F.N.G

Chapter 2 – Arrival-1

2

ArrivalTwo seats away is a guy with a huge Adam's apple and g*n-barrel blue eyes like two line drives. His face should be on a calendar; he's too young-looking to be on Uncle-Sam-Wants-You posters, but the face is too honed to go to waste. He isn't looking right at me, but rather out the window behind me, and for a minute I can't look anywhere but into his eyes. I think of line drives. Say, when the mosquitoes are in off the river, towards the end of a pickup game, sunlight winking through the shabby bleachers behind third base, and a THWACK! Busts the ball out of nowhere, right at me… well, the guy's eyes are like two of them.

Of course I'm trying hard to think of something, anything besides this jet that is as big as a barnyard. I wonder where we are. From Seattle to Wake Island, where I only barely woke because me and some little guy sneaked a bottle of bourbon through the fence at Ft. Lewis.

The goddamn U.S. Army locks you in a fence twenty-four hours before your flight.

Twenty bucks for the bottle, but it kept me passed out until the rough landing scared me awake. That was when I first felt this alone. So alone, even though the plane is crammed full of guys like me. Like a toy box full of play soldiers.

Now, the plane's wing points steadily at a splotch of rock in the ocean while we spiral lower. My seat belt is too tight, I need to piss. The guy beside me wakes up and soon everything is almost upside down.

~ ~ ~

“FALL OUT!”

Some prick lieutenant screams it like his echo is the only thing he's ever heard. So Okinawa is another airport, another stepping stone toward The w***e's door.

“Ungoddamnly hot here. I'd rather be home,” from the guy with those eyes.

He moves his mouth a lot when he talks and his whole face changes but it starts and stops in that calendar smile. His voice moves that Adam's apple moves like a busy bobber on the end of a fishing line.

Some lifer directs us to a painted yellow line while he is talking. “This here s**t-lookin’ rock is Ok-i-fucki-Nowhere,” he says.

Ok-i-fucki-Nowhere is scorching concrete checkered by red and yellow lines. The front wheels of our plane are straddle a red one. Our yellow line stretches forever west, unless the sun sets differently in Asia.

We are jungle-green mockingbirds and, like he's holding a cracker, there's a guy facing our line who reads the roll-call numbers through his nose:

“US five-five, niner-four, niner-seven, one, one.”

“Here,” one bird calls.

“RA three fifteen, forty-six, sixty-six oh seven,” like he's pinching his nostril.

“Here.”

Standing in that heat, completely Olive Drab, we don't seem like men—instead like poultry, like a truckload of doomed fryer hens, all so alike.

“I'm Albert Steven Saxon, answer to a*s, hail from Kansas City, and I'd rather be there instead of here,” he says.

His speech is fast and even, like baseball chatter. He pops little bubbles out of his chewing gum when he isn't talking. It seems like his jaw muscles would get sore.

“I'm Gabriel Sauers, from near Cincinnati.”

Our line lumbers toward the tropical webbing that pushes against the airport concrete. There are vines as thick as telephone poles that wind through each other and into some stubby trees that don't have tops. Above the trees is the looming tower of the terminal, studying the landing field like it a one-eyed rooster.

A path that is almost invisible from the runway leads to an open area where a lot more guys are sitting in red dust. No one seems to have anything to do. Some are smoking or reading, but they are mostly grouped into fours and fives, sitting in the dust, probably talking about yesterday or a year ago.

Albert Steven Saxon sprawls into the dust and pulls his hat over his eyes. He is lanky. His legs look like they grew twice as fast as the rest of his body, and his uniform fits funny. The shirt bags out like it is full of air and his pants are about the right length but shaped like sausages.

“How long you reckon we'll be laying around this here hole?” he asks.

“Not long enough. The next stop is the big one, I'm sure of that.”

“‘The big one.’” I like that, Gabriel,” he tells me, from underneath his hat. He says it again, and the bill of his Army baseball hat is so low all I can see is that calendar smile, teeth like a tight white fence.

Another plane comes in, a military transport, camouflaged in the same colors as the jungle that this airport is hacked from. But I'm not ready for the load of guys that streams out: not in any line.

Marines. Fuckin’-A filthy. Pimples galore, jags of beard, in ODs that are torn and stretched and not even olive drab but permanently rusted-looking, red, the color of the dust. The first ones that come into the clearing pass the word back to the others still on the airfield.

“Hey,” one yells. “Get a load of these newbie dudes!”

And as they come in with their enormous packs, every single one stands a minute and eyeballs us. They are ragged, they stink, there is almost no difference between the color of their jungle utilities and their faces. They are carrying rucksacks that are like mule packs: dirty, bulging sacks with things tied on by shoelaces; bandoliers of machine-g*n ammo are strung around some like vines. They've got every weapon I've ever seen: mostly rifles, M-16s that are gouged and broken, some held together by tape. There are M-60 machine guns and a few shotguns. Almost all of them have grenades tied to their rucks, and everyone who has a hat on wears a “boonie” hat, camouflaged jobs, like duck hunters wear.

“Jesus.” a*s comes off his back and pushes his Army Issue baseball hat back, then just sits there, eyes line-driving the other guys. A short Marine comes over our way and stands staring back at a*s, who is staring only because he can't help it. The Marine asks if anybody is from the City, and the guy next to us answers Oklahoma City.

