Heywood Fetcher

  ~You’re In the Army Now

  The reality of Heywood’s soon-to-be new life began to set in by the fall of 1967. For the last several weeks during this period, his time was devoted to mostly closing up shop. Only days earlier, he’d watched as the happy buyer of his much beloved GTO drove off into the sunset, fully believing that the owner never did anything more than drive the GTO back and forth to work and had no idea how fast the car could actually go. Heywood was left without transportation, but it mattered little. Uncle Sam awaited his arrival at the nearby Army base, a mere forty-five miles from his home in Kentucky. In retrospect, it seemed to him that it was but a few weeks earlier that he had arrived in a much larger city wondering how he would ever survive. How much his life had changed since those eventful high school days.

  Now, real life came at him in waves. The days of focusing on the trivial matters of his teen years fast receded into life’s rearview mirror. It was time for him to put on his big boy togs and go out into the adult world, a world where, it seemed to Heywood, all they ever talked about was economic issues, family matters, high taxes, job insecurity, and rebellious youths with their drugs, long hair, and loud rock and roll music. Most of all, they talked about young people’s growing reluctance to represent the nation’s efforts to show those communists in Southeast Asia that the country wasn’t going to let a bunch of Viet Cong guerillas succeed in their brazen attempt to rid a small part of the Orient of the deleterious effects of a hundred years of foreign intervention.

  Heywood never considered himself an expert on matters of international diplomacy, but it did occur to him that sending young men half a world away to beat the jungle looking for little people wearing silk pants and carrying AK-47’s who were supposedly attempting to unshackle their nation from the disastrous effects of centuries of Western colonialism might be somewhat shortsighted.

  Heywood, even at his young age, understood a need for the country to provide jobs in the cities for all those newly arrived factory workers. Although doing it by increasing the size of the defense budget by billions of dollars to build munitions as well as take young men off the streets and train them for a controversial war of dubious necessity didn’t make a whole lot of sense either.

  To Heywood, it was the responsibility of the non-communist citizens of those places to take up the slack and defend their country. Sure, we could send them some arms and ammo, but they ought to do the fighting and dying, if that’s what had to happen. He couldn’t recall reading in any of the numerous history texts made available to him all through high school where any human being from a place called South Vietnam ever came to America to help out in any independence movements.

  In the end, Heywood could see where it was heading. If he didn’t use his head, he would end up in some swampy, mosquito and snake infested country dodging bullets sent his way by a bunch of really short people who had no comprehension of the concept of Manifest Destiny, the divine sanction of the United States territorial expansion as ordained by providence.

  Apparently, it was the country’s job to carry this message all over the world and, especially, to all those backwater places where no sentient human being would ever choose to live, unless they were unfortunate enough to have been born there and didn’t know any better.

  Heywood hadn’t just arrived in the big city on the back of hay wagon (although he did arrive in the back of a moving van). Others trod the same perilous path that presently lay before him. They, too, had ultimately come to the same conclusion he did. If his skinny rear end never showed up in Vietnam, it would be much more difficult for any of those sneaky communist sympathizing Orientals to fill it with buckshot.

  Heywood decided he was going to beat them at their own game. He’d read somewhere, long in the past, that it was usually much better to confront dire issues head on. Don’t wait for problems to come to you. Meet them head on and one’s chances of prevailing, or at least surviving, were increased significantly. That’s why Heywood got up off of his rear end and marched down to the local Army recruiting office to enlist.

  He found out that if you joined for a period of three years instead of getting drafted for the two year period, a recruit could also choose a job that did not simply require becoming what they called a grunt. Grunts were the guys that did most of the real fighting. Most draftees were funneled into the infantry to become ground pounding grunts. If you wanted to find out what it was like to fight in a real war, go find a grunt and he could tell you. Those were the guys who knew what it’s all about. Heywood had no desire to ever be one of those guys.

