Shooting the Moon (7 page)

One Sunday afternoon I was lying across my bed, alternately imagining I was an ambulance driver in a combat zone and that I was a character in an Archie comic, a new girl who wasn't an idiot like Veronica but was still good-looking, when TJ's voice boomed across the hall. “Hey, Jamie, want to look at some pictures?”

I slowly rolled off the bed and shuffled over to TJ's room. It was a wreck. He'd been trying to get organized, since there would only be two days between graduation the next week and when he
left for San Antonio to get processed into the Army. So there were boxes everywhere and a footlocker spilling over with the things he had to take to basic training: underwear, thong shower shoes, socks, a shoe shine kit. And then there were stacks of photographs, which he'd gotten the brilliant idea of sorting through and filing in folders before he left. It was the sort of plan that seems good when you come up with it, but after about twenty minutes you're sorry you started.

Still, TJ looked happy sitting on a chair in the middle of his room, surrounded by piles of pictures. “Look at this one of Mom,” he said, holding up a picture of my mother looking up from the book she was reading,
Pride and Prejudice,
her favorite novel of all time, her forehead furrowed with deep lines, as though they had drawn them on. Her expression was clearly saying,
I get five minutes to myself all day, so you best back out of the room slowly and leave me be.

“That's not going to be her favorite picture in the world,” I said. “I'd think twice before showing it to her.”

“Yeah, maybe you're right.” TJ put the photograph down on the floor and picked up another, this one of the Colonel getting out of the car after work. It was what they call a candid shot, which means the Colonel didn't know TJ was taking it. His face was halfway in the shadows of the carport, but the sunlight caught the shine of his polished boots. I was surprised by how tired he looked.

“When did you take that one?”

TJ shrugged. “A couple of weeks ago, I guess. He looks like an old man, huh? I guess that's another one not quite right for the family album.”

I took the picture from TJ and examined it more closely. There were bags under the Colonel's eyes. He was carrying a briefcase, but by the slump of his shoulders, you'd think he was carrying a suitcase full of cement.

There was no doubt about it. The Colonel looked like a man who hated his job.

Working at the rec center, I was learning more about Vietnam all the time. It was in the air you breathed if you were spending your days around GIs, some of whom had already done their tour, some who were gearing up to go, and a whole bunch who had their fingers crossed the war would be over before their units got called up.

Sgt. Byrd gave me daily vocabulary lessons. Sometimes it was like he was still in-country, and there were days I thought maybe he wanted to go back. Every once in a while he made me feel scared, the way his face got dark and cloudy over something he saw in one of TJ's pictures. But there
wasn't ever a time when he didn't want to talk. He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you spill them out the right way.

“If you recall, you call that a cracker box,” he said, pointing to a picture of an ambulance I'd printed from TJ's fourth roll of film. “The
bac-si
rides in the cracker box—
‘bac-si'
is what you call a medic, it's a Vietnamese word—or they go in the traveling medicine show, which is what you call the medevac helicopter.”

“How come they do that?” I asked. “I mean, how come they make up words for everything that already has its own word?”

“I don't know. Maybe it makes it less real, more like a cartoon, something that's not happening directly to you. Or else it's just fun to do it. The human animal is an endless creative creature, in my experience.”

So I learned “chop chop” was food and a “daily-daily” was the antimalaria pill GIs had to take. Medics were called “Docs” and “band-aids” and
“bac-si,”
and infantrymen were called “grunts.” An Army helmet was a “steel pot,” and camouflage uniforms were nicknamed “tiger suits.” If you were KIA you'd been killed in action, and if you were KBA, you'd been killed by artillery. A “glad bag” was a body bag. “Expectants” were wounded soldiers who were expected to die.

“What did they call you?” I asked Sgt. Byrd when the vocabulary lesson got too filled with body bags and wounded soldiers for my comfort.

He grinned. “I was a 1st Cav grunt and a Cheap Charlie because I never spent any money in the bars. Other than that, mostly I got called Ted and a few other names too improper to repeat. Oh, and Kodak. I got called Kodak.” He held up his camera bag. “For the obvious reasons.”

