Cherries

CHAPTER THREE-2

When the number finally ended, the girls quickly dashed off stage, and entered a portable dressing room. The musicians set their instruments to the side and joined the women in the small room. The audience was still in a high state of excitement and now realizing that the concert was over, began to clap their hands and chant for an encore. Several minutes elapsed and not one person had left the area; the chanting and clapping continued in hopes of convincing the band to return for one last song.

The dressing room door finally opened, and the musicians burst out, running across the stage to their instruments. Seconds later, the three girls reappeared, dressed now in different colored silk robes; all using towels to wipe away sweat. The audience roared its appreciation.

The lead guitarist began plucking out soft notes to quiet the crowd. The center dancer of the three picked up a microphone and smiled at the crowd. “We are ‘The Crescent’ from the Philippine Islands, and we want to thank all of you for attending our concert. This will be the final song of the evening and is dedicated to all of you. Be safe and good luck!”

Suddenly, the guitar tempo changed and the band joined in, the dancers swaying from side to side. This song was heard many more times in various in-country concerts during the many months to come. The crowd quieted and the girls began singing ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’. The sad song stimulated memories of home and of those left behind. The rowdiness had ceased and the atmosphere changed drastically to one of calm and sentiment. Many in the audience were singing along and swaying sideways to mimic the singers on stage.

Bill and John left before the end of the song in order to beat the rush back to the barracks.

When arriving, they found most everybody asleep, except for six people down on the far end of the building. Two of them were sitting on John’s bunk. When approaching the group, they stopped talking and looked up to the new arrivals.

“How are you guys doing? My name’s John and this is Bill. Seeing as you’re sitting on my bunk, do you mind if we join you?”

One of them, appearing to be the leader of the group, spoke up, “Hell no, we don’t mind. Come on and have a seat. This is Dan, Billy, Paul, Mike, Joe, and I’m Steve,” he said, pointing them out when saying their name. “We’re just shooting the shit.”

This was the group’s second night in the Replacement Center, and therefore, they knew their way around the basecamp. It was an opportunity for John and Bill to learn more about their temporary home. When interrupted, Paul had been in the middle of a story about the massage parlor on the next block. For the benefit of their new acquaintances, he started over from the beginning.

“It was a real b***h, man. They had twelve tables in this room. You strip in this little back closet, hang your clothes on a hook, and walk out with a towel wrapped around your waist. I got on the nearest table where this forever-smiling chick was waiting for me. There were at least nine other guys getting massages at the time. Man, that chick had magic fingers. In the fifteen minutes, she worked on me; it felt so good that I almost fell asleep. She was just about finished working on my legs when, get this, she asks me if I wanted a hand job.”

Everyone laughed.

“Go on, Paul, don’t stop now,” said one of the guys on the bunk.

“Well you know that sounded pretty good to me.” Paul continued, “I never had a chick do that to me before, so I asked her how much, and she tells me twelve bucks.”

“Twelve bucks,” Joe blurted out. “s**t, I’ll beat you for twelve bucks.”

The laughter was so intense that it was difficult for the men to hold back the tears in their eyes.

“Come on, guys,” Paul pleaded. “Let me finish.”

It took a few minutes for the group to regain their composure. Finally Dan volunteered, “Go on, Paul. We’ll try to control ourselves.”

“Okay, well I told her that I only had five bucks in my wallet, so I’d come back another day. Then she says, ‘No sweat, GI, I do for five dorrers’. s**t, I thought that was a bargain, so I told her okay. Now, instead of taking me somewhere else that was more private, she pulled my towel off right then and there and grabbed hold of me.”

Dan and Billy elbowed each other in the ribs; Joe slapped his knee and started chuckling. Paul looked at them incredulously and continued, “That was the last thing in the world I expected. Man, I jumped right off that table, embarrassed as all hell, and snatched back my towel, wrapping it around my waist. She looked hurt and some of the other people were looking over at us. I caught my breath, leaned over, my mouth inches from her ear, and told her calmly that I did not want her to do this right here in front of everyone. She smiled – looked straight into my eyes and asks me if I was a Cherry boy.”

The small group could not take anymore and began to howl and roll around on the two cots. The racket began waking some sleeping soldiers; they scowled at the group and told them to keep it down. Nobody wanted to start any trouble so the group apologized and continued to converse in a lower tone.

“I don’t believe it. Our own Paul chickened out – poor thing couldn’t handle the pressure,” Dan said sarcastically.

Paul shot back coldly, “If you think you’re such a bad a*s, then why don’t you go try it tomorrow. Show everybody what you have?”

“That’ll be the day I pay some chick five bucks to beat my meat.” Dan stated, nodding his head affirmatively and looking at the rest of the group for support.