  It wasn’t that Heywood was a coward. He was from a family that had always stood up for the country in times of peril. As far as Heywood was concerned, this had nothing to do with protecting his country and everything to do with that little thing called Western Imperialism. If one didn’t know what that was, just go find any old world history text book and you were sure to find out. French Indochina, which later became South Vietnam and North Vietnam, had been under colonial rule of France for many years. Communist China lay just to the north of the part of French Indochina that became North Vietnam. When the French finally smartened up, following a period of prolonged guerilla warfare and gave up on the imperialist model of governance leaving the door open for more ism’s: capitalism and communism, all hell broke loose. As far as the United States was concerned, communism was not going to happen in the part of French Indo-China that became South Vietnam as long as there existed millions of draft age young men walking the streets of America not yet scarred by a decade of post-World War II foreign interventionist policies.

  It was a resigned Heywood who walked into the local Army recruiter’s office that fateful day in 1967 and asked the nice soldier wearing the highly decorated uniform point blank, “What kind of job do you have for me, that if I sign up for, will never be needed in Vietnam?”

  For a second, the recruiter seemed to be taken aback or even amused at Heywood’s candor.

  “Well, that depends,” responded the smiling recruiter. “It depends on how smart you are. Are you one of those educated, smart people?”

  Heywood saw no reason to be coy with the guy. What they were talking about dealt with life and death matters. He was mostly interested with the part that empathized with staying alive.

  “I’m smart enough to understand that getting shot at on a daily basis is not conducive to a guy ever reaching the age of retirement. Besides, my family has participated in every war this country has ever fought, and I presently have a couple of cousins in Vietnam right now with more on the way. So if you don’t mind, I would like to do my service time elsewhere. Can you help me out, or do I need to go on down the street to the Air Force recruiter?”

  “No need to do that,” replied the Army recruiter. “All we need for you to do is take a few tests for us. That will answer all of the questions we both need to know.”

  Two weeks to the day following that first meeting, Heywood had his answer.

  “Well, partner,” began the recruiter after having reviewed the results of Heywood’s tests. “Looks like, according to your test scores, you are eligible for just about anything we have to offer. What are you interested in doing in the Army?”

  Heywood thought about the question posed to him before responding.

  “I think it has more to do with where I do the job, than what I am doing. I can also tell you up front that I don’t see myself as a career soldier. I want to get in and out alive,” answered Heywood.

  The veteran NCO looking at Heywood smiled, seemingly amused at Heywood’s frankness.

  “What would you say about working in a guided missile fire direction center? What would you say about living and working in the Miami, Florida, area? What would you say about me making this all happen for you after you complete basic training here in Kentucky followed by several months additional training at a missile school out west?” responded Heywood’s newest and best friend in the whole United States Army.

  “I would s
ay you’ve just been added to my very exclusive Christmas card list. Where is it you said I am suppose to sign?” answered Heywood with an ear to ear grin covering his face.

  Within a month of that angst-filled day at the recruiter’s office, Heywood found himself, along with about a hundred other vacant-eyed young men of similar age and description, standing in an old WWII era building at the south end of Louisville, Kentucky, holding up his right hand as part of the official (you better keep your big mouth shut now, recruit) induction ceremony into the U.S. Army. Heywood intentionally did not repeat a single one of the many “repeat after me” words just to see if it made any difference. It didn’t. He knew because he asked one of the heretofore smiling NCOs, what would happen if a guy later admitted to not actually saying the magic words.

  The NCO answered the question by ordering Heywood to get down and give him twenty-five pushups. He’d been in the Army all of 67 seconds before getting his first official reprimand. Heywood actually felt good since he’d initially intended to ask the guy if he wanted to go have a beer somewhere while they waited for the bus.

  On the way to the basic training center at Fort Knox, Kentucky, Heywood could swear he heard guys crying. He was not an elitist but after looking around to get a better look at the young men who were about to join him on this, very possibly, adventure of a lifetime he suspected he knew why most of them were there. He observed their mannerisms, their language skills, their dress, and their attitudes. After thinking about it for only minutes, he came to the conclusion most of the young men present were jobless, uneducated draftees most likely heading for a tour of duty on the front lines in Vietnam. With this in mind, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for them and more than a little bit ashamed of himself. Then he followed that up by retreating to one of his favorite mental defensive positions relating to why some people survive and succeed and why so many fail in every facet of their existence. It had everything to do with evolution or the survival of the fittest. The theory was that, the smartest and the strongest usually survived and the weakest perished.

