The wheelies are playing basketball in the white lie ward.
    Recently amputated men play basketball to learn how to control their shiny new wheelchairs.  If you can play basketball in a wheelchair you can do just about anything.  Except walk.
    While nurses touch you from the voids which have no stars, you stand staring through a glass door at the energetic amputees.  The doctors and nurses call the amputees "amps" or "ampies."  The amputees, perhaps more in tune with reality, accept no slack, and prefer to call themselves "gimps."
    The gimps are pieces of people with brains attached, strangely still alive, weaponless men who went off to war and interfaced with a hostile explosive device and were unlucky enough to get only half-killed.  If suffering is good for the soul, then the Viet Nam war must have done the gimps a world of good.
 

    Tough nurses force you to walk back to your own ward and lie down on a spiffy clean rack.  The rack is too soft for comfort after a year of sleeping on a reed mat in the back of the Woodcutter's hooch in the village of Hoa Binh, Viet Nam.  For three months you have spent most of your time on this rack, in the prone position, locked at attention like a good Marine, a vegetable waiting to be put into the stew.
    To starboard a sexy nurse is sponging off the quadriplegic Seabee.  They've got the Seabee laid out like a clothing store mannequin in clean blue pajamas.  The nurse with the sponge is Lieutenant (j.g.) Audrey Brown.  Every guy in the ward with legs wants to jump her bones and every guy with hands tries to cop a feel.
    The quadriplegic Seabee's last Darvon injection is wearing off.  His nose is starting to ache now because they've stuffed his nose full of plastic tubes.  His jaw is wired.  The only way he can express his pain is with his eyes.  The nurses watch him real close because he's not a very happy guy and they think he might try to kill himself by biting his tongue off and swallowing it.
    The Yokosuka Naval Hospital near Yokohama on Tokyo Bay in Japan stinks of alcohol.  You sleep on a black-air pillow of painkilling drugs.  You get glucose for breakfast and pretend you're having eggs.
    While you eat through a hole in your arm you wiggle your fingers and your toes to verify that during the night some New Guy surgeon has not chopped off your hands and your feet.  You feel lucky that you have avoided the abrupt surgery of land mine, shell, and booby trap, and the hassle of owning a flesh-colored prosthetic device, but you worry a lot about last-minute complications involving your extremities.  After the war there's going to be a lot of people walking around with no feet and you have a pretty good idea that multiple amputees are not going to receive invitations to join the Pepsi generation.
    They cut off a scout sniper's leg one night when his vein graft broke.  He embedded his campaign ribbons into caramel candies and drank them down by chugging a quart of vodka.  Then he sang drunken songs to himself.  As the pins on the ribbons cut open his stomach, he bled to death.
    There are those we pray won't recover.  Whenever one dies, we smuggle in beer and throw a party.
 

    Lying around being a vegetable gives you a lot of time to think, and that's not helpful.  Why did you go to war?  They've been trying to figure that one out since Hitler was a Corporal.  You were young and the young love to travel.  Now suddenly you're old and you just want to go home.
    The walls of the post-op ward are eggshell white.  Your pajamas are sky blue.  Squid pecker-checkers in pea-green gowns and funny green shower caps patrol past the sixty beds in the ward, looking at clipboards through thick glasses and stopping to talk about you like you're not even there.  If you speak to them they look at you like you're a chair that suddenly started singing "Moon River."
    Lieutenant (j.g.) Audrey Brown finishes up with the quadriplegic Seabee and stops by your rack for a moment and fluffs your pillow like a moonlighting angel.  She's very sweet to you, considering that relatively speaking you are hardly even wounded.  You've got shrapnel lacerations and a slight limp.
    At Charlie Med back in Viet Nam they dumped your naked carcass onto a canvas stretcher laid across two sawhorses and surgeons dug a hundred pieces of pressed steel wire hand-grenade shrapnel out of your body.  You're serviceable now and won't be surveyed back to civilian life as a circus freak or singing paperweight.  Only now when you try to squeeze your pimples they don't come out white--like maggots--but are bits of black flaky charcoal with gray metal inside.
    You've got what the doctors call "proud flesh" all over your face.  Proud flesh is a special kind of scar tissue, the doctors say--the toughest kind.
    First they tried some skin grafts using skin from a white Yorkshire pig.  They found shrapnel.  They gave you the shrapnel in a plastic vial.  But the pig skin refused to graft, and that was okay with you.  Then they took some cuttings from your buttocks, sewed them on, stuck an I-V in your arm, hung a bottle over you, and waited.
    While you slept, you had a dream in which you could hear the clicking of surgical tools.  Scalpels sliced off your face and the medical staff made sandwiches.  Then they wheeled your gurney over to the new economical do-it-yourself amputation ward--for sergeant E-5s and below--where you were issued a rusty hacksaw and a bullet to bite on.
    You have no complaints.  You don't look so bad for a dumb grunt with his ass grafted onto his face.  You look a little bit like Errol Flynn if Errol Flynn had ever played Frankenstein.
 

    Lieutenant (j.g.) Audrey Brown smiles at you and her smile makes your shorts too tight.  You think maybe you might love her a little bit if she were a little younger and not quite so strict.  She makes you eat green beans.  You hate green beans.  She puts giant Popsicle sticks into your mouth and looks into your mouth with an expression on her face like she's poking into a hole full of pond scum and rotten chickpeas.
    Nurse Brown dominates you with needles and with big soft white tits that smell like talcum powder and fresh bread.  Back when you wouldn't eat your solid food she leaned down and let you look at them as long as you would allow her to spoon-feed you.  Those were the good old days.
    Now you are sorry when Nurse Brown's warmth moves away.  She stops at the next bed to readjust the oxygen tent over the Crispy Critter.
    The Crispy Critter to port is a tanker, an overflow from the burn ward.  Somebody RPG'd his ride.  He was trapped inside a burning tank.  Ammunition cooked off in the storage racks and the tanker was thrown free by the explosion.  They couldn't find a vein in the Crispy Critter tanker's charred arms, so they stuck the I-V needles into the tops of his feet.  At night you can hear him plea bargaining with God.
 

    They segregated me for a while, until the military intelligence pogues in S-2 got the story down pat the way they wanted it in the newspapers.  Then I was transferred to the recovery ward.
    In the recovery ward we get to eat nonliquid eggs for breakfast.
    I bring six metal trays of food back from the galley and pass them out to the gimps.  The walking wounded and the wheelies bring the nonambulatory wounded and the gimps hot chow and horse pill tranquilizers.
    The snuffies hang tight together here in this forgotten place, and we take care of one another, every night, just as we took care of one another in Viet Nam, because there's nobody else we trust.  God loved us, but he died.
    Skillful surgeons and tireless nurses tend us by day, sewing up the wounds they can see.  But at night we return to Viet Nam and wake up screaming.  We piss napalm and cough up spiders.  Nobody here but us vegetables, legless, ball-less wonders, more gargoyles for the museum, hire the handicapped-- they're fun to watch.  Every night we fight to keep our brothers alive.  Every night we suture up our gaping invisible wounds with black-light needles.  Although we have malaria, we still maintain our area.
 

    I do my impression of Mort Sahl, the political comedian.  I hold a newspaper as a prop and I tell the story of how America was invaded by Eskimo Commandoes.
    "So they were chubby little troopers, wearing fur hats with red stars on them.  Rawhide parkas.  Combat boots.  They came in for a beach landing in battle-gray kayaks.  They had scrimshawed bayonets of walrus bone, government-issue.  And a K-9 Corps of penguins in flak jackets.  They had rawhide bandoliers loaded with snowballs."
    I get a few mild chuckles as I pace up and down the center aisle of the recovery ward.  Wounded people who think they might be dying are a tough audience.
    "The Communist Eskimo Commandoes were ordered to blow up the TV-dinner factory near Laguna Beach, California.  The Eskimo political commissars figured that without TV dinners half of the male population of America would starve."
    Somebody way down at the end of the ward says, "There it is."  He gets the big laughs.  I hate it when amateurs get bigger laughs than I do.
    I continue: "But they saw some California girls.  All California girls over the age of nine are gorgeous honeys.  It's a state law.  If a girl turns sweet sixteen in California and she's not well on her way to being a stone fox, the California Highway Patrol escorts her to the border and exiles her to Nevada.
    "So the Eskimo Commandoes started rubbing noses with the beach bunnies and lost all of their military discipline and political indoctrination in less than five seconds.  The beach bunnies were like pink frisky seals and promised to take off their bikinis if the Eskimo Commandoes would denounce Karl Marx.  The chubby dupes of Moscow agreed, and then everybody sat down in the sand and ate corn dogs.  The Eskimo Commandoes soon discovered that, unfortunately, the Laguna Beach sand angels were all deformed freaks.  The good news was that they were biologically accommodating."
    Someone says, "How were they deformed freaks?"
    I say, "They all had breasts that were bigger than their heads."
    Through the moans and the groans, someone says, "Okay, so then what happened?"
    I say, "Oh, I don't know.  The usual thing.  They told Eskimo jokes."
 

    Noon.  The quadriplegic Seabee has visitors from back in the World.  They come down the aisle through the ward with high heels tapping, looking neither to the right nor the left.
    There's his mother, dabbing her nose with a paper napkin.  And his father, who looks lost.  And his girlfriend, all big ass and chunky legs and smelling like a graveyard for dead flowers.
    They talk to the quadriplegic Seabee a lot but they don't say anything.  The Seabee looks relieved that his jaw is wired together so that he couldn't talk even if he wanted to.
    When the visitors from home leave, his girlfriend, sobbing, lags behind, savoring her big moment as the heroine in a soap opera on TV.  She says, "Bobby, I'm sorry."  She takes off her gold engagement ring with a diamond in it the size of a grain of sand and places it on the foot of his bed.  She hurries away, reeking tragedy from every pore of her fat little body.
    Later on that afternoon some pogue Admiral in a hat with gold scrambled eggs all over it comes in with about five hundred photographers and pins medals for heroism under fire and Purple Hearts on us while we are helpless to resist.
    I get a Silver Star and a Purple Heart, but they don't say why.  Probably some pogue made a clerical error.
    When they come to the Crispy Critter tanker, the weight of the Navy Cross hurts his chest.  They pull the medal off of his pajamas and pin it to his pillow.
 

    "AH-OO!  AH-OO!" says Ranks, announcing his arrival deep in his diaphragm with a traditional Marine Corps "bark" that is like the love call of a horny gorilla.  Ranks is a Lance Corporal from Motor T. He pushes a gurney piled high with magazines and paperback books down the ward.  He stops at each bed to chat and to proudly show off his rank insignias to any New Guys.
    Everyone salutes him and he returns their salutes.
    Ranks was blown up by a booby trap planted inside his truck's engine.  Some VC sapper used fifty pounds of officers' metal rank insignias stolen from an American PX as shrapnel for a bomb.  When Ranks opened up the hood of his truck to check his engine, he got a face full of brass.
    A black grunt with a bandaged head is telling a cute Japanese student nurse a sea story about the first time he got hit.
    "This is no shit," says the grunt head-wound.
    Noting the confusion on the student nurse's face, Ranks translates: "This is a true story."
    "The Six souvenired our herd a C-A op in a beaucoup number ten thousand hairy A-O."
    Ranks says, "Our commanding officer assigned our military unit a combat assault in an unusually scary place."
    "The cannon cockers checked fire on the arty prep and Huey gunbirds standing by hit a hot Lima Zulu."
    "After an artillery bombardment, armed helicopters carrying Marine riflemen landed under heavy fire."
    "A B-40 sucking chest wound wasted my bro."
    Ranks translates: "My friend was killed when shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade hit him in the lungs."
    "The Kid took A-K rounds B-K T&T."
    "Rifle bullets went through my leg below the knee."
    The black grunt head-wound says, "Payback is a motherfucker.  "
    Ranks explains, "What goes around comes around.
    The grunt continues, "Phantoms pickled ordnance, snake and nape.  Cobras peppered the treeline, want some, get some, here's a little money from home for yo' zipper-head mama, Mr. Charles."
    "Our fighter-bombers dropped bombs and napalm on enemy positions effectively and then helicopter gunships strafed enemy military personnel and their mothers."
    The grunt concludes his sea story by saying, "A dustoff dee-dee'd friendly Whiskey India Alphas to Charlie Med, most ricky-tick.  Them chuck squid pecker-checkers were number one.
    "A medical evacuation helicopter," says Ranks, "flew American battle casualties to a battalion aid station without delay and the treatment by Naval personnel was excellent."
    The Japanese student nurse smiles at the black grunt, then at Ranks, shrugs, and haltingly says, "I'm very sorry.  I do not speak English."
    As the confused nurse walks away, Ranks and the black grunt head-wound laugh and say, "There it is, bro.  Sorry 'bout that."
    Stepping over to my rack, Ranks says, "Hey, joker, m'man, my bird is coming out!"  He points to his cheekbone.  A silver eagle with spread wings is embedded just below his left eye, a silver shadow just beneath the surface of his skin.
    Ranks has got a brigadier general's star of glittering silver in his jaw and gold and silver oak-leaf clusters in his neck and silver railroad tracks embedded in his forehead.  His whole body is full of metal.  When they cut open his chest they found a ball of lieutenant's bars as big as a man's fist, miniature bullion, a pirate's treasure of silver and gold.
    "Outstanding, Ranks," I say, saluting.
    Ranks returns my salute and pushes his gurney on to the next bed.
    "AH-OO!" says Ranks, "AH-OO!  AH-OO!"
 