Sgt. Byrd was not my only source on the lifestyle and culture of the Vietnam War, however. There were also my students.

Just like Private Hollister had said, there were soldiers who wanted to learn how to develop and print their own pictures, and now I was the resident expert, if you didn't count Sgt. Byrd, and since
he didn't actually work at the rec center, I didn't count him.

The first soldier I helped was Corporal Yarrow. Cpl. Yarrow was the saddest-looking human being I'd ever seen, hangdog eyes worse than a basset hound's, bushy black eyebrows that sagged to a point above the bridge of his nose. That he always had a joke or a smart-aleck comment coming out of the side of his mouth was my first surprise about him. That he was so smart he could cuss in German, French, and Spanish without anybody having ever taught him how was my second.

His first surprise about me was that I was twelve years old. He'd come hollering into the darkroom, “Hollister said somebody back here could help me with this film? That wouldn't be you, would it?”

“It's me, all right.” I was hanging some prints on the line to dry. “What do you need help with?”

He came over and stood beside me. “Nice pictures. Who took 'em?”

“My brother. He's with the 51st Medical Company, in Phu Bai.”

“Oh, yeah? I was with 1st Battalion, 69th Armor, in the Binh Dinh province. I was a gunner.”

“A gunner?”

“Yeah, a tank gunner.”

I took that in. Tanks are serious business. Shooting a gun rapid-fire from the top of a tank is very serious business. It looks cool in the movies, but in real life it has to be a tough job. But Cpl. Yarrow didn't look tough. He just looked like a sad, nice guy.

“So anyway,” Cpl. Yarrow continued, “I went fishing down at Big Bend while I was on leave a couple of weekends ago, and the only thing I caught was what I caught on film. If you catch my drift.”

“Fish weren't biting?”

“They might have been biting something, but it wasn't anything dangling off the end of my hook. Still, the scenery was great and the beer was flowing, and I have lots of warm and fuzzy memories.” He held up his film canister. “Not too fuzzy, I hope. I was gonna drop the film off at the PX, but then this friend convinced me I ought to develop it myself,
since it's black-and-white film, and he thinks I need a hobby.”

So I taught Cpl. Yarrow what to do, and his pictures came out great, so then he brought in his buddy, Pvt. Garza, the one who told him to develop his own film in the first place, and Cpl. Yarrow and I taught Pvt. Garza.

I was a good teacher, which surprised me. I am not the world's most patient person, and I don't always do a great job of translating the thoughts in my head into words. But it was easy talking about how to develop film and print pictures. It helped that Cpl. Yarrow and Pvt. Garza picked up on everything fast and found the process interesting. I remembered what Sgt. Byrd told me the first day we worked in the darkroom together, that he was a process guy. I knew what he meant now. Every part of the developing process was interesting to me. Whenever I made a discovery—that a certain kind of paper worked better, or that I got better results if the developing chemicals were a degree or two cooler—I was in a good mood for the rest of the day.

On the days I printed TJ's pictures, I always
drew an audience. It was like Private Hollister had put a sign out front:
VIETNAM PICTURES ON VIEW TODAY IN DARKROOM.
He always knew when I came in with a roll of TJ's film, and he'd always be the first one back to take a look. “Don't show me nothing bloody,” he'd say when I told him the pictures were up on the line. “I can turn on the TV if I feel the need to see blood.”

Private Hollister especially liked TJ's pictures of the moon and of pretty nurses. “You think he's got a girlfriend over there yet?” he asked one day, studying a blond WAC holding a cat.

“How would I know? He just sends me film. He doesn't write me letters.”

Private Hollister studied the photographs. “I'd say he's writing you a letter with every picture he takes. Does he write letters to your folks?”

I nodded. “They're boring, though. Mostly they're about the food and the bugs.”

“See? He's sending you the real stuff. I bet you don't show all these pictures to your parents, do you? I bet you hide some of 'em away.”

“What makes you say that?”