  Case in point: Did Heywood sit around crying when he got his draft notice? No, he did not. He got the hell up and changed the game. It’s called initiative. He did not like the way the game plan had been laid out for him, so he got busy and changed it to better suit his own ambitions. If people didn’t like it, they could just shove it. There were already enough people out there in the world blindly walking out into traffic. If you want to survive all the government sponsored bullshit shoved your way, then get off your butt and do something. There were a lot of young men heading for Canada. That’s a little more than Heywood felt comfortable with. He couldn’t run away as he had too many relatives who would come looking for him for bringing shame upon the family name.

  Protecting the family name issue always seemed odd to Heywood since about half of the family, still living back in those hollers in Kentucky, did not have the proverbial pot to piss in or the price of a good bottle of whiskey to their name. Still, if somebody showed the flag you damn sure better get up and follow it, no matter where it ended up.

  Heywood intended to end up in south Florida, not South Vietnam, and if any of those sneaky VC guys ever got that far, well then, he would shoot’em down with a missile.

  A week later, Heywood could not tell you if he had been there a week or a month. Things had happened so quickly once they arrived at their destination, the Fort Knox Army Basic Training Center. Everything was a blur. As soon as the bus pulled up to what looked to be a harmless old building that he later found out was built for the soldiers who fought and won WWII, a bunch of bug-eyed, red-faced men in green fatigues wearing Smokey Bear type hats started yelling at the new recruits at the top of their lungs.

  Heywood attempted to calm one maniacal looking NCO down by informing him he’d had a very trying day already and would appreciate it if he wouldn’t yell at him. Heywood told him he wasn’t an idiot after all and that he could understand things just as easily if they weren’t shouted at him. Unfortunately, all this did was cause the fire breathing individual standing before him spitting in his face with every expletive deleted word uttered to tell Heywood to get down and give him twenty.

  Then, when Heywood asked him twenty what, the guy got so mad a blood vessel broke in his nose. As the stricken NCO was led away cursing the ground that all shit-for-brains new recruits walked on, he was replaced by another equally unfriendly sort. This time, Heywood decided to keep quiet and wait until later to let the rest of the NCOs know that there really was no reason to yell, especially at him. He felt sure they would understand. He’d been told most all of his young life that things usually got done just as quickly if a person asked politely. They just needed to get to know one another better.

  For the next, it seemed like, fifty years, Heywood’s group of raw recruits were marched, trucked, bused, herded, prodded, excoriated, demeaned, and, in general, physically and psychologically abused from morning to night. It seemed as if every fifteen minutes, some bugged-eyed NCO would come running into the always too hot or too cold, completely un-insulated old World War II, two story, wooden barracks yelling for them to form up out in the street ASAP.

  From there, they would be marched to some usually stark looking structure wherein they would be abused and yelled at by every human they came into contact with. Absolutely no one talked. Everyone who had anything to say to a new recruit yelled. One foot away or ten yards away, it made no difference. They yelled. Heywood wondered how unpleasant it must be to go have a beer with any of those guys if all they did was yell all the time. Or worse, be married to one of them.

  Heywood listed the many things that happened during this period that lasted for the greater part of the entire first week: getting shots for every possible malady afflicting mankind; issued enough green clothing to camouflage the state of Delaware; signing enough forms that if bound up would rival a set of encyclopedias; dropping down on the cold ground and doing at least five-thousand pushups because the DIs (Drill Instructors) didn’t like his looks, questions, answers, or stupid grin; and finally, the wretched refuse of society cannon fodder that made up the remainder of Heywood’s squad chose him as squad leader.

  Heywood knew right off that the platoon sergeant didn’t much approve of the squad choosing him as their leader. Heywood was about to suggest that someone else could do the job better, but the DI told him to shut up and put on the armband signifying the position. All in all, Heywood did not relish becoming the center of attention among a group of individuals many of whom looked as if getting their shoes on the right feet in the mornings might be considered the highlight of their day.

  Little did he know that this particularly tiresome week would be looked back upon in the near future as one of the easier periods of the training cycle. Weeks and weeks of cold feet, yelling DIs, aching muscles, enduring excruciatingly painful lectures on every inane subject imaginable including gonorrhea, lice, crabs, and stories of GIs whose peckers rotted off after the unfortunate troopers failed to remember what they were told in basic training were endured. Heywood made a special mental note to try to remember that pecker rotting off story, just in case.