“Oh, Jesus. A bunch O’ dumb-fucker clodhoppers.”

The first few minutes of conversation are like that. We are foreign and antagonistic to each other. As more Marines come and spread throughout the clearing the conversations change. One guy wants to know who is leading the American League and if the ‘69 Chevies will really come stock with FM radios.

“Where'd ya get those hats?” a*s asks eventually.

“Quang Tri. We're up near the Z. They sell ‘em everywhere. You'd best get one if you go to the field.”

He takes his hat off and gives it to us. It has been rolled, crammed, and wadded so often it doesn't have a shape. Like a shrunken gunnysack. The whole thing is covered with inkings that are fuzzy because they've been wet and been gone over a lot of times. It has a calendar with days X'd off and the names of places he has been. “God is my point man” is written in red ink.

“Keep your pot close by, though,” he says. “You'll want to crawl up inside that fucker sometimes.” He slaps his steel helmet, which hangs on the bottom of his rucksack like a mushroom broken off its stem. He lights a cigarette with matches and uses only one hand.

“Been in the field for seven months and been getting the s**t kicked out of us for a solid week so they lifted us out, too many guys losing it, know what I mean?”

“Guys going crazy, huh?”

“Going, goinger, and gone—that's all there is left of us. I flipped my own damn self, couldn't have taken another day. Fuckin’-A lost it.”

I wish afterward that I didn't notice his eyes that get like clear shooting marbles in the handsome red face.

~ ~ ~

There is something so common to all of them. Things hang around their necks: dog tags taped together so not to rattle, rosaries, three and four strands of beads, silver crosses, crude peace medals. There is no extra flesh on the hundred of them. They are all, in fact, as skinny as Bluetick puppies.

And they're all high or getting that way. One guy pulls out a bag of dope that is as big as a softball and rolls a joint eight inches long out of C-ration toilet paper, and when I get a hit I know it ain't like any dope I've ever had.

On two hits I get ungodly high. I keep flashing between these veterans and squirrel hunting back home. Today is opening day. These guys and their plastic rifles don't have much in common with the old farmers waiting in the woods for daylight, but as I lie there too stoned to move I daydream and the feelings seem a lot alike. Bullets are the only thing hunting and war have in common, but I want to find other things, to calm myself.

~ ~ ~

For twenty-four hours the war machine breaks down somehow, somewhere. The Marines can't leave until something changes, and we are held up by something else. Little by little we mingle with the vets, but there is a constant gap of experience that keeps hold of the conversations, the feelings, the looks, even the laughs.

I keep comparing the differences in their hats and ours. Ours are all alike: olive-drab Army baseball hats. The tags inside all read “Cap, man's cotton, OC 107 DSA 100-65,” but all their Boonies read differently:

Fuck the Army.

Try a little tenderness.

War is hell and scary.

West by God Virginia.

Stop ugly children, sterilize LBJ.

I spend the whole night in about the exact spot where I first sat down. The air hardly changes temperature, and when I wake up in the middle of the night the sky glitters. a*s is sleeping beside me, and the sounds he makes are like practice snores, as if the voice he snores through hasn't deepened yet. On the other side of the clearing I can see a flashlight moving and a guy is calling, “Hawkins, Cecil Hawkins,” in a singsong way, over and over. After I get up and take my leak and get back down I don't think I'll be able to go to sleep again, but the last thing I remember is that voice singing for Cecil Hawkins, nearer but still far away.

It is just getting light when they line us into the plane alphabetically. Saxon, Albert S., draws the seat across the aisle from mine. He is making conversation with the guy next to him while the plane is taxiing.

“Well, y'reckon the war will be over by tomorrow?” he asks me after we level off.

“I doubt it. Last I heard they couldn't decide what shape to make the peace table.”

I try to read but I can't concentrate. When I give up the book we are going through clouds the color of Mom's hair.

When we begin to drop he says, “Here we go,” so when we land

I say, “Here we are.”

Cam Ranh Bay doesn't look anything like I imagined it. And I had imagined it, imagined it, imagined it.

When we were making our low approach, the village itself looked like stacks of wood chips.

We get processed through the airport and put into a bus. The compound is centered around the airport. There is nothing but buses, jeeps, and trucks on the roads. For one short distance we cross through gates and drive for five minutes through sand dunes. All along the road is concertina wire laid in three layers with guard towers every so often. There are Vietnamese walking along the road. There is a scrapped tank swarming with little n***d kids. Everything seems extra noisy—the high whine of the bus's diesel engine, planes landing and taking off over the road, helicopters hovering in lines.

I can see the village now and then through the sand hills. It is very low to the ground. Nothing sticks up higher than ten feet. When we approach another part of the compound the road is flanked by sandbagged watchtowers. Men hang out of some of them as we go slower now. They yell.

“God pity Eleven Bravos.”

“I'll be eating your sister's sandwich in twenty days.”

“Peace, brother.”

No one in the bus yells back. Eventually we stop and line into lines that line into ranks that line-drive into a mess hall, eat in twenty minutes, and line again in front of a staff sergeant.