The same speaker at the Veteran’s Day assembly three years running, steel hooks
gleaming at the ends of his arms. By now
we could give the speech better than he could. We filed into the gym and wanted
to know, how the hell did he keep that shine
on his shoes? His words were spit shined, too, their cadence drawn from close-
order drill, crisp as the crease in his pants
put there with a strop instead of a steam iron. Maybe he had a hard time believing
the words himself, but that didn’t stop him
from despising us. And we deserved to be despised, especially later when we made
hooks of our hands in the lunchroom’s roar
and tried to pick up the flatware, or when we saluted each other on the way to
class with crooked fingers. Not many stories got told
about the war in Southeast Asia, still a year or two before we could sneak into an
R-rated war movie worth believing. In history class,
we barely made it to the Marshall Plan. Nothing anybody who was still living had
lived through was worth learning about.
The older brother of a boy who played snare in the marching band pulled two
tours as a door gunner on a Huey. Just legend
the poor bastard in that job had a life expectancy of 8 minutes in combat, but that
was the kind of statistic we could quote. He came home
without a scratch or a single word to say about duty. I never knew who was behind
the wheel of the panel truck that hit him
his first week back. He’d gotten his road bike running again and had it wide open
on the Huntingdon highway just to see
if it would go as fast as he remembered. When he was released from the VA
hospital, he could still walk a little if he had to
and took a job tending bar at the golf course. I wasn’t old enough to go in there but
I went in anyway, a wall of bottles behind him
so orderly anybody could lay hand on the gin and vermouth. He wore his hair
almost short enough to stay hired. I wanted to hear
a war story that might be true, but the drinkers did the talking, insurance agents
and 18-handicappers with battle stories that weren’t about anything
he would call battle. He nodded and never told the stories he hadn’t been able to
leave in-country, about how much duty entered into it
discharging his M-60 at any muzzle flash he thought he saw in the tree line so he
could get out of there in one piece, home to his hero’s welcome.