A Simple Act

            “Christ, but I’m hungry.”

            “Why don’t you just shut the hell up about it?”

            There was no way I could fault either sentiment. We were hungry, and we had a long wait ahead of us. On the other hand, it wasn’t doing much good to keep mentioning it. Doing so was sort of like scratching at a scab and hoping it would help heal the wound. My life, if you want to know, was like one big scab at that time so I didn’t know where to start scratching. Not just me either, the other two fellows were pretty much in the same boat.

            “In the same boat.” That’s pretty funny. We weren’t in the same boat but we were in the Navy, all three of us, and our beloved Navy had screwed us over pretty bad.

            The first speaker was a Seaman Apprentice from Tennessee. Wilson was his name, Robert maybe. We had been together for over six weeks now and had gotten to know one another well. The third man was Eddie Conners, a Seaman from East St. Louis—a brown-skinned fellow as rough as his hometown’s reputation. The fourth of our crew, Seaman James Dykes, hadn’t travelled from San Diego with us and we weren’t sure where he was.

            We knew where we were. We were at an airport terminal in California, waiting for the plane to take us to Da Nang in the Republic of South Vietnam on a lonely Saturday in late November of 1967.

            It was like this. We had joined the Navy to ride the Waves, as the old joke goes. Each of us, in our own way, had managed to piss off this venerable institution, and it had gotten back at us in classic fashion. I have no idea what the others did. I dropped out of one the Navy’s “A” schools and had told the personnel officer that I had joined the Navy to go to sea and see the world, not to spend my time studying at some shithole base in California. I had foolishly thought that the ghost of John Paul Jones would break into a broad sailor’s smile up in Navy Heaven upon hearing this 1967 version of “Give me a fast ship and so forth.”

            I had misjudged the prevalent sense of humor in the modern Navy and was now waiting for the goddam plane that would take me to Vietnam.

            “N-A-V-Y,” as in, “Need Any Vaseline Yet?” In short, I, we, all of us were in hell of a fix. Some Navy higher up—had to be an Annapolis grad, it was such a strange idea—decided that it was a waste of good Marines to guard Navy bases in the war zone and they should train predominately misfit sailors for the job. So, they had sent us to a few weeks of training on shooting various weapons, throwing hand grenades, standing guard, and going on patrols, things that would be of no value either in the free world or our subsequent Navy careers.

            “Give me a cigarette then,” Wilson said. “If we can’t have breakfast, at least we can have a cigarette.”

            He had a habit of explaining things that way when he talked. Sometimes it got on a person’s nerves like when they had us throw hand grenades with the marines at some god forsaken Marine Base out near San Diego. I hadn’t thrown one as far as they would have liked so on the way back, Wilson explained it to me. “They want you to throw it as far as you can so the shrapnel doesn’t fly back and hit you.”

            “Shut the fuck up about it,” I had said, “I don’t care what the Marines want or don’t want.” For the present, I handed him a cigarette and said, “Make it last. We have a long time to wait.”

            He lit the cigarette and leaned back. “They wanted us to get here early so we wouldn’t be late.”

            “Moron,” I said and leaned back to consider why I hadn’t fled to Canada when I had the chance.

            “Wake me up if they decide to leave early,” Conners said. He leaned back in his chair and pulled his “Dixie Cup” hat over his eyes so it rested on the bridge of his nose. He had creased such “gull wings” in it that it looked like if it slid off, it would sail ten feet. The Navy didn’t care much for that shit. They wanted you to wear that silly hat just like they gave it to you, completely round. Only Yoemen, or “squat to pees” as they were lovingly called by the Bosun’s Mates, did that. It is said that if all the hats on a ship got mixed up and had no names on them, a person could find his hat by the way it was rolled or creased. I don’t know. There is a lot of crap they say about sailors that never has been proven.

            Anyway, here is the deal. During the weeks of training for this assignment, the United States Navy had screwed up our pay records big time. Actually they didn’t screw them up, the payroll guys told us. It was that the large training bases didn’t like to pay all those temporary trainees that came through. They just kept adding your pay to your records. “What’s your beef?” was their attitude. “We give you a place to live and three meals a day. What you need money for? You’ll get paid when you get in-country.” That term “in-country” was a strange one. It meant to them that we weren’t their problem. To us it meant the physical location whereupon we could start counting the days until we returned to the “land of the round-eyes.” To others, it would mean the end of the road, that “in-country” was where they would buy the farm.