    Now that I'm out of the recovery ward, every Thursday at 1600 hours I go get my head gear oiled by a shrink.
    A Navy psychiatrist is to psychiatry what military music is to music.  No fucking pogue lifer questions Command.  Even the chaplains are on the team. The job of a milita psychiatrist in time of war is to patch over any honest perceptions of reality with lies dictated by the party line.  His job is to tell you that you can't believe your own eyes, that shit is ice cream, and that you owe it to yourself to hurry back to the war with a positive attitude and slaughter people you don't even know, because if you don't, you're crazy.
    Five minutes after I met my shrink I psychoanalyzed him as a weakling and bully who was always chosen last for baseball teams when he was a kid and who glories in the power he can exercise in the doctor-patient relationship, in which he is always the one who gets to be the doctor.
    I hate his crisp clean khaki uniform.  I hate his deep masculine voice.  I hate him because he is everybody's counterfeit father.
    Lieutenant Commander James B. Bryant drones on: "You are merely identifying with your captors.  It's an old, old story.  It really is not at all uncommon for hostages or prisoners to come to admire-"
    I say, "Man, you are so out of date, even your bullshit is bullshit.  "
    Commander Bryant leans back in his blue-gray swivel chair and smiles.  The smile is half smirk and half smug superiority and half shit-eating grin.  "What are your gut feelings about the enemy, now that you're free?"
    I say, "Who's the enemy?"
    With either the patience of a saint or the arrogance of a saint--with saints it's always hard to be sure--he says, "The Viet Cong.  Define the Viet Cong for me."
    "The Viet Cong are scrawny rice-munching Asian elves."
    The Commander nods, picks up an unlit pipe, and chews on the stem.  "I see.  And how do you feel about having done your duty to your country in your three tours in Viet Nam?"
    I say, "Being young is the art of survival without weapons, but we had weapons, and we used them to burn Viet Nam alive.  I'm ashamed of that.  It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but it was the wrong thing.  In an unnecessary war, patriotism is just racism made to sound noble."
    "But soldiers in all wars have "
    "John Wayne never died, Audie Murphy never cried, and Gomer Pyle never dipped a baby in jellied gasoline."
    "I see," says Commander Bryant, making a little note on his little notepad.
    I say, "Why is it so important to you that I be crazy?"
    The Commander pauses, then says, "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."
    "Look, read my lips.  I was a soldier in the Liberation Army.  I lived in a Viet Cong village with Viet Cong people.  I was never tortured.  I was not brainwashed.  They never even questioned me.  They knew more about my area of operations than I did.  I fought against the enemies of the people of my village and I'm glad I did it and I would do it again."
    Commander Bryant smiles.  "Of course you did."   He makes a note.
    "You know I did."
    "Typical messianic complex."
    "See?  I can't talk to you.  You're not real.  You're just a box of words."
    The Commander says, "Let's say for the sake of argument that you did in fact defect to the Communists.  And that you may have killed American military personnel."
    I say, "People.  I may have killed people.  It was my gun, but you pulled the trigger.  And I never defected to the Communists.  Communism is boring and does not work.  But if the federal government of the United States died, I'd dance on its grave.  I've joined the side of people against the side of governments.  I've gone back to the land.  When Americans lost touch with the land, we lost touch with reality.  We became television.  I don't want to be television.  I'd rather kill and be killed."
    "But how can you morally justify trying to kill your own people?"
    I say, "How can I morally justify trying to kill anybody of any country?  I killed Viet Cong soldiers, but I didn't kill them because they were evil human beings.  I killed them because I believed they were wrong.  It's not personal.  The War for Southern Independence proved that you don't have to hate people to fight and kill them.  The Americans I fought were not bad men.  They were some of the finest looters and killers I ever run with.  But they were on the wrong side.  You have to shoot a rabid dog, even if it's your best dog.  I've been loyal to what's right and I have been betrayed by my country."
    Commander Bryant throws his pencil onto his desk.  "You can't seriously expect me to believe that."
    I stand up and walk to the wall.  I take down one of the doctor's many medical diplomas.  I select one that has fancy printing on it that looks like the icing on a wedding cake.  "Well, you can believe it, not because I said it but because I did it."  I turn the diploma over, slide out the cardboard backing, and pull out the diploma.  "Action is expression.  Attitude is posing."
    I fold the diploma.  I say, "I have been a prisoner of the war, and that has given me a very bad case of existential jet lag, profound and permanent.  Ordinarily, I'm not one to hold a grudge, but I am a Viet Nam veteran and the White House has murdered forty thousand of my friends."
    The Commander watches me, his mouth open, with just a trace of trembling in his sweaty upper lip.
    I fold the diploma into a paper airplane.  "War makes you nervous, but it also provides you with opportunities for therapeutic action."  I throw the paper airplane across the room.  The paper airplane lands on the Commander's desk and crashes into his second-place trophy from the Cape Cod Yachting Club.
    The Commander grits his teeth and says, "You are a traitor in time of war."  He slams his palm down hard on his desk.  "With paranoid psychotic tendencies."
    I say, "I'm not a traitor in time of war.  War has not been declared by Congress.  There is no war.  Only the muscle flexing of an Imperial President.  The thing I don't like about pogues is that you love rules, but not logic.  I renounce my right to citizenship in an idiot's world.  Your ignorance is as hard as iron.  And it is willful ignorance, ignorance by choice and by design.  Of course, more than one person has accused me of having a bad attitude.  But don't worry, you fucking pogue lifer, you're safe, the pogues always win, sooner or later.   Nobody likes a man who means what he says.  In the land of mutants, plain talk is deadly poison and the man who means what he says will be hanged."
    "You, Private, are clinically insane."
    I laugh.  "I roger that I've been hitting Maggie's drawers in my wild shots at sanity.  Was Colonel Tibbets insane when he dropped a bomb on Hiroshima and vaporized a hundred thousand people?  No, Doc, I'm only half crazy.  If I have survived--and I'm not sure I have survived--it's only because I have a genius for staying only about half crazy."
    Commander Bryant suddenly jerks open a desk drawer and digs out a manila file folder.  "Oh, really?  Well, smart guy, take a look at these photographs and tell me what you see."
    The first dozen snapshots are of dead Marines photographed where they fell in the field in Viet Nam.
    I say, "Can I keep these?"
    "Of course.  But why?"
    "I want to show them to civilians back in the World.  A picture is worth a thousand words."  I put the snapshots into the cargo pocket of my utility trousers.
    Commander Bryant opens another desk drawer and brings out a brown file folder.  He pulls out a handful of eight-by-ten glossies and drops them onto the desk in front of me.
    I flip through the photographs.  Bad lighting.  Obviously the pictures were made in a morgue.  A dead man on a slab.  The dead man is my father.  "Your mother has already remarried."
    Commander Bryant says, "Yes.  You killed him.  That's right.  You killed him.  He killed himself.  He died of shame."
    I say, "You're wrong.  My father trusts me."
    Commander Bryant is astonished.  "Is that all you've got to say?  Come on, let's hear your smartass comeback to those pictures.  "
    I place the photographs back into the brown file folder and I drop the file folder onto his desk.
    "Do not take prisoners," I say, "and do not allow yourself to become one."
 

    Walking back to the transient barracks after visiting Ranks and the quadriplegic Seabee and the Crispy Critter tanker in the recovery ward, I see some Navy hospital orderlies standing in a group, smoking cigarettes, and watching a Marine grunt who won the Congressional Medal of Honor at Con Thien.  The grunt has a flesh-colored plastic leg.  He's pulling a shit detail, policing up cigarette butts.
    The squid orderlies laugh and smoke their cigarettes and make remarks, just loud enough to hear, and they thoroughly enjoy that unexplainable gut-level poisonous hatred that men who have skated being in a shooting war can sometimes feel for less fortunate men who have been forced to meet themselves face to face in battle and have survived.
    Like a woman who has never given birth, the man who has not faced death and inflicted death will for all of his life feel somehow not quite complete.  Combat veterans are completely puzzled and bemused by the strangers who try to start fistfights with veterans in bars to prove how tough they are.  Macho civilians envy the veteran for something the veteran, or at least some veterans, would be only too happy to transfer, or get rid of, like bad memories, or a plastic leg.
    The soldier's war comes and goes, and ends.  But noncombatants search endlessly for substitutes for war and attach to war that esoteric glamor which always attaches itself to the unattainable.  It's like talking to a race of people whose big disappointment in life is that they will never be survivors of the sinking of the Titanic, will never be one of the chosen few who can proudly say that he had his hands burned off in the crash of the Hindenburg.
    Veterans quickly learn that the fantasies of aspiring war heroes and the realities of the experience of war, what you gain for a short time and what you lose forever, can never be bridged.  As the Spanish say, there is only one man who knows, and that is the man who fights the bull.
    I greet the limping Marine policing up cigarette butts and we give each other a thumbs-up.
 

    Last night a Recon buck sergeant who made the decision that the rest of his life would not be life locked himself in the laundry room and hanged himself with his pajama bottoms.
    Marines know how to die without wasting anybody's time.  Vein grafts break in the night.  Grunts cough up pieces of metal and die.  Nineteen-year-old boys go yellow in the face, then gray, and don't say a word.  The orderlies find them in the morning.
    If you want to make a sculpture of a Marine who has been blown away and fucked up totally, all you have to do is drop a living brain onto a pile of raw hamburger meat on a gurney and hammer the whole mess through and through with railroad spikes and ten-penny nails.  Then you set fire to the brain.
    Now when I visit my friends in the recovery ward I try not to look at the things in the beds, because I've been here before and I know the question they all want to ask:  Will any of us ever be human again?
 

    The clerk at casual quarters says, "S-2 called, joker.  Your orders are in.  I picked them up for you."
    I say, "Thanks, bro."  The clerk hands me a manila envelope, then bows.
    The casual company clerk is wearing a red silk kimono sewn with white tigers and blue dragons.  On his feet are black leather combat boots, without laces.  The lump under the kimono is the colostomy bag that hangs under his arm.  The North Vietnamese Army pulled his intestines out and stomped them into the dirt.  For the rest of his life the clerk will shit through his armpit into disposable plastic bags.
    The clerk once said to me, "I've been in a war and I've been in a hospital.  That's my life."
    I look at my orders.  Somebody in the chain of command finally made a decision about me and cut me some travel orders.  I'm not going to be shot.  I'm being given an honorable discharge as a Section Eight, a medical discharge they give to crazy people.  I've got a lot of money on the books in back pay for the time I was a prisoner of war.  I'm to report to the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, California, for immediate discharge.
    Bowing to the company clerk, I say, "Go easy, bro.  You owe it to yourself."
    As usual, the company clerk is smiling.  He has always been an easy audience for my jokes.  The casual company clerk smiles a lot because he no longer has any lips.
 

    I walk over to transient barracks, wondering if maybe my orders could be some kind of clerical error, like when they let that lady out of the deathcamp by mistake.
    The barracks is deserted.  Transient barracks in casual company is always deserted because the garrison squids see transient Marines as slave labor on the hoof and nobody wants to be press-ganged into some shit detail or working party.
    Most of the racks aren't occupied and the mattresses are bent double on bare springs.
    While I'm packing a small AWOL bag for outposting, two civilians in cheap Hong Kong suits come into the barracks.
    One guy is young, tall, slender, tanned, and has perfect white teeth.  He has blond hair, blue eyes, well-developed muscles, and he reeks with good health and vitality.
    The other spook is middle-aged, with reptilian eyes, jowls, and the exaggerated black brow line of a Neanderthal.
    The perfect team: the Surf Nazi and the Missing Link.
    The Surf Nazi says, "We talked to your head doctor about you, boy. He says you threatened to make a stink, request mast, go to the newspapers, if we kept you in an isolation ward, or if we tried to shitcan you on a DD--a dishonorable discharge."
    I say, "So who the fuck are you?  CIA?  NSA?  G-2?  S-2?  FBI?  Staff Counter-Intelligence?  Consulate representatives?  Office of Special Assistants to the Ambassador?"
    "N.I.S.," says the Surf Nazi.
    "Yeah," echoes the Missing Link.  "We're N.I.S."
    I squat, Vietnamese-style.  I say, "Naval Investigative Service." I laugh.  "More spooks."
    Using a window as his mirror, the Missing Link takes quick puffs on a cigarette while he clips his nose hairs with shiny little scissors.
    The Surf Nazi says, "You're gonna pull brig time.  You are guilty of violating Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military justice: aiding the enemy and misconduct in the face of the enemy.  Both carry the death penalty.  We could shoot you, boy.  I'm talking firing squad.  We will Eddie Slovik your ass.  We got you on a charge of soliciting American soldiers to lay down their arms.  Yeah, so you pulled a little tour of duty with the pajama boys.  Well, we are going to deep-six you for collaborating with the enemy in time of war.  Davis, you're history."
    I say, "I didn't collaborate.  I joined up.  I enlisted."
    "Then you confess that you're a traitor to your country?"
    I say, "I confess that I'm a traitor to the federal government.  The federal government is not the country.  It likes to think it is, and it damned sure wants honest citizens to think it is, but it's not.  I believe in America more and have risked more for America than any incestuous nest of parasites who call themselves Regulators.  Thomas Jefferson never dropped napalm on peasants.  Benjamin Franklin did not shoot students for protesting an illegal war.  George Washington could not tell a lie.  My government of self-righteous gangsters makes me ashamed to be an American.  I secede from your Viet Nam death trip."
    The Missing Link says, "We will court-martial you for treason.  We will keep you here on bad time for-fucking-ever, sweetheart.  We will red-tape you to death."
    "Get out of my face, you pathetic simpleton.  What are you going to do, send me to Viet Nam?"
    The Missing Link puffs away inside a cloud of cigarette smoke.
    The Surf Nazi opens a window.
    The Missing Link says, "You're freezing me.  You're driving me crazy, always opening windows."
    The Surf Nazi says, "You're poisoning me.  You're giving me cancer.
    "It's low tar!"
    "I don't like the smoke , says the Surf Nazi. "It stinks."
    The Missing Link puffs.
    The Surf Nazi says, "Show him."
    "No," says the Missing Link, "I don't want to show him.  I don't like him."
    The Surf Nazi says, "Go on.  Show him.  I'm hungry."
    The Missing Link grumbles, says, "Yeah, I guess I'm hungry too."  He pulls some papers from the pocket inside his coat and gives them to me.  The papers are Xerox copies of newspaper clippings from half a dozen big newspapers.  The headlines say: MARINE PRIVATE CAPTURED and TORTURED BY CONG and BRAINWASHED BY COMMUNISTS and WAR HERO DEEP-SIXED ON SECTION EIGHT.  One clipping features a photograph of me proudly accepting a Silver Star.  Some big General I never saw in my life is pinning the medal to my chest.  The headline reads: GYRENE POW HERO AWARDED MEDAL FOR VALOR.
    My father's death was not from shame.  I'm a hero.
    The Surf Nazi says, "Talk to the newspapers.  Tell them your delusions.  Try to be a guru for the hippie scum that is protesting the war.  Would the Marine Corps make a hero out of a defector?  You're brave, you're loyal, but you're a little bit confused, that's all.  And understandably so.  You're just not packing a full seabag, boy.  You're one sandwich short of a picnic."
    I say, "I understand.  You're afraid to admit that anyone might choose to fight you.  Might give people ideas.  No American soldier can ever be portrayed as resisting the government of America, because too many people would ask why, too many people would ask what went wrong, and there are no erasers on spook pencils."
    The Surf Nazi grins.  "There are no spook pencils.  There are no spooks.  We're not even here."
    "Not even here," says the Missing Link.  He paws through the shaving gear on my rack.  My rack is so squared away that you could bounce a quarter off the blanket.  The Missing Link examines my razor blades, then picks up a letter addressed to my mother telling her I'm still alive and coming home in one piece.  We don't have a telephone on the farm.
    I say, "Put that letter down, dick breath, or you will be wearing a stump sock on your neck."
    The Missing Link looks at me, says nothing, takes a puff on his cigarette, then drops the letter onto my pillow.
    "Let's eat," says the Surf Nazi.  Then to me: "We'll be watching you."
    As the spooks turn to go, the Missing Link says, "Yeah, be watching you."
    I say, "And we will be watching you."
 

    The flight on the Freedom Bird from Japan to California inside Fortress America is an eighteen-hour fantasy for two hundred lean and tan Viet Nam veterans.  Lots of cold beer and round-eyed stewardesses.
    War may be a Cinderella story in which men turn into soldiers, but being discharged at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station south of Los Angeles is a dull and tedious cattle call from big white squad bays to Quonset huts all over the base to the red brick HQ and then back again.
    Medical examinations.  Lots of miscellaneous spit and polish stateside bullshit.  Pay records cleared--I get a year's back pay.  We drop our skivvies and draw our pay and it's hero to zero in eight hours flat, out of the Green Mother and back in the World.
    We know we're on our way to being civilians when we're sent to an auditorium and the Los Angeles Police Department gives us a recruiting speech.
    After the recruiting speech we're ordered to go to the building next door for the next step in our processing.
    Inside the building, pogues sit at desks, shuffling papers like battery hens awaiting the laying urge.
    A pogue clerk lifer with his eyes on his paperwork shoves a sheet of paper at me without looking up.  "That's your DD 214," he says.  "Hang on to that."
    I wait.  The pogue clerk ignores me.
    I say, "Okay, pal, so what's the next stop?"
    "What?"
    "Processing.  Where do I go from here?"
    The pogue clerk looks up and sighs.  He has the fucking pogue lifer's weird blend of arrogance and incompetence, the surly smirk of the punk who is unaccountable and knows it.  He's old, and tired, and he doesn't look like anybody.  He says, "Jesus."  He frowns.  His face is fishbelly white and spotted with red acne.  "That's it, dummy.  You're out."  He says, very slowly, in the whining voice of somebody's smart-mouthed kid brother, "Do . . . you . . . under . . . stand?"
    I say, "That's it?  That's all?"  To his sneer I say, "Hey, bro, cut me some slack.  This is my first discharge."
    The pogue looks down at his paperwork, pouts, ignores me.
    I turn and start for the door.  When I put my hand on the doorknob the pogue says, "You got to have your papers stamped if you want to get off the base."
    I turn around and walk back to the counter.  "What?"
    The pogue holds up a rubber stamp.  "You got to have your papers stamped if you want to get off the base."
    "So stamp them.  What's wrong, your arm broken?"
    The pogue pouts, says nothing.
    I say, "Would you like to have your arm broken?"  But I do not unscrew his head and sbit down his neck. That's not my job. Not anymore.
    The pogue is coy.  "I can't stamp your papers.  Your papers are not in order.  "
    "What's wrong with them?"
    "They're not in order."
    I stand at the counter, opposite the pogue, and I do nothing.  I wait.  I don't protest.
    Perhaps the eternal appeal of war is that the pogues are all in the rear.  In the field in Viet Nam I would trust a grunt with my life even if I had never met him and didn't know his name.  It's pretty to think that there are some pogues out there somewhere who are dittybopping into a crew-served weapon, but that kind of thing never happens, because pogues know how to avoid a fight.  Pogues know how to get good men to do their fighting for them.  Then, when the going gets rough, the red-tape soldiers sneak away in the night and cozy up to their Swiss bank accounts.
    Little Hitlers, Wally Cox Nazis, pogues rule the world not by courage or ability but by sheer weight of numbers, cultivated inertia, flattering myths revered in common, and an undying loyalty to an ignorance as hard as iron.  They have killed all of the tigers and the rabbits are in charge.
    I wait.  I don't argue.
    The fucking pogue lifer says, "I'll give you a break.  This one time.  But next time, I'm warning you, you better have your paperwork in order before you come in here."
    Paper rattles under the pogue's fingers.  The pogue brings the rubber stamp down hard on my medical discharge with the authority of a thunderbolt from God.
    "Okay," I say, "we're done.  You can slip back into your coma now."
    As I leave the Quonset hut, trying to figure out the meanings of the papers in my hand, I hear the fucking pogue lifer reply to a comment from someone in the rear of the office.  He says, "Yeah.  It was a dumb grunt.  Just another dumb grunt."
    Far in the rear of the office, someone laughs.
    Outside, in the cold light of a counterfeit sun, I laugh too.  I don't say to myself, "Well done, Marine." But I do say, "There it is."
    Pulling a tour of duty in the military service of your country is like being put onto a chain gang for the crime of patriotism, except that on a chain gang you get shot if you run away and in the military you get shot if you stay.
    Walking to the bus station, I contemplate my bleak and hopeless future, a future populated by surly file clerks, loyal company men, hall monitors who grow up to be cops, brainless civil servants, sexless schoolmarms and stern librarians and Hitler Youth meter maids, and a whole catalog of pasty-faced bureaucrats bloated up fat and sassy with money extorted from taxpayers by force, sopping up gravy they didn't cook.  The whole damned world is ruled by fucking pogue liters and Viet Nam has taught me that my religion is that I hate pogues.
 

    Still in uniform, I take a bus from El Toro to Santa Monica, California, via Los Angeles.
    Sleeping on the bus, I have a dream in which Charlie Chaplin turns into a werewolf and vomits up the arm of a child.  Part of me is bleeding in the dream.
    Los Angeles is a big concrete refugee camp lost inside a Gordion Knot of freeways, a place where stores have iron bars over their doors and where bag ladies patrol the street picking up scraps.
    Santa Monica is by the sea.
    In Viet Nam, Bob Donlon never stopped talking about the glories of the Oar House bar.  He made it into a legend.
    On the wall outside hang two huge boat oars.
    Inside, the Oar House is a dismantled carnival that has been glued onto the walls of a long narrow cave, a junkyard of the past and a museum of the bizarre.  On the walls and ceilings hang branding irons, old movie posters, a brass diver's mask, a stuffed shark, a wooden wagon with a World War I German Iron Cross painted on the side, an old motorcycle, a canoe, a stuffed wolverine, a stuffed muskrat, a stuffed baby elephant, life-size clown dolls, and a painting of a guy picking his nose and coming out with a miniature cheeseburger.  There's a lot of other stuff, but it's getting blurry.
    The floor is an inch deep with sawdust and peanut shells.
    Between chugging pitchers of beer I'm telling Katrina, a sexy German barmaid with hypnotic legs, who is as pretty as a silver dollar, the story of my life: "Like the Indians, we fight to stay on the land.  On the land we are men.  We are free.  We don't need anybody.  In the cities we are refugees.  Katrina, the Indian agents gave government cattle to the Indians.  Beef on the hoof.  The proud Sioux warriors didn't know what to do with cattle.  They didn't know how to kill them so they could eat them.  When they got desperate, they stampeded the cattle and pretended they were buffalo, then rode them down and shot them with flint-tipped arrows.  In refugee camps we have no dignity.  We'll be forced to beg from the fucking pogue liters and live on their handouts.  The pogues want us in the cities.  They own the cities."
    Katrina does not speak English well, so she makes a good listener.  At some point in my babbling I ask Katrina to call Donlon on the phone for me.  I give her the number.  "Tell him the Joker says to polish his brass and present his ass, most ricky-tick."
       Katrina calls, gives Donlon my Papa Lima, my present location.
    By the time Donlon comes in with a hippie girl I'm a hammered Marine hanging on to the bar, throwing marriage proposals at Katrina like darts, and mumbling about Song and the Woodcutter and Hoa Binh and Johnny Be Cool.
    Donlon and the hippie girl take me home with them and put me into bed.
 

    At breakfast there is little time for a reunion.
    "Welcome home, bro," says Donlon.  He hugs me.  He has grown paler and fatter.  "Joker, this is my wife, Murphy."
    "Hi, Murphy," I say.  Murphy is wearing blue jeans and a leather vest with nothing on underneath.  On the front of the vest are two yellow suns and jagged yellow lines.  Murphy has very big breasts and sometimes you can see a brown half-moon of nipple.  Murphy is not a pretty woman, but she is very earthy, very attractive.  She doesn't say anything.  She doesn't smile.  She walks over, hugs me, kisses me on the cheek.
    "Let's go, Murphy," says Donlon.  "We're late."
    Donlon safety-pins a white band of cloth bearing a blue and red peace symbol around his bicep.  Murphy puts on an armband that says MEDICAL AID.
    "Make yourself at home, Joker," says Donlon.  "We'll be back tonight, maybe late."
    "Where you going?"
    "Federal Building in Westwood.  Protest by the VVAW."
    "The what?"
    "The VVAW.  The Vietnam Veterans Against the War."
    "I'll go with you."
    Donlon says, "It might get violent."
    I laugh.  "If you're going, I'll go with you."
    Murphy goes into the bedroom and comes out with a logger's shirt and some faded blue jeans.  "You can wear these."
    I say, "No.  But thanks, Murphy.  I'll wear my uniform.  I'm proud to be a Marine."
    Donlon laughs.  "Lifer!"
    I shrug.  I say, "Once a Marine, always a Marine."
 

    During the drive to Westwood in Donlon's orange Volkswagen bug, Donlon says, "We sort of been expecting you to visit.  We saw your picture in the L.A. Times.  It said the Crotch souvenired you one Silver Star for being an outstanding and squared-away POW.  All of the guys were glad to hear that you were a POW.  The Green Machine had you down as MIA, but we all know what that means.  We figured the gooks had planted you in a tunnel wall somewhere north of the Z."
    I say, "What a pretty picture."
    Murphy says, "It must have been bad over there, as a prisoner.  "
    I say, "No, it wasn't so bad.
    Donlon says, grinning, "So did you ever meet the Phantom Blooper face to face?"
    I say, "Does a teddy bear have cotton balls?  Does Superman fly in his underwear?"
    Donlon says, "Bullshit."
    I say, "No, that's straight skinny.  The Phantom Blooper and I were tight.  We used to hang out together down at the Viet Cong E.M. club."
    Donlon laughs.  "There it is."
 

    Before we get to the Federal Building, Donlon brings me up to date.  Donlon is studying poly-sci at UCLA.  Animal Mother is alive; he escaped from a Viet Cong prison camp in Laos.  He's still in the Crotch, a lifer, stationed at Camp Pendleton.
    Stutten lives in New Jersey and has a kid with a harelip.
    Thunder is a cop with the LAPD and is a star sniper on a SWAT team.
    Hand Job died of colon cancer at age twenty-two.
    Daddy D.A. is an alcoholic working as a mercenary with the Selous Scouts somewhere in Africa.
    Bob Dunlop joined the cancer-of-the-month club and is dying of cancer of the mouth.
    Harris, the hillbilly, shot himself in the head, but didn't die.  When people ask him if he served in Viet Nam, he denies that he is a Viet Nam veteran.
 

