Shooting the Moon

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  The quiet came from the Colonel.

  All spring, the big mystery had been why the Colonel was so against TJ enlisting. At first I thought it was my mother who made him say all those things to TJ about how fun college would be and how it would be a shame to miss it. My mother is a former Southern belle debutante, very flowery and chock-full of good manners, but she generally gets what she wants. Only she hardly ever comes right out and forces things to happen. She’s more subtle than that. It wouldn’t be at all unlike her to work behind the scenes, making little suggestions to the Colonel about what he should say to TJ to get him to change his mind about enlisting.

  Add that to the fact that the Colonel is 100 percent gung-ho Army, hoo-ah, yes sir, the last person on Earth you’d think would try to keep someone from joining up. How many times had I heard the Colonel talk about the honor of sacrifice? When we were stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he’d driven me and TJ to the veterans’ hospital over in Durham one Christmas just to pay our respects to the soldiers there, a lot of whom had fought in World War II. We owe them our gratitude and respect, the Colonel had said. The very least we can do is wish them a Merry Christmas. This was a man who didn’t want his son to enlist?

  So it had to be my mother making the Colonel try to convince TJ to break his enlistment contract, I was sure of it. But one night, when we were sitting at the dining-room table playing Scrabble after dinner, the Colonel said, “You won’t have two seconds to play tic-tac-toe where you’re going, son.” And my mother sighed and said, “Would you please stop, Tom? This has gone on long enough. Please honor TJ’s decision.”

  Well, that rocked me right back in my chair. It was clear from my mother’s tone of voice that the Colonel had been getting on her nerves for some time now, only up until this point she’d been too much of a lady to let it show. But if it wasn’t my mother behind the Colonel’s constant haranguing, what did that mean? That the Colonel himself didn’t want TJ to enlist? This plain floored me. It was as if Thomas Jefferson had stood up in the middle of writing the Declaration of Independence and declared he was against democracy. It was like Thomas Alva Edison saying, “Oh, heck, what’s so great about electricity after all? Let’s keep using candles.”

  I decided to try to talk to him about it. I was at this time about nine months away from turning thirteen, and I felt I could speak to the Colonel as an equal. Also, I thought this might be an opportunity for me to make a good impression on him. Not that I thought the Colonel had a bad impression of me. He seemed to like me just fine on a day-to-day basis, and I assumed he loved me—not that anyone in my family went around saying, “I love you.” But the Colonel seemed to want me to be happy, and he seemed genuinely pleased when I was happy, and that struck me as a pretty good definition of love when you got right down to it.

  But it’s one thing to like somebody and to love your own child. It’s a whole other thing to be impressed by someone. At age twelve and a quarter, I was not actually all that impressive. I was always spilling on myself at the dinner table, and my hair never just laid down flat on my head and looked nice, and my grades were not stellar. Good in math, so-so in everything else. I did have a good arm and an ability to memorize football statistics. I was an excellent card player. But my clothes were always wrinkled and in disarray by ten in the morning. I hated extracurricular activities. There was no chance I was going to cure the common cold or rocket into outer space any time soon.

  Still, I kept looking for ways to impress the Colonel. I mowed the lawn without being asked to. I babysat Cindy Lorenzo for free. I joined the junior high school pep club, even though I am not a naturally peppy person, and went to all sorts of boring junior high sports events and cheered and yelled like a person who has school spirit and a good attitude.

  Why did I think it would impress the Colonel to have a man-to-man conversation about TJ, especially when I wasn’t a man and what TJ did or didn’t do wasn’t actually my business? Well, I saw it as a taking-the-bull-by-the-horns opportunity. The Colonel was behaving in a mystifying way. I would ask him why and have an adult conversation about the pros and cons of his behavior. He would be impressed because I was acting like such a grown-up person. And, with any luck, I’d find out why he couldn’t bring himself to be happy about the fact that his number one and only son had joined the Army.