  If the miserable weather that cursed the entire training cycle has not been mentioned yet, it’s time it was. It was miserable. It got cold. It rained. It sleeted. It rained some more. It snowed. It rained again and then froze, covering everything with a sheet of ice. For the entire eight weeks it got progressively worse.

  While all this nasty weather was going on into infinity and beyond, it seemed like training went on as normal. Every laborious, scary, nasty, exhausting, demeaning, seemingly senseless training regimen scheduled got done. Horror stories were common place.

  Heywood knew he would forever recall the young Hispanic recruit wailing and screaming in agony as he attempted to claw through the multiple layers of inclement weather clothing to find his John Thomas, so he could take a pee that he had had to hold in for the last two hours of standing his post o
ut in the field. It had ended tragically with the poor young man lying on his back on the frozen ground screaming, “I can’t find it. I can’t find it.” All while the warm fluid forced its way out of his swollen bladder into the frigid clothing he would not be able to change for another two days.

  Heywood was a quick learner so he drank nothing unless he absolutely felt he needed it to survive. He, too, had come perilously close on a number of occasions when he couldn’t get his clothing off without a fight.

  One of the most traumatic recurring experiences had everything to do with eating at the mess hall. First of all, you had to make it through the overhead hand bars before you were allowed inside the mess hall to eat. That was a trick for a lot of the guys, including Heywood. Recruits had to walk up to this twenty foot long, eight foot high, overhead ladder device, take off their gloves in below freezing weather, jump up and grab one of the bars and while supporting all their weight, including thirty pounds of winter clothing with only their arms and exposed hands and hand-walk the entire twenty feet without their feet ever touching the ground. If you failed to make it, you had to go to the back of the line and stand in the cold until it was your turn again. It took Heywood almost two weeks to get the hang of it, so to speak. He finally did like some of the others and started thinking of himself as a monkey. Within a few days he looked like Bonzo the Chimp swinging through the jungle. It certainly wasn’t one of his best moments, but at least it got him inside where it was warm.

  The mess hall workers probably scared him more than anyone. They all were so bitter, all the time. Forget about making a suggestion or choosing which particular piece of chard black bacon you wanted. It seemed most of the cooks looked forward to those moments when a recruit actually requested that their eggs be prepared a certain way. When that happened, most of the cooks laughed like children as they went about mangling the requester’s order. Heywood quickly learned that if you wanted to survive you never made a special request nor looked one of the cooks in the eye as they were super defensive about their food being commented on once the usually gagging recruit was safely out of the mess hall.

  The safest course of action for Heywood was to simply get in line with a tray and allow whoever was serving whatever grizzled mess that came from the big pots on the chow line to slop some of it on his plate. Then, keeping his head down to keep from making eye contact with any of the future ax murderer candidate chow hall staff, he’d grab a carton of milk along with a banana or an apple or a cookie, and headed for the farthest table away from the chow line.

  Once safely at the table, the best bet was to do nothing but eat or, in Heywood’s case, act like you were eating. Somehow Heywood knew he had to get most if not all the food on his platter into someone else’s stomach before trying to leave the building. The chow hall staff frowned upon seeing their hard work tossed unceremoniously into a big nasty garbage can. That’s why he always tried to sit at one of the tables with the southern boys. Most of those guys were not at all particular about what they ate, so he kept slipping most of his food onto their trays. Heywood wasn’t sure, but he suspected that a couple of the those boys never even bothered to spit out the ever present gristle that he swore made up the greater part of whatever low rent meat that was served. It goes without saying that Heywood lost a lot of weight throughout the entire basic training ordeal. If it wasn’t for him going to the PX for candy bars to keep his energy level up, he probably wouldn’t have made it.

  About the only good thing that could be said about the mess hall food was that it was not as bad as the food they got served in the field. It was basically the same food, only it was usually cold, coagulated, and mixed together with everything else, namely: gravy, pudding, salads, gelatin, cake, as well as those always tasty crushed cookies. Oddly enough, many of those country boys actually gained weight.

  Quite possibly the hardest thing for Heywood to do all during the frigid cold eight week training cycle was to stay awake during the indoor lectures. In fact, Heywood had so much difficulty staying awake that he was summarily relieved of his squad leader responsibilities. He didn’t really give a big rat’s ass. He had enough problems keeping his own crap straight, much less having to remind guys with names like Clem and Skeeter to be sure and put the sheet under the blanket when making the bed every single day.