            We eventually would get paid when we arrived at our permanent location. But right now, it wasn’t helping. We had to get from San Diego to the airport on our own and be at this crummy place, they said, at 0600, or six in the morning, to catch a plane for Da Nang. The Navy talked like that, “Zero Six Hundred.” They, the Navy, didn’t add “hours” like the Army guys do. So if you ever see a movie where a character playing a Navy officer says, “Zero-Six Hundred Hours,” you will know it is bullshit and the scriptwriting lacks verisimilitude.

            So, after spending every cent we could muster between the three of us, and picking up a ten-dollar money order my daddy wired to San Diego, we got to town, procured three bunks at the YMCA, bought hamburgers, two packs of cigarettes, and a six-pack of beer—which we had to drink in the goddam alley behind the “Y.” They take that “C” in the cornerstone very seriously. Despite all we managed to follow orders and arrive at the airport, broke and hungry, right when they told us to.

            “Good,” the “squat-to-pee” who signed us in said. “Now your plane leaves from here between 1900 and 2000 so don’t get lost.”

 For those of you in the free world, that’s a wait of between 13 and 14 hours. Each of the three of us expressed our disappointment in our own way.

            “Jesus.”

            “Oh hell. They want to get everyone signed in on time so the plane wouldn’t be held up.”

            “Goddam mutherfuckin’ son of a bitch’n asshole Navy pricks.”

            I, being the oldest, and nominally in charge, did think to ask, “Are there any arrangements to feed us while we wait?”

            The yeoman looked at me as if I had just asked to be promoted to admiral. He attached tags, one by one, to our sea bags and placed them with a stack of others, behind him.

“Meals,” I said. “We haven’t had anything to eat and we haven’t been paid in six weeks.”

“Next,” he answered, looking past me to where stood a small, young Seaman Apprentice in line who had his mom and dad with him. I recognized him from our weapons training group but didn’t acknowledge it. You could tell that all three had been crying. We left and found a seat, orders in hand. Just then, a snappily dressed man in a blue blazer and white pants walked up to us. He wore a serious-looking badge that identified him as manager of the terminal. He looked at each of the three of us in turn and then asked, “Who is in charge here?”

            We looked back at him and didn’t answer.

            “Would you mind?” He said pointing to a far corner of the waiting room where some metal folding chairs had been placed. “We have a special waiting area for our servicemen.” He smiled.

            I looked at the metal chairs and at the soft cushions on the ones where we were sitting. “Doesn’t look that special to me.”

            His smile disappeared faster than a whore’s hug. “We like to keep the military personnel separate from our regular passengers,” he said.

            “They want us to sit by ourselves because we bother people,” Wilson said.

            “Mister,” I said, “do you have any idea where we are headed?”

            His face took on a stony look now. “Sir,” he said, “that’s not important for me to know. I’m just asking you to respect our rules.”

            “Fuck your rules,” Conners said.
            “Sir,” the attendant said, “The military has an MP stationed nearby and I wouldn’t like to have to fetch him.”

            “Fetch him?” What was this guy, a godammed trained puppy or something?

            “I’ll bet you would too … wouldn’t you?” I said.

            His smiled returned. “If I must,” he said.

            Conners started to rise. “No,” I said to him. “We’ll move.”

            “If we whip this motherfucker’s ass,” maybe they won’t send us over there,” Conners said. The attendant took a step back and put his hand to his mouth.

            “No,” I said, “they’ll still send us. They’ll just give us a shittier assignment once we get there. Come on.” I rose and took my orders in hand and headed for the segregation area. It wouldn’t be the last one I saw during my military career.

            So there we sat, our stomachs beginning to growl and our asses already sending protests up our spine to our brains. It was 0700, almost.

            A short time later, Dykes showed up. “Where you been?” I said. “We thought you might be a ‘no show,’ and you’re the squared-away one.”

            Dykes was a tall Seaman with a ruddy complexion and short hair somewhere between brown and red. He was one of those guys—you know the type—that could pick up any girl in any bar and no one could ever figure out why. He just had that something. His hat was cocked to the side of his head, the brim formed into a ‘circle-lip’ of even geometrical proportions. “I’ve been here since before daylight,” he said. “I stayed in a hotel last night.” He said it like someone might say “I graduated from Harvard.”

            “La di fuckin’ da,” Conners said.

            “He just said that to make us feel bad,” Wilson said.

            “So you must have money,” I said, trying to keep the hope out of my voice.

            “Had,” he said. “That’s the right word, ‘had,’ as in I had some money but I just spent the last cent on a sweet roll.”

            We deflated like three balloons. “You were our last hope,” I said. “We’re all financially embarrassed at the moment.” Then I added, “And hungry, too. We didn’t even have a sweet roll.”

