As our conversation faltered, I asked Tom about a place to eat on base.
“Say the food is okay at the NCO Club,” he said, giving me an out if I wanted it.
“No club tonight.”
“Pretty fair steaks at the Kelly Restaurant.”
“Where’s that?”
“I’m going up, if you want to come along.”
“Sure. What about your letter? I’ll wait if you want to finish it.”
“Fuck it,” he laughed. “She’ll marry some prick before I get stateside anyway. Get ready.”
As we walked down the hall to the central stairwell to call a cab, I was again struck by the quiet, the sense of desertion, but as I moved between those rooms, those walls which could not hold even a breeze, I realized they provided an unusual privacy for enlisted men. People were behind those walls — signaled by a muffled laugh or cough, a book falling from sleepy hands, a radio humming, a bunk groaning under a restless sleeper — privately behind them. I could not remember a single moment during my first hitch of being alone in the barracks, not even in the latrines.
“You people live good,” I said.
“Ain’t home,” Tom said, turning into the stairwell.
* * *
The Kelly Restaurant was exactly what you would expect on a military installation: the second-best eating place in any small American town where the Baptists and Methodists gather to exchange weather complaints, clothing compliments and pessimism, a warehouse of scratched and chipped formica and cracking plastic, except the Kelly Restaurant served Japanese beer in liter bottles.
“The steaks were okay,” I said as Tom and I were on our fourth or fifth bottle, “but the waiters were surly as hell.”
“Fuckers,” he said, grinning so hard his cheeks bunched into tight little balls of leather. “Real shits. Don’t tip ‘em, they pick your pocket on the way out.” He raised the tall green bottle. “Banzai!” We drank to that. “Crazy little Japs,” he said, “Tried to win the war.” He shook his head without shaking his grin at all. “If they’d a give this stuff away free, they could a walked on the drunks from San Francisco to Cincinnati. Wouldn’t be no wars if people drink more.”
“Just be sloppier. Huh,” I said as an airman second and his date strolled past our table, “That wouldn’t be a bit sloppy.” The airman turned around, but I smiled at him, and he turned back around.
“Leech bitch,” Novotny said.
“Who?”
“Fucking leech. Dependent child. Sixteen years old and already given the clap to thirty-seven guys.”
“You know her?”
“Comes to the pool all the time to make us holler. Ain’t hollerin’ yet. Only airmen mess with leeches. Below our principles.”
“Might be all right.”
Novotny straightened up, dropped his grin, and very solemnly said, “Man might as well be a lifer as screw a leech.” He paused, concerned, “You ain’t no lifer, are you?”
“Lifer?”
“Taking twenty?”
“Shit, I don’t know…”
“What the hell you doing back in the Army anyway?”
“Shit, I don’t know. After my wife left me, I…”
“Woman trouble. Knew it,” he interrupted. “Soon as I laid eyes on you, knew it. Woman trouble. You know I’m the only guy been here long as I have hasn’t got a Dear John. Only one left. Seen ‘em all go down. Woman trouble. Spot it a mile away.” He shook his head. “What you need is a seventy-five cent love affair, fellow.”
“Is it that cheap? I don’t have a pass yet, anyway.” All new personnel had to be on base fifteen days before they were allowed a pass.
“No, no. This’s different. Over at the Airman’s Club. Six bits. No nookie, just true love and dancing. Be my guest.”
We settled the check, then walked through a drifting mist toward the barn-like tin building which housed the Airman’s Club. Our voices and laughter rang in the cool, damp night, clear and echoing along the glittering black streets. The soft halos of the street lights wavered in easy breezes and jeeps and trucks hissed politely past. I remembered, remembered those Friday nights in Seattle, Ell and I wandering home from weekly hamburgers and beer at a neighborhood bar; madcap rainy evenings that seemed to dance to our laughter, alone and together, untroubled as never before or again, wet and cold and happy as when we were children. And later tipsy and steaming under the shower, slick and soapy, and we could never wait, never.
* * *
Novotny danced and furiously danced with his seventy-five-cent-love-affair until I expected his bad leg to fly off and tumble right up to the bandstand, felling potted palms as it went; but it seemed as able as his other. Able enough to play football, he explained, and added that the season would start soon and anyone who wanted to play could go over to the Agency outfit and sign up. The three Army units — Agency, ACAN and the 721st — had one team among them.
“We really tear up airmen,” Novotny said, sitting down while his girl caught her breath — my affair had long since left me to my sullen silence. Novotny had that same strained grin again, as if he did not intend to wait for the season. “I hate this fucking place, but we get a good club like last year — won the base championship — and it’s okay. Football season goes real quick, bam bam bam, then six more months and I’m going home. Back to the ZI, the Zone of Interior, the Land of the Big PX, multicolored staff cars and concrete barrios. No more PI for this GI. I’m going civilian-side.”
All the way back to the barracks he explained why I too would soon adhere to the motto, IHTFP or I Hate This Fucking Place. At the time I wondered what there was to hate, though I later understood that it was the time itself, the slow, inexorable murder of the time, the boredom of escape, the pure nihilism of the peace-time soldier, suffering not only the contradiction of terms “peace” and “soldier” but that of “time” too. But I didn’t hear what Novotny was saying then: I had my own enemy, blacker and vaster than time — memory, or history as it is popularly called. I named it my enemy then, hating it as the Roman soldier who pierced Christ’s side must have hated Him. Salvation is a hateful thing: surely the memory of man proves that.
No, I didn’t hear the pain in Novotny’s voice, the grinding agony of having no meaning. I fell asleep, thinking, Surely soldiers gripe in Heaven… no one understands the reward for virtue… only the penalty for guilt. Then I dropped away to visions of a scarred leg dancing alone in the desert, a vast stone leg pursued by a girl-child, pretty and pink, but when she caught it, her hands rotted black and fell away as my father’s voice tolled, “My name is Ozymandias, king of despair: / Look on my works, ye warrior and king.” (I always dream what I’ve read, though changed in my mind as if I’d written it. A mighty conceit.)
* * *
Later that night I dreamed of home, a cool spring morning, soft and fresh. As I walked to my car, the sweet air tickled my face and sprinkled goose-bumps with a quick shiver among the sun-white hair of my arms. The chill, pleasant and deep, touched with excitement, caused me to pee in the thick grass where the washing machine emptied. It was right, the sky open and blue and the long run of the pasture glistening clean and dark green with the dew, and the patch of grass curled and thick, and all this mine, and the sky and the fields and the grass, all mine, and me, young and king in the heart of her.
The stream, golden arch into the tight grass, sparkled and slowly rolled, then I too, like a wisp, toward the dark tangled hairs flew. As I drifted, the grass bore my Ell, my first, naked and green in the sudden night, arms and shining legs lifted. Then finished, easily I rested in her, lovers on the patchwork fiber of my back seat, my car half-hidden in a low brush thicket, and I lost in her, in the ease and softness of her under the wide sky of night, my Ell, my fallen breath cupped in the curve of her neck. But quickly she whispered of things wet, warm, and dangerous, of spermy traps, and I leaped away to clutch the condom bloated with the tinkling afterthought of a pee. The thin walls burst, flooded the shame of my wa
ste across the moonlight plain of our loins. I cried in guilt for she saw… and woke crying in fear of the loneliness too she must have seen. Else why she should love me? I asked half-dreaming as I crawled from the damp bed.
I stripped the bunk, flipped the mattress, and wandered to the latrine to shower. Back in the room I smoked, leaning against the screen. I wonder if John Wayne ever peed the bed? The stretch of a grin on my face only eased the mood for a second.
Ah, you crazy bastard, Krummel. What are you doing here? Came to laugh. You dream of being a warrior? Seems to me you pee the bed and cry for yourself. What else should I do? You could have been anything? I wanted to be everything. I couldn’t decide. I always got to places too late. Now you’ve learned the worth of a limited choice. No, I just made the wrong ones. So now you wait for a war like a fool? Why not start your own? You know your history. You need nothing else. Whatever I say, you’ll say I’m just afraid, which I am. I can only be what I am. And your history, your memory as you call it, dictates what you must be? Yes. You wandering purposeless fool, out of time and place, remembering wars that never happened, heroes that never died much less lived. I couldn’t stop dreaming of a better time, of honor and heroism and virtue. Where else can I find them? They told me that is where they were, cast in the fires of battle. Maybe they’re right in some way they don’t understand. Maybe you’re a fool? Maybe.
