I Pledge Allegiance Read online

  The sound of our 8”/55 guns is something beyond belief. Again, they prepared us for this, but they didn’t, they couldn’t. I happen to be directly under one of the turrets when the boys start firing back, and I tell you, I have never been as terrified of anything in my life. You could combine all the terrors of my life to this point, and they would not add up to this.

  And it is relentless.

  Boom! B-B-B-B-B-BOOOM! B-B-B-B-B-B-BOOOM!

  It’s like a machine gun, only a million times the power, the sound, the size. Everything is faster and bigger and louder. Guys are shouting all over the place — it’s chaos. Except that it isn’t. Because we are trained for this. We are fighting men now, and whatever the fear and the shock and the adrenaline, we are here for this, and deep down nothing is getting in the way of our being here for exactly this. Our mission.

  I am petrified. But I am not overwhelmed.

  Within the first thirty seconds, I conclude that I am going to die here and now.

  Thirty seconds later, when I find that I am not dead, I conclude other things.

  I conclude that I am never going to die.

  I conclude that I have never been more alive in my life.

  I watch our shells trace across the sky, arc majestically, and come crashing down on the very skull of North Vietnam. I find myself yelling, bellowing, for the gunners to step it up. Pound them. Put them away. I don’t even know what I’m looking at out there, but I’m suddenly gesturing, pointing out spots for them to target there on the distant unknowable shore. As if I know what I am doing. As if anybody would be heeding me even if I did.

  That is adrenaline, I guess.

  “Did I tell ya? Did I tell ya?” It’s Huff, rushing up beside me, grabbing me as if he’s going to toss me over the side, but just shaking me like a madman instead.

  “You told me, Huff.”

  “Will I ever have to tell you again?”

  “You won’t. This is unbelievable.”

  “It doesn’t get much better than this. To be young men, in the warm morning Asian air, pounding the stuffing out of the enemy? And they started it. Right?”

  “They started it, Huff. We were just floating here, minding our own business.”

  Even as I am saying it, I am aware that this is, at best, an incomplete summary of events. We were floating here, minding our own business, with our hellacious firepower angled in a hostile way toward their country. Would I be so reasonable with them if they were likewise floating off Hyannis?

  No.

  But so what?

  Then as I stare at the action, the real action comes to me. I get a sharp shove at my side and look to find another sailor waiting to off-load a big shell on me.

  “Resupply! Resupply!” I hear from above.

  A supply line has formed, and we commence passing the heavy shells up the line to the gunners.

  “I cannot wait to get my shot, boy, I tell ya,” Huff says as I hand off to him. Huff is a gunner. But this is not his shift. He will get his turn. “I just want to blow stuff up, y’know. This is cool, but honest, that business down south of the DMZ, that’s the stuff that’s got my name on it. Blowing tunnels and bridges and supply lines right off the map, that’s the stuff that’s gonna show ’em who’s boss, and nobody even needs to get hurt, am I right?”

  What he means by nobody getting hurt is that tunnels and bridges and supply lines don’t tend to shell you back. Here in the North, we are taking on the full forces of a country rather than pockets of resistance.

  So he’s not right. But again, do I care? Adrenaline says no.

  “You’re right, Huff.”

  From what I can tell, the enemy stopped firing in our direction quite some time ago. From the explosions and ongoing villages of fire we have created, it seems we got our man, and then some.

  But we continue to pound the daylights out of them. We continue to pound, like we get paid by the artillery we use.

  And I continue to watch, and my heart pounds every bit as hard as the big, bad 8”/55 guns that are making every other sound in the world meaningless and futile.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Burst First

  It takes forever for mail to reach us. We, as a ship, have our own ZIP code and everything. But I suppose if you’re nowhere near a post office, and your entire ZIP keeps moving up and down a strange coastline, you can hardly blame the mailman if he’s not exactly popping ’em through the slot in the way you’re used to.

