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------- ------- ------- ------- -------We read Conrad’s Lord Jim while standing in the chow line. I’d finish a page and tear it out for Drake. We both agreed that, like Jim, we had ‘ability in the abstract’. Drake was a tall and almost good-looking guy except that his face was slightly out of line, as if something had gone a wrong in production. We’d gone though basic training together and were both assigned to Guided Missile School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma for second eight. -------It was seventeen degrees when we flew out of McGuire and in the low-seventies when we landed in Oklahoma. It got better from there. The food was good at Sill and, unlike during basic, there was plenty of it. Duty at the missile school was easy. The NCOs treated us like soldiers instead of recruits. ------- After lights out that first night, I listened to Drake, Bill Murray, and Cowboy trading one-liners. God, they were funny. I laughed so hard I could hardly breathe. Later when it got quiet I lay in my bunk thinking that I was two thousand miles from home and I’d never been happier. -------I liked Drake, but I couldn’t figure him out. He was smart, and he could crack me up any time he opened his mouth, but there was always something strange about him. Like the Sunday afternoon we hiked to the mountains. We walked for an hour, and the mountains never moved. We finally realized they were probably a hundred miles away. It was a nice day, though, so we kept going and saw hawks and prairie dogs and jackrabbits as big as deer. Then we started seeing scraps of metal on the ground -------“You know where we are, don’t you?” Drake said with a grin. -------“No,” I said, “what do you mean?” -------“We’re in an impact area, troop.” -------“Holy shit!” I said. -------“They won’t be firing Sunday afternoon.” -------“How do you know?” I said. “Anyway, there might be duds. We’re going back.” He laughed and bent to pick up a piece of shrapnel. -------“A souvenir,” he said. He showed me the live rounds of armor-piercing ammo he’d pocketed at the firing range at Dix. ------- Drake had flunked out of Columbia, he told me, because he did his studying at Yankee Stadium. His father taught college physics, and his mother was a pediatrician. I guess you’d call him downwardly mobile. He’d spent hours on the basketball court and could shoot field goals like Wilt Chamberlain. We got in a few pickup games at Sill. Drake was only fair under the net, but he could sink a long shot from anywhere on the court. All he wanted out of life, he said, was a Chevy Corvette. Didn’t sound like enough, but what the hell, I had no idea at all what I wanted. ------- We had a good time at Sill, Drake and me, and Bill Murray, Stan Flores, and Don Richards. We spent most evenings drinking 3.2 beer at the EM club. The Oklahoma night skies were unbelievable if you’d grown up in Jersey. It was February, and the prairie smelled like spring. Vietnam was just a couple years away, but we’d never even heard of it. ------- Sometimes the NCO’s liked to remind us why we were in the army. Most of them had been in action, either in WWII or Korea. One sergeant told us he really missed the hunting. ------- “What was there to hunt in Korea?” I asked. ------- “Gooks,” he said and grinned. ------- To tell the truth, I could see how it might happen. We were so bored one afternoon after running through the firing sequence twenty times that we got to talking about a war. It would be better, we decided, than spending two years in the van. We meant it, too. ------- After we got our certificates as Guided Missile Crewman they sent some of us to New Mexico to link up with a battalion over from Germany for training. They don’t let us fire missiles in Europe. Oro Grande had been a Jap prison camp during the war. The wooden barracks looked like an old west ghost town. You could see through the walls, and it was cold as hell at night. The desert around the camp was bare and beautiful. I liked to sit on a low hill after chow and watch the light go down over the mountains. ------- We were going back to Germany with the battalion when the exercise was over, but Drake was out of luck again. He’d traded in a pair dry rot boots and hadn’t gotten his replacements. He offered to buy a pair, but they just wanted an excuse to grab some poor schmucks for staff at Oro. ------- “A year in this shit hole!” Drake was sick about it. I can still see him sitting on his bunk with his head in his hands. I was worried about him. They said that a few months before, a soldier had wandered off into the desert and never been found. We dragged Drake down to El Paso with us on a weekend pass to cheer him up. ------- Paso wasn’t much back then, just a tired old city surrounded by rocky hills. We ate Mexican food that was too hot to taste and went across the border to check out Juarez. What a dump! The buildings were falling down, and the market looked like a slaughterhouse. We went to see a bad bullfight. Not that I’d know what a good one looked like, but this thing was pathetic. Everyone cheered for the bull. Afterwards we went to the Chico Bar, and I got a Scotch and soda for fifty cents. It tasted great. For a buck apiece they took us in a back room and played a grainy porno film. You couldn’t even see what happened. Some women in their thirties or forties came and sat at out table. One of them put her hand on my leg, but I shrugged it off so she turned to Drake. ------- Things got fuzzy after that. We were back in our hotel room, and a guy was passing around a bottle of tequila. I woke up on the floor next morning. Two GI’s I didn’t know were sleeping in the bed I’d paid for. I had a bad hangover, but Drake showed up for breakfast looking almost cheerful. ------- “Where were you?” I asked. ------- “Buying some experience,” he said. ------- It was Sunday morning, and I hadn’t been to church for months. I asked Drake if he’d go with me. We found a big Episcopal Church full of families with kids and everybody dressed up. It was like being home. The sermon was about hospitality to strangers, and I thought, what the hell, if somebody asks Drake and me to lunch we’ll go. ------- They didn’t, though. I went up to the minister afterwards and found myself handed out the door like a dirty rag. Drake and I might have been a couple lepers. ------- “It was me,” Drake said. ------- “No,” I said. “It’s an army town.” Maybe he was right, though. It was hard to put your finger on it, but Drake looked like trouble. ------- -------We’d fired three of our four practice missiles by now. They went up like giant Roman candles and made the loudest sound I’d ever heard, like a thousand trumpets, and none of them came anywhere near the target. One went two hundred miles until it ran out of fuel! I guess that’s why the Germans insisted we go to the States for training. -------The night before the last missile was fired, Drake and I and Donny Ball pulled guard duty at the launch site, ten miles west of Oro. They gave us pick handles to guard twenty million bucks of equipment. We’d carried rifles and live rounds at Sill, but the sergeant said they couldn’t take the chance that some dumb ass might shoot at a coyote and hit ten tons of toluene and nitric acid standing fifty feet in the air. -------I was asleep when someone shined a light in my eyes. He had a gun and told the two of us to stay in our bunks and we wouldn’t get hurt. -------“We’ll be out of here in two minutes, soldier. We cut the phone line, so you might as well go back to sleep.” -------I heard the trucks start up. I guessed they’d sell whatever they took for scrap across the border. Then I heard shouting in the distance. Drake and the missile were over a low hill a hundred yards from the guard house. -------Drake! Oh, Jesus, no! -------“Drake!” I shouted, but it was too late. I heard half a dozen shots, and suddenly the night lit up. I remembered to stick my fingers in my ears, and then the ground shook and the shack was gone and I could see the stars. 7 August 07 |