Here’s the deal. Our trucks and vans are waiting with motors running outside the deployment hut. It’s just after 0700 hours and the air outside is chilly. (It’s March, after all, not the best time to be riding under a canopy in a truck opened to the rear without any heat!) Across the Rhein/Main tarmac big commercial jets are lifting off every half- minute, leaving trails of exhaust that make Germany smell fresh and foul at the same time. We boots have filed from the hut carrying our duffel bags and rucksacks, the women soldiers carrying their purses with shoulder straps for their girl stuff, all of us sniffing and looking around like dog-soldiers to fathom what lies ahead. Me, I’m feeling okay. My goal is to get promoted to E-4, and E-5, so I can qualify as a gunner on whatever tank I get assigned to. A gunner is what I want to be.
Where we line up behind the vehicles, the vans look warm inside while the canvas-covered trucks are cold and dark. All the same, our optimism is high and we’re excited to be here! Preference for duty in Germany is second only to Hawaii. All that stands in the way is cool air and a bumpy ride in a covered truck on the famous Autobahn.
This lady spec five comes along with her clipboard, wearing a lettuce green blouse and a forest green skirt. Bemedaled in ribbons and army gold! She looks great as she pivots and starts highstepping backwards in her brown sensibles, calling out our names. She slaps bumpers with her clipboard and sounds just like a German. “Wurzburg!”
More names and more taps on bumpers: “Schweinfurt!” “Bad Kissigen!” “Bamberg!” “Nuremberg!” “Bindlach/Bayreuth!”
She gets into it and gets your attention like one of those people you meet in the army or anywhere who turn out to be incredible. “Load it up, young bloods!” she sings out. “Enjoy the cool spring air of Germany! Won’t be chilly, you get underway. Need rises, remove yo overcoats from yo duffel bags, cover yo little baby-selves! One pit-stop per manifest! Midday chow on arrival at yo destination! Hang tough over here, young bloods! Be smart! Make yo mommas proud, wherever they be!”
Back-stepping to another truck, she calls, “You bloods enjoy yo‘selves in the new army! Learn to be good soldiers, you’ll be happy for the rest of yo stupid lives! Adios, amigos! Load it up! Snuggle up so you don’t freeze to death in the new army!”
“Ma’am, how long to Whirrsberg?”
“Vhairz-bairg!! Pick up on that umlaut, soldier! New army ain’t no social service agency, not no more. Gotta be smart in today’s army! Vhairz-bairg! Leighton Barracks. Two hours here to there. Shoot, you get nothing outta that orientation?! Don’t be pissing me off! Vhairz-bairg! Start learning…NOW!”
A couple soldiers, likewise adoring her, try “Vherzbairg” and grin like me in enjoyment of her sisterly sass. “Vairzberg, ma’am.”
“Keep yo noses clean,” she calls when it’s my turn to climb into the rear of a truck under canvas. “Mind yo Ps, Qs, and umlauts! Have yo‘selves a time over here! Learn to talk some Deutsch! Get smart in your dumb-ass lives for a change, ’specially you bloods! Don’t be looking for no double-A momma tell you everything to do! This be the world, boys and girls! Understand? It be yours from which to grow before it is too late.”
Adoring the spec five in her crisp uniform (what a soldier!) I climb into the rear of the truck she just tapped. Tossing in my duffel bag, I turn to help the next soldier, a double-A girl with big eyes and ice-needle hair seeking to escape her overseas cap. Offering a hand, I pull her up into the cramped space. As our boarding concludes, I settle onto a bench seat on one side, my feet among duffel bags and rucksacks, and the cute black girl, among others, does the same more or less opposite. Leg room is sparse at best. I smile at her. The flamboyant spec five has us all in a good mood. The girl smiles back, warming my hungry heart. The truck bed is like a tent with negative headroom and holds seven or eight of us, mostly male with the three females. It has someone joking, “Mind if I smoke?”
Slouching on the benches, using rucksacks as pillows and arm-rests, duffel bags as foot-rests, we settle in, waiting for the gears to crank and the truck to rock and roll to our new life in Bindlach/Bayreuth.