  Heywood wasn’t the only one to have difficulty staying awake when the platoon was marched directly from hours of outside activities such as climbing poles, jumping over things, sticking a bayonet into a sack of sand, and marching on the parade field to the toasty buildings wherein all sorts of classes dealing with questions on when it was okay to shoot people, bayonet people, or blow up people with one of those handy dandy grenades were held.

  Heywood found it even harder to keep his eyes open as one of the many always yelling NCOs attempted to impart their personal experiences relating to relieving various and sundry enemy combatants of limbs, life, and pursuit of happiness opportunities in wars spanning the previous quarter century. At times, Heywood couldn’t help but wonder when certain ones of those old warriors got that glazed, distant look in their eyes while telling of personal hand to hand combat experiences that just maybe some of these guys were sexually repressed. They simply hadn’t gotten laid often enough. He wondered if maybe he should write it up and send his idea off to the Pentagon. The country needn’t be sending troops to Vietnam. They should be sending hookers, hookers with big tits because all those little Oriental girls were notorious for having small tits. Send a bunch of big tit Caucasian farm girls over there, and this war would be over in a skinny minute.

  “Private Fetcher, are you sleeping during my class, again?” was the all too familiar sound of a Drill Instructor’s voice he heard much too often.

  Heywood couldn’t help it. He tried as hard as he could, but he just could not stay awake long enough to take in the how to resist becoming a stool pigeon if captured by a bunch of pajama wearing little guys in the jungle lecture.

  The temperature in the old coal furnace heated wooden building had to be about ninety degrees. They usually had been running, jumping, climbing, and crawling all morning. Heywood was tired. He was bored. He was sick of all the horseshit. Just give him a gun a send him to Vietnam already. Maybe the Viet Cong would shoot him. But right at the moment that sounded infinitely more agreeable than listening to a bunch of vocabulary challenged lifer NCOs’ bullshit.

  Did they really expect him to believe they always dug a hole to shit in while out in the jungle? Heywood would shit wherever he could when it was necessary: in the woods, in an alley, on old Mr. Johnson’s porch (the guy called the police on him for stealing a couple of his apples), and, most definitely, in a jungle.

  “Private Fetcher, I want you to get down and give me twenty-five pushups to help you remember not to fall asleep in class.” That’s what the appalled DIs usually said to Heywood while he wiped the much needed sleep from his eyes. Later while they were all outside smoking as many cigarettes as possible before being herded back inside the oven hot building for another session of how to not divulge any military information whilst a rather nasty tempered little VC, reeking of dead raw fish recently eaten, threaten to stick a bamboo pole up your ass so far that you could blow your nose through it, Heywood learned a good lesson about putting hastily extinguished cigarette butts in his pocket. Don’t do it. He got his ass chewed out royally when an unsympathetic DI failed to commiserate with him when a still live butt burnt a hole in his fatigue jacket pocket while he stood at attention.

  When asked why he had put a burning cigarette butt in his pocket in the first place, Heywood responded that he figured it made about as much sense as most of the other stuff they had been doing all morning. Later after completing the fifty pushups ordered by the un-amused DI, he changed his story and swore he must have had one of those brain seizures that he’d forgotten to tell the recruiter his family was afflicted with. That got him another fifty pushups.

  Heywood didn’t want to seem irreve
rent, but common sense told him most of the stuff they were trying to cram down his throat would never see the light of day in a war zone. Practically every book about fighting a war of any kind always ended up referring to something called field expediency which Heywood understood to mean doing what you had to do or what you could do under challenging circumstances. Besides, Heywood wasn’t going to Vietnam, he was going to Miami. So what the hell did he care? The last he’d heard they had indoor plumbing in south Florida where he was going to serve his tour of duty either watching for hostile air craft or chasing every cute little bikini clad vixen in the land of sunshine, suds, and surf.

  The remainder of Heywood’s basic training became little more than an expansion on the same theme with the basic plan being to reduce each recruit to the status of a mostly mindless cannon fodder candidate.