            “It wasn’t much of a sweet roll,” Dykes said. He sat. “Why aren’t you sitting in the comfortable seats?”

            “Don’t ask,” I said. “Patriotism probably.”

            “They want us here so they can keep an eye on us,” Wilson said.

            “Cocksucker motherfuckers,” Conners said.

            Having thoroughly explained the decision regarding our location, we welcomed Dykes into our little sea of misery. It was almost 0730.

            Several “Navy-Years” later, Conners was softly snoring, his hat just ready to slide from his nose. I was, with closed eyes and an open mind, trying my best to reconstruct the series of events that had gotten me to this place at this moment. Wilson was reading a newspaper he had retrieved from a trash can, his lips moving with each word and his head nodding with each sentence—a sort of literary ballet in action—while Dykes studied a group of keys on a chain.

            “Why am I taking all these keys with me?” he said to no one in particular. “What am I going to need keys for in Viet-fucking-nam?” It was the first time I had heard that name. I would hear it again, and again.

            I opened my eyes and turned to him. “Hell,” I said, “Wilson is taking his alarm clock.”

            Wilson quit reading. “I’ll need to know when it’s time to go on duty,” he said.

            “I think they’ll let you know things like that,” Dykes said.

            “But if they ever forget to, I’ll have a backup plan.”

            We nodded in appreciation of this exquisite slice of logic. “Backup plans are nice,” I said. “I only wish one of the four of us had thought of one for today. Then maybe we could all eat.”

            Connors was awake now and chimed in. “Goddam asswipes led me to believe we would be winging our way to the Orient by now,” he said. “Why would we need a goddam backup plan?”

            Again, the logic was unimpeachable. “Have you considered,” Dykes said, “that we are the first generation to fly off to war in a commercial airliner?”

            “I guess we are,” I said. “Never thought of it before.”

            “It will beat a troop ship,” Wilson said. “They don’t have stewardesses on troop ships. There are too many troops.”

            Why was our country sending such deep thinkers to fight in somebody else’s war halfway around the world? I suddenly suspected that there had been more pristine logic expressed in our little group this morning than in all the cabinet meetings held on the war so far. With Wilson as Secretary of State, Conners as Secretary of War, and Dykes as Chief of Staff, our country wouldn’t have been in this mess. As for me, I didn’t see any role in politics. I thought for a moment and decided that my role would be to report. Yeah, report. I made a vow that I would put all this down on paper someday when I thought the world at large was ready for it. It was 0900.

            A thousand years or so later it was 1000, or “four bells,” if you must. I know that was the time, for Dykes gave a start, punched me, and politely asked, “What the fuck time is it?”

            “Ten hundred, I said. “Nine hours or so hours to go. Why?

            “I fucking forgot something.”

            “What?” I said. “Your Bible?

            “Hell no,” he said indignantly. “I nearly forgot to do something.”

            “All you had to do was show up here,” I said.

            “No,” he said. I promised my mother I would call this aunt who lives here that I don’t even know.”

            “You don’t know your own aunt?”

            “It’s a long story,” he said. “They moved here from Pennsylvania nearly 20 years ago and haven’t been back since. I don’t even remember them.”

            “But you’re supposed to call them?”

            “I promised my mother.”

            Now for a short lesson in nautical propriety. You can mess with a sailor. You can mess with the Navy. You can mess with his ship. You can mess with his shipmates or about anything or anybody that impacts his life. Hell, you can mess with an admiral if your rigging is tight enough. But you don’t mess with a sailor’s mother. I understood fully the moral obligation that Dykes felt. “So go call your aunt,” I said.

            “Do you have a dime?”

            “Hell no. I have maybe three cents.”

            “Wilson,” Dykes said. Wilson looked up from his paper. He had gotten to the third page by now. “Do you have a dime?”

            “I pitched my last dime in on the cab fare so we could make sure we got here on time,” Wilson said.

            “Pile it on, motherfucker,” Conners said from beneath his hat.

            “He’s dreaming about food again,” I said. “Wake him up.”

            Dykes looked at the skull and crossbones tattooed on the back of Conners’ hand and the scars on his knuckles. “You wake him up,” he said, looking at me.

            “I know he doesn’t have any money,” Wilson said, “so you really don’t have to.”

            “Shit,” Dykes said. “What am I going to do?” He reached under his top and pulled out a wallet that was folded over his 13-botton pants. He showed me that it was void of folding money. Then he pulled out a piece of paper. “I have their number right here.”

            “Maybe the airline folks will let you use a phone,” I said.