  Most nights after dinner, especially in spring, the Colonel liked to work in the garden until it was too dark to see. Spring was the Colonel’s favorite time of year. He was a man who liked to dig in the dirt, and in the spring that’s what he spent most of his free time doing. “Five-cent plant, fifty-cent hole” was his motto, which is why he had two hundred pounds of cow manure delivered fresh from the farm the minute the last frost date had passed. He’d hoe up his garden beds and work that manure in, pausing every few minutes to sniff the air and holler out, “Nothing ever smelled better!”

  It was early April, and since it was Texas, the frost date had long passed and he already had plants growing, tiny ones, so he was spending his evenings patrolling for miniscule pests and the first bud of a weed that dared to show its face in his garden beds. He’d cuss them and then dispose of them. I was surprised he never hung up little dead slugs around the perimeters, just to show their friends what happened to trespassers.

  “I heard if you put out bowls of beer, it’ll draw the slugs away from your plants,” I told him as I walked out into the backyard from the kitchen. “They like the beer so much, they crawl into the bowl and drown.”

  “You read that in Time magazine, Sport?” The Colonel looked up from where he was spraying pesticide on his baby tomato plants.

  “Probably. I’d sure like to see a drunk slug, wouldn’t you?”

  “Only if it were a dead one.” The Colonel stood up and walked to get the hose. “Why don’t you go on weed patrol? I can’t believe how fast those suckers come up in Texas. Back east, you don’t see your first serious weeds until May.”

  I went over to the bed next to the one he was watering. “I was wondering something, sir,” I started out, not sure exactly what I meant to ask him. “About TJ enlisting?”

  “You’re not thinking about enlisting too, are you?”

  “I would if they’d let me, sir.”

  He looked at me and grinned. “I don’t doubt it.”

  “I guess what I’m curious about is why you don’t want TJ to enlist. I mean, you love the Army more than anybody I know.”

  The Colonel wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “If TJ wants to join the Army when he’s done with college, I’d be all for that. He might think about joining ROTC when he’s in college. The Army can help him pay for medical school. But he needs to go to college first, before he joins. He needs to grow up some more. TJ’s not ready for the Army.”

  TJ needed to grow up? That was like saying the Eiffel Tower needed to get a little taller. TJ was more grown up than most adults I knew. And who had spent more time planning battles and executing strategies than TJ? Nobody except maybe Douglas A. MacArthur or General George Patton.

  “Are you scared something might happen to him?” This was the one explanation I’d been able to come up with on my own. Sure, the Colonel was a big, tough guy, but even big, tough guys don’t want their sons to get killed.

  “There’s a weed to your left, looks like poke-weed.” The Colonel leaned across me and plucked it out. “You let pokeweed get too big, you’ll never get it under control.”

  End of conversation. Obviously, the Colonel wasn’t telling the whole story about why he didn’t want TJ to enlist. The only thing I knew for sure after that conversation was that he wasn’t planning on telling it any time soon.

  He still tried to try to talk TJ out of enlisting, though, using every one of his formidable talents of persuasion during the thirty-day window when TJ could have still ripped up his enlistment contract. He’d joked, cajoled, argued, offered bribes both material and monetary. He somehow got his hands on a recent University of Georgia yearboo
k and took to perusing it during dinner, making comments about all the interesting activities one might get involved in at college, and how to his eyes it appeared that all the pretty girls headed to Athens, Georgia, in the fall for college. “You’ve heard of Georgia peaches, haven’t you, son?” he’d ask. “I got me one”—and here he winked at my mother—“and you could get yourself one too.”

  TJ, for his part, listened, laughed, nodded, argued, and rolled his eyes, but he did not budge and he did not change his mind. Then, one day, just like that, the window closed, and TJ was in the Army, no turning back. In two months, at the end of May, he’d report to an MEPS, a Military Entrance Processing Station, in San Antonio, where he would present all the necessary paperwork and take his physical, then choose his MOS, his Military Occupational Specialty, which he had already decided would be in the Medical Service Corps. He’d go through basic training, come home for a few days, and then, more than likely, get shipped off to Vietnam sometime in July.