    The Federal Building is so big that it dominates Westwood, the chic cluster of boutiques nestled against the campus of UCLA.  Overlooking a vast veterans' cemetery that extends as far as the eye can see, the Federal Building looks like the Tomb of the Unknown Veteran.
    On the front lawn along Wilshire Boulevard, thousands of people are massed in the sun.  There are banners and placards everywhere.  A pretty teenaged girl's T-shirt reads: TO HELL WITH NATIONAL HONOR--WE WON'T BE USED AGAIN.  And I see a middle-aged woman carrying a hand-lettered sign that says: MY SON DIED FOR NIXON'S PRIDE.
    Donlon parks the car ten blocks away and we walk back and join the crowd.  We listen to a lot of fiery speeches.  One vet says, "Viet Nam means never having to say you're sorry."  Another says, "Viet Nam is like a piece of shrapnel embedded in my brain."
    Donlon steps up to the microphone and says, "I want all of the FBI informers in the audience to raise their hands."
    Nobody raises a hand, but everybody looks around at everybody else.
    One of the guys behind Donlon raises his hand.  The guy has a red bandanna tied around his head.  He says, "I confess!"
    Everybody laughs.
    Donlon says, "That's just the King, people."  To the King he says, "Your Highness, sit your silly royal ass down."  The King makes a courtly flourish with his hand and steps back.
    Donlon continues: "Okay, now I want everybody who thinks that one of the individuals on either side of you is an FBI informer to raise your hands."
    Everybody looks around and laughs as all hands go up.
    Donlon does an about-face and addresses the Federal Building.  "Yo, J. Edgar.  How's it hanging?" Then, to the audience:  "The FBI is the highest achievement of the federal civil service.  It's the phone company with guns."
    The audience laughs and applauds.
    Most of the men in the audience have ragged beards and are wearing hippie beads, peace symbols, and military gear--mildewed boonie hats, faded utility jackets studded with unit patches and badges, representing all branches of the military.
    Donlon reaches over and takes my arm and pulls me to the microphone.  "This is Joker, a brother, just back from the Nam.  Come on, Joker, say something funny."
    I look at the audience and I think about what I should say to men who have gathered together to fight against their own war.  When the silence starts to make me feel self-conscious, I say, "You can't fight bayonets with songs."
    Someone says angrily, "What does that mean?"
    "Yeah," says the audience.
    I say, "I mean that you people are warm-hearted, you're good people, but you are kidding yourselves if you think that slogans printed on gumballs are going to stop the Viet Nam war.
    The audience grumbles, jeers, moves closer to the podium.
    The King jumps forward and says, "He's right!  Pick up the gun!  Pick up the gun!"  His face is wild.  "Off the pigs!"
    Donlon pushes the King back, says to me and to the crowd, "Joker, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War observes a strict policy of nonviolence.  We're not going to fight anybody.  Not even against Nixon, the skull-king of San Clemente."   He taps his armband.  "I'm a peace marshal.  That means that it's my job to prevent any of our people from resisting arrest by any means except passive resistance."
    I say to Donlon and to the crowd, "I wish you luck."
    Before anyone can say anything there is a sudden flurry to port.  We all look over there and we see a long double line of the biggest policemen in the world advancing, faces hidden behind tinted Plexiglas helmet shields.  The policemen are carrying long walnut nightsticks.  Their uniforms are so blue that they look black.  They attack, silver badges flashing in the sun like shards of burning metal.
    The black lines merge and whack at the edge of the crowd with nightsticks, attacking without warning and without mercy.  Before we can react, chaos breaks out as tear gas canisters are lobbed in from starboard, followed by a second double line of cops, a blocking force.
    People run around in circles, trying to escape, choking on the tear gas.
    I see Murphy frantically distributing damp dishrags to be used as primitive gas masks.
    A ragged verse of the song "We Are Not Afraid" ripples through the demonstrators while white-helmeted tactical squads in blue flak jackets elbow their way through the trapped demonstrators, clubbing everybody.  Some of the veterans lose their tempers and take swings at the cops with their fists while peace marshals try to restrain them.
    The King picks up one of the slim gray tear gas canisters and throws it back at the police.  The smoking canister hits a cop in the kneecap and brings him down.  This enrages the police even more.
    I see Donlon and some of the other peace marshals begging the police to have mercy.  The police ignore the peace marshals and hit them with their nightsticks.
    I move toward Donlon and I hear a police Sergeant give the order: "Pound the shit out of everything hairy that moves."
    The cops converge on a fifteen-year-old girl.  The girl is wearing a boy's sweater.  The sweater is gold-colored and has a black high-school varsity letter on it.  One cop gets behind the girl and latches a bar arm control on her throat with his nightstick, chokes her with his nightstick across her throat.  Her tongue comes out.  She's suffocating.
    The middle-aged housewife with the MY SON DIED FOR NIXON'S PRIDE sign moves clumsily, pulls at the cop's arm, but he shrugs her off.  The cop says, "Get away from me, bitch.  You're next."
    The housewife hits the cop with her cardboard sign.  The cop releases the girl in the varsity sweater and allows her to collapse unconscious to the ground.  Then he turns and hits the housewife in the face with his nightstick.
    The cops reach the microphone, where twenty disabled Viet Nam veterans in wheelchairs are jammed together.  The cops dump the crippled and legless veterans out of their wheel-chairs onto the ground and beat them with nightsticks as they try to crawl away.
    I see Donlon trying to protect the wheelies and I'm right behind him, ready to kill.  Donlon tries to talk to the cops, tries to reason with them, tries to calm them.  But the cops are as reasonable as Brownshirts in Nazi Germany.  When Donlon tells the cops that the crippled men are wounded veterans, the cops get even madder.
    One cop turns and hits Donlon in the face with his nightstick.  Donlon falls.
    The cop who hit Donlon turns away and returns to beating the wheelies.  The wheelies who have arms hold up their arms to block the blows.
    As I move toward Donlon some cop involved in a violent struggle drops his helmet.  I pick up the helmet, which looks like headgear for a Martian gladiator.
    I charge the cop who hit Donlon.  By the time he looks at me I'm already swinging the helmet and the helmet hits the cop's Plexiglas face shield and the face shield shatters and the cop's nose breaks and blood splatters the inside of the Plexiglas so that he can't see.  While the cop takes off his helmet I get an armlock on his throat and I put my knee into the small of his back.
    I say, "Drop the nightstick or I will break your spine.
    Somebody lays a nightstick hard across one of my kidneys and it hurts and I fall down.
    When the police handcuff me I'm spread-eagled on the deck.  Donlon is lying next to me, unconscious.
    A cop steps up to Donlon, says, "We're Viet Nam veterans too, asshole."  The cop spits in Donlon's face.
    Another cop says, "That boy is going to lose that eye."
    The spitting cop says, "Yeah.  Life is hard, then you die."  And they both laugh.
 

    I'm herded together with a hundred other prisoners of war.  The pigs don't see us as people anymore.  We are no longer American citizens.  We're the Viet Cong.  We're the enemy.  We are dupes of Moscow.  We are round-eyed gooks and we have no I.D.
    Except for the guy they call the King.  The King flashes FBI credentials at the cops and they let him go.
    A blond cop comes up to me, looks me over.  He is a snarling, sneering little shit.  "Look.  Just lookie lookie," he says, and two more cops come over to check me out.  Blondie taps my chest with his nightstick.  "Look at this rack of fruit salad. He's got three Purple Hearts. But no stripes."
    Blondie gets up in my face and says, "You make me ashamed to be a Viet Nam veteran."
    I say, "You make me ashamed to be a human being."
    The blond cop slaps his nightstick into his gloved hand.  "Yes, this is starting to look like another case of resisting arrest.
    Suddenly a cop, still wearing his helmet and with his face shield down, shoves his way past the three cops and says, "This one is mine."
    The helmeted cop drags me away and throws me roughly into the back seat of a black and white prowl car with a rack of blinking blue bubble-gum machines on top.  Inside, the car smells of vomit, whiskey, and cheap perfume.
    As the prowl car pulls away, the blond cop and his pals wave goodbye to me and laugh knowingly.  I feel like a Viet Cong Suspect who has just been invited along for a friendly little chopper ride.
    I watch through the metal screen as the cop takes off his helmet and looks back at me, grinning.
    Thunder laughs.  "Joker, you piece of shit.  Where the fuck did you come from?  We thought the Phantom Blooper wasted your ass at Khe Sanh, the day before we pulled out.  You're a real ball of tricks, man.  You're a fucking magician."
    Jerking myself clumsily up into a sitting position, I say, "Thunder, you fucking pogue lifer.  What the hell are you doing being a cop?  It's good to see you, man."
    Thunder shrugs.  "Hey, man, maybe half of the guys in the department are Viet Nam veterans.  What can I say?  It's a good job.  Good pay.  Twenty years to a pension.  I ain't no Einstein.  They got me with the snipers.  Only now I don't waste gook officers.  I waste dirt-bags, junkies, and pimps."
    I say, "Yeah, sure, and dangerous criminals like those people back there."
    "Listen," says Thunder, looking back over his shoulder as he drives, "I hate that bullshit.  I really do.  Hey, Donlon is a friend of mine.  I was looking for him when I found you.  Somebody told me he was hurt.  I'm in the VVAW too, Joker, only don't tell them that downtown.  Orders is orders."
    I say, "How bad is Donlon hurt?"
    Thunder says, "Listen, we'll go to this place I know.  I'll get you out of those cuffs and we'll have a couple of beers.  Give the fucking pogue liters downtown time to book the demonstrators.  I'll call the station and find out where they took Donlon.  I didn't see Murphy.  She must have got away."
    "That's solid, man.  Thanks.  And thanks for the huss."
    Thunder says, "Don't thank me, bro.  We're family."
    I don't trust myself to make a reply.
 

    VVAW lawyers have Donlon out on bail in a couple of hours and Thunder drives me to the hospital in Santa Monica where they've taken him.
    Thunder stays in the car.  "I can't be seen talking to Donlon," he says.  "I'll wait for you.  I'll drive you to the airport."
    I go in alone.  Murphy is in the waiting area.  Some other wives of vets are with her.
    "Are you okay?" I ask.
    Murphy says, "Yes, thank you, Joker.  I'm glad you're here."
    I say, "Is he sleeping?"
    "Yes."  Murphy looks up at me, holding her feelings in.  "He's lost his eye."
    I don't say anything.  Then:  "I've got to go, Murphy.  My family is waiting for me.  They haven't seen me for three years."
    Murphy stands up, hugs me.  "I understand.  It's okay.   There's really nothing more you can do here.  You'll keep in touch?"
    I say, "Of course.  Will you be okay?  Is there anything you need?  I've got some money with me, back pay."
    Murphy says, "Thank you for the offer, but we'll be okay."
    A nurse comes out of Donlon's room.  The nurse is a sexy candy-striper with long blond surfer-girl hair and big blue eyes.
    I say, "Could I just look in on him for a second?"
    The candy-striper starts to say no, but Murphy touches her arm and the candy-striper says, "Okay.  But just for a second.  Okay?"
    I go into Donlon's room.  He's drugged to the gills.  One whole side of his head is bandaged.  His head is in a harness so that he can't move.  His eye is covered with a Styrofoam eye-cup.
    I stand by the bed.  I feel like I'm back in the recovery ward in Japan.
    Donlon opens his good eye and sees me.  He's too weak to say anything.
    I lift his hand off the bed and I hold his hand in a grunt handshake.
    I say, "I wish you a lifetime of cold L-Zs."
 

    The day after the peace rally in Los Angeles I'm standing in a dirt road in front of Cowboy's home in Kansas.  It's twilight and I'm thinking about how Kansas is nearer to Oz and the Emerald City than it is to the village of Hoa Binh, Viet Nam.
    Here in this vast ocean of swaying wheat, gold below and blue sky above, the air is clean and the silence is broken only by the flutter and warble of flights of sparrows.  For a moment the war seems like a black metal fantasy, nothing more than a particularly noisy nightmare.
    But even here in Kansas with my feet firmly set on American soil I can see Cowboy's face the moment before I fired a bullet through his head.  He gave me the Lusthog squad, and when I took the squad from him he trusted me to protect the life of every Marine in the squad, even if I had to get wasted to do it, even if I had to waste another Marine to do it.  I just wish it hadn't been him.  I liked him.  He was my best friend.
    In my nightmares I see it over and over, but it's always the same.  Cowboy is down, shot through both legs, his balls shot off, an ear off, a bullet through his cheeks has torn out his gums.  Cowboy is being shot to pieces by a sniper in the jungle.  The sniper has already mutilated Doc J.-for-joint, Alice, and Parker, the New Guy.  Cowboy has shot them all in the head with his pistol and tries to shoot himself, but the sniper shoots him through the hand.  Then the sniper is shooting Cowboy to pieces so that the rest of the squad, led by Animal Mother, will try to save him and then the sniper can kill the whole squad, and Cowboy too.
    One time each night Cowboy stares at me with eyes paralyzed with fear, and his hands open to me like language and I fire a short burst from my grease gun and one round goes into Cowboy's left eye and rips out through the back of his head, knocking out brain-wet clods of hairy meat. . . .
    When you kill someone you own them forever.  When your friends die, they own you.  I am a haunted house; men live in me.  Every time I dream about Cowboy the nightmare ends in a fearful splattering of blood and I wake up in a cold sweat, wanting to scream, but afraid to give away my position.
    Now I'm on the other side of the planet, in a place where violent death is not the daily concern.  This is Kansas farmland, where weather is God and the ripening wheat is life itself.
    According to a rusty mailbox, Cowboy's parents live in an old Winnebago motorhome.  The motorhome is roughly the shape of and has been painted to look like a sliced loaf of bread.
    Off to starboard there's a small barn and a corral.  In the corral is a beautiful white horse.
    I step up onto the broken cinderblock that serves as a front step.  As I knock on the aluminum door, Cowboy's horse watches me from the corral and snorts.
    A woman comes to the door and invites me in.
    Cowboy's parents are dirt farmers.  Farm people feel that they are obligated to invite visitors to stay for supper, because it's only good manners.  And it would be bad manners not to accept.
    Because I am Cowboy's friend his mother cooks up a batch of Cowboy's favorite food: chili with Gordon Fowler's original Texas-style chili seasoning.  The chili has a lot of spicy Mexican things in it.
    Nobody says anything when Cowboy's mother sets a place for him at the dinner table.
    Mrs. Rucker says, "He always had his nose in some book about Texas.  I guess Johnny always wanted to be from Texas.  I don't know why."  Stirring the chili slowly, she says, "He was a good boy."
    When we sit down at the table Mr. Rucker invites me to say grace.
    I lower my head and say, "We thank You, heavenly Father, for the blessing of this food.  We ask You to bless our body strength in your glory.  Amen."
    The Ruckers say, "Amen.
    We eat.  I pull Cowboy's Stetson from my AWOL bag.  "Here," I say, "I think you should have this."
    Mr. and Mrs. Rucker look at the pearl-gray Stetson.  It is sun-faded, battered, shrapnel-torn, and too much of the red clay of Khe Sanh has been rubbed into it for it ever to come clean. it still bears a black and white peace button.
    Mrs. Rucker shakes her head.  "No," she says, a little coldly.  "It's yours now.  You best keep it."
    I put the Stetson back into my bag.
    "They sent a Captain," says Mrs. Rucker.  "He had a real bad sunburn.  I gave him some lotion for it.  He was a nice young man, very well spoken.  Missing in action, body not recovered, he said to us.  He said that they knew that Johnny was gone, but that his body was lost."
    I don't say anything.  I'm thinking that after what my bullet did to Cowboy's head, his body if recovered would have been sent back tagged "remains, nonviewable."
    Mrs. Rucker says, "It don't seem right somehow that he ain't resting here at home near his people."  She looks away.  "We for the longest time figured how maybe he was still alive, maybe they made a mistake."  She pulls a Kleenex from a cardboard box and blows her nose.  "I still get blue sometimes.  I know it's wrong, but I got hate in my heart.  I got hate heavy enough to carry to the grave.  I sent them a good Christian boy and they made him into a damned killer.  Then God's hand reached down and struck him."
    Mr. Rucker says, "Them people lied to us.  John Wayne movies murdered my son.  Them pointy-headed politicians hung him up like a hog for slaughter."
    Mrs. Rucker says, "I know that war was wrong.  I know it.  They were done wrong, all the boys.  But he was still my son and I'm proud of him.  Johnny was the best thing about this country."
    Mr. Rucker says, "Where are your people, boy?"
    I say, "Alabama, sir."
    "Farm people?"
    I say, "Yes, sir, we had a hundred and sixty acres in watermelons, but my dad had to go to work strip-mining coal.  He died while I was in Viet Nam.  I got a letter from my grandma.  She said he had a stroke.  I guess he didn't take to coal mining."
    "These are hard times," says Mr. Rucker.
    "Yes, sir," I say.  "Hard times."

