Ryan
stayed in touch with me at Tripler Army Hospital in Hawaii. He didn’t re-up but
managed a lateral transfer, landing a gig as a detective for the Santa Barbara
Police Department. He suggested I come to Santa Barbara to join him there once
I recovered. He said my military experience in the CIC would count for
something towards a lateral transfer too, and that his recommendation ought to
make it a shoo-in. Once stateside, I found it difficult to adjust from the
beginning.
Ryan
damned near held my hand to take me through the hoops; registering at City
College and filing the paper work for getting my G.I. Bill started. For reasons
only the gods grasp, a lateral transfer of all of my military time qualified me
for Public Service Purchase towards retirement bennies but it was required I
take Criminal Justice courses and basic Police Officer Service Training taken
off from requirements in the Academy.
I knew I
wasn’t cop material by then. My head still rang… I had nightmares. Flashbacks.
I couldn’t concentrate. I could’ve had a good career, but I walked out of class
one morning and changed majors to philosophy with Dr. Timothy Fetler, and after
transferring to UCSB, completely immersed myself in Religious Studies with
Walter Capps who held the first seminars on Vietnam Veterans, while eking-out
average grades in everything else.
My records
from Vietnam were expunged for the most part and as far as the VA was
concerned, I received an honorable discharge as an E-6 staff sergeant and
though I didn’t expect a Purple Heart there was no mention of medical
treatment, or where and how I served except for a couple authorized ribbons. I
didn’t find out about these omissions until Professor Capps urged me to apply
for VA Disability Compensation.
On
college campuses Vets were an isolated lot among the bright-eyed kids on Mom
and Pop grants in those days. Some of us on the GI Bill walked around like we’d
fallen through a rabbit hole. Max McGee
is another Vet that’s a ghost shadowing this story. He knows all the key
players and all of them know him… like the string in string theory… I think. Max
and I weren’t the kind of Vets who went on to bigger and better things, like
grad school or engineering degrees, and we recognized that character in each
other. Max achieved a little more than I did as an art student that earned a
BFA and I declared a major in history before dropping out. I had some serious
drinking to do and school was getting in the way.
We spent
hours in his garage on Cinderella Lane next to a pumpkin patch. One night we
were stopped by the cops because we’d been hurling pumpkins at each other in
the pumpkin patch next door. There was no arrest, but I remember throwing one
and yelling, “Take that Prince Charming!” and he’d throw one back and yell,
“You see a prince here you can suck his dick!”
We
rolled in the pumpkin patch laughing and hooting after the cops left us. The
scary thing to me was that I think I felt an urge to hold him… to protect him,
and we cried. I smashed another pumpkin over his head when he tried to walk
away, and it started all over again. The details of what happened then are
still creepy to me, but we might have done something that night in the pumpkin
patch. There was no travelling down the Hershey Highway or anything like
that. We shoved the idea that we might
be gay into the background with all the other ghosts and avoided eye contact
for a while. After all, he was married, and I was… well, I had a memory of
someone, a woman… and after her, I was so very alone. Relationships, gay or
straight take commitment and let’s just say, after Kim-Ly, I wasn’t commitment
material. It hurts too much to love somebody that much and some of us just
ain’t cut-out for suffering the pain of it more than once. Though he was
absolutely devoted to his wife, Max had a similar attitude about love and it was the glass slipper neither of us looked for or talked about it after that night. We both left Prince Charming at the pumpkin patch on Cinderella Lane before the ball.
During
that time Max and Celeste had a baby girl and he’d become domesticated… for a
while. He told me about how he missed graveyard shift cab driving and the
independence it gave him. He said he hadn’t felt at home in any other job since
returning State Side. I dropped out of school and was driving a hack graveyard
shift when I met Anna and it turned out that she knew Max too. I didn’t see
much of him until after these events had passed. I heard that he’d been a
teacher or something at the prison up in Vacaville and then, much later, there
were the rumors about Nicaragua. After his divorce geedunk floated around that
Max was there with a Miskita Chica and Eden Pastora. Had I known then I would’ve worried about him.
When I did find out my fears were salved after I heard that the Bird Dog had
him covered. The consciousness of a warrior ain’t human and combat’s nasty
enough for those of us who are fuckin’ animals from the get-go. But going into
the cesspool of values that is war without the DNA for it, he would be more
than scarred for life and I don’t wish that on anyone… especially not someone I
love. A lot of Wannabees that missed out on Nam became Mercs and found out it
takes more than an abundance of bar-room testosterone to have what it takes.
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