            “Good idea,” he said. “I’ll bet when I explain it they will.” He sprang from his seat and rushed toward the ticket counter. I watched as he moved from agent to agent, his enthusiasm evidently dropping with each move. Finally, he moved to a desk manned by the same man who had made us move earlier. I saw Dykes gesture, his arms spreading toward the sky and I saw the man shake his head and say something. Dykes sagged and walked away, but when he had gone about ten feet, he turned and shot the man the finger with a loud slap of his free hand. Passengers stared as he returned.

            “They all said …” he began.

            “I know,” I said. “I watched.”

            “They won’t do it for one because they would have to do it for all,” Wilson said.

            “Shut the fuck up,” Dykes said. “Only one thing left to do,” he said.

            I said, “What’s that?”

            “Turn beggar,” he said. “Either that or tell mom I failed.” With that, he rose and headed toward the main part of the waiting room.

            It was painful watching him. The few passengers that would listen shook their heads as soon as he started talking. One lady even moved her young child to behind her in a gesture of protection. One thing I’ll say for him: he was persistent. The Navy was lucky to have a man who stuck to his mission like Dykes. It appeared, nevertheless, that he was destined for failure. As his dejected figure started back, he passed a janitor mopping an area of the terminal. Dykes looked at him, stopped, stared, and spoke. The man listened quietly and nodded. Then he thrust a hand into a pocket, pulled it out, and handed Dykes something. They talked for a moment. Dykes patted the man on the arm, said something to him and started back toward us.

            He reached us just as the terminal manager arrived with a huge, muscular Army MP following. As Dykes sat, the manager pointed at us and said to the MP, “Them.”

            “I’ll handle it,” the MP said, motioning for the manager to return to his duties. He then turned to us. “You boys been causin’ a little ruckus, I hear. Y’all got some problem or t’other?”

            Oh shit. There is no meaner creature on earth than an illiterate southern redneck with the tiniest speck of military authority. None of us spoke.

            “I ain’t askin’ you agin.”

            “We’re just waiting for a plane, Sir,” I said, “to take us to our duty station in the Republic of South Vietnam.” Now that’s a subtle way of pissing them off, these authority-crazed enlisted men, calling them “Sir.” They know you’re mocking them but there’s not much they can say or do.

            He considered the situation, probably computing behind his thick skull how much paperwork he faced if he harassed us too much. “Let me tell you soon-to-be war heroes somethin’.” He drew himself up and, I’ll swear on my parents’ graves, actually patted his pistol. “If I have to come back, you’ll miss that plane and that ain’t no way to start off being a hero.”

            We said nothing. None of us had been in the military long, but we knew already that backtalk was nourishment for the bullies that drifted through the service like damaged goods passing along an assembly line. He waited, sniffed the air, turned, and walked away.

            “Got it,” Dykes said, holding up his dime.

            “And from a janitor,” I said. “What made you ask him?”

            “I saw the anchors tattooed on his arm,” Dykes said. “He told me he was World War Two, USS Arkansas. Bosun’s Mate Third Class.”

            “Well jack me off with a bilge pump and call me a snipe,” Conners said.

            “I’ll be back,” Dykes s said and, with that, he was off. It was 1030.

            He was gone less than 10 minutes before he came back on the run. “Come on,” he said, “They’ll be here shortly.”

            “Who?” I said.

            “My aunt and uncle. They’re coming for us.”

            Conners stood. “All of us?”

            “All of us,” Dykes said. “Turns out they just live a short ways from here.”

            “They don’t want us to spend the whole day here bored to death,” Wilson said. We all looked at him and shook our heads.

            What else is there you would like to know? They were there in less than 20 minutes and we were at the terminal entrance to meet them. Since we were the only four sailors standing in one group, they had no trouble finding us. Dykes ran around and identified himself, spoke to them briefly, and motioned for us to get into the car. We introduced ourselves.

            What about them? They were a quiet couple in their early fifties, ancient to us in other words. Uncle Earl had landed at Normandy with the Big Red One and fought his way through France and Germany. Aunt Louise married him while he was attending college on the GI Bill. He was a mechanical engineer and a hell of a nice guy. She was, well she was a sweet aunt. What else can I say? They lived in a ranch-style bungalow in a subdivision near the airport.

            He was tall, with brown hair beginning to turn grey. She looked as if she had just stepped from one of those 1940s movies about a happy family. For reasons we didn’t discuss, they never had children, but Dykes later hinted at war wounds.