I watched the rain suck at the curling blue smoke, the mourner’s rain, chokingly heavy and black, and the glittering drops plummet to earth, to earth and who knows how much farther.
* * *
The next morning Sgt. Tetrick gave me a guided tour and lecture on Clark Air Force Base, Philippines. Clark Air Force Base lies on the central Luzon plain in the province of Pampanga near the city of Angeles. It is bordered on the west by the Bambam river which skirts a heavily jungled range of hills and on the east by the Manila-Baguio highway. Clark is one of the largest bases in the Far East. It provides runways and support facilities for countless jet fighters and bombers which guard Southeast Asia against China, or for American business interests, or against the Eskimos, depending on your politics and memory. The base, in its turn, is also guarded. A strong hurricane-wire fence encloses the entire base. The fence, as any other important facility of the base, is also closely guarded by the Air Police, Filipino constabulary and Negrito pygmies. The APs patrol the perimeter in jeeps and three-quarter-ton trucks, armed with Browning automatic shotguns, submachine guns, carbines, rifles, pistols, and angry German Shepherd police dogs. The APs shoot on sight, usually forgetting the warning shots, and quite often kill, not only thieves and infiltrators, but expensive dogs and each other on occasion. When an AP kills a Filipino intruder, he is quickly court-martialed, found guilty, fined one dollar, given a carton of his favorite smokes by an apologetic major, then flown back to the states on the next flight. The Filipino constabulary, being indigenous, suffer no such inconvenience. They are merely required to reimburse the government for each round of ammunition expended that does not find a human target. They seldom miss; ammunition is expensive. The Negritoes, true pygmies, live mainly in the hills except for a small group which resides in cardboard, tin and board shacks near the back fence. They are famed for their unreasoning love of Americans, their righteous hatred of Filipinos and Japanese, and their action against the Imperial Army of Japan during World War II. Their favorite trick, since they are able to stalk and hunt quite well, was to quietly remove every other man’s head in a Jap barracks or bivouac at night, placing it on his chest so that his comrades might find it the next morning. This usually disabled the whole unit: those who weren’t sleeping forever never slept again. In spite of these gruesome tricks, the Negritoes are jolly little folk in their gray uniforms and silver badges, bare, dusty feet and bush hair only half hidden by helmet liners, and faces split by smiles twice too large for men only four-feet-six. They perform their work in the highest of spirits and with the greatest of efficiency.
However, the base loses approximately $140,000 in theft and pilferage each month. In a single night eighteen hundred iron crosses were lifted from the military cemetery for scrap iron. On another, five two-and-a-half-ton trucks and six jeeps were stolen from a motor pool and driven on boards over that high, well-patrolled fence. Still another time an imaginative thief stole a fireman’s uniform, then a fire truck to go with it. He drove the truck out of the station with siren and flashing lights going full blast, raced the five miles to the Main Gate as seven Air Policemen stopped traffic for him.
Tetrick pointed out all these events should have been expected once the Army allowed their personal Air Corps to become something he called the “Air Farce” — unfairly, I’m sure. “Three old ladies with blowed-up rubbers could take this place,” he grunted.
If the base, as we agreed, existed only because intelligent thieves were leaving something for next time, the base didn’t seem excited about the danger. Conditions were calm, situations normal at the seven swimming pools, the PX shopping center, the Officer’s and NCO’s and Airman’s clubs, the veterinarian’s office and the golf course (where every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon Tetrick baked his bald head and managed to get drunk before the sixteenth tee). The residential sections were as cool and unruffled as if they were in Indianapolis and Vietnam on the dark side of the moon. Everywhere was order, lawns just so high, geometrically trimmed hedges and trees, clean sidewalks, uncluttered roadsides. As Tetrick drove me around base, I was reminded of the just completed campus of a mammoth junior college in Southern California. “I don’t know what it is,” Tetrick said again as we drove toward the Main Gate, “but it ain’t soldiering.”
