I walk the base and I feel like I’ve landed on the moon. The base is a city, with tens of thousands of people and everything you could possibly need. I walk past dental clinics, restaurants, snack bars, a woodshop, a post office, a swimming pool. They even have basketball and tennis courts, a golf driving range, a laundromat, and a bank. At night there are nightclubs and bowling alleys. I mostly stay away. I keep mostly to myself.
I visited my buddy in the photo lab, and he gave me more photographs. He said I had some great stuff. He said they’d run in Stars and Stripes, but I had stuff good enough for the papers back home. Maybe a book. I thanked him for saving me copies. They are good. Real. They show the real Vietnam. They show marines in the bush injured and dying, not this facade they’ve erected here in the rear. This isn’t real. This isn’t Vietnam. I look at the pictures and I think, If I can make it out of here alive, if I can make it back home, maybe I really do have a chance at one of the newspapers.
Okay, maybe not the New York Times. Maybe that’s as unreal as this base. But maybe the Jersey Journal.
I talked to the PFC in the rack beside me. His nickname is Pee Bucket. No joke. He said he was in one of the shitters when his post got mortared and the entire shitter fell over with him in it. He came out with his pants around his ankles. Somebody said he smelled like a pee bucket and the name stuck. Why he told the story to me, who knows?
Pee Bucket is going home. He lost his left leg below the knee to a land mine. He was supposed to fly out today, headed to some place in California where he’s going to get a prosthetic leg and learn to walk again, but he missed his flight out. I don’t have to ask him why he missed his plane. I know why. He’s scared to go home. He doesn’t feel like he belongs there anymore. He belongs here. He has a job here. What’s he going to do at home, without a leg?
I think the same thing about my own situation. I once had a calendar to count down the days in-country. I think I wrote about that. I no longer count days. I’ve become used to the grunt life. I’ve become used to living in the bush. There’s a rhythm to it. I’m on my own with my brothers, what remains of them. Nobody can get to you. Your parents can’t tell you what to do. Your employer can’t tell you what to do or how to do it. Even the military can’t get to you. What are they going to do if I refuse an order? Send me to Vietnam? Send me out on search and destroys?
I smiled at that thought. I can’t believe I’ve missed the bush.
Captain Martinez came to see me—my first captain at Firebase Phoenix. Corporal Cruz got hold of him and let him know I’d been wounded. Martinez said that based on my combat experience and my injury, I could finish out my duty here, in the rear. Martinez asked if I could type. He needs a clerk. I thanked him and told him I’d have to think about it.
It sounds crazy, but I believed that I belonged in the bush, and I couldn’t leave it, not without Cruz.
Chapter 21
July 26, 1979
A car approached, and I was happy to have a distraction from William’s story about pulling Forecheck from the trees. A silver Mercedes wove along the wooded driveway and parked. A man, presumably the husband, stepped out. He was a big guy, maybe six foot six and stout. I could tell from his expression, and the way he disregarded William at his El Camino and then me, that he wasn’t happy.
William and I followed the husband into his torn-up master bathroom, though my mind kept slipping back to the story William had just told me about pulling bits and pieces of his friend Forecheck out of a tree.
“Why can’t you just fill in the rotted areas with wood putty? Why do you have to replace it?” the husband asked William. This guy, Eric something, was an insurance agent, but that didn’t stop him from throwing around construction terms like Christmas Catholics throw around Hail Marys and Our Fathers at holiday masses, without any real understanding of the meaning behind the words.
“Dry rot is a fungus,” William said. “You have to cut it out. If you patch it, it will keep spreading and get worse over time. You’ll have a new bathroom, walk in one day, and step through the floor.”
Eric made a face like he didn’t believe it. “Why didn’t Todd tell me it would cost this much?”
“Todd couldn’t have known how much it would cost. You can’t know when the walls and the flooring are in place.”
“Well I’m not paying that much to fix it. Come up with another solution.”
“There are no other solutions,” William said. He sounded bored, or tired.