“'Cause you know TJ don't want your folks to see 'em. If he wanted them to see all this stuff, he'd send the film to your mom, get her to get it processed at the PX. Don't cost but a few dollars.”

Private Hollister was right. I'd only shown certain ones of TJ's pictures to my parents, pictures of dogs and mess halls and big jungle plants. But I'd known without him having to tell me that TJ wouldn't want me to show them everything. With each roll of film TJ sent me, there were fewer blond WAC's and more soldiers missing arms and legs. More medevac helicopters. More dust and dirt and chaos.

One day after I'd developed a roll of film and had the negatives hanging from the line to dry, I realized I was squinting as I examined them. It was as though I only half wanted to see what was there.

It was as though I was scared to look any closer.

I thought about waiting until the next day to print the pictures, even though it was early and Private Hollister said there wasn't much for me to do that day. I had all the time in the world to print
pictures, but I found myself cleaning up, wiping down tables, measuring out more fixer, inventorying chemicals.

Finally I made myself slip the first negative into the enlarger. What emerged on the paper was a picture of a GI in a wheelchair, his right leg amputated at the knee and wrapped in a white bandage. He looked so much like TJ, I gasped and took a step backward. I had to force myself to look again and see for sure that it wasn't my brother in the wheelchair, that it was someone I'd never seen before in my life.

I decided to print the rest of the pictures later.

Some of the soldiers who looked at TJ's pictures had been in Vietnam, and the pictures reminded them of all sorts of things. “You ever heard of rice paddy stew?” one guy asked me, looking at a photograph of guys eating at the mess hall. “You take your C rations, like the beef and the franks and beans, throw in some cheese spread and crackers and rice, add a bunch of Tabasco sauce, and mix it all up and cook it. Nine times out of ten it's better than whatever they're serving in the mess.”

The soldiers who had never been to Vietnam were the ones who got quiet when they saw TJ's pictures. Pvt. Garza was like that. He was on the quiet side anyway, which made him a good sidekick for Cpl. Yarrow, but he got downright silent when he looked at TJ's photographs.

“The war's almost over,” Cpl. Yarrow told him one day when he was standing in front of a picture of a medevac helicopter lifting off, the sun setting behind it, dust billowing out in huge clouds beneath the propellers. “Chances are you'll never get sent. Don't worry about it, man.”

Pvt. Garza shook his head. “It's not over yet.”

“Any day, that's what they're saying.” Cpl. Yarrow put his hand on Pvt. Garza's shoulder. “Any day.”

There were afternoons I'd feel shaky leaving the rec center, anxious and a little bit nervous, and I just needed to get it out of my system, so I'd go to Cindy's house and tell her what I was learning about Vietnam. She was halfway interested in some of the things, not at all interested in others. Mostly she wanted to know if TJ had sent me more pictures of the moon. There was one in every roll,
and I'd always make Cindy a print. By early August she had a collection of them taped to her wall.

“Does Mark write you letters?” I asked one afternoon, sitting on Cindy's bed, Brutus nestled in my lap. “Does he tell you anything about what it's like to be over there?”

“He writes a big letter that's for everyone in my family,” Cindy told me. “He tells us about different things he sees, like the animals and the different kind of flowers.”

“Do you, you know, ever worry about him?” I hugged Brutus close to me.

“Why would I worry about Mark? He's an Army soldier. Fighting in wars is his job.”

I nodded. Fighting was a soldier's job. Everybody knew that.

It was just, somewhere down there in the pit of my stomach, I was starting to think that I didn't like fighting as much as I thought I did. I was starting to feel like I wished I hadn't told TJ to go.

By mid-August Private Hollister and I were neck and neck in our race to see who would be the gin rummy champ of Fort Hood, Texas. And we weren't the only ones paying attention to the competition. All the rec center regulars checked in at least once a week to see who was in the lead. They'd pull Private Hollister's notebook right out of his top desk drawer and run their fingers down the rows of numbers, adding it all up. Most of them were rooting for me, because I was so much younger and a girl, I guess.