“Gonna be a long-ass ride on rock shocks,” comes from a soldier up near the dark cabin of the truck that holds the pilot and co-pilot, a corporal and a PFC.
Time goes then to army waiting. Like what’s new? All at once, however, the gears engage, and as carbon monoxide fills the air somebody mocks, “Gas! Gas!”
The driver grinds into gear and the truck’s big wheels begin at last to roll. Down-shifting, the driver finds a gear in which to accelerate, gears down further and does it again as he swings left, and left again. By now the tented space is taking in fresh air and the vehicle is squealing power on the upgrade. We’re on our way. Sunlight is coming up on the new world. It’s as promised in recruiting stations, an opening of curtains in a way to a lighted sky.
“First of a new breed born of equality,” a major told us during our indoctrination at Rhein/Main. I was so impressed by his cool line that I wrote it down with some other things he had to say.
“Not the last of an old breed but the first of a new breed. A new army with new ideas and new training. New high-tech equipment and new brains. People volunteering to meet new challenges. Getting along like brothers and sisters. Competing and blossoming unto your best. Best fighting machine ever known to man! Pity any fool doesn’t recognize the new power of the new U.S. Army!”
The truck rumbles and I attempt to position myself so I can gaze out through the rear opening. No luck. I can’t turn body and feet enough to gain an angle and need to let it go. Need to sit looking at my hands in my lap. Thinking how I loved the spec five and how reassured she made me feel to be where I am now. Thinking how the racial stuff faded in basic and all the more in armor school, like a flu bug dying off.
Of the dozen trucks and buses fanning into Germany ours is headed for Bindlach, which city is next to a city named Bayreuth and close to the old East German border. (“Don’t be saying BAY-RUTH like it’s some goddamn candy bar!” the spec five shouted as we loaded up. “BYE RHOOT! Hear me!? BYE RHOOT! Pick up on some Deutsch over here in the new army! Get smart in yo dumb-ass lives for a change! This be the world, young bloods! Be the frigging world!”)
Slipping into civilian traffic, our truck is soon gunning over the Autobahn. ETA Bindlach: Three hours. As in a movie theater, visibility has improved in the enclosure despite the troops going silent. The view through the rear opening is like a TV test pattern waiting for a picture to catch in color. Wires appear to cross the opening while no one in the cramped space is saying a word.
So what’s with the silence, I ask myself before long? Germany was a topic of war stories through armor school and here, in-country, nobody has anything to say? What if I speak? What if I say, ‘Hey, Jimmy Murphy, South Boston, tanker to be, 2nd ACR…where you guys from?’ What if I make them grin by saying, ‘Is this the new army or a squad of old-timers who have lost their vocal cords?’
The truck charges on toward Bindlach (our pit stop remains an hour away) like a locomotive not about to let up. As we heard at Rhein/Main, Christensen Barracks is built on a bluff overlooking Bayreuth (Bye Rhoot!) where it fills the valley on both sides of the Red Main River. Home of 1st Squadron, 2nd ACR, which, as we also learned, patrolled the East German border for forty-four years! Right into reunification, and has an eye on things still. Army talk. Still there continues to be nothing but silence in the rumbling truck, and I’m finding it hard to accept that we’ve been underway for half an hour and no one has said a word!
I rearrange my legs among the duffel bags and twist my neck for a better view of what is falling away behind us. Between hills to the north are clusters of red tile roofs that look like photos of the German countryside in magazines. Streaming sunlight. Filaments of smoky clouds floating in a blue sky. A changing view from where I’m packed in two people from the opening. I’d like to take in the Benzes and Beemers sliding past like TV commercials but have no wish to suffer an aching neck. I glance over the
staring and snoozing deadheads and say at last, “Where’s the flight attendant with pretzels now that we need them?”
No response. We all made transatlantic flights in recent days but only the black girl with icicle hair dares to half-grin and glance my way. Silence, not camaraderie or adventure, is ruling the day. The driver down-shifts, ascending an extended grade, motors on.
