Purple Daze (5 page)

—Ziggy

Phil's in Vietnam
in Jungle Fatigues.

 

I'm in an apron,
balancing plates of pancakes.

 

The old people order $2.49 specials,
short-stack, crispy bacon, black coffee.

 

I pocket sticky tips: Nickel and dime
my way to college.

Dad's baking grass brownies for
tomorrow's march, while Mom
paints signs:

PEACE

 

The newspaper shows a police barricade:

 

TURN LEFT AND GET SHOT

 

My parents think they can walk the 45-mile
perimeter of “troubled activity” in downtown
without getting trapped in a crossfire.
Mom picked flowers for the cops.

 

They're nuts.

Thank god Don is still in high school so I don't have to worry about him getting drafted until after graduation and maybe by then the war will be over and all our soldiers will be home and marrying their girlfriends and moving into gingerbread houses and having kids and growing old together and dying in each other's arms and being buried in the same cherry-wood casket and more than anything I want this for Phil and Nancy and I promise to write Phil everyday because some guys in Vietnam get lost in their minds and believe jungles and killing are the real world and forget what it's like back home and I don't want that to ever happen to him so I'm going to write about Boss Radio's Top 40 and
The Fugitive
tracking the onearmed man. ...

Ms. Hawes asks us to come up
with ideas we'd like to research,
because she thinks we should spend
more time in the library.

 

“It doesn't have to be long,” she says.
“Any ideas?”

 

Cheryl raises her hand. “How about
interesting quotes?”

 

Don nods. “Yeah, about war?”

 

Today we're peeling and eating roasted
chestnuts because we're reading Hemingway's
memoir
A Moveable Feast
.

 

Ms. Hawes talks with her mouth full.
“Can you be more specific?”

 

Nancy folds up in her chair.
“Is old guys dreaming up wars so
our brothers and boyfriends get shot
specific enough?”

I'm teamed up with Don for the research project.
We meet at the library during lunch,
where he unearths a quote in a dusty book by
British historian, James Anthony Froude,

 

“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is
the only one to whom the torture and death
of his fellow creature is amusing in itself.”

 

The following day we wear black to school,
as planned. I have a fake bullet hole in my neck,
food-coloring blood spilling.

 

Ms. Hawes asks each pair to read in front
of the class. Ziggy and her partner chose one
by John le Carré,

 

“You should have died when I killed you.”

 

Everyone laughs.

 

Me and Don are next. I found this one
myself,

 

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet
and fitting to die for one's country. But in
a modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting
in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good
reason.”

 

Ms. Hawes likes it because Hemingway served
in World War I, so he knows what he's talking
about.

 

I like it because the room is suddenly quiet
as a drawn-in breath.

Dear Cheryl,

 

 

Thanks, doll
for the pics of roses—
I can almost smell them.

 

I'm lying on an army cot at my outpost.
Every breath, I suck in a battalion of bugs.
Damn insects. It's raining and they decided
to come in here where it's dry.

 

Last night I about got plugged writing
a letter using this same flashlight.

 

A sniper saw it.

 

That would be a helluva way to sign off—
with a big glob of guts.

 

Your friend, Phil

 

P.S. I got a nasty paper cut licking
the flap of Nancy's envelope.
Only one letter so far.
What's up?

Mrs. St. Johns faints in Home Economics when she opens the refrigerator and sees her Oscar Mayer wearing rubbers.

 

I mean, grow up!

Mom says I'm too young to shave my legs,
so I bought Nair. Industrial cream in a jar.

 

I'm not supposed to pluck my eyebrows either,
so I use her Lady Schick on the stubble between
my brows.

 

Ziggy says they're going to grow back thicker—
that if I keep shaving up there I'll have a mustache
between my eyes for the prom.

Simple bathtub chemistry concoction:

 

gasoline
, noun. A colorless, liquid mixture of hydrocarbons, which evaporates and burns easily.

 

benzene
, noun. A colorless liquid that vaporizes and is set on fire easily.