About half a mile from the gate, just as I could see the guardhouse through the heat haze, Tetrick swung the jeep left down a side road toward a distant group of large frame buildings. “Central Exchange,” he explained. “They keep the scrip there,” he said, referring to the Military Payment Certificates, MPC, Scrip, or Funny Money as it was called, which was paid instead of green backs as a courtesy to the Filipino economy. “When what’s left of the Huks don’t steal it. They got $60,000 three years ago. They’ll be back when it runs out.” He turned left again about half a mile from the Exchange on a gravel road leading toward a square, windowless building. He parked next to the double hurricane fences with the challenging barbed wire strands leaning out along the tops.
“This it it,” Tetrick said as if it were. “Seven hundred twenty-first Communication Security Detachment Temporary Operations Building.” He pulled a security badge out of his shirt pocket and gave me a temporary one. At the gate he waved to the guard on the roof of the building, then inserted his badge into a waist high slot in a black box next to the gate. “That checks the badge. If it is right, a light comes on up there and he opens the gate.” A buzzer sounded, and Tetrick opened the gate. “The second won’t open until the first is locked again.” Another buzz and we were in the compound. As usual the grass was just so, the sidewalks bordered in neat, ankle-high hedges, and a yard-boy, a jolly-eyed, bent, old man peeking from a floppy straw hat, leaned on a hoe. I glanced back at the elaborate gate system, at the yard-boy, then at Tetrick.
“Don’t let it trouble you,” he chuckled. “The girls in Town know more about what we do than we do.” He opened the steel door by inserting his badge in another slot, then led me into the electronic murmur of secrecy. Behind me I noticed that the old man had, with polite discretion, turned his back.
* * *
I took the ease of the afternoon after Tetrick’s tour, swimming and resting in the sun. The pool was mine except for a middle-aged dependent wife sitting on the edge of the pool, three loud children, the golden-fuzzy lifeguard, and two airmen. The woman alternately heaved one massive leg then the other through the water as tiny whirlpools in the chlorine-tinted water sucked vainly at her massive flesh. She sat under the lifeguard stand and chatted with golden-fuzzy. She seemed to be trying to peek up his trunks, and he down her blue suit, though why, I did not
dare guess. The children were hitting each other, the meek waters of the kiddie-pool, me twice with rubber toys, and their mother for attention. At times all three balled at her passive shoulders, yammering and pounding their flesh of flesh. Mrs. Leech would shrug, laugh and shake her brown hair like a starlet, and fling the children away like so many dirty drops of water off an angry dog’s back, then turning up to golden-fuzzy again, grin up his skinny leg. The two airmen were quiet. One spent the whole afternoon rubbing iodine and Johnson’s baby oil into his already brown-black skin, while the other swam the length of the pool twenty times at an eight beat crawl, rested for five exact minutes, then swam again.
From the towel I communed in the broad open plain, bowing to Mount Arayat, the lifeless volcano squatting like an altar on the level distance, a ruined memory of ancient sacrificial fires, the tip of its cone crumbling into a snaggle-toothed decay as hordes of jungle clamored upward, hand over fist, pulling down the tired slopes. It was told that Huk bandits and headhunters shared the distant giant, secure in his hairy trunk, lost to man and his reckoning of time.
At five it rained for eleven minutes, sudden heavy drops, and at five-thirty the sun disappeared into a deep purple mass of clouds rising soft and curved against a shell-pink sky. I paused to watch the sunset, the purple reaching for black, the pink easing to purple, as I strolled back from the pool, toasted, hungry, tired.
After a silent meal I laid out a uniform, read for a bit, then dozed, awaking to the tickle of laughter, talk and the ringing of bottles. Never having been one to either stuff wax in my ears or tie myself to a mast, I slipped into my trousers and nosed down the hall toward the open door of Novotny’s room. As I passed, he called an invitation to me for a beer. I nodded, guessed that I would, and went on to the latrine.