    After supper Mr. Rucker sits in a rocking chair in a faded gray work shirt and stares through steel-rimmed glasses at a glowing plastic log in the electric fireplace, and smokes his pipe.  The smell of the pipe smoke is pleasant and reminds me of the Woodcutter.
    Mrs. Rucker and I sit on the sofa.  The sofa is red, black, bloated, and ugly.  Mrs. Rucker shows me the condolence letter sent by the Marine Corps.  She says, "It was real thoughtful of johnny's General to take the time to write to us.  They must have thought Johnny was real special."
    I read the letter:

    Dear Mr. and Mrs. Rucker:
        On behalf of the officers and men of the First Marine Division, please accept my deepest regrets and
    heartfelt sympathy on the death of your son, Sergeant John Rucker, U.S. Marine Corps.
        Although words alone can do little to console you in your great loss, I hope you will find comfort in
    the knowledge that John died valiantly in the service of his country and his Corps.
        If I may be of assistance to you, please feel free to write to me at any time.
                                                                                                                Sincerely yours,
    The letter is signed by the Commanding General.
    I don't tell Mrs. Rucker that the condolence letter is a form letter.  When I was a Combat Correspondent and pulled pogue duty in the Informational Services Office in Da Nang, I used to type them up by the dozens and sign them myself, forging the Commanding General's signature.  No one man ever could have signed letters as fast as our men were dying.
    Mrs. Rucker pulls an envelope from a thick stack of letters tied with a yellow ribbon.  Mrs. Rucker says, "This one came two weeks after they told us that Johnny was gone."
    The envelope is marked FREE where the stamp should be.  The letter inside is written in longhand on Marine Corps stationery, the cheap stuff they sold in the PX, a blue flag-raising-at-lwo-jima across the sheet, and a gold eagle, globe, and anchor at the top.  It's a letter Cowboy wrote to thank his mother for a box of sugar cookies she'd sent in a care package.  It is signed, "All my love, your green amphibious monster, Johnny."
    Beneath Cowboy's signature are a dozen other signatures.  The whole squad shared the box of cookies, so we all signed, thanking Mrs. Rucker.  My name is first.  At the bottom of the letter is a P.S.: "Don't worry about me, Mom and Dad.  Joker will take care of me.  I've got friends here, and we all take care of each other."
    We sit, in silence, and all of the unasked questions hang in the air between us like black stone funeral wreaths.  Why didn't I take better care of Cowboy?  Why did I survive while Cowboy died?
    After a while, I say, "Thank you, ma'am, for the supper.  I enjoyed it.  But I should be getting back on the road.  I'm kind of anxious to get home."
    "I know you are," says Mrs. Rucker.  "But it's late.  You're welcome to stay the night."
    Before I can reply, Mrs. Rucker gets up and walks to the rear of the motorhome.  "I'll fix up Johnny's bunk bed for you."
    "Thank you," I say, knowing that my visit has been an intrusion, and thinking that Cowboy's parents don't seem to have known him very well.
 

    Sometime after midnight I take Cowboy's guitar from the wall over his bunk and I go outside.
    I sit on the corral fence.  Cowboy's horse watches me with suspicion.  Then the beautiful stallion trots across the small corral, ghost-white, sleek, and strong.  The horse nuzzles my arm with his nose.
    I sing a song that Cowboy wrote in Viet Nam to Cowboy's horse.  The name of the song is "Jukebox in the Jungle."
    Cowboy's horse seems to like the song:

    The lights out here ain't caused by crowded barrooms,
    There ain't no jukebox in the jungle,
    There ain't no honky-tonks in Viet Nam,
    So, darling, when I got your Dear John letter,
    There was no place to go to hide my pain. . . .

    In the morning at first- light Mr. Rucker gives me a ride into town in his Datsun pickup truck.
    I catch a bus to the airport.
    It's only a short hop on a Delta 707 to occupied Alabama, the Heart of Dixie, where they talk so slow that if you ask them why they don't like Yankees, by the time they finish telling you, you agree with them.
    My plane lands in Birmingham and I catch a Greyhound bus north a hundred miles to Russellville, the county seat of Winston County, the "Free State of Winston."
    I sit in the bus, an unreconstructed Viet Nam veteran, and I watch the familiar countryside of low rolling hills and red dirt farms and cotton fields that go all the way to the horizon.
    The South is a big Indian reservation populated by ex-Confederates who are bred like cattle to die in Yankee wars.  In Alabama there is no circus to run off to, so we join the Marines.
    History is a Frankenstein's monster puppet whose strings are manipulated by the White House.  Indians are murderous red devils who spitefully built their villages on top of gold deposits and in the paths of railroads and were unwholesomely partial to captive white women.  Confederate soldiers are un-wholesomely partial to black women and had nothing better to do than whip Uncle Tom to death and sell black babies down the river.  The Russians, who have never fired so much as a pea-shooter at an American soldier, and who have never taken a cupful of American soil, and who lost twenty-five million people saving the world from Adolf Hitler, are an Evil Empire spawned by Satan, and are our worst enemies on the planet.  Because of our history, we drop bombs bigger than Volkswagens onto barefoot peasants twelve thousand miles from home and call it self-defense.
    Black John Wayne saw it all: you can stay here and live with us in our constructed phantom paradise if you promise to pay lip service to the lies we live by. If you salute every civil service clerk who claims to be Napoleon, you may play in our asylum.
    In America we lie to ourselves about everything and we believe ourselves every time.
 

    Looking through the smoked glass of the bus window is like watching a movie.  I see an abandoned black tarpaper shack with broken windows like open mouths.  The inevitable stripped and rusting car bodies sit in the weedy front yard next to the inevitable collapsing tool shed.
    I see scrub pasture being grazed by a bony red swayback mule.
    Nothing but a few metal historical plaques remain to show that the Greyhound bus is rolling along a black strip of asphalt laid down over the graves of a defeated race of people who lived in a stillborn nation, rolling through a haunted region, over buried battles.  It's Viet Nam, Alabama.
    The South was the American Empire's first subjugated nation.  We are a defeated people.  Our conquerors have cured us of our quaint customs, quilting parties, barn raisings and hog killings, and have bombed us with revisionist history books and Sears catalogs and have made us over into a homogenized replica of the North.
    The only visible relics of our conquered nation are crumbling brick walls and weed-grown fieldstone foundations and fluted white Doric columns being swallowed by swamp water.  Crumbling earthworks, trenchlines and gun emplacements, are silent now in the shades of forests of virgin timber, all garrisoned until the end of time by ragged, barefoot Confederate grunts, sweet old ghosts wailing to be understood.
    But the Confederate Dream lives on.  The Confederate Dream, a desperate and heroic attempt to preserve from federal tyrants the liberty bequeathed to us by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.  Stubborn sinews of the Confederate Dream live on, deep in our genes, a dream recorded silently and permanently by the metal in this soil.
 

    The Greyhound bus pulls into Russellville.  My hometown is moving on the other side of a piece of glass now and looks like television.  We glide past the Confederate stone soldier.   Beyond the stone soldier I can see a parade breaking up on a back street.
    In almost every town in the South that is big enough to have more than one gas station a stone soldier of the finest Italian marble pulls guard duty in the center of town.
    Our stone soldier is standing tall, leaning on a marble musket, staring intently at the horizon to detect the advance of Yankee armies.
    For generations the stone soldier in Russellville stood his ground in the center of the main intersection in town.  But after a drunk driver from Moline, Illinois, splattered his fancy little foreign sports car all over the stone soldier's marble pedestal, the old campaigner--one Yankee to his credit, confirmed--was shifted to a more strategic position across the road and onto the courthouse lawn.
    I get off the bus at the courthouse.  I say to the bus driver, a sexy young black woman with a red silk scarf around her neck, "Thanks, darlin'.  Don't work too hard."
    She grins.  "You take care now.  And welcome home."
 

    Russellville is so small that I used to draw a crowd when I'd set up my old paint-spattered rickety stepladder in front of the Roxy Theater.  Climbing up that baling-wired stepladder with an armload of foot-high red plastic letters of the alphabet to put up the title of the latest Elvis movie is probably the most dangerous thing I have ever done.
    People are friendly in Russellville, and used to stop and talk to me while I placed the letters, to ask me what the next movie was, or to make fun of my spelling errors, so eventually I started talking back to them, and telling them jokes.  Pretty soon I decided I was ready to be and wanted to be an actor in Hollywood.  Of course, in Russellville it was easy to stand out and be a star.  And it hasn't changed.  It's still just a wide place in the road.  It's still just another hillbilly half-town, clean and quiet, the kind of place that falls off maps.
    I walk past the Roxy Theater, which was built in an old-fashioned design like fancy icing on a Technicolor wedding cake.
    I walk into the parade as it turns a corner, breaks ranks, and dissolves into costumed people.
    When I was in high school the most common kind of parade down the main street of Russellville was the parade of hot rods full of my friends, one hundred 1955 Chevrolets burning up the last remaining fossil fuels in an eternal looping back and forth through town, from the A&P parking lot SALE-SALE- SPECIAL-SPECIAL at one end of town and back to the King Frosty, beneath an ice-cream cone that had light inside and was as big as a man, and back again, yelling at everybody, giving the finger to the guys, banging on the side of your car at fifteen-year-old jailbait.
    Every girl wore her boyfriend's varsity sweater and class ring.  The girls put adhesive tape on the rings to make them fit.  The big joke was to say, every time you saw a couple who were going steady and sat close together while cruising, "I wonder who's driving?"
    I feel like a New Guy in my own hometown.

 
    The band uniforms are of Napoleonic design, red longcoats and tall furry hats, brass buttons and brass buckles.  Trumpets and tubas gleam like burnished gold sculptures.
    As I scan their faces to see if there's anybody I know, the marchers fall out.  The last few ranks continue to lift their knees in a fading reflex even after the snare drummers stop rapping out the cadence on the metal edges of their drums.  The fat bass drummer unstraps himself from his drum and puts it down on the ground.  The drum says: THE MARCHING 100.
    On Main Street, farmers' wives without makeup and farmers who look at events and react, if they react at all, only with shy smiles, flow in converging currents along the sidewalks, heading for their cars and trucks.  The men are tall and thin and tanned and wear faded blue overalls and brown felt hats.  The women are plump and plain and wear cheap cotton dresses from Sears.
    The drum majorette walks by with silver in her eyes, tooting absentmindedly into the silver whistle in her mouth, her perfect body molded by gold sequins.  It's Beverly Jo Clark.  I know her.  But she doesn't recognize me.
    She's gone before I can speak to her; she's like a dream come true.
    Then come a dozen girls in red sequins and white vinyl cowboy boots, some idly twirling chrome bars with white rubber tips.
    I speak to a girl behind one of the blinking batons.  She's about seventeen, maybe a senior, but probably a junior.  I say, "Hi.  Don't I know you?"
    The girl looks at me, blushes, giggles, retreats toward her girlfriend.  The girlfriend has Bette Davis eyes and Betty Crocker thighs.  The two of them waddle away like baby ducks, sparkling red sequins and shiny batons glinting in the sun.
    I say, "Wait . . . Don't you know me?  I'm Jim Davis.  Do you know Vanessa Oliver?  Janice Tidwell?  Yvonne Lockhart?  JaDelle Steffanoni?  Donna Murray?  Jodi Corica?  How about my baby sister, Cecilia Davis?"
    The majorettes look back, giggling, embarrassed.  They are staring at the scars on my face.  The girlfriend says, "You're too old for us, mister."  And they laugh and strut away quickly, elbow to elbow, exchanging big whispers, both talking at the same time.
 

    I've come a long way to get home, only to find out that it wasn't worth the price of the trip, only to discover that, bottom-line, I am ashamed.  I am ashamed to call myself an American.  America has made me into a killer.  I was not born a killer--I was instructed.
    Russellville is a town that fears God and raises yearly crops of cotton, corn, and boys willing to die for the President.
    As more farms fail, the town grows.  The hearty yeoman farmers of Concord and Lexington Green, hard-working men who were close to the earth, are now refugees in the cities, begging for handouts from crooked politicians.  In the country, a man made his living by hard work.  In the cities, you survive by guile, lying and stealing.  Grunts work; pogues make deals.
    Home.  It hasn't changed.  It just isn't the same anymore.  It's not America anymore.  I'm not standing in the country I was born in and I am not the person I was born to be.  Drive-in movies don't show me pictures I care to see anymore.  Ice cream tastes like clay.  Breasts are coconuts with nipples of black rubber.  I can't remember:  When did I go there, and why?  And why did I come back?  And where am I now?  I don't know.  None of us really know.  The world we knew just ran away, it's gone.  And where are we?  We're alone.  That's where we are, bros, there it is, no slack, payback is a motherfucker, we are alone.  Meanwhile, all around us, like bloated white spiders, civilians cluster in their plastic shacks, polishing imaginary Cadillacs.
    Walking the streets of the town I grew up in, I marvel at Black John Wayne's relentlessly perceptive vision of reality--a vision I had to struggle to attain in the Viet Nam war, but which Black John Wayne seemed to have been born with.  He was right all along when he kept saying that, sooner or later, what politics comes down to is a nightstick upside your head.  They neglected to tell us that particular important piece of information in civics class at Russellville High School.
    Sitting Bull once said, "The white men are smart, but they are not wise."  Americans do not respect people.  Americans respect money, power, and machines.  The Vietnamese are poor, the poorest people on the earth, yet they have dignity, sensitivity, pride, and a sense of honor.  The Viet Cong live in a hellish world, and are happy.  Americans have every luxury, and are sad.  We're not morally bankrupt; we're in debt.
    Americans have become, by imperceptible degrees, by the silent death of a thousand cuts, pathetic reservation Indians.  Our Puritan heritage, our horror of everyday life, has always been a sickness, a disease dragging us down.  Ultimately, the American vice and fatal weakness is pure uncut vanity.  We turn our backs on the facts, and laugh.  America arm-wrestles with God, confident of eventual victory.  Meanwhile, trapped inside the reality of death like white mice in a jar of black glass, we damage each other mindlessly and without mercy and without even a concept of pity, in our futile attempts to escape.  Even against time itself, Americans think we can simply send in the Marines.
 

    Americans are prisoners of their own mythology, having watched too many of their own movies.  If they ever want to send Americans to the gas chambers, they won't tell us we're going to take showers, they'll herd us into cinder-block movie houses.
    In this country plain truth is as hard to find as Oswald's lawyer.  Lost among our myths and dominated by our machines, we plug into the drug of our choice--sex, power, fame, money, booze, heroin--because we're afraid of the future, which is beyond our control.  And our fear of the future makes us hate ourselves and makes us hate the work we do.
    We spend our days moving pieces of paper from one side of the desk to the other.  But it's just busywork, and we know it. We're all drawing the dole from the men who own the cities and who own us, too, like cattle, lock, stock, and barrel.  If the men who own the cities suddenly closed down the supermarkets and turned off the electricity, we'd all starve and freeze, and we'd cry and be lost and we'd be afraid of the dark, and the men who own the cities know that, and so they know the exact extent of their power.
    Life in the cities costs more than your soul, sometimes much more.  Sometimes it costs more than you can pay.
    As a kid, I played war in these streets.  I remember the screams and the war cries, the pock of light-bulb hand grenades and the clatter of the trash can lids we used as shields.  Real war is exactly like it was when you played it as a kid.  Until you get shot.  When you get shot, it's different.  Everything in life somehow ends up being different from what you've been told.  And when you learn that, when you learn to what monumental extent you have been bullshitted in the land of a thousand lies, something in you dies, forever, and something else is born.  From that moment on, you're in danger.  In the land of a thousand lies, to be an honest man is a crime against the state.
    When you return to your boyhood town, you find that it's not the town you were seeking, after all, but your boyhood.  I'm not standing in the same town I grew up in.  My old hometown has changed.  My real hometown has been taken away and a replica left behind.  The sun was bought on sale at Sears and then stapled to the sky.  The American hooches along the tree-lined street are colorful and unbelievably large.  The lawns are neatly mowed, precisely trimmed.  Translucent plastic grass like they put into Easter baskets has been manicured to within an inch of its life--the jungle tamed.
    Cardboard leaves flutter lifelessly on cast-iron trees.  And, down along Main Street, where the telephone poles are black and look like Tinkertoys, every building is gray.  It's typical Downtown America--noisy, dirty, locked and barred.
    My happy little hometown has been transformed into a brick and neon camp for round-eyed refugees.
    Back in Hoa Binh, Song once said that Americans are like a man who marries his bicycle.  He brings his bicycle into his house and sleeps with it.  One day his bicycle breaks down.  Then the man is afraid to take a trip, because he has forgotten how to walk.

 
    Limping slightly, I walk the five miles to our farm, past the cotton-mill village, past acres of cotton fields.
    When I see the farm it looks like a foreign place.  Home.  Home, that's what we were all fighting for in Viet Nam.  Home was where we all wanted to be.  We thought we knew where that was, but we were wrong.
    There are no rice paddies in my father's fields.  My father's fields lie fallow, spotted with big clumps of Johnson grass and a five o'clock shadow of ragweeds and thistles.  In my father's fields there are no fields of fire.  My father's fields are no longer strung with strings of dots that up close turn into fat round blue-green watermelons.  And the only barbed wire is a two-strand boundary fence that needs repair.
    I turn off the two-lane highway and climb through a gap in the boundary fence.  I cut across the fields.  I have worked and reworked every inch of this land, with mule-drawn plow, tractor, and hoe.  I've had every ounce of this dirt under my fingernails.
    I take a shortcut through a treeline that runs along a shallow stream.
    I see a deer and the deer brings back memories of my childhood wars.  In that treeline where the deer stands I stood tall with a Japanese bayonet my father brought home from World War II.  I hacked my way through many summer banzai attacks of enemy saplings.
    Later I squatted in the dirt and beat red ants to death with a rubber tomahawk.  The red ants were Communists and I was Gregory Peck on Pork Chop Hill.
    When I was twelve I got a .22-caliber single-shot rifle for Christmas and massacred squirrels, rabbits, and little gray lizards.  But I would never shoot a deer.
    A rack of antlers moves from the brush and there is the soft rhythmic tapping of hooves on a carpet of dry leaves.  A stag appears, light brown with a white breast and white powder-puff tail, a rack of antlers of brown-yellow bone, and eyes too big and too human.  The stag pauses, listens.  He steps into the creek, drops his head, drinks from the softly flowing water.  I stand still and wait until the deer melts into the trees.
    It's too late to go back to the land in America; the land doesn't want us.
 

    I walk along the dry creek bed where I caught salamanders called "water dogs" and marveled at the transparent jelly of frog eggs on the bottoms of wet rocks.  Pebbles crunch under my spit-shined shoes like I'm walking on old bones.
    Somewhere around here I buried my first pet, Snowball, who was run over by a drunken electrician driving a red pickup truck.  I buried Snowball in a shoebox along with a wedge of cornbread and a note to God telling God what a good puppy he was.
    I change direction into a meadow full of wild flowers the color of fire.  The trees are booby-trapped, the soil is wired, and there is a sharp piece of metal inside every blade of grass.  With one eye I scan the trees for snipers while my other eye X-rays the deck for punji pits and bouncing betty prongs.  A patch of blackberry briars tears into my trouser legs like concertina wire.
 

    I walk out of a treeline and for the first time in three years I see the house I was born in.
    Our house is 140 years old.  It was built by my ancestors with their own hands on the site of a log cabin built by James Davis in 1820.  The 160 acres were awarded as a bounty land grant for service as a private under General Andrew Jackson.  In 1814 James Davis fought at the battle of Horseshoe Bend and helped to slaughter Creek Indians so that Alabama could be stolen from them finally and forever.  Nobody remembers who the Creeks stole it from.
    The house is a mountain of scarred wood, weathered planks the color of pewter, newer planks like old ivory.  The house sits on a fieldstone foundation, simple, unadorned, seemingly indestructible, the home of plain people.
    Rusting by the barn are a manure spreader, hay mower, disk, rake, spike-toothed drag, and a grinder for mixing corn and oats for the pigs.  It's sad to see good tools that have not been properly cared for.
    As I walk into the yard of hard dirt, a little red bantam rooster we call Pig, because of how he eats, suddenly stops pecking and scratching and squawks and sputters across the yard in that clumsy wing-flapping that chickens call flying.
    Ma is sitting on the front porch in her rocking chair, fanning herself with a cardboard fan that has a full-color picture of Jesus on the front.
    Beyond the house, on the slope, Old Ma, wearing a faded blue sunbonnet, is working in her vegetable garden, repairing a scarecrow made of gleaming aluminum pie pans and large clear-plastic Pepsi jugs.  The scarecrow looks like a monster born out of trash.
    The only melons I've seen on the farm so far are the dozen by the porch where we used to spit the black seeds.
    Pig sputters by, chased by a big red hound dog.
    Half of the hound's face has been eaten away by the mange.  The old dog lopes along clumsily.  His ribs protrude, curved and well defined.
    My sister Cecilia, too tall for her body, all arms and legs, her hair cut short like a boy's, wearing blue jeans and a man's gray work shirt, and with a strand of pink plastic pearls around her neck, charges across the yard.  She pauses to break a switch from a dead peach tree.  She swats at the hound with the switch.  She says, "Go home, you mangy old dog.  We ain't got but one chicken and you can't have him!"
    The hound stands his ground, crouches, snarls, flashes big yellow teeth, and his teeth make me think of the napalmed tiger we saw that night on our way to the Nung combat fortress.
    Cecilia drops the switch, runs up onto the front porch and back into the house.
    Within seconds she reappears, slamming the screen door behind her.  She jumps off the porch.  She walks up to the hound and kneels, shoving a white paper plate at the dog.  On the paper plate are three greasy pink black-edged wedges of fried bologna and half of a fluffy white homemade biscuit.
    The dog hesitates.  Cecilia pushes the plate under the dog's nose.  She picks up a piece of bologna and holds it out.  The dog snaps at the meat, then gulps it down.  While he eats the rest of the meat and the biscuit, Cecilia strokes his head.  The dog growls deep in his throat, and eats faster.
    I say, "Hi, Stringbean."
    Sissie looks up and her whole face opens into a smile.  "James!"  She jumps up and hugs me.
    I give Sissie a one-pound sack of candy corn.  Holding onto the candy, Sissie climbs onto my back.  I give her a piggyback ride to the house as she yells, "Ma! Ma!  It's James!  James is home!  James is home!"
    My mother stands up on the porcb, shades her eyes with her cardboard fan, and looks at me, puzzled.  She says, "James?  Is that you?"
    Old Ma starts coming in from the fields.
 

    Before supper I put my AWOL bag into my old room.  It's the same room, only smaller, and airless, and my bed is a kid's bed, still covered with a quilt hand-sewn with big patchwork butterflies.
    My microscope and the beakers, flasks, and test tubes of my chemistry set are coated with a fine film of dust.
    There's a framed photograph of Vanessa, my high school sweetheart, signed T. S. T. S. A., too sweet to sleep alone.  Vanessa used to write T. S. T. S.A. on the flap of her letters to me when I was in recruit training on Parris Island.  My Senior Drill Instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim, a romantic, enjoyed making me eat her letters, unopened.
    When I was in Viet Nam, Vanessa sent me a peace button I wore in the field, now on Cowboy's Stetson.
    The only addition to my room is the framed boot-camp photo of a tanned, overly serious kid in dress blues.  The kid has ears like an elephant.  The photo used to be on the coffee table in the living room.
    On the wall is a framed, knitted scene of Marines on Iwo Jima raising a Christian cross.
    My books are all here, hundreds of books.  Paperback books on apple crate shelves.  But books can't help me now.  I miss Hoa Binh and the rice fields.  I miss being with people who have something to lose.  All Americans have to lose are their American Dreams.  Land stopped being worth fighting for when they turned it into real estate.
    Standing in my childhood room I feel homesick.  I feel like I'm in a motel.
    For one moment, I am back in the triple-canopy jungle, surrounded by shadows that are the Viet Cong.  And I'm reaching down in the torchlight to pull on the tooth of a napalmed tiger.
    In one corner of the room is a wooden crate shipped from Da Nang.  The crate has been opened. Inside, my loyal brothers at Khe Sanh have carefully packed my gear, including--duly tagged as a war trophy--my Tokarev pistol, the most highly prized souvenir in Viet Nam.
    I snap a loaded clip into the Tokarev and drop it into my Stetson.
    It feels so good to have a friend again.
 

    At the supper table, we pray before we eat.
    At supper I meet my stepfather, Obrey Beasley.  He's as thin as a rail and his head is as bald as a baby's butt.  He is wearing faded blue bib overalls and no shirt.  His arms are skinny, pale, and black with hair.  He's got varicose veins in his nose and smiles too much and doesn't mean a damned word he says.  He says, "I wish I could kill me some of them Communists!"
    Obrey spits Bull Durham chewing tobacco onto the floor and says, "I read the letters you wrote to Pless from the war, boy.  I think it was real smart of you to get that job that let you sneak out of the fighting, that writing job.  That was slick.  Got out of the Big War myself.  Claimed as I done my back.  None of them Army doctors could show as how I weren't really laid up!"  Obrey laughs, then returns his attention to the television set, which is new and in color, and has been moved into the dining room while we eat.  "Was a assistant file clerk at TVA," he says.  "My back problems paid off again.  Got me a medical pension!"
    For supper there's fried chicken, hot, golden brown, and sticky.  There's a steaming bowl of green beans, flaky homemade biscuits too hot to hold, thick gravy, boiled potatoes, roasting ears of yellow corn, hominy grits, black-eyed peas, and cornbread.  The rich smells from the food are both strange and familiar.
    I peck at the food on my plate.
    Old Ma nudges me, winks, says, "Your eyes always was bigger than your stomach."
    My mother says, "I wish you'd wear your Army uniform to church come Sunday.  They all been praying for you."
    I say, "Ma, I just got home.  And I'm not in the Army.  I'm a Marine."
    Old Ma says, "Boy, how come you didn't write us more letters?"
    I say, "I been busy, Old Ma.  Besides, I didn't know you could read."
    Old Ma laughs.  "Ain't nobody that busy."  She kicks me under the table.  "Go on and eat.  You look like something the cat dragged in."
    My mother calls to Sissie on the back porch, "Sissie!  You wash up, now.  Come on to the table.  Your brother's home."
    "Okay," Sissie calls back. "I'm coming."  And then she mumbles, "I didn't ask to be the last one       born. . . ."
    Ma says, "I guess you must of heard about Vanessa, your little girlfriend."
    I say, "No.  Is she okay?"
    Ma hesitates.  "She's married, James.  She's pregnant.  When they said you was missing she married one of the Hester boys.  She come by Tuesday a week.  Said she was real sorry.  Said she wanted to tell you her own self, but she's scared."
    I say, "Of what?  Of me?  Why?"
    Ma purses her lips.  "We got a letter . . . from the Army. . . . "
    I say, "What letter?  What did it say?"
    Ma says, "I don't know.  I got it put up somewhere.  Or maybe I throwed it out.  It said we was to be real careful around you for a while, that you were, well, that your mind wasn't right."
    I say, "Those fucking pogue liters . . ."
    My mother is stunned.  "James!  Don't you dare use that trashy language in my house!"
    Before I can reply, Sissie comes in.  She's wearing my Silver Star on her torn white T-shirt.
    "Sissie, " says Ma, "don't you be messing in James' things."
    Sissie struts around the table.  "I found this pretty blue box in the trash pile.  This shiny brooch was in it."  Sissie hugs me.  "Can I have it, James?  Please?  Pretty please with sugar on it?"  It's the Silver Star they gave me in Japan.
    I say, "It's yours, Stringbean."
    She says, "To keep?"
    I say, "To keep."
    Sissie kisses me on the cheek the way Song used to.  "You're the best brother I ever had."  She grins.  "Of course, you're also the only brother I've ever had."  She sits down at the table and admires her shiny brooch.
    "Pass the potatoes, please," says Old Ma.
    Obrey grunts, burps, finally passes down a bowl of boiled potatoes that look like albino hand grenades.  Old Ma sets the bowl down in front of Sissie.  "Eat, girl.  You got all day for playing with James' hero medal."
    Obrey says, grinning in a friendly way, "Even a blind hog can root up an acorn every once in a while."
    "Look, James," says Old Ma, nudging me.  I look at the television.  It's a news special about our boys in Viet Nam entitled, The Viet Nam Violence Freaks, jerky mini-cam movements and disconnected images of violence, a dinnertime feeding for civilians weaned on recreational gore.
    Obrey says, "Cecilia, switch the channel."
    On television are some glowing Army grunts in overly green jungle utilities.  The grunts on the screen are as green as Frankenstein, like newly minted monsters standing by to be chased by a mob.  They drag a limp enemy soldier out of a tunnel.  The enemy soldier is a skinny teenaged boy, greased, zapped, blown away and wasted.  The body looks like a muddy sack full of butchered meat.  The voice-over says, "Viet Nam violence freaks kill and kill without a twinge of guilt. . . ."
    Television blood is an attractive shade of red, bright, not dark.  And I think:  If bloodfrom that dead boy seeped down through the tubes and wires and transistors, and dripped out from the bottom of the TV screen and onto the floor, would that blood glow with an electric light as though alive?  And would it still be too red?  And would anybody be able to see it but me?
    Sissie listens to the announcer's voice-over.  As the scene cuts abruptly from body bags to a beer commercial, Sissie asks, "James, what is napalm?"
    Obrey interrupts.  He says, "You know any of them Army boys?"
    Sissie shoos a fly off of the fried chicken.
    I say, "No.  I wasn't in the Army."
    Obrey takes a big bite of hominy grits.  "Can't understand you, boy.  If you wasn't smart enough to get into a college of some kind, I bet you could have got out of going some other way."  He picks up his coffee cup, pours coffee into the saucer, blows on the coffee to cool it, then slurps the coffee from the saucer.  "Seems to me," Obrey says, "you got a little suckered in."  He smiles, very friendly.  "No offense."
    I eat black-eyed peas. I eat black-eyed peas with revolutionary enthusiasm, my eyes on my plate.  The Woodcutter would be proud of me.
    Obrey is encouraged by my silence.  He says, "Your mama and me done talked it all out.  The deal is, our minds are set that the Christian thing to do is that you're sure enough welcome to stay on here for a week or two--three if you need it--give you time to sign on for a job down at the cotton mill and find a place of your own in town."
    I look across the table at my mother.  "Ma?"
    My mother looks away, twists her hands into her apron.  "Obrey's the man of the house now, James.  Times have been hard for us, what with your daddy passing on and all.  It's been such a sorry time for us.  The government stopped paying us for not growing peanuts.  All we got left is a piece of your daddy's insurance money.  Least till Obrey can find a buyer for the land.  We're bad off."
    "Grow up, boy," says Obrey.  "You been living high on the hog in the service, eating on our tax money, but now your free ride is over.  Time you learned to stand on your own two feet and be a man."
    Ma looks up.  "But we all proud of you for your being a hero in the Army."
    "I'm not a hero, Ma.  The war is wrong."  And then in terms she can understand: "It's a sin, Ma.  The war in Viet Nam is a mortal sin."
    My mother looks at me as though I'd just slapped her face.
    Then my mother says, "Well, I wouldn't know anything about that.  I only know what President Nixon says on the television.  And I guess he must know what he's doing, or he wouldn't be President."
    I say, "That idiot Nixon doesn't know a damned thing about Viet Nam."
    Ma purses her lips.  "Well, he knows a little bit more about it than you do, I guess."
    I say, "Daddy would believe me.  He'd know I don't lie."
    My mother says, "Oh, I know you don't lie, James.  But maybe you just a little mixed up, that's all.  You home now.  Time to forget what happened overseas.  Just pretend it never happened.  Put it out of your mind."
    Old Ma says, "Hush up, now, Pearleen.  Don't fuss at James.  Let him alone.  He's been gone a month of Sundays and he just got home and already you're fussing at him."
    Obrey says, "The smarter boys got out of it."  He sops up bean juice with a wedge of cornbread.  He bites through the crunchy brown crust and into the soft yellow bread inside.  He says , "You should have got out of it."
    I lean across the table and I take a good grip on Obrey's throat.  I get up into his face.  I say, "You shut your mouth, you ridiculous feeb, or I will use your nose as pivot point for an amtrack movement."
    Obrey says, "You're cruising for a bruising, boy."  He draws a fist back for a punch.
    Sissie jumps up from the table and grabs Obrey's cocked arm.  "Stop!  Don't you hurt James!"
    Obrey slaps Sissie.  Hard.
    Sissie steps back, stunned, but not really hurt.
    I look at my mother.
    My mother says, "Obrey is your father now, James.  He has every right to punish Cecilia."
    Obrey says, "You listen to your mother, boy.  You getting too big for your breeches.  Maybe you'd like a sample of the back of my hand.  That'll take the starch out of you!"
    I say to Sissie, "You okay, Stringbean?"
    Sissie nods, wipes tears from her eyes.  On her pale cheek, distinctly outlined, is the red mark of Obrey's hand.
    I say to Obrey, "If you ever touch my sister again, I'll kill you."
    Obrey pulls away, says to my mother, "You see that, Pearleen?  I told you when he come back he'd be like a rabid dog."
    My mother says, getting up from the table, "It's the Lord's truth."
    I'm thinking that I should punch Obrey's fucking heart out.  Instead, I bend down and pick up the Tokarev pistol in my cowboy hat.  I chamber a round.  I say to Obrey, "Take this pistol.  Take the damned gun or I'll shoot your dick off."
    Obrey is too scared to move.
    I say, "Take the pistol, butt-hole.  Do it now!"
    Obrey, too scared to not move, takes the pistol from my hand.
    I say, "Now hold it up to your head."
    My mother starts to say something, but I say, "Shut up, Ma.  Just shut the fuck up."  To Obrey, I say, "Put the pistol up to your head or I'll shove it up your ass!"  I step closer to Obrey, threatening him physically.
    Trembling, Obrey lifts the pistol up to his head.
    "Okay," I say, "now put your finger on the trigger."
    Obrey hesitates.
    I say, starting to lose control, "Just what is your major malfunction, numbnuts?"  Getting up into Obrey's face, I scream, "DO IT!  DO IT NOW!"
    Obrey does it.
    Cautiously, Obrey puts his finger on the trigger.  He's sweating like a pig now.  The gun barrel has indented a red "O" into his temple.
    I say, "Are you scared?  Good.  Now, being in Viet Nam is different in three ways.  First, the amount of time you're under the gun is not for ten or twelve seconds, but for a year.
    "Second, it's not your finger on the trigger.  No, the finger on the trigger belongs to a guy who lives in stinking holes in the ground.  This guy craps shrapnel and eats napalm for breakfast.  You're an invader standing on his ancestral land.  You've killed his farm animals and some of his relatives.  You've burned down the house his grandfather built with his own hands.  You've tortured his brother soldiers to death as a form of recreation.  You've poisoned his crops.  The Agent Orange in his food and water has caused his wife to give birth to monsters.  And, when he pulls down on you, when he targets you, you have just asked his baby sister if she wants to fuck. . . ."
    Obrey's eyes are blinking uncontrollably.  He's drooling.  Suddenly I realize that Obrey has shit in his pants.  He stinks with the smell of it, the smell of fear.
    My mother, Old Ma, and Sissie are all crying.
    I say, "Give me that pistol, you pathetic substandard non-hacker."
    Obrey is frozen.  I step forward and pull the gun from his hand by force.
    I say, "The third thing that is different is that in Viet Nam the weapons are not on safety and are locked and cocked."  I take the pistol off safety and cock it.
    Obrey says, tears streaming down his cheeks, "How can you be so violent?"
    I say, "That was not violence, peanut balls, that was only real life.  This is violence."
    I pull the trigger of the Tokarev and bam-- I fire a bullet into the kitchen floor.
    Everybody jumps, stunned.  The women abruptly stop crying.
    My mother says, wiping her tears, "I can't believe your language.  I just can't believe it."
    I say, "I shoot a gun in the kitchen and you're worried about my language?"  I laugh.  "That's just the way people talk, Ma, when they're not on television."
    My mother says, "Decent people don't use them vile words.
    I say, dropping the Tokarev into my Stetson,  "They don't talk that way in Heaven, Ma, but they talk that way down here."
    My mother says, "Good Lord, I can't believe that.  Don't tell me about it."
    Obrey says, backing away from me, "You a killer now, boy.  You got blood on your hands.  Your kind don't fit in.  You don't belong here no more.  You ain't fit to live with decent people."
    I take a step toward Obrey, but my mother steps between us. "Don't you dare lay another hand on my husband!"  She turns away from me.  "Well, I've had just about all I can stand for one day.  I'm give out." As an afterthought she adds, "There's banana pudding for dessert."
    Obrey and my mother retreat down the hall.  At a safe distance Obrey says to me, "I don't want loaded guns in my house.  You ain't impressing nobody.  I own the land you're standing on, and I want you off."  Then to my mother: "That boy is hog wild and jaybird crazy."
    I say, "Don't worry.  I'm not staying."
    Obrey sneers.  "Where you gonna go?  Ain't nobody gonna give no job to no crazy Veet-Nam veteran.  You're up shit creek without a paddle, boy."
    I say, "Hey, I got me a job in Istanbul polishing brass-topped buildings, if that's all right with you, and even if it's not all right with you, shit-for-brains.  Now go away.  Leave me.  Change your pants."
    As Obrey and my mother hunker down in their bedroom I can hear my mother saying, "Where's that Istanbul?" and, "I swear, I prayed that the Army would make a man out of him.  I prayed, Obrey.  I prayed to the Lord."
    Old Ma gets up from the table, comes over and hugs me.
    I say, "I've missed you, Old Ma.  Been doing any fishing?"
    Old Ma says, "No, James, I don't get around too much after I broke my hip.  I never thought I'd be old, but look at me now."  She pats me on the back, but her hand is frail and weak.  Old Ma has always been old, but she never seemed old, until now.  The bounce has gone out of her.  "I'm just an old broad, but I'm still sharp upstairs.  You a good boy, James.  Your daddy was always proud to bust of you."
    I say, "Thank you, Old Ma."
    Old Ma whispers to me, "He sure knows how to lap up the joy juice.  He's just eat up with jealousy, that Beasley.  Don't blame your mama."
    Old Ma, looking tired, her face soft but solid, like an old cameo, goes off to bed.
    Sissie and I eat banana pudding.  Sissie picks through the creamy yellow pudding and eats vanilla wafers and round chips of banana until she looks sick.
    I go outside and chop firewood until sundown, until night comes, night, the great black dragon.
 

