My life took a turn when I was drafted for Vietnam. It was exactly my sort who got sent there, my sisters were saying: too poor to say no, too stupid to fight it.
What they couldn’t get into their heads was that it didn’t bother me. I had no plans to be a draft dodger and I wouldn’t have known how to anyhow. Anything that would make a man of me so I wouldn’t stay the youngest boy in a family of girls was fine by me. It was in my nature to be calm and quiet, but leaving was a dream I clung to, even if that meant going to war.
Of course, I didn’t have the first idea what being a soldier really was like. The image I had in my head was a far cry from any violence. Just look at a picture of me at nineteen, all smiles, a man who’d only just stopped being a child. No idea what lay ahead. Not that anyone at home knew much more than I did, but what my sisters couldn’t make heads or tails of was how excited I was.
Not even boot camp got me down. I gave it my all, even if I wasn’t cut out for any of it yet. I crawled in the mud, walked miles and miles with my feet bleeding in my boots, assembled and disassembled my M14 over and over while my instructor yelled in my face that I wasn’t good for shit. I paid him no mind: I was sure I was just as American as anyone else, even if the others said I really was born yesterday and even if, in or out of my uniform, the higher-ups were never going to see me as anything more than a Negro.
I didn’t put up a fight when I was assigned to the MOS everyone prayed not to get assigned to: infantry, meaning I was on the front lines as cannon fodder.
My bunkmate tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I’d be wise to get laid so I didn’t die a virgin. I did like that fellow and he looked so serious that it almost broke my heart. He eyed me like a man headed for the gallows, and it was only then that I saw I hadn’t really lived, that I hadn’t had even one girl, that I’d be going so far away that my sisters wouldn’t be able to find me on a map and I didn’t even know for sure why that country in particular.
Was I scared? That I was. Did I feel any regret? Not really. I reckoned that God would be with me every step, because that was how I’d been raised, and I set off with the others for Louisiana and Tigerland, Fort Polk, for infantry training, then I was sent straight to Vietnam with no real idea whether I’d come back to America standing on my own two feet or in a thousand pieces in a sealed coffin.
For a long time I suspected that, if I hadn’t gone, Leslie wouldn’t have been so hung up on guns, on my uniform, wouldn’t have been hell-bent on one of his own. Maybe, if I hadn’t gone to ’Nam, he’d still be alive, still with me telling me stories about the girls batting their eyes at him at school, and I wouldn’t be here, freezing to death, alone with my ghosts.