgetfulness. Out of nowhere three naked women cartwheeled in front of me. Their pubic hair was at my eye level.
“Groovy, soldier boy,” one said after she stood up, her breasts wiggling. The clipped sides of my army haircut gave me away. She bent over, kissed me on the lips, and grabbed my hand, rubbing it against the bristly hair of her crotch. Then she ran away laughing. I wanted to be a longhaired hippie guy with these beautiful women available to me. Why oh why did I ever get married?
I walked south along the beach, scrambling over rock out-croppings, getting my shoes wet in the ocean. I came to a cove behind a rock and found a couple moaning their way through sex. They were both naked, sitting up, perched on a blanket. She sat on his lap, facing him, languidly going up and down.