  Training experiences of special note might include the lesson Heywood learned when he hung around at the back of the platoon the day they went to the grenade throwing range. It went without saying that Heywood hoped he never got so close to an enemy combatant that he might benefit by throwing a grenade twenty-five or thirty yards. That was way, way too close to another human who had designs on eliminating him as a functioning member of the human race. Better to stay back and let the artillery do it.

  Anyway, it turned out Heywood ended up having to throw five grenades instead of one. It was a rule never to return to the company area with live munitions. If they took it to the field, it stayed in the field. When Heywood got up off the ground where he had only moments been thrown down upon because he forgot to follow the DI’s orders to hit the ground as soon as the grenade left his hand, he got a big surprise.

  “Not so fast, dipshit,” were the kind words Heywood heard as he got to his feet. “You need more practice so we’re going to toss the rest of these babies before we’re done.”

  Before handing him another grenade, the Mensa candidate DI threatened Heywood with his life if he got them killed.

  “Three fricking years! I got three fricking years of this crap,” were the words Heywood repeated over and over as he tossed all the remaining grenades in textbook fashion.

  This pretty much was typical of what went on daily for the remainder of Heywood’s stint at the basic training center. There was the idiot at the gun range who gave him half empty clips of ammo causing Heywood to miss out on getting time off if he scored the highest on the rifle range. Heywood had his gun, so sorry I mean his weapon, sighted in perfectly because he did not miss a single target while the ammo supply lasted. He told the duffus who couldn’t even count to twenty when putting the cartridges in the clips that he would find out where he lived and make a point of going there to steal his dog someday if they both survived this insanity, that is.

  The only other incident worth mentioning relating to Heywood’s basic training experience had to do with getting a few days leave in between the end of basic training and reporting to his next temporary duty station in Oklahoma.

  Heywood decided it would probably be the proper thing to do if he turned up at the old neighborhood tavern to visit with some of the old gang before departing for the frontlines out in the great state of Oklahoma. The usual meeting spot was a corner tavern where the innkeeper was a nice old gentleman who had allowed Heywood to partake of alcoholic libations on the premises even before he was of legal age.

  A good old time was had by all. Heywood did not have to buy a beer the whole evening. That fact may have been at least part of the reason why Heywood became involved in a rather embarrassing incident.

  After ingesting several mugs of the local favorite, the boys started to act like boys and brag about all those very important boy things.

  Heywood no longer had a fast car so that wasn’t anything he could brag about any longer. Nor did he have the longest penis, by a large margin. That was also not something he would bring up. There was one thing that Heywood was now in possession of that he became more confident of as he consumed the free flowing suds. That had everything to do with the fact that he was now a finely tuned fighting machine thanks to the efforts of the United States Army.

  Heywood had spent the last eight weeks honing his killing skills, especially those skills that utilized one’s physical talents like hand to hand combat. Naturally he felt obligated to inform his old pals that things had changed, and he was no longer a person to be taken lightly or messed with.

  This, of course, elicited several dismissive comments from some of his old pals. But Heywood knew they were ignorant of the lethal tools he now possessed in his finely tuned appendages. He cautioned them not to get him riled up for everyone’s sake.

  Booze will do strange things to young men, even causing them to recklessly risk injury in the face of insurmountable odds. Heywood flat out told them this. “Don’t make me use these hands and arms that have been turned into lethal weapons,” he said in all earnestness.

  The booze won the day. One short, but stout, young man stepped forward and dared Heywood to put up or shut up. The mildly inebriated young friend would not be dissuaded no matter that Heywood tried hard to impress upon him the many days and hours of lethal hand to hand combat training he’d absorbed during the last couple months at the nearby Army base.

  Feeling somewhat forgiving regarding his old friend’s booze-based decision to confront a finely tuned human war machine, Heywood faced his rash young friend determined that he would merely teach him a lesson.

  Recalling his many hours of training, Heywood feinted one direction and then moved at lightning speed towards his aggressor. It was over before it actually started. Heywood’s rash young friend was bent over double trying to get his breath back from laughing so hard. While at the same time, Heywood was wondering why things got so dark. Maybe that was because he was upside down in huge metal trash can that sat in the corner of the room.

  “Damned Army,” Heywood said over and over while he waited for someone to grab his feet and pull him out of another of those embarrassing situations he seemed to have a knack of getting himself into.

  “Damned Army!”