  When it does arrive, though, we have a kind of ritual. Like a bunch of squirrels with acorns, we all make our way back to The House, where we lie back and silently read out our mail, waiting for whoever is going to burst first. It never fails. You just can’t help eventually sharing pieces of your mail out loud with the guys.

  One of the good things I have learned from Navy life is that despite our backgrounds, there is a lot more in common between us than I had ever really thought about. First among those things is food. Everybody’s mother asks about the food.

  “‘Are you getting greens?’” Moses reads to us, though he is doing equal parts laughing and reading so we have to listen hard. “‘You know, son, that you will never be fed greens the way you were in this house here, so you are going to have to make sure you get your hands on whatever greens you can find. And please, don’t let them tell you that that ol’ iceberg lettuce is any kind of greens because that is pure nonsense. Shouldn’t even call them greens, they should call them whites. And speaking of whites to look out for …’” The rest of the letter is omitted. Not to protect anybody’s sensitive ears, but because Moses is now laughing so far beyond his ability to form words, he may not ever get back. He’s in the rack above me, and when he laughs himself right out of that rack, I snatch the letter out of his hand as he flies by. He lies flat on his back looking up as I hold it, but he just keeps laughing without making any effort to get it back.

  I hand it to him, unable to keep from laughing myself, though I haven’t read a word. You don’t read another guy’s mail unless he clearly tells you to.

  “‘Scurvy!’” Seven reads out, from his own mom. “‘You do know about scurvy, don’t you? It is a disease that the Navy is famous for because of their inadequate food, so unless you want to come back to me with horrible bandy legs and bendy bones, you make sure you get vitamin C, and A, and D, and all the sunshine you can manage.’”

  This time it’s the audience that makes the reading impossible. Everybody roars at the notion of Seven getting sunshine. Then he puts down his letter, picks up his guitar, and starts howling his way through Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.”

  “‘You’re all the sunshine I need, Ma,’” he sings, really mangling the original lyrics. But hey, it’s his mom.

  Rascal has the biggest stack of letters. He claims they are all from heartbroken girls.

  “Okay,” Huff says, “read us one. Any one.”

  “Cost ya a buck,” Rascal says.

  “What?” Huff says. “Don’t be a dope. We’re all reading.”

  “You ain’t readin’ what I’m readin’. A buck. Guaranteed satisfaction, or your money back.”

  “I could just lie and say I was not satisfied and you’d never know.”

  “I sleep two and a half feet away. I’ll know.”

  We laugh a lot at letter time.

  There are also great fat silences that seem to come over all of us at exactly the same time. I don’t know how that happens.

  Right now the place goes silent while the guys read whatever private stuff they’ve got. Me, I’m reading Rudi.

  Dear Morris,

  How hard is the war going to be if even your own guys scream and shout at you all day long? The sergeant screams so much and so close up to me, it feels like it is always raining on my face.

  Sorry, how are you, Morris?

  I’m scared all the time though maybe not as much as you might expect. Are you scared? I’ve been hearing a lot about the Navy. The Marines talk about the Navy a real lot. The
y say yours is the easy war and the safe war. That we do all the dangerous stuff while you sailors mostly go fishing and work on your tans. Then there’s all that other stuff that I can’t even repeat that they say about sailors. Do you think all that is true? About you having an easier war than me? Does it feel like that to you?

  Here’s what I mean about being not as scared as maybe you’d of thought I might be. The surprise thing is, I think I fit in here. I know, isn’t that crazy? All those years and years of never fitting into anything that didn’t have you and Ivan and Beck making sure I fit and even then never being a really good fit anyway, let’s be honest. Then I get this letter telling me I now belong to a whole new something and it’s a something that scares me into wetting my pants. Remember that? I am sure that you do. But then comes the funny part and it is that I settle into the Marines real quick. Like from the first day of basic training. I like the way the days are all put together for you so you don’t have to worry about where to be or what to do. I like the idea that we have a big important something that we gotta do. I like the idea that the kind of jobs you get in the Marines mean it is kinda clear whether you get it right or wrong without a lot of talking or thinking about it. I mean you shoot at a guy, you can sorta tell if you got it right, right?