I sit back. Look down my front. And it’s then that I see the knife and think, good God! The knife’s wooden handle extends from the shoe and sock of the soldier opposite, who has settled into snoozing and allowed his feet to wander.
Fear shoots through my mind. A banana shank of a kind I saw in South Boston. Here in the army, in Germany, in our midst like a hand grenade with the pin pulled! A banana shank!
Fucking black guys! is my instant thought. Guessing I’m the last to see it, seeing how it explains the silence, the terror and possible injury, the bleeding and possible death, it has the hair on the back of my neck alive and rising.
The soldier with the shank is dozing next to the girl with icicle hair. As I let my eyes survey right and left I see that he’s the only soldier to have fallen asleep. That he’s carrying in Germany gives me an immediate headache.
A banana shank. An illegal street weapon inadvertently revealed in the back of a truck. Street scum, I think. Dumb gangbanger slipped into the army. How could he remain immune to the instructions and warnings in basic? What’s he thinking, that World War II remains underway? Or is it his fellow soldiers he’s armed himself against, soldiers he anticipates cutting on his way to serving life in a fucking federal prison? Why are black people so fucking stupid with their knives and guns?
Here I am, falling in love with the army, with everything, and now this. I look away. Look within. Glance to the black girl whose eyes are letting me know that she knows. That no, it isn’t what she wants to see. That yes, it’s something she thought she had left behind in brainless Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit.
For me, anger continues climbing my neck in memory of shanks carried on streets and in street cars, in hallways and locker rooms in South Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury. Weapons with which to kill. Weapons with which to sever arteries and release gushing blood and life. Destroyers of existence. A banana shank honed razor sharp, its handle taped black like the handle opposite, covering blond wood. A blade ready to slip through Chiquita stalks with ease, but mainly through flesh, a hooked, lethal weapon ready to leave valleys of waste and loss, heartbreak and regret. Called ‘spade blades’ in Boston, the shank re-ignites anxieties of dark streets and black-hooded gangs, no matter that I vowed long ago to never fear any man face to face.
My thought is to lean over and say, ‘Have you no integrity, you stupid piece a’ shit? You deserve hurt of any kind that ever comes your way.’
Irish thug and pug that I once was, hurt is what I want to inflict in my anger, and I have to check myself against taking action that can turn into a bloody mess. The death of my dreams as well as the moron’s, if he has any in his empty head. ‘What’s with you, asshole?’ I’d like to ask. ‘Have you not learned that the army has no room for simple-minded fucking gangbangers?’
How to explain my deep disappointment? That I’m less resentful of the gangbanger than I am of being pressed into a street scum mentality of my own. It’s something I worked long ago to leave behind. White trash from Southie. Irish punk from Southie. I’m here because I want to move on and this moron is letting me know that moving on may not be so easy. After some great black men in basic and in armor school, after some great lectures up to and including the big command master sergeant and the talented spec five at Rhein/Main, it comes to this…the crappy side of life I meant to never visit again.
Our truck keeps rolling and I cannot help imagining the buses and other trucks being alive with laughter and talk, discovery and adventure, anticipation and happiness. I imagine friendships forming within the thrill of being young and rolling into personal history here in the heart of Europe.
Let it go, I advise myself. Step around it like a dog turd on the sidewalk.
This while my life-long problem with black guys (which I know has a mind of its own) keeps refusing to go away. Rather it grips my neck, and what I’d like to do is give the gangbanger a little Clint Eastwood grin on the way to FedExing his face into the back of his fucking skull. A right cross carrying a thousand pounds per square inch. A lethal blow commencing on a swiveling of the hips, advancing to the shoulders, detonating on contact with his nose and sending it to the hairline on the back of his neck! What’s he doing, bringing a shank into the army in his shoe? Who does he mean to cut…Adolf Hitler? An unsuspecting comrade because he happens to be white? A comrade who owns something he means to steal? Let it go, I advise myself again. Make love, not war. What does it matter if a percentage of immature black guys don’t know up from down?
