Shooting the Moon

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  On the days I printed TJ’s pictures, I always drew an audience. It was like Private Hollister had put a sign out front: VIETNAM PICTURES ON VIEW TODAY IN DARKROOM. He always knew when I came in with a roll of TJ’s film, and he’d always be the first one back to take a look. “Don’t show me nothing bloody,” he’d say when I told him the pictures were up on the line. “I can turn on the TV if I feel the need to see blood.”

  Private Hollister especially liked TJ’s pictures of the moon and of pretty nurses. “You think he’s got a girlfriend over there yet?” he asked one day, studying a blond WAC holding a cat.

  “How would I know? He just sends me film. He doesn’t write me letters.”

  Private Hollister studied the photographs. “I’d say he’s writing you a letter with every picture he takes. Does he write letters to your folks?”

  I nodded. “They’re boring, though. Mostly they’re about the food and the bugs.”

  “See? He’s sending you the real stuff. I bet you don’t show all these pictures to your parents, do you? I bet you hide some of ’em away.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “’Cause you know TJ don’t want your folks to see ’em. If he wanted them to see all this stuff, he’d send the film to your mom, get her to get it processed at the PX. Don’t cost but a few dollars.”

  Private Hollister was right. I’d only shown certain ones of TJ’s pictures to my parents, pictures of dogs and mess halls and big jungle plants. But I’d known without him having to tell me that TJ wouldn’t want me to show them everything. With each roll of film TJ sent me, there were fewer blond WAC’s and more soldiers missing arms and legs. More medevac helicopters. More dust and dirt and chaos.

  One day after I’d developed a roll of film and had the negatives hanging from the line to dry, I realized I was squinting as I examined them. It was as though I only half wanted to see what was there.

  It was as though I was scared to look any closer.

  I thought about waiting until the next day to print the pictures, even though it was early and Private Hollister said there wasn’t much for me to do that day. I had all the time in the world to print pictures, but I found myself cleaning up, wiping down tables, measuring out more fixer, inventorying chemicals.

  Finally I made myself slip the first negative into the enlarger. What emerged on the paper was a picture of a GI in a wheelchair, his right leg amputated at the knee and wrapped in a white bandage. He looked so much like TJ, I gasped and took a step backward. I had to force myself to look again and see for sure that it wasn’t my brother in the wheelchair, that it was someone I’d never seen before in my life.

  I decided to print the rest of the pictures later.

  Some of the soldiers who looked at TJ’s pictures had been in Vietnam, and the pictures reminded them of all sorts of things. “You ever heard of rice paddy stew?” one guy asked me, looking at a photograph of guys eating at the mess hall. “You take your C rations, like the beef and the franks and beans, throw in some cheese spread and crackers and rice, add a bunch of Tabasco sauce, and mix it all up and cook it. Nine times out of ten it’s better than whatever they’re serving in the mess.”

  The soldiers who had never been to Vietnam were the ones who got quiet when they saw TJ’s pictures. Pvt. Garza was like that. He was on the quiet side anyway, which made him a good sidekick for Cpl. Yarrow, but he got downright silent when he looked at TJ’s photographs.

  “The war’s almost over,” Cpl. Yarrow told him one day when he was standing in front of a picture of a medevac helicopter lifting off, the sun setting behind it, dust billowing out in huge clouds beneath the propellers. “Chances are you’ll never get sent. Don’t worry about it, man.”

  Pvt. Garza shook his head. “It’s not over yet.”

  “Any day, that’s what they’re saying.” Cpl. Yarrow put his hand on Pvt. Garza’s shoulder. “Any day.”

  There were afternoons I’d feel shaky leaving the rec center, anxious and a little bit nervous, and I just needed to get it out of my system, so I’d go to Cindy’s house and tell her what I was learning about Vietnam. She was halfway interested in some of the things, not at all interested in others. Mostly she wanted to know if TJ had sent me more pictures of the moon. There was one in every roll, and I’d always make Cindy a print. By early August she had a collection of them taped to her wall.

  “Does Mark write you letters?” I asked one afternoon, sitting on Cindy’s bed, Brutus nestled in my lap. “Does he tell you anything about what it’s like to be over there?”

  “He writes a big letter that’s for everyone in my family,” Cindy told me. “He tells us about different things he sees, like the animals and the different kind of flowers.”

  “Do you, you know, ever worry about him?” I hugged Brutus close to me.

  “Why would I worry about Mark? He’s an Army soldier. Fighting in wars is his job.”

  I nodded. Fighting was a soldier’s job. Everybody knew that.

  It was just, somewhere down there in the pit of my stomach, I was starting to think that I didn’t like fighting as much as I thought I did. I was starting to feel like I wished I hadn’t told TJ to go.

  ten

  By mid-August Private Hollister and I were neck and neck in our race to see who would be the gin rummy champ of Fort Hood, Texas. And we weren’t the only ones paying attention to the competition. All the rec center regulars checked in at least once a week to see who was in the lead. They’d pull Private Hollister’s notebook right out of his top desk drawer and run their fingers down the rows of numbers, adding it all up. Most of them were rooting for me, because I was so much younger and a girl, I guess.

  The closer it got to Labor Day, the more often we’d draw a crowd when we sat down to play. Even Sgt. Byrd would come out of the darkroom from time to time to watch. “Play ’em as they lay, my young friend, hit him where it hurts, don’t let the crumbheads get you down,” he’d say, or something else so Sgt. Byrd-like I’d know it was him with my eyes closed.

  “So when’s your last day, anyway?” Private Hollister asked me one morning while we were trying to get some actual work done. I was underneath a pool table picking up beer can tabs and cigarette butts. Apparently there’d been quite a crowd the night before, soldiers from the 1st Armored Division, whose units were being sent to Vietnam.

  “Friday before Labor Day, I guess,” I called up to him from the floor. I picked up another cigarette butt and popped it into a paper bag. “I wonder if any of those guys ever heard of that useful invention known as an ashtray,” I said, crawling out from under the pool table and rattling the bag at Private Hollister. “It comes in handy, I’ve heard.”

  “Ah, you know how it is when a guy’s being sent off to war.” Private Hollister leaned against the mop he was using to clean up spilled beer off the floor. “He gets a little wild. Mostly they’re just scared, I guess, and covering it up by drinking and yelling.”

  “I guess. Still, now my hands stink and I think I’m about to come down with asthma.”

  “You don’t come down with asthma. Asthma’s just something you’ve got. It’s a condition. I had it when I was a kid.”

  I stood up and walked over to the trash can. “Why do you want to know when my last day of work is, anyway?”

  Private Hollister grinned. “I’m working up a strategy, and I need to know how many days I got to beat you fair and square. Your last day of work’s gonna be our official last day of playing gin, the way I see things.”

  “If I win, it is. But if I lose, I’ll be coming by after school.”

  “Doubt I’ll be here much longer after Labor Day. I’ll go back to my unit around then.”

  “What do you mean, your unit?”

  Private Hollister began pushing his mop along the length of the floor. “Rec center’s a temporary assignment for me. I’m a radio operator, 1st Signal Troop, but they needed somebody here this summer and I was the one who got pulled for the duty. They got another guy c
oming from Fort Sill sometime in September; he’ll take over here and I’ll go back to where I came from.”

  Then he stopped mopping and looked over at me. “You think your dad knows who I am? I mean, have you ever mentioned me to him?”

  “Yeah, of course. I’ve been keeping him updated on our games and everything.”

  “What kind of stuff do you tell him? I mean, good things? Things that would make him think I was a good guy or a good worker or whatever?”

  I laughed. “What are you talking about? Why do you care what the Colonel thinks about you?”

  Private Hollister put the mop away in the supply closet and walked over to his desk before answering me. He picked up our game notebook and held it like it was a good-luck charm. “There’s some rumors going around post. About how they’re going to send some guys from 1st Signal Troop over to Vietnam pretty soon. Radio operators.”

  My mouth went dry. “That’s you.”

  Private Hollister slapped the notebook against his knee. “Yep, that’s me. It’s just a rumor that’s been going around, but I wondered if your dad had said anything about it to you. Because he has some control over that situation.”

  “The Colonel has some control over who goes to Vietnam?”

  “Well, yeah, from Hood, I mean. If they’re gonna move some troops, then Col. Dexter is part of the group that says who’s going. He’s the chief of staff, right? The adjutant general reports to him, gives him the list of who he thinks should go, Col. Dexter signs the orders. Your daddy’s a big-shot wheeler-dealer, I don’t need to tell you that.”

  Private Hollister put down the notebook. Then he walked to the pool table and picked up a stick, examining it as if it were an item of some interest to him. “If they send me to Vietnam, my mom’s gonna go nuts.”

  “They won’t send you,” I insisted. They couldn’t send him. His brother had already died there. It wouldn’t be fair to send Private Hollister, too.

  Private Hollister looked up at me. “They will if they want to.”

  “But I don’t want them to.”

  That made Private Hollister laugh. “I figured you’d think this was the opportunity of a lifetime for me. An all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam. Maybe round trip, maybe not. Go live the life of a real soldier.”

  I looked down at my feet. “I guess.”

  “Well, do me a favor, okay? Let me know if you hear anything. Your dad might say something to you, since he knows we work together.”

  “That wouldn’t be Army protocol. The Colonel doesn’t tell me anything about work. Nothing like that, anyway.”

  Private Hollister lined up a shot on the pool table. “Maybe you could ask him, then. I mean, ask him what he knows.”

  I looked at the clock. It was almost one. I needed to be at the Lorenzos’ house in fifteen minutes, to babysit Cindy while Mrs. Lorenzo went to the commissary. “I have to go now,” I said. “I have a babysitting job this afternoon.”

  “Think about it, Jamie. If it’s gonna happen, I need to know. I got to get prepared, you know, in my mind.”

  As I walked out the doors, the sudden crack of the balls scattering across the pool table made me flinch. I remembered something that Sgt. Byrd had told me, that he dreamed about Vietnam almost every night, and some nights he woke up to find himself crouched in the dark between the bunks in his barracks, his whole body alert, listening.

  Listening for what? I’d asked him.

  The sound before the sound, he’d told me. The sound that comes right before the sound of everything getting blown to smithereens.

  I did not want Private Hollister to go to Vietnam.

  I didn’t want anyone else I knew going to Vietnam. But Private Hollister was the one who I might be able to help.

  In my hand I held one very important card.

  I made a fist.

  I got ready to knock.

  eleven

  When I got to Cindy’s, she wanted to put on a ballet for me, and I said sure. But I barely paid attention, I was so busy thinking about what I would say to the Colonel. Somehow I had to convince him to keep Private Hollister at Fort Hood. But how do you ask the most full-out Army man in the Army for a favor like that?

  My biggest obstacle was plain and simple Army protocol, which of course the Colonel was a stickler for. You did things a certain way, played by the Army rules at all times, followed the chain of command. If the rumors were true, some bigwig over in Vietnam had decided he needed more radio operators, and some other bigwig, probably at the Pentagon, looked through his files and came up with the great idea of sending a few from 1st Signal Troop, Fort Hood. The paperwork would be drawn up by a clerk, copied in triplicate, rubber-stamped, and sent over to Fort Hood and up the chain until it reached the Colonel, who would sign it, unless there was an excellent reason not to. He did not mess with protocol. Period.

  “You aren’t watching me!” Cindy stood in front of me, hands planted on her hips. “You’re looking at me, but you’re not watching! I know, because that’s what my dad does too.”

  “I was watching, really,” I lied. “You looked really good. I like how you twirl around.”

  Cindy nodded, like she agreed that she was quite a fine twirler. “My mom says if I keep practicing I can get real ballerina shoes with hard toes. And maybe I can take lessons over at Miss Marie’s Dance Studio in Killeen.”

  “You want to show me some more?”

  Cindy sat down next to me on the couch. “No, I’m tired now. And I’m very sad.”

  “Why are you sad?”

  “Because my mom told me Mark won’t be home for Christmas. Hell still be fighting in the war.”

  “TJ won’t be home for Christmas either,” I said, realizing it for the first time. What would it be like, to go downstairs Christmas morning by myself, to see if Santa Claus (aka the Colonel) had come? What would it be like without TJ behind me, excited as a little kid, even when all Santa had left him the last few years were clothes and new sports equipment?

  “Do you think Santa Claus goes to Vietnam?” Cindy asked.

  I nodded. “Sure. He goes everywhere. When we lived in Germany, he came to Germany. He’ll go to Vietnam, too.”

  Cindy sat up. “I was born in Germany. I was born in West Berlin, West Germany, in a United States Army hospital. I was born in Berlin, Germany, but I’m still an American, so don’t tell me I’m not.” She elbowed me in the ribs to emphasize her point.

  “I was born in Heidelberg,” I told her, moving over a few feet so she couldn’t get me again. “But I’m an American too. All Army kids born in Germany are.”

  “A boy at school called me a Nazi. He said I was like Hitler.” Cindy chewed on a cuticle, her eyes darting around the room. “I told him he was crazy. I said, ‘You’re so crazy it makes me hate you.’”

  “That’s happened to me,” I said. “Kids calling me a Nazi. They think it’s funny.”

  Cindy and I looked at each other. Now we had two things in common: brothers in Vietnam and being called Nazis by jerks.

  It was quite a list.

  “We’re Americans, you and me,” Cindy said, and clapped her right hand over her heart. “We’re not stupid Nazis.”

  “Not us,” I agreed.

  We sat there quietly for a minute, with a friendly feeling around us. I started wondering how complicated Cindy’s thoughts got about things. She knew Mark was fighting in Vietnam, but did she know what war looked like? Was she scared he wouldn’t come home, or that he’d come home missing an arm or a leg?

  Why, I suddenly wondered, was TJ sending me pictures of soldiers missing arms and legs?

  Why was TJ sending me pictures?

  Was he trying to scare me? Or was he just trying to tell me that war wasn’t anything like the way we’d dreamed it, playing with our little green Army men under the trees?

  I looked down at my hands, and suddenly I got it. Of course that’s what TJ was trying to tell me. He was smart enough to know I wouldn’t believe it if all he sent me we
re words. He’d had to show me with pictures.

  Cindy jumped up. “I have a present for you! Stay right here!”

  I imagined Cindy traipsing back into the room with some papier-mchÉ glob she’d made at the art camp her mom had taken her to the week before. But when she returned, she was carrying Brutus.

  “You can take him,” Cindy said. “Because I was thinking about it, and I remember that I have something else from you to keep. I have all the moon pictures you gave me. I don’t need so many things from you, only one or two at a time.”

  “Things of mine?”

  “Yes. And then I pretend we’re sisters who share things.”

  I took this opportunity to study my toes and feel guilty for all the times I could have been nicer to Cindy. I felt like I should do something right then, like give Cindy a little hug or tell her I thought of us as sisters too. But I didn’t have it in me, which I understood then and still understand to this day to be a sorry thing.

  Then Cindy smiled at me. “Did you know I used to be a princess?”

  “You’re not a princess anymore?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’ve decided I’d rather be president of the United States. You can do more things when you’re president. Did you know I can be president, even though I was born in Germany? It’s a law that says it. Nobody can tell me I can’t.”

  “They’d be stupid to try,” I agreed.

  She sat down and leaned toward me so that her face was close to mine. She looked left, then right, then whispered, “I’m going to be president so I can make them send Mark home. My mom keeps crying. She says she’s going to kill herself if he dies in that war.”

  “She said that to you?”

  Cindy put her finger to her lips. “Shhh. No, she said it to Daddy when they thought I was asleep, only I was spying. She didn’t even say it. She screamed it. I was very frightened. But if I was president I wouldn’t be frightened, because I could bring Mark home. And TJ, too, if you want me to.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That would be good.”

  But the funny thing was, it almost made me feel sad to say it. Because I knew that if I wanted TJ home, then I had lost my good feelings about the war forever. I had lost the excitement that used to get me so wound up I could hardly calm back down again for hours. I lost the green Army men under the shady trees and the thrill I felt when I imagined being an ambulance driver in a combat zone. I lost hooah and combat ready, sir.