  So there wasn’t much left for the Colonel to say. During those couple of months before TJ had to report, life mostly went on as normal, TJ getting ready to graduate from high school, me dreading the end of seventh grade, when I’d have to say good-bye to my best friends and begin searching around for new ones. The only thing different was that the Colonel wasn’t talking. Oh, he’d say the normal things, like, “Please pass the butter” or “Did you finish your homework?” but usually having the Colonel in the house was like having an opera going on. He was big, he was loud, he had a lot to talk about. So when he started getting quiet and stopped saying anything, well, it felt like we were living in a library. Or a morgue.

  One Sunday afternoon I was lying across my bed, alternately imagining I was an ambulance driver in a combat zone and that I was a character in an Archie comic, a new girl who wasn’t an idiot like Veronica but was still good-looking, when TJ’s voice boomed across the hall. “Hey, Jamie, want to look at some pictures?”

  I slowly rolled off the bed and shuffled over to TJ’s room. It was a wreck. He’d been trying to get organized, since there would only be two days between graduation the next week and when he left for San Antonio to get processed into the Army. So there were boxes everywhere and a footlocker spilling over with the things he had to take to basic training: underwear, thong shower shoes, socks, a shoe shine kit. And then there were stacks of photographs, which he’d gotten the brilliant idea of sorting through and filing in folders before he left. It was the sort of plan that seems good when you come up with it, but after about twenty minutes you’re sorry you started.

  Still, TJ looked happy sitting on a chair in the middle of his room, surrounded by piles of pictures. “Look at this one of Mom,” he said, holding up a picture of my mother looking up from the book she was reading, Pride and Prejudice, her favorite novel of all time, her forehead furrowed with deep lines, as though they had drawn them on. Her expression was clearly saying, I get five minutes to myself all day, so you best back out of the room slowly and leave me be.

  “That’s not going to be her favorite picture in the world,” I said. “I’d think twice before showing it to her.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” TJ put the photograph down on the floor and picked up another, this one of the Colonel getting out of the car after work. It was what they call a candid shot, which means the Colonel didn’t know TJ was taking it. His face was halfway in the shadows of the carport, but the sunlight caught the shine of his polished boots. I was surprised by how tired he looked.

  “When did you take that one?”

  TJ shrugged. “A couple of weeks ago, I guess. He looks like an old man, huh? I guess that’s another one not quite right for the family album.”

  I took the picture from TJ and examined it more closely. There were bags under the Colonel’s eyes. He was carrying a briefcase, but by the slump of his shoulders, you’d think he was carrying a suitcase full of cement.

  There was no doubt about it. The Colonel looked like a man who hated his job.

  nine

  Working at the rec center, I was learning more about Vietnam all the time. It was in the air you breathed if you were spending your days around GIs, some of whom had already done their tour, some who were gearing up to go, and a whole bunch who had their fingers crossed the war would be over before their units got called up.

  Sgt. Byrd gave me daily vocabulary lessons. Sometimes it was like he was still in-country, and there were days I thought maybe he wanted to go back. Every once in a while he made me feel scared, the way his face got dark and cloudy over something he saw in one of TJ’s pictures. But there wasn’t ever a time when he didn’t want to talk. He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words’ sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you spill them out the right way.

  “If you recall, you call that a cracker box,” he said, pointing to a picture of an ambulance I’d printed from TJ’s fourth roll of film. “The bac-si rides in the cracker box—‘bac-si’ is what you call a medic, it’s a Vietnamese word—or they go in the traveling medicine show, which is what you call the medevac helicopter.”

  “How come they do that?” I asked. “I mean, how come they make up words for everything that already has its own word?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it makes it less real, more like a cartoon, something that’s not happening directly to you. Or else it’s just fun to do it. The human animal is an endless creative creature, in my experience.”