 

polystyrene
, noun. A colorless plastic used for insulation and in making toys, household appliances, luggage, and reeds for musical instruments.

 

The Pentagon requests bids to manufacture Napalm from 17 U.S. companies. A small company in Michigan called Dow Chemical gets the contract. Before then, Dow was best known as the maker of Saran Wrap.

 

One 200-liter cylinder hitting the ground causes mass destruction. Flames roll in a circle approximately 250 feet in diameter. The heat inside the zone ranges from 1,800–3,600°F. Within the zone, there are no survivors.

 

Outside the zone, jellied gasoline clings to human skin, melting flesh. Reports document civilians being boiled to death in rivers heated by Napalm.

Dad got cracked with a nightstick
during the protest. Seventeen stitches
in his scalp.

 

Mom calls from the emergency room
ticked because they weren't hauled off
to jail with their friends.

 

The doctor signed her petition, though,
so not all is lost.

 

Mom fixes Dad up on the couch
with an ice pack, puts on Dylan,
“Like A Rolling Stone.”

 

Out come the brownies.

Dear Cheryl,

 

Let me tell you about a weapon
with a killing punch.

 

Howitzer: 109 mm. Weight: 27 tons.
Type of shells: White phosphorus.
Chemical. High explosive. Illumination.

 

Two weeks before I got here, a battery
killed 900 of the 1600 VC hit. Yesterday
two companies were sent to take a hill.
500 strong. Only 67 walked back.

 

Took the damn hill though.

 

Stay cool—Phil

 

P.S. I used to hate Disneyland.
Now it's all I think about.

No one understands why I
volunteer for extra shifts at work.
Why I signed up for night class:
Psych 101.

 

Why I wasted tips and weekends
painting my bedroom
salmon
,
then bought a gallon of
raven
,
because all that fleshy-pink
left me too vulnerable.

 

Not much time to write.
Too much time to think
because shrapnel rockets
through my brain, ricocheting
off work, school, bone:

 

Is God going to spare P.F.C. Phillip
C. Rose because I want Him to?

Ziggy's been depressed since
Mickey enlisted in the Navy:

She sobs into the phone,
“What if he gets sent to Nam?”

 

“Ships don't go to the
Demilitarized Zone,” I say.
“It's on
land
.”

 

She sniffles.
“If Bubba gets drafted,
he's flying the coop.”

 

That's the first smart thing I've heard her brother say.

Cheryl,

 

I've been awake for 42 hours.

 

I stood outpost last night.
The posts aren't sandbagged or fortified.
Just a shelter half-staked, so if it rains
you won't get too wet.

 

Mine's staked over a grave.

 

I hope those bastards smokin' pot and burnin'
their draft cards appreciate how hard it is peein'
in a bunker even when you're lying on your side
and there's a downhill slope.

 

The goddamn mosquitoes are having me for
a picnic, and we're out of knock-down spray.
I'll probably get Dengue Fever like the lieutenant.

 

Love, Phil

 

P.S. I don't tell Nancy the stuff I tell you.
She thinks I'm on some vacation
getting this bitchin' tan.

I scribble in my journal, watering thoughts
and letting them sprout, like Ms. Hawes said.

 

All at once I'm outside, on my knees,
yanking weeds, tears turning dirt to mud.

Before he left I swiped the bandana he
wore to the concert. It smells like his
coppery sweat and Lucky Strikes.

 

I knot it around an envelope, the
one with the Amelia Earhart stamp
I'm afraid to mail,
and slip them under my pillow,
sleeping with uncertain synapses.

Established by Executive order 11231, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 8, 1965. To be eligible for award of the medal, individual must:

In addition, personnel serving in Thailand, Laos, or Cambodia in direct support of operations in Vietnam during the same time period are eligible.

 

* Design created by sculptor Thomas Hudson Jones, former employee of the Army's Institute of Heraldry.

34 people died in the riots.
1,000 injured: 90 cops, 136 firemen,
10 guardsman, 23 people from government agencies,
773 civilians and protesters, including Don's dad.

 

I know because Bubba tore out newspaper articles: