6.

The truth is, I don’t know exactly who I am. I’ve been living in made-up skin so long I don’t know what I look like anymore. I walk around in a permanent Halloween costume.

Look: I can tell you who I’m not.

Maybe that’s a good way to start. Yes, let me start there.

I’m not some homeless veteran with his greasy cardboard sign and grocery cart filled with cans and bottles and feces-smeared blankets. I’m not some grimy figure lurking around construction sites to steal pieces of copper.

Not at all. I’m a published poet. I’m a published novelist. I’ve won prizes and, miracle of miracles, I earn a good living, too, though my employer probably wouldn’t enjoy being pulled into this foolish story.

Let’s just say that I have a great day job that supports my poetry habit. I earn a damn good living. I have investments and clients. I own Hickey Freeman suits and Allan Edmonds shoes. I counted the other day. I own $3,000 worth of shoes. I drive a BMW.

I’ve made my dreams come true, but I can’t make the nightmare of the army go away. Those days keep sneaking up on me.

Maybe this all started when we moved earlier in the year, and I had to clean all that stuff out of the attic.

It was terrible work: the past had become an inexplicably literal burden. My wife, Carol, and I had been good children and saved so much of our parents’ stuff. Old quilts that had belonged to great aunts I’d never met, locks of my great-great-grandmother’s hair, deeds to forgotten pieces of property marked CANCELED, my aunt’s high school yearbooks with best wishes from people named Berty and Mugsy—and on and on it went that hot summer afternoon in the attic at 332 East Acacia Road until I came across a box with my army uniform inside.

In the upper left-hand corner of the box, hand printed in fat marking-pen ink, are my rank and my last army address. The writing looks new to me, as if, in spite of everything, sergeant continues to be my title, as if Detachment A, Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit remains my permanent address. In the reddish purple ink of the cancellation stamp’s circle, US ARMY is at the top, APO 09166 is at the bottom.

“What’s this?” my son wonders, looking at the box. He’s helping me empty out the attic.

His right index finger taps the date in the middle of the cancellation mark. He taps it. 22 May 72. Eleven years before he was born.

“That was a long time ago,” he says. “Ancient history.”

“Is it, now?” my grandmother used to say. “Is it, now?”

My son opens the box.

“You were in the army,” he says, surprised. He stares at me, as if I might be a stranger. “Did I know that? How did that happen? You’re a poet, right?”

“You’re a trained killer,” is what Goldberg says when I visit him.

My old army buddy. We’ve been friends for more than forty years.

“We can makes jokes about it,” he says, “but that’s the fact of the matter. They taught us how to kill people.”

We did make jokes about it until we got to the Military Police School shooting ranges at Fort Gordon, Georgia. When we heard the click of rounds being chambered, the pop pop pop of the firing, and the clatter of the expended shell casings hitting the ground, things weren’t so funny anymore.

In the dust of the firing, the arm of the paper-target man goes first, and then his head. The human outline is turned to shreds. The army wasn’t joking; the army wasn’t joking at all. It tore up those human forms; it turned them into confetti.

As it happens, though, I’m really not a trained killer. Not at all.

“Ryan!” Sergeant Schumacher screams at me. It’s a hot August day in 1970 on the pistol range at MP school. He hits me on the top of my steel helmet with his clipboard.

“Fucking A, Ryan, you’re not even hitting the target. Get someone else in here wearing your fatigue shirt. I don’t want no one flunking this exercise. Ryan, I want you to kill for me!”

“But, Sergeant, I don’t know how. I need more training.”

“Get someone else the fuck in here, Ryan, or you’ll be on KP for the rest of your natural life.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Right away, Sergeant.”

Pretty soon my friend Peter Everwine, wearing my fatigue shirt, which identifies him as RYAN, easily empties the .45 into the head of the target.

“That’s, my boy, Ryan,” Sergeant Schumacher says to Peter Everwine and puts his arm around him.

“See that head. That’s how those hippies are supposed to look. Blow their brains to little greasy bits. Just remember, Ryan, it was trainees of mine that shot up those Commie college students in Ohio. You know that song they wrote about it? Well, that’s a song about me, Ryan. I trained those troops. ‘Four dead in O-hio.’ You betcha, Ryan. I’m a celebrity.”

The next day Drill Sergeant Rodriquez hands me an Expert Pistol Marksman Badge, and my army lies have begun.