Perimeter duty was humdrum, hours turned into days, days into weeks, weeks into more weeks. I watched the same nondescript farmers working the same old rice paddies, and never paying any attention to me. It was as if I wasn’t even there, and soon that’s how I thought of them.
At night, I gazed at the heavens, wondering and doubting. Wondering if omnipotent beings inhabited the gazillion orbs, and doubted that my particular circumstances would hold any interest to them.
Each new dawn I trudged back to the compound to eat the same everyday slop then reported for working parties. All “keep me busy” work to harass and to reaffirm my station in the ranks. I coped with it, except for the detail the first sergeant had called “burning shit.”
Wooden outhouses known as “honey palaces” squatted in different locations throughout the compound. Inside there was no privacy of walls or stalls, you sat butt-cheek to butt-cheek with those on either side. The place was always jammed with guys whose guts sought relief from the daily greasy fare, or skaters who wanted a break from work details—everyone sitting with their pants down gabbing and smoking. Between the suffocating heat and the offensive smells, it was not a desirable place.
Below each individual backside was a fifty-five gallon barrel cut in half and filled with kerosene. On burning detail, you lifted the hinged door on the back of the structure, your nose and mouth covered with a rag, and pulled out a barrel. Then you drug it sloshing and splashing to a clearing where you added gasoline to the olio, flicked in a match, and back-peddled from the fiery whooosh!
Then you went and got the next bowl of olla podrida.
By the end of the day your clothes smelled like a cesspool, and the odor of burnt shit clung in a death grip to every hair on your body. At the mess hall, no one would sit next to you, and usually some officer would order you outside to eat in the heat. In the shower, no amount of scrubbing cleansed you, and you left still polluted.
After pitching a bitch to Greene about how I was about to go dinky dau with the routine, he took pity on me and got me a pass. So I headed across the street to Freedom Hill, and after a stop at the cafeteria to gobble down a cheeseburger and fries and slurp a pop, I headed for the USO. As soon as I closed the door, a Donut Dolly was there to offer greetings. I, cognizant of the smell that I imagined misted around me in a gaseous vapor, kept a cautious distance, but she seemed not to notice. She looked like some dude’s older, ugly sister, but was all smiles and down-home sweet.
“Where are you from soldier? Where are you stationed? When are you going home?”
When I told her how much time I had left on my tour, her smile took a major broadside. But she was a trooper, and immediately sent in a repair crew and got it back up to snuff. She then took my arm and guided me to a flimsy card table. I sat, and another Dolly magically appeared and put a Styrofoam cup of punch, and a doughnut on a paper plate in front of me. As I munched on the white-powdered ring, I checked the place out.
Maps of the United States adorned the walls, and guys would stick colored pins in their hometowns. Picture frames hung in various locations encasing a variety of clichés. One was the oft-used “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” and I was beginning to wonder just how many blabbermouths there were in the military. Embroidered on cloth was the word—Mother—surrounded by buttercups, and hummingbirds slurping up a beak full. And over a shelf stacked with notepads, pencils, pens, and envelopes was the directive: YOU HAVE TO WRITE THEM TO GET THEM!
Plastic flowers grew from Coke and Pepsi bottles that sat on doily covered end tables. Soldiers sat at grade school desks corresponding with the folks back home, while others slumbered in armchairs. A coffee maker hissed in the corner. The music was Percy Faith and the television I Love Lucy.
The place was obviously meant to be cozy and familiar, but the mood was all wrong. The forced smiles of the Donut Dolly’s were over-sized, like the painted ones on clowns. And the soldiers looked like they were uncomfortable being there, but it would be impolitic to leave. Any thing had to be better than what awaited them on the other side of the exit.
I bolted.
The extensive PX was a bizarre bazaar, aisle after aisle of goodies. For the gluttonous were shelves loaded with canned foods, condiments, potato chips and such, candy, cookies, and cases of soda. For those fond of personal grooming were offerings of health and beauty aids. For the civilians-at-heart were pants and shirts, underwear, socks, shoes, and hats. For the jocks, sporting goods were on display, including golf clubs? For the intellectual another aisle offered books, newspapers, and magazines . . . and comics and Playboys for the less refined. For those into entertainment, there was a selection of televisions, radios, tape recorders, and record players along with albums and forty-fives. For the shutterbugs, cameras, film, and picture processing ruled a large area. For the lonely was the MARS station, the place for calling back to the States, the line long, out a rear door and off into the distance.
And smack dab in the middle of all the wandering browsers, were booths manned by sales reps from American car manufacturers. They were all grins and glad hands, urging you to buy that family sedan, or gas efficient runabout, or that souped-up job. Or, if you were of the more freewheeling type, to glance over the brochures for Harley hogs and Suzuki rice burners. Their spiel was to purchase a vehicle now, and it would be waiting for you when you got home.
And, after the paperwork was completed and the money had changed hands, the hustler would lay a paw on the buyer’s shoulder and say, “There’s just one more little thing, you’ll have to sign this transfer of ownership.” His eyes would go big as ostrich eggs and he would add solemnly, “Just in case, God forbid, something should . . . um . . . happen.”
I bolted.
Last stop, the outdoor beer garden. Luke-warm beer down my gullet, hot sun on the back of my neck, blaring jukebox in my ears. Not much fun. But there was no place else to go except back to the base. So I began to pound them back.
The festivities ended when I reached into my pocket and found it devoid of the monopoly money-looking military script. I carefully eased off the stool and unsteadily made my way back to the bullshit. On the way, I passed a squad of Seabees in the process of evacuating great mounds of soil, tooling around on front loaders and bulldozers. I stopped to read an elaborate sign announcing that construction was underway for a new air-conditioned theater and bowling alley.
I shook my head. “All—hic—the comforts a home.”
Lunging off, I concentrated on putting one down in front of the other.
