There's a Man With a Gun Over There (13 page)

In the fall of 1971, I made almost daily trips to the little post office in Turley Barracks with the applications and the essays required by various graduate school English Departments. I wanted out of the army. Oh how I wanted out.

“Are you sure,” I asked PFC Ellert the first time, “that my envelope will arrive on time?”

“Ryan, come on,” he said. “You know better than to ask a question like that. You of all people, Mr. Big Shot Customs Inspector. This is, first of all, the army and, second of all, the Postal Service we're talking about here, so there really are no absolutes, are there? What I'd recommend is that you slap one of those pale green Registered Mail forms on the envelope. I'd insure it, as well. That'll make them nervous. They'll think mistakes will be expensive. That way, no one will fuck with it. It's easier to fuck with fourth class mail. Come on, man, you of all people should know that.”

Yes, of course. He knew that Goldberg and I opened and inspected Parcel Post packages at the Heidelberg Military Post Office, where all the army mail from this area went before being shipped overseas. That was one of my jobs, tearing open mail. Snooping. The other two jobs were doing black-market investigations with the German Customs Police and clearing US soldiers and civilians through customs stations at military transfer points.

Funny, before my army days, I had thought the mail was sacred somehow, untouchable without a search warrant. Part of the castle that was the free man's home.

“Forget that chickenshit, good-citizen, social-studies crap, Ryan,” Sergeant Dooley said when he was showing me the various Customs inspector routines of my new job in Detachment A of the Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit. “Fourth class mail belongs to the army, and the army can do what it goddamned well pleases. You and me, Ryan, we scare the shit out of fourth class mail. Besides, we're detached here in ole Detachment A. We don't give a howdy goddamn.”

That said, Sergeant Dooley walked over to a stack of boxes eight or nine feet high and parried at them with a bayonet he carried.

“Men,” he said, imitating a drill sergeant, “this is hand-to-hand combat. Be sure to yell ‘Kill!' as you strike your blow for democracy.”

He slashed several boxes with the bayonet.

“The poor and dumb have to learn their lesson. This'll teach those fuckers not to pay up for first class postage.”

Sergeant Dooley then pulled several of the cut packages out of the stacked pile and shook their contents on the concrete floor of the postal warehouse.

What fell out were the things low-rent people with torn hopes shipped—stiff, crotchless lace panties bought in sex shops; collections of cocktail swizzle sticks; creased, out-of-focus Polaroids of naked women; collections of twigs and rocks; bottles of beer with those European-styled ceramic caps, their contents now slowly leaking and turning their cardboard packing to mush; cracked Hummel figurines, and souvenir cuckoo clocks, their cheap movements broken on the floor.

A bird from one of those clocks, with a misaligned spring in his chest, rapidly puffed himself up and then went through a slow deflation like a blown-out tire. He did this over and over again while making muffled, pleading chirps. Sergeant Dooley's foot flattened him.

“Who buys this crap?” he asked the air.

Later, when Goldberg and I took over the job, we tried to be more careful with these shabby valuables, but after a while we became as callous as Sergeant Dooley.

Who cared about this pitiful stuff?

Goldberg and I were going to graduate school after the army. We were going to be professors: I was English literature, and he was history. We were above this kind of crap, weren't we? We had bigger things on our minds. Goldberg planned to study the beginnings of American imperialism, and I wanted to write about the slow encroachment of evil in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
.

Who cared about these stupid army jobs?

We were supposed to be looking for contraband or stolen property, but we never once found anything of consequence. While we heard stories about the Top-Secret Decoder supposedly found by one of our predecessors in a parcel post package, the tale sounded like fiction made up to convince a commander to keep the Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit and all its little perks in business. Usually what Goldberg and I found was just some piece of GI clothing, or a tool, or a piece of camping equipment. The thefts were pathetic, but we recorded them in our LOG OF RECOVERED GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. These numbers, like the body counts in Vietnam, proved that we were doing our jobs, though the army often didn't care if you took your uniforms once your time was up. But we didn't mention that in our reports. If we found a dress uniform, we valued it at $100 because that's what a Penney's suit cost, and Lance B. Edwards, our boss, had a Penney's catalog tucked in his bottom desk drawer that he used to value stolen property.