  And here is an important something, Morris, that I probably wouldn’t even tell the guys here because I don’t want them to think I am crazy, at least not so soon. I found out I really like to be told what to do. I even like to be screamed what to do if that is what they think they need to do.

  The Marines don’t complicate things for me which pretty much everybody else always does. It is like they know me.

  I hope your tan is doing well (I am joking there) and that you are not missing home too bad.

  Your very good friend,

  PFC Rudi

  “What’s so funny?” Bruise asks.

  I am not even aware of laughing.

  “He fits,” I say, and I’m aware of shaking my head in wonder.

  “Who fits where?”

  “My pal from home, Rudi. Starting to look like he’s a pretty snug fit with the US Marine Corps.”

  “Is he mentally defective?” Moses asks, quite seriously, probably reasonably.

  “No,” I snap. “He’s just a natural-born Marine.”

  “That’s a yes, then.”

  Everybody’s laughing. They are laughing because it was a funny line.

  I’m not laughing. Stupidest, strangest thing ever, but all of a sudden I’m all choked up. Who could believe it?

  Next thing I know, I’m standing, squared up in front of Moses’s rack.

  “You gotta take that back, Moses,” I say.

  And just like that, nobody’s laughing anymore.

  Moses, back lying comfortably in his rack, stops reading his letter, holds it flat to his chest. He looks at me and speaks in an odd-sounding way, a little like a question and a lot like a form of pity. “Sit down, Mo.”

  As he is in the rack above me, and we are eye-to-eye, that should be good advice. I would very much like to just lie back down.

  “I will be very happy to sit down, after you take back what you said about my friend.”

  One by one, each of the guys swings around to a sitting position in his rack. Except Moses.

  “You can’t be serious,” he says.

  “I think I can.” I’m fighting myself not to tremble too obviously. It’s the only fight I am truly up to here. And I think I’m even losing this one. “You can’t say stuff like that about a guy’s friend when you don’t even know him.”

  I sound crazy. Even to me I sound crazy. But there is this great gulf between what I can rationally think and what is flopping around in my gut. And my gut is feeling this overwhelming need to protect and defend Rudi. To make sure that he isn’t taking any more guff off of anybody than he already has, than he already has to.

  Especially about his intelligence.

  Moses wounded me, is what he did. Because he made me feel like Rudi was unprotected, let down by me, personally. I was failing in my mission already.

  Even if it sounds like Rudi needs less protection than I do right now.

  “You going to take it back, Moses?”

  He gives it just a little bit of thought.

  “Nah, I don’t think so.”

  “Then I’m going to have to call you outside.”

  Basically, the same sound comes out of every guy in The House, including me, including Moses. A groan.

  “Just take it back, Moses” is one popular sentiment.

  “Just let it go, Mo” is the other one.

  But both perfectly reasonable options lose, and I find myself following Moses out of The House, through the passageway, and up to the next deck. We don’t even get topside, since that’s not where the fighting goes on. It became common knowledge almost as soon as we boarded ship that the private place for sorting out differences of opinion is on the gun deck below topside, right underneath the turret, where munitions are stored and not much else happens with the ample space. I follow Moses through hatches and up ladders as if I were his apprentice.

  We reach the empty space and stand opposite each other. I assume the position, arms up, fists curled in, almost like I am ready to punch myself. I have no idea where I learned this stance.

  It’s possible I have never felt stupider in my whole life. I don’t stand a chance, and it would be very difficult for me to put into words what I might hope to achieve. I would bet that nobody on the entire ship would vote for this to happen, other than the utter complete sickos who just love blood for blood’s sake. For his part, Moses’s face shows no hint of any kind of pleasure in this.

  And yet. Somewhere deep inside, where common sense cannot reach, I feel noble about this.

  Until the punch.

  Moses says, “Okay?” like he’s asking permission.

  I nod, and his hands are so quick that as I nod I actually nod my nose right into his straight snapper of a right hand.

  I go down. My knees buckle and I fall forward, making things even more pathetic by bashing my mouth on Moses’s knee on my way down. My arms don’t feel right, don’t do the job of getting me up off the floor. I can feel the warm blood pooling up behind my wiggly bottom front teeth. I manage eventually to stagger to my feet and find Moses politely waiting for me. I mimic his approach and say, “Okay?”

  He nods, then punches me hard enough this time that, though I attempt to fall forward, I find myself sitting on my butt about six feet from where I started, looking up at my puncher. Then there is a gap. There are blackout conditions.

  Then I am topside, at the rail, the wonderful, wonderful life-saving sea breeze blowing consciousness into me from the top down.

  “You’re a good boy, Mo,” comes the voice right at my ear.

  I turn to see Moses’s face right in my face. Because he is holding me up. My arm is around his shoulders, and he is dabbing at my lip with a wet and ruined handkerchief.

  “Does that mean I win?” I say, smiling and splitting the lip a little more open.

  “You are a good boy, and a great friend to that jarhead, leatherneck, simpleton of a moron Marine idiot pal of yours.”

  He lays a big wide smile on me, one that does not have so much as a dent in it.

  “Am I going to have to teach you another lesson?” I say. I’m at my most menacing, which is not wildly menacing at the best of times. But the truth is, the words feel fine now.

  “Now, now, Mo, you know that violence never solved anything.”

  I’m wobbly, but not so bad I can’t handle that one.

  “Then what happened to my face? “

  “We’ll call that friendly fire. Very different thing. It’s real violence that never solved anything.”

  “You don’t believe that, Moses.”

  He laughs. “Nah. That was just a test to see if you had a concussion. Violence solves everything, man. That’s why we’re here.”

  I shake my head g
ently. I see things a lot differently from how Moses sees them. I always have, always will.

  But I know I want him right beside me every single day until they send me home.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Cherry Bomb Jamaica Pond

  It always shocked me.

  No matter how many consecutive Fourth of Julys we’d come here and do exactly the same thing. No matter how many consecutive years we took the green line to Park Street and then made the nervous walk over to the North End to purchase the illegal fireworks. I knew weeks in advance — certainly by, say, June 21 — what was going to happen and what it was going to sound like.

  Still, it shocked me. Every time.

  Cherry bombs, M-80s, bottle rockets, Roman candles, everything we could scrape up the money for was part of our arsenal. Then we would bring craft to float out on the pond and attack. Ivan, who only cared about the boom-boom element, just brought a copy of the Globe and folded boats out of the newspaper. Sometimes he didn’t even bother with the folding, just balling a sheet up and telling us to use our imaginations as we fired away. Rudi usually managed to come up with something half-shipwrecked already, since he shopped in people’s trash cans. Beck, also working the reasonable/economical side of things since we were going to destroy these things anyway, hand made a couple of boats out of scraps of whatever he found at home. His boats looked better than real boats and sometimes didn’t even sink when we had done our worst.

  Me, I always bought a Revell model kit special and slaved over the details, insignia, whatever, until the vapors from the glue made me fall out of the chair. The boats I brought were always as perfect as I could get them.

  It was stupid, I know, but it felt right to me. There was always some little-boy part of me that just thought they deserved a certain respect, a fighting chance, if we were going to unleash all our firepower on them.

  I never explained that to the guys. I know that Ivan, for one, would have floated me out on a boat and shot bottle rockets at me all day if I tried to explain my feelings.

  I just never enjoyed the explosions much. I would spend 364 days every year convincing myself that that wasn’t so, and then one day jumping out of my skin with shock and the wrong kind of surprise all over again. I always wanted to be there, because I never liked the guys doing things without me. Especially things that had become part of our traditions. But it got to be hard.