I look to the girl with icicle hair and the way her eyes pass tells me again that she is aware that I’m aware. She tugs her skirt down her knee, looks off at an angle, and it bothers me that she’s the one suffering a stiff neck on this occasion of entering Germany. It bothers me even more that nothing is going to go down for any of us on this Autobahn ride, no laughter or friendship, no remembrances of things past, our good time messed over by a shank in a low-life’s low-quarter shoe. The mentality of an asshole. One who has no idea who he’s messing with.
The truck rushes on, air whistling all about. I can’t help looking at the handle the dozing soldier has allowed to become visible in the mix of shoes and socks, duffel bags, rucksacks, pant legs. Every soldier in the crowded truck, black or white, is holding as if in the presence of a rattlesnake no one dares disturb. A viper in our midst loaded with venom. Street scum. No getting around it. Every time something criminal has gone down in the army, a handful of incidents having to do with cheating, dope, stealing, they’ve involved street scum like this gangbanger who was unable to leave criminality in his wake and should not have been let into the army in the first place.
Something about the black girl opposite said she wanted to talk and laugh and be friends, but she has been looking away most of the time to avoid the venom that appears to be lying in wait. A nice-looking girl who has, I’m guessing, enlisted as a way of moving on in her life, too. My thoughts have me resenting all the more the tamping down of happiness, discovery, adventure the self-indulgent brother sprawled at her side is inflicting on all of us in his ignorance and arrogance. Given a chance, I might have become friends with the girl by now, maybe more than friends, like Dahlia in high school with her strawberry-colored lips.
Why not a black girlfriend? I wonder in an attempt to look away from the viper in our midst? Black girls are plentiful in the army, and some (not unlike some brothers) appear willing, even eager, to ignore the line. This girl’s flawless chocolate skin and glistening icicles. Would kissing her, like Dahlia, be a journey into the heart of where it’s thrilling to be? Red berries on a hot fudge sundae. Gourmet city. The beautiful Rhein/Main spec five, too, in her crisp lettuce green, black and gold army piping, her filly’s ankles highstepping backwards…was a lady I could have teased all day long.
A girlfriend who is a soldier, black or white or whatever? Fat chance, really, for not only were we told a hundred times that women soldiers felt nothing of what we might be feeling, but were to be regarded “as nothing more or less than fellow soldiers.” Those warnings plus, of course, my ugly mug. “Homely Irish baboon,” as Kenny Washington at the gym liked saying for its element of accuracy. Truth is, my half-flat nose has to precede any meeting with any girl of any color, and while I might experience feelings–in response to their shapes, faces, smiles–I learned long ago that few, if any (Dahlia Anderson alone, and who knew why?), were likely to experience similar feelings for me. My crooked teeth, if only on the left, odd teeth that have had me raising a hand all my life to shield smiles or laughter escaping the pie hole beneath my nose. A girl would have to be more than hard up to take in what I have to offer an
d know the vaguest rise in temperature. Hard up or crazy, no getting around it.
“Hey, man, what you doin’ carrying a shank?”
Just like that, as the brother has stirred in rearranging himself, I lay out my fearless words. “Banana shank in your shoe. Bring it on the plane? What’re you thinking, this is World War II, gonna run into Himmler at the PX?”
The brother is coming around, taking in that something very rude is going down.
“Say?” he says. That alone: “Say?”
“Said: What’s with the shank? Think you need a shank in the fucking army?”
“Fuck off, man.”
“Gonna cut me? Give it a shot. I look afraid?”
He glares. I grin, look, I think, like some goon on the ice at the Garden. A mere smile. “Who you gonna cut…friend or foe?”
He does the blinking in the face of my grin. Looks aside. I blink, too, after a moment, keeping in view the shifting of his feet and pant leg, the re-concealing of the weapon.
Holding in place, my heart continues to hammer. I surmise the brother to be short, muscular, criminal, probably dangerous, no matter that he, too, had to have enlisted to escape himself. I want to say: ‘Have you no self-respect? Why are you doing something to make people distrust you and every brother? You go insane long ago in the tunnel of being black? Why prepare to hurt people, to ruin lives and ruin yourself for worn-out reasons?’
Carrying Page 3
