46.

Blam, all right. I stayed out of the way of those desks until the bell rang.

A few days later, soldiers in the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students during the war protests at Kent State in Ohio. Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. The day after that, my orders finally came. I saved them. The orders, I mean. I wasn’t thinking about the dead at Kent State back then. I was too worried about me. I hardly noticed what happened at Kent State.

I have the orders right here: “5 MAY 1970. SPECIAL ORDER NUMBER 100. PERMANENT CHANGE OF STATION. RYAN, RICHARD M., PFC, Co. C, DLIWC, Assigned to: Fourth Regt (MPC) Fort Gordon, GA 30905 to attend course 830-95B10 for approx 8 wks.”

Eighteen of us listed there for Military Police School.

“What does that mean?” Jim Eastlake asked.

“Maybe they’ll send you to Kent State,” Neil Renner said and whistled one of his trilling little tunes. It sounded like bird-song. “Vietnam wasn’t enough; they’re starting a war against the hippies.”

As I write this, I realize now that I was passing through the famous and the horrible moments of my time on the wrong side.

“See. I told you,” my friend Tom Bamberger says.

“I thought I was getting away with something,” I say.

“Nah. You were just kidding yourself, walking around in that uniform with one of those short haircuts thinking you were some kind of hippie and you were really just a guy in the army with a gun. The man over there with a gun.”

Oh yes, I almost forgot: the army got even with Neil Renner for the black armband he wore to the lunch in San Francisco. Unlike the rest of us, Neil was sent to Vietnam.

After the orders were handed out, one of the Green Berets came up to Neil while he stood in a circle of us, telling one of his stories.

“Fuck with us,” the Green Beret said and shoved Neil in the chest, “fuck with us, Renner, and you’ll never get out alive. You understand that, Renner? Do the rest of you understand that, too?”

He pointed his finger like a pistol at each of the rest of us standing there.

“Fuck with us, and you’ll never get out alive.”

I didn’t want to look him up, but I had to, my eyes half-closed as my finger went down the names. He wasn’t all that far from Rasmussen:

NEIL P. RENNER
Casualty was on Sep 20, 1970
In QUANG TIN, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
GUN, SMALL ARMS FIRE