  So I learned “chop chop” was food and a “daily-daily” was the antimalaria pill GIs had to take. Medics were called “Docs” and “band-aids” and “bac-si,” and infantrymen were called “grunts.” An Army helmet was a “steel pot,” and camouflage uniforms were nicknamed “tiger suits.” If you were KIA you’d been killed in action, and if you were KBA, you’d been killed by artillery. A “glad bag” was a body bag. “Expectants” were wounded soldiers who were expected to die.

  “What did they call you?” I asked Sgt. Byrd when the vocabulary lesson got too filled with body bags and wounded soldiers for my comfort.

  He grinned. “I was a 1st Cav grunt and a Cheap Charlie because I never spent any money in the bars. Other than that, mostly I got called Ted and a few other names too improper to repeat. Oh, and Kodak. I got called Kodak.” He held up his camera bag. “For the obvious reasons.”

  Sgt. Byrd was not my only source on the lifestyle and culture of the Vietnam War, however. There were also my students.

  Just like Private Hollister had said, there were soldiers who wanted to learn how to develop and print their own pictures, and now I was the resident expert, if you didn’t count Sgt. Byrd, and since he didn’t actually work at the rec center, I didn’t count him.

  The first soldier I helped was Corporal Yarrow. Cpl. Yarrow was the saddest-looking human being I’d ever seen, hangdog eyes worse than a basset hound’s, bushy black eyebrows that sagged to a point above the bridge of his nose. That he always had a joke or a smart-aleck comment coming out of the side of his mouth was my first surprise about him. That he was so smart he could cuss in German, French, and Spanish without anybody having ever taught him how was my second.

  His first surprise about me was that I was twelve years old. He’d come hollering into the darkroom, “Hollister said somebody back here could help me with this film? That wouldn’t be you, would it?”

  “It’s me, all right.” I was hanging some prints on the line to dry. “What do you need help with?”

  He came over and stood beside me. “Nice pictures. Who took ’em?”

  “My brother. He’s with the 51st Medical Company, in Phu Bai.”

  “Oh, yeah? I was with 1st Battalion, 69th Armor, in the Binh Dinh province. I was a gunner.”

  “A gunner?”

  “Yeah, a tank gunner.”

  I took that in. Tanks are serious business. Shooting a gun rapid-fire from the top of a tank is very serious business. It looks cool in the movies, but in real life
it has to be a tough job. But Cpl. Yarrow didn’t look tough. He just looked like a sad, nice guy.

  “So anyway,” Cpl. Yarrow continued, “I went fishing down at Big Bend while I was on leave a couple of weekends ago, and the only thing I caught was what I caught on film. If you catch my drift.”

  “Fish weren’t biting?”

  “They might have been biting something, but it wasn’t anything dangling off the end of my hook. Still, the scenery was great and the beer was flowing, and I have lots of warm and fuzzy memories.” He held up his film canister. “Not too fuzzy, I hope. I was gonna drop the film off at the PX, but then this friend convinced me I ought to develop it myself, since it’s black-and-white film, and he thinks I need a hobby.”

  So I taught Cpl. Yarrow what to do, and his pictures came out great, so then he brought in his buddy, Pvt. Garza, the one who told him to develop his own film in the first place, and Cpl. Yarrow and I taught Pvt. Garza.

  I was a good teacher, which surprised me. I am not the world’s most patient person, and I don’t always do a great job of translating the thoughts in my head into words. But it was easy talking about how to develop film and print pictures. It helped that Cpl. Yarrow and Pvt. Garza picked up on everything fast and found the process interesting. I remembered what Sgt. Byrd told me the first day we worked in the darkroom together, that he was a process guy. I knew what he meant now. Every part of the developing process was interesting to me. Whenever I made a discovery—that a certain kind of paper worked better, or that I got better results if the developing chemicals were a degree or two cooler—I was in a good mood for the rest of the day.