Once we finished with our inspections, we'd lick the backs of these stickers we had and use them to cover the cuts made by our knives in the packages:
INSPECTED BY THE TWENTY-SECOND MP CUSTOMS
.

“That way,” Lance B. Edwards said, “we let everyone know that the Big Green Machine is out there, even reading your love letters to Sally Rottencrotch.”

After all these years,
my
box is still in good shape. I mailed it first class, so no one from Twenty-Second MP Customs had ripped it open. Instead of turning my uniform in at the end of my time in the army, I stole it. I wanted to have a physical reminder of those years, even though I hardly ever wore that uniform.

Except for ceremonial occasions, I normally worked in civilian clothes. I was an undercover black-market investigator. Pretty cool, eh? I love to haul that line out at parties.

“So what did you do in the army?” people ask.

“Me?” I say. “Oh, just a little police work.”

I let a beat go by.

“I was a plainclothes black-market investigator.”

“Wow!” they say. Or “Cool!” or “No kidding.”

“I worked with old Nazis.”

“Really?”

Doing my army time in civilian clothes.

Wearing civvies was, all of us in the unit liked to think, one of the great benefits of the job. Of course there were also some significant disadvantages. Like, for instance, those days when we were ordered to burst into someone's apartment in search of black-market material. With our double-sided credentials held out in front of us as we confronted a startled resident, we'd yell, “Customs Police!
Zoll Polizei
!”

Then, an hour or two later, after tearing the drawers and the closets apart, Herr Hellman and Herr Diener of the German Customs Police, along with Goldberg and me, would load up our unmarked Ford with the evidence we'd confiscated—stolen sacks of rice and flour, all marked PROPERTY OF US ARMY—while occupants of the apartment yelled and cried.

Yes, there was always that, wasn't there?

And that pregnant woman, at the end of the tunnel in my conscience, screaming “Nazi!”

In the army you had what was called a home of record. That was your official hometown address, and I used that of my then-wife Jenny's. That's where she'd grown up: 1648 Bluebell Lane, Rock Hill, MO 63119.

“What a pretty address,” the lady clerk at the Armed Forces Entrance and Examination Station in Little Rock, Arkansas, told me while she processed my paperwork on the day I was inducted into the army. She wore white cotton gloves, as if she wanted to avoid the stain of war on her actual flesh.

“I love bluebells,” she said, her gloved fingers typing up the papers that took away my civilian rights.

She was horrified when she came to the line on the form called RELIGION. I'd marked the NONE box.

“None,” she said. “Don't be silly. You can't choose NONE. What if something happens to you? How will you get to heaven?”

She patted my hand, the glove cool against my skin. I suddenly realized that I was sweating. I picked up the form again and looked down the list of choices.

“I don't see Buddhist or Muslim.”

“Well, of course not. Those aren't
real
religions; they can't help you.”

I thought about checking OTHER, but I gave in, the way I always did. It just seemed easier.

“OK,” I said, and checked METHODIST.

“I'll bet you feel better already. Now you're really in the army.”

Suit, Man's, Summer, Model 10-16-4, Size 38
, the label reads.

My uniform is inside the box, neatly folded there, as if waiting for my return to duty. I set it out on the floor, like one of those paper cutout dolls. Cap on top, shirt inside the coat, the skinny black necktie folded on the front of the shirt. I thread the black belt with the brass buckle through the loops of the pants and lay them out below the coat and then tuck the thin black socks under the cuffless pants bottoms. Even the shoes, with their thick coat of polish and the wrinkle across the top of the right one, are here, ready to go.

Tucked in the pocket of the uniform is a reel of old-time Super 8 film.

A few weeks later I borrow a neighbor's ancient Bell and Howell movie projector and play the film. The machine makes a chattering, meshing noise, and there I am, thirty years ago in the same uniform, a few days after I got home, unsteady in the flicker of the images going through the projector. The colors are murky, as if the past eventually turns into mud. I stare at myself in the past, still trying to make sense of what happened.