    When I come in from chopping firewood I go to Sissie's room and I wake her up.  She follows me to my room.
    I dig into my AWOL bag and pull out a small brown paper sack.  I make a shush gesture, putting a forefinger to my lips, and I give the paper sack to Sissie.
    Sissie opens the sack and peeks inside.  Her mouth falls open.  She reaches in and pulls out a few of the crisp new one-hundred-dollar bills.  "James, I'll bet there's a million dollars in there!"
    I say, "Not quite.  It's three thousand dollars.  From my back pay for when I was a P.O.W.  It's yours now."
    Sissie says, "But don't you need it?"
    I say, "I've kept a couple of thousand.  That's all I'm going to need."
    Sissie thinks I'm playing a joke.  "But this is your money, James.  You earned it.  "
    I laugh.  "Well, not actually."  To her puzzled look, I say, "I wasn't a very good prisoner."
    Sissie doesn't understand.  She looks at the bills.  "But why you giving it to me?  What can I buy?"
    I take her hand between my two hands and I hold up the three hands between us.  "Listen, Stringbean, I'm going to have to go back into the service.  I'll probably be shipped back overseas.  Maybe for a long time.  I wish I could take you with me, but I can't.  In a couple of years you'll be sixteen and they can't put the law on you.  When you're sixteen, you take this money and you buy yourself a bus ticket to Arizona.  They've still got room to breathe out there.  Get yourself a job.  You're a smart girl.  You got a good head on your shoulders.  You'll be okay.  I got confidence in you."
    Sissie nods, not understanding.
    "Now you take this money and hide it.  Don't tell anybody you got it.  Okay?  Not anybody.  I want you to promise."
    Sissie thinks about it, then says, "I promise, James.  Cross my heart and hope to die."
    I say, "Wrap it up in wax paper and stick it in a Mason jar and bury it under the house.  Okay?"
    Sissie nods, not understanding.  "Okay, you ol' poop-head.  I promise it'll just be our secret."  She hugs me good-night.  "Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite.  I'll take real good care of your money for you, big brother, until you come back home."
 

    Sissie goes to her room and I flop down on my back on my bed, still wearing the green of a cold-hearted Marine.  I stare at the ceiling.  It's hard to sleep.  There's no firing in the distance.  No dying sick men screaming in the dark.  It's too quiet.
    When I do sleep I have a nightmare about a napalmed tiger.  The napalmed tiger has red, white, and blue stripes.  It lopes across my father's fields, slapping watermelons off the vines with powerful claws, splattering the rich earth with black seeds and wet chunks of juicy red meat.
 

    In the morning I feel a painful poking in my ribs.  I open my eyes.  At first I think I'm having a nightmare and that the old Broom-Maker of the village of Hoa Binh had come to exact her revenge.  But it's only my mother, waking me.  My mother is holding a broom by the yellow bristles and is poking me in the ribs with the tip of the long handle, careful to keep her distance.
    I say, "Ma, that hurts.  I'm awake now."
    My mother says, "Breakfast is on the table, James.  I took your Army clothes out of that little bag and washed them for you.  I took them pictures."
    I say, "What pictures?"
    "They was in your pockets.  Them that showed dead people in the war."
    The pictures I took from Commander Bryant, the Navy shrink.  I say, "Where are they?"
    My mother says, "I burned them."
    I laugh.  "I don't need photographs, Ma.  I got pictures of Viet Nam tattooed all over my body.  What are you going to do, burn me too?"
    She does not reply.
 

    Breakfast.  There is gunpowder in my cereal bowl.  Civilian gunpowder.  Pure and white.
    Obrey is not at breakfast.  Ma says, "Obrey's sleeping in today.  His back has been acting up."
    Old Ma says, "Daughter, that man was born tired and he's still resting.  Or maybe he's still wore out from his little hissy-fit."
    I say, lying, "I'll be leaving tonight.  Maybe get a job up North.  Or find a place where they got rich farmland.  Maybe get a piece of land up North somewhere.  Do a little farming."
    My mother is deaf and dumb to any unpleasant reality and hears only what she wants to hear; she's pretty much got that down to an art form.  But now my mother and I are communicating again because now I am telling her nothing but lies.
    Ma, if I dared to speak the truth to you, I'd have to say that I joined the Marines to get away from you and people like you.
 

    In Birmingham I will catch a plane back to Los Angeles.  In Los Angeles I'll take a flight to Viet Nam.  I'll get a visa by using my old Combat Correspondent I.D. card; I'll say that now I'm a freelance reporter, looking for a story.
    From Da Nang I'll thumb a ride on a medevac chopper going toward the DMZ.  I'll buy a bicycle.  I'll ride the bicycle to the village of Hoa Binh.
    I should be there in time for spring planting.  Time to plow the paddies and plant the tender rice shoots.  Maybe I'll learn to hear the rice grow, after all.
    The only time I ever felt like I was being what an American should be and doing what an American should be doing was when I was a prisoner of the Viet Cong.  I could be real there.  I could be myself.  Even when I was playing a role there I was myself.  Here I'm expected to play a role, but I don't know who I'm supposed to be.  People who have nothing to lose have nothing to live for.  I'd rather be killed in a war than be bored to death an inch at a time.  In the village of Hoa Binh I was free.  I was not a helpless pawn.  I had a future.  I had friends who could be trusted.  War is real and men need reality like they need air and food.
    When I was a fighter in the Viet Cong, I was real.  When I was a fighter in the Viet Cong, life was not a talk show.
 

    Sitting across from me at the breakfast table, my mother does not know what to say in response to my announcement that I'm leaving and going up North to farm.  So she simply ignores it and tries to sound cheerful.  "Well, tonight's Obrey's bowling night.  Maybe we could give you a ride to the Greyhound station.  Save you walking."
    I swab up some gravy with a piece of biscuit.  "Thank you, Ma. I'll be home on about sundown."
    To the gloomy silence around the breakfast table, I say, "Cheer up."  I smile and say, "Toi chong chien trach."  Fingering a braided string inside my shirt, I hold on to the white jade Buddha given to me by Comrade-General Tiger Eye, Commander of the Western Region.
    When Ma, Old Ma, and Stringbean look at me, confused, I translate: "Toi chong chien trach.  It means, 'I'm going home.'"
 

    I walk miles across our neighbor's fields to the Rock Creek Cemetery.
    The graves in the cemetery have been covered with special sand that is as white as sugar.  On each low mound of earth are green wire stands holding plastic flowers mounted on Styrofoam blocks of pink or white.  Once a year, on Decoration Day, the families of the dead come together and clean off the graves of their ancestors, and remember all of the generations that came before, just as they do on TET in Viet Nam.
    In the Davis section of the cemetery lie about fifty of our people, going back to 1816.  The oldest marker is for William Oliver Davis.  The marker is a thin slab of orange fieldstone, weathered, the name and the date almost unreadable.
    Near my father's grave is the impressive granite marker put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy back in the 1930s, when Solomon Davis was buried in his Confederate uniform, seventy years after the end of the War for Southern Independence.  Grandpa Davis was a scout for Bedford Forrest and was wounded at the battle of Shiloh.  He died in the middle of the jazz Age with a grapeshot the size of an iron golf ball still inside his chest.
    My father's grave is freshly dug, not yet covered with white sand, but still the plain rich brown of turned soil, the color of soil in a freshly plowed field.
    I touch the gray limestone block that says: PLEASANT CURTIS DAVIS.
    My first memories of my father are of me bouncing beside him, a boy sitting on the hard seat of our green wagon.  The wagon was drawn by a sturdy and indestructible one-eyed mule we called Roosevelt.  The wagon bed was loaded high with ripe sun-warmed watermelons.
    We'd drive down to the county highway and park by the road.  To people in the cars that whizzed down the highway we sold watermelons, big, dark green, and round, for a quarter each, while Roosevelt grazed on wild flowers by the side of the road.
    My job was to make change out of a cigar box while my father helped our customers pick a good melon, ripe but not too ripe.  He'd thump the melons hard with his finger until he found one that sounded just ripe enough.
    At the end of the day my father would count up the cash and pay me my wages.  My father liked to say, "If you've got a dollar you didn't earn, you won't have fun when you spend it."
    My father never had any money, but his weathered face had that dignified and undefeated strength that comes from keeping faith with the land.  He'd say, laughing, each morning when he came to wake me up at the crack of dawn, "Farming puts iron into your blood!"
    One day some pogue book-farmers come down from up North, college kids working for the Yankee law.  Wanted our neighbors, mostly sharecroppers, to spray bug poison over the soil.
    My father refused, but some of our neighbors went on ahead.  They sprayed poison out of airplanes and it spread onto our land.  The poison ended up killing all the earthworms that help to keep the soil arable.  We lost the crop.
    Next season my father rolled his John Deere tractor and broke his hip.  Our friends and kinfolk pitched in to help, and we made a crop that year.
    Hospital bills put us so far in the hole that a rich man from Decatur offered to buy us out.  The rich man said we could stay on and work the land for him on shares.  The rich man was not a farmer; he was a banker who liked to buy land.  The banker joked, "Land is the one thing you can't make more of."
    The only way my father could hold on to the farm was to take a job with a strip-mining outfit in Jasper.  He hated his job because of how strip-mining ruins the land.  One night after supper I asked him how he liked his new job.  He said, "Son, I done plowed up a snake."
    Back in the big double-U-two, when Americans were all ten feet tall and named Mac, my father was a cook in the Navy.  At battle stations he was an ack-ack gunner.  Somewhere off Okinawa he shot down a kamikaze plane that was diving into an aircraft carrier.  The plane exploded so close that a piece of wingtip hit my father in the neck.  My mother says that my father looked into the Japanese pilot's face moments before the plane burst into a red ball of fire.
 

    Standing over my father's grave, one war older, I think:  In every other way, you never let me down.  You were always as dependable as a tractor.  But you never told me about war, and I don't know why.  You never talked about your war.  Your brothers, my uncles, who fought the Nazis in Europe, never talked about the war.  All of you let me go off and stick my face into a meat grinder, when you all knew it was going to be a meat grinder.  I went to Viet Nam a military virgin, too dumb to do anything but draw fire.  And you cheered me and were proud of me and you wished me good luck, but you never gave me one word of warning.  I didn't want to go; I did it for you.
    Touching my father's cold gray granite tombstone one last time, I know that I've got no choice but to secure this detail and move out toward the future.  Time measured in blood never ends.  Blood never dries.  Facts are not pretty.  By some black magic a stray Viet Cong bullet ricocheted around the planet and blasted open an artery inside my father's head.
    My last day on the farm, all of the hogs had died of cholera and my father and I spent the day burning them.
    My father is dead now, and time is moving away from him.  Meanwhile I have plowed up a few snakes of my own, the ground is full of snakes; that's my op and I'll walk it.
    But, touching the tombstone, I wonder if my father knows that I'm here, and if he knows, is he still proud of me?  I'm not even twenty-one years old yet and already I've killed more men than Billy the Kid.
    "Life," I say before I go, "that's something I learned off of you."
 

    On about sundown, when the crickets start to sing, I walk back to the house, tired from hiking through the woods all day.
    Still in uniform, I put on my dirty Stetson.  I pick up my AWOL bag.
    Obrey gives me a ride to the bus station in a black Ford pickup truck.  The truck has extra wide tires and chrome wheel rims.
    As we drive away from the house I was born in I do not look back.  I'm afraid.  I'm afraid that artillery shells will be going in, blasting the ancient wood apart.  I'm afraid that Phantom fighter-bombers will be booming in low over the treeline, strafing the banty hen in the yard with automatic cannon fire and laying shiny canisters of napalm across Old Ma's vegetable garden, burning the scarecrow and the squash.
    I was born in Viet Nam, a long time ago.  My hometown is strange to me now, like a foreign country.  It's too late for Vanessa and me to settle down in a little bunker somewhere, cook C-rations, clean our M-16s, and raise recruits.
    If I look back, even for a moment, the old house will be gone, swallowed up by a whirlwind of red fire and smoke.
    I look forward, straight ahead.  As my father said to me the day I left the farm to go to Viet Nam: "The step is hard that tears away the roots."
    The Phantom Blooper is going home.
 

    I ride in the open truck bed, with Sissie on one side and Obrey's purple bowling bag on the other.  Sissie and I are scrunched in with a dozen cardboard boxes full of empty beer cans that have been stomped flat.  The sun has gone down and it's cold enough to freeze the personals off a cast-iron dog.
    At the bus station I say goodbye to my family.
    The bus station is actually Stella & O.V.'s Shell station, a white mobile home set up on cinder blocks.  Upon a broken thermometer on a big flat Coca-Cola bottle of rusting red metal hangs a hand-lettered cardboard sign: CLOSED.
    Obrey says, "Boy, I'm a good Christian.  I forgive you for the things you did last night.  I guess maybe you got some call to get your back up.  I hope you do real good up North."  He smiles his sickening sweet smile, but he does not offer to shake hands.
    My mother takes Obrey's arm and says, "You see, James?  Things are going to go right for us."  She gives me a stiff little hug.  "You be careful.  Be a good boy and things will go right for you.  Write us a letter when you get settled, so we'll know where you are."
    Old Ma hugs me and says, "Make the most out of the horsepower God gave you, James.  Bless your heart.  We all love you."
    I say, "I love you too, Old Ma."
    The family climbs back into the cab of the pickup truck while Sissie hugs me.  Sissie is crying.  She doesn't say anything, but kisses me on both cheeks and holds out a gift for me inside a brown paper sack.
    Sissie wipes tears from her eyes with a shirt sleeve and hops into the back of the truck.
    The black pickup pulls away.  Everybody waves.  Obrey toots his horn.
    Sissie continues to wave to me from the back of the truck until she is out of sight.
 

    Inside the brown paper sack is a glass fruit jar.  The fruit jar is full of fireflies.  Alabama kids call these fireflies "lightning bugs."
    The lightning bugs radiate phosphorescent light.  The false light is cold and yellow and faintly edged with green.
    When I see the headlights of the Birmingham Express coming over the hill in the dark I unscrew the lid from the Mason jar and I throw the lid away.  I hold the open fruit jar up high over my head, as high as I can reach, like I'm the Statue of Liberty.
    I give the fruit jar a swat with my Stetson and a hundred phosphorescent dots of light explode up into the night sky, winking like muzzle flashes in a treeline, a hundred Alabama lightning bugs, alive and free, and glowing, like sparks from a fire.