            Uncle Earl dropped us all off at the house and left us there to freshen up and enjoy coffee and snacks. Then Aunt Louise ordered us to go into the living room and make ourselves comfortable watching television.

            It was much nicer than the airport terminal.

            Uncle Earl came back with groceries, including a big bottle of Jack Daniels Whiskey and six of the thickest steaks I had seen up until that point in my life. Dykes went into the kitchen and caught Aunt Louise up on family news. Wilson helped Uncle Earl cook the steaks. Connors and I watched a football game and drank whiskey. It all ended too soon. We finished the meal with an explanation by Wilson that they had left the steaks medium rare because “It improves the flavor.” We never would have guessed.

            We even napped for a few minutes before Uncle Earl and Aunt Louise took us back to the airport. After hugs all around, we watched them drive away. I was thinking how a simple act of kindness could transform one of the worst days of my life to one of the best. It wasn’t, I regret to say, the best time in American history to be a member of the armed services and it would be a long time before the kindness of a stranger was shown me to me again. I never complained though, for it made the support of shipmates that much more important.

            Speaking of shipmates, when we joined the line for the plane, the young Seaman Apprentice who had checked in behind us that morning was there. We introduced ourselves and welcomed him into our group with him appreciating the comradeship. He sat with me all the way to Da Nang and we got to know one another. He was an only child and devoted to his parents. This would be his first time away from them. He came from a long line of sailors and, facing the draft, joined the Navy more from tradition than any longing for adventure on the high seas. During our in-country processing, he became a part of our bunch and never tired of telling us how nice it was to have friends.

            His name was Matheson and we learned that he wanted to go to college on the GI Bill when he got out of the Navy. He planned to be a teacher and, as we got to know him better, we would often tell him how good we thought he would be at it. That always made him feel better about being away from home.

We eventually received our permanent assignments and would be parting ways. Someone suggested we share a final evening in the EM Club at Camp Tien Sha, sort of a “goodbye shipmates, hello Vietnam” party. We met up there, had a few beers, watched the first of many USO shows we would see while in-country, and wondered about our future. Far too soon, our time was up and we had to leave.

Standing outside the club, Matheson wanted to hug us all before we left. We weren’t used to such displays, and the Navy would hardly have sanctioned it, but his family had moved to California from Ohio and that’s how they do things there. So, being a little drunk, we humored him, because by then we thought of him as our little brother. Even Conners joined in—albeit reluctantly—observing, “You white motherfuckers are crazy.” It was just a small act of kindness, and it seemed to make Matheson so happy: a group of grown men hugging one another under a brilliant oriental moon as drunks staggered by laughing. It was the second good time the original four of us had together before our tours got underway, and Matheson enjoyed being a part of it this time. He always seemed to feel good about knowing us. For our part, he made us smile and feel a little better about ourselves. The Navy was lucky to have him, and so were we on that warm night with a soft breeze blowing in from the South China Sea, the mingling smell of salty air, ancient vegetation, rotting fish, and human endeavor flowing over us like messengers announcing our place on the planet. It was a smell you wouldn’t easily forget.

We said goodbye in a sort of “So long, it’s been good to know you,” style and wished each other smooth seas. Matheson insisted on a final hug so we lined up and complied before we went our separate ways on unsteady feet that faced an uncertain future.

            It had been a great night, wrapping up an adventurous trip over from the states. Conners, Wilson, and I would meet again one year later as were processing out of Vietnam to new berths. We would have enough stories to last all the way back stateside. Dykes wasn’t there because, according to Wilson, he had extended his tour for six months. If you did that, the Navy gave you 30 days off free, a reward called “Basket Leave.” They would fly you anywhere in the “free world” and then back to Vietnam. According to Wilson, who ran into Dykes at a PX after he returned, Dykes had used the opportunity to go to Paris, France because he wanted to climb that big tower there and because he had read that they—the French—drank wine with breakfast, good reasons, I suppose. It sounded like Dykes anyway.

            We talked a lot about our trip over and the party we had the night when we first got in-country. We were changed, I suppose, and would never be the same young men that stood outside the EM Club in their new, but ill-fitting green uniforms—Matheson’s being at least a size too large making him look like a kid playing grown-up—and all of us with our stiff, clean, combat boots. We were just “new guys” but we would learn fast.

Oh yes, we also talked about Matheson. He didn’t make the whole tour. The Tet Offensive hit a month and a half after we got there and he bought it in a rocket attack out near Marble Mountain on the third day. I imagine we would have hugged him again that night if we could have foreseen the future—that he wouldn’t be there a year later to fly back home with us.

But that was one of the many things we had no way of knowing at the time.