“Yeah, you probably do it every night too, don’t you?” Paul retorted.

Joe interceded, “Goddamnit, Paul. Don’t get bent out of shape. You know we’re just f*****g with you.”

Paul sat there and fumed. It would take him a few moments to compose himself and allow the angry color to drain from his face.

The group quickly changed the subject and began talking about other topics for the next couple of hours. As they were conversing, John could not help but notice the diverse regional accents and slang terms he was encountering for the first time in his life. It both fascinated him and made him feel a long way away from his home in Detroit.

During one of the discussions, Dan informed Bill and John of the radiophone in a building next to the PX. The MARS station allowed a person to call home for a small fee. It was not a telephone, and both parties had to use proper radio procedures and military etiquette, such as saying “over” when one party finished talking, before opening the channel for the other to reply. Bill and John agreed to look into it the following day.

In the morning, the first manifest included the names of those six soldiers from the late night muster. Assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, they would be traveling north to a place called Phu Bai. Somebody in the crowd stated that the 101st was in dire need of replacements as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars were kicking their asses in a valley called the A Shau. Rumor had it that entire platoons were lost during those hard-core firefights.

After all the names on the manifest are read, Bill and John left quickly to avoid any work details and headed straight for the MARS station, anxious to place a call home. Instead, they found a long line of prospective callers and observed several pages of names posted on the door – a waiting list. Neither had any idea how long it would take to rotate through the list, but added their names to it, just in case they were still at the Replacement Center when it was their turn.

With nothing else to do until the next reading in a couple of hours, both decided to walk around the center. They found an outdoor movie theater, another restaurant, a swimming pool, post office, two basketball courts, baseball diamond, and the notorious massage parlor. It was like visiting a recreation center or youth camp, with the only sign of war being the bunker line and barbed wire.

After the noon manifest reading, those remaining soldiers filled in the holes and tightened up the formation. Several Non-Commissioned Officers (NCO’s) weaved through the formation, grabbing personnel for various details. A young buck sergeant, looking younger than most of the men standing on the street, strolled through the formation and chose Bill, John and a dozen other soldiers for a painting detail. This time nobody could escape.

John and Bill’s group painted in the hot sun all afternoon. Ironically, they were painting the fence enclosing the Reception Center’s swimming pool. The water teased and beckoned to them all day. Finally, unable to control himself any longer, Bill dropped his brush, rushed through the gate, and jumped fully clothed into the refreshing and cool water.

The rest of the men in the paint detail exchanged glances in stunned silence. Then, as if on cue, everybody dropped their brushes and followed Bill’s lead. They splashed around in the water, unchallenged for several minutes, like a group of grade school children on a field trip. All at once, two service club attendants emerged and ordered them from the pool. Reluctantly, one by one, they emerged from the water and returned to their tedious detail.

Clothes dried quickly in the hot, blaring sunshine, and soon they were all sweating again, contemplating a second dip in the pool. At five in the afternoon, the project only required another hour to finish, but they were all relieved of their duty and told to go to the mess hall for dinner.

After John and Bill ate dinner and cleaned up, they returned to Alice’s Restaurant. This time, their attempt to win on the slot machine was successful when Bill hit the jackpot with the first three tokens.

Bill stood there dumbfounded and watched the hundreds of coins dropping into the tray below. Bells and sirens were sounding from the machine and a red strobe light above signaled that somebody had just hit the jackpot.

“Glory be – this sure is my lucky day! Just look at all these here coins,” he cried out joyfully.

The noise and strobe light quickly attracted other soldiers who began to gather around the two winners. Everyone watched the payout window; numbers continued to climb and approached one-thousand – falling tokens already filling most of the tray below. Those standing around showed mixed support; some congratulated Bill and were happy for him, others simply looked on, saying nothing. One person, in particular, appeared to be quite upset, complaining loudly to his friend, “Damn! I just left that machine. Had I stayed and played another coin that jackpot would have been mine!”

Someone turned and responded to him loudly, “Yeah, but you didn’t, and now it isn’t. So get over it and give the guy a break!”

“f**k it, don’t mean nothin’,” he mumbled and walked away.

Meanwhile, Bill frantically raked the tokens into old coffee cans and found it difficult to keep up with the machine payout. The counter was still rolling and had passed fourteen-hundred. It stopped suddenly at fifteen-hundred and was quiet again.

Someone yelled out, “Way to go man. You just hit for seventy-five! Don’t spend it in one place.”

It took several more minutes for the two of them to transfer all the coins from the machine tray into empty coffee cans. When they finished, they muscled the five filled cans over to the cashier cage. The woman behind the counter congratulated them and paid Bill in military certificates.