Shooting the Moon (2 page)

“Pathfinders!” he'd yell, zigzagging across the yard toward the imaginary end zone.

“Combat ready, sir!” I'd yell back, completing the old 8th Infantry Division call-and-response we'd learned as kids, which was part of our life, just like answering the phone “Colonel Dexter's quarters” or making sure we had our military IDs with us whenever we went to the PX or the commissary so we could prove who we were, proud citizens of the United States Army.
Hooah,
as we liked to say.
Hooah,
yes sir.

Even more than football, the Colonel loved the Army. He loved starched and stiff uniforms and boots polished to a high shine. He was crazy about military parades and had dragged me and TJ to parade grounds from Fort Benning to Fort Ord. I'd even seen him get teary-eyed when the troops
passing in front of the inspection stand turned right-face to salute whatever bigwig officer was sitting in the catbird seat. It got to him every time.

“The Army way is the right way,” he'd say to us whenever we piled into our blue Ford station wagon to start out for a new destination—Fort Hood, Fort Campbell, Fort Leavenworth. It was the pep talk he gave us in case we were feeling sad about moving again. “It's about duty, it's about honor, it's about sacrifice.”

If you weren't an Army brat, that kind of talk would probably have you rolling your eyes. But we believed it. I believed it. It made me proud to hear the Colonel say it. When he'd saved that soldier's life out in the field, in the middle of combat exercises with artillery and tanks, he'd risked his own life, came a hair's width away from getting killed. Sometimes at night in bed I'd get cold and still all over thinking about that, how the Colonel might be dead right now. But in the daylight I wore his bravery like a badge of honor.

TJ and I loved the Army so much we'd spent most of our time as kids playing Army with our
friends, planning out battles and strategies in deep, serious voices, setting up hundreds of little green Army guys out under the trees. I always played TJ's second in command, moving the green men around as he ordered, gathering sticks and acorns and whatever else he thought we might need in the heat of combat.

One time, after a fierce battle against Bobby and Charles Kerner, whose troops stubbornly refused to surrender for almost two hours, TJ unwrapped a piece of gum he'd had in his jeans pocket and folded up the foil wrapper into a shiny triangle. He chewed the gum for a minute, then stuck it to the foil triangle and stuck the triangle to my T-shirt.

“What did you do that for?” I asked him, feeling the wet gob of gum through the fabric of my shirt.

“It's a medal,” TJ explained. “For courage under fire.”

I wore that medal for two weeks, until the gum finally lost its stick somewhere between the school playground and my second-grade classroom.

The Colonel had been an Army brat too, and
he loved telling the story of how the Army had lifted his father up from poverty to a good life. Papa Joe had been the fastest boy in his school, even with his shoes flopping apart, and one day he'd been spotted by an Army recruiter, who told him he ought to sign up for the service the minute he turned eighteen. So that's just what Papa Joe did. With his first paycheck he bought his mother a new dress, the first store-bought dress she'd ever had.

Every once in a while the Colonel pulled out the box of things he'd saved growing up, when he had traveled all over the place just like we did, from this post to that one. He showed us ticket stubs from train trips through Germany and Italy, and matchbooks he'd collected from restaurants in just about every American city you could think of.

“Kids,” he'd say, leaning back on the couch, his arms spread out wide, “I am a man of the world, full of knowledge and vision, a lover of international cuisine, an appreciator of fine art and good-looking women, and I have the United States Army to thank for this most excellent state of affairs.”

“Oh, Tom,” my mother would say, laughing, the music of it all high and bubbly. Then she'd roll her eyes, acting as though she were immune to the Colonel's charms. “What you are is a man who likes the sound of his own voice.”

“You love me, woman,” the Colonel would bellow. “Don't be afraid to admit it.” And then he'd turn to me and TJ and say, “All the ladies love me. They can't help it,” and we'd blush and giggle, and I'd think that nobody in the world had a father as outstanding as the Colonel. I loved the Army, too, for making him exactly the way he was.

You would have thought the very
idea
of TJ enlisting would have sent the Colonel cartwheeling down Tank Destroyer Boulevard, Fort Hood's main drag. But when the announcement came, over a Sunday dinner in March, a couple of days after TJ's eighteenth birthday, he didn't say a word for a long time, just looked down at his plate like the medium-rare steak staring back up at him was about to whisper the meaning of life.

“Aren't you going to say anything, sir?” TJ finally asked, when the Colonel's silence was starting to
make us all feel nervous. It wasn't like him to shut up for any length of time.

After another minute, the Colonel sighed. He's a big man, six foot four standing around in his socks, a once-upon-a-time West Point defensive tackle, a regular bruiser, so it was funny to hear him sigh like a Sunday school teacher. He began tapping his finger against the table like he was keeping time to a song playing inside his head.

“The point is, son, you're going to college in six months.” He tapped slowly at first, then worked up to rat-a-tat-tat speed. “The University of Georgia, class of 1973. Then medical school. You want to enlist after that, I'll hand you the pen myself.”

TJ sawed at his T-bone in his slow, deliberate way. “College is the coward's way out, sir. How can I go to college when guys I played football with are fighting in Vietnam? Eddie McNeil's missing in action.”

The Colonel took a deep breath before he spoke again. I wondered if he was thinking about Eddie, who had been one of TJ's best friends when TJ was a junior and Eddie was a senior and could
do no wrong on the football field or any other place he decided to show up. He went straight from his graduation gown into an Army uniform, and a few months later shipped out to Vietnam. Two weeks ago, the day after Valentine's Day, the principal had announced over the loudspeaker that Eddie was MIA. TJ had been pale as a ghost when I saw him get off the bus that afternoon, and when he told me why, I'd wanted to say something to him, but I didn't know what to say except, “He's probably okay.”

TJ didn't say anything in reply. He just walked inside the house and closed the door to his room behind him.

“You won't find Eddie when you go over there, son,” the Colonel finally said. “You can't put yourself on a one-man mission to go find your friend in the jungle.”

I eyeballed TJ, trying to figure out if Eddie McNeil was his real reason for enlisting, or if he was looking for any reason to go. We'd been playing war all our lives, and more than once TJ had said he'd like to get a taste of real combat, to
see if he could handle it. Sometime around tenth grade, when it became clear TJ was talented at science, the Colonel started pushing medical school on him, and slowly TJ had come around to the Colonel's point of view, but I would have bet money that part of him still wanted to test his mettle in battle.

Now TJ said, “I want to go to Vietnam because it's the right thing to do, sir. That's the only reason. I'll go to college when I get back.”

Up to this point, my mother had not said a word. This was her way. She liked to let everyone else talk first, to get what they had up their craw out of their system before she weighed in. But now she leaned forward, her eyes rimmed in red, and said, “If you want to be a hero, then go to medical school. You can save hundreds of lives when the time comes.”

“I've already signed the papers,” TJ said. He tapped lightly against his salad plate with his fork, like he was underlining his point. “I'm going to join the Medical Corps. It'll be good experience.”

“You've got time to change your mind, son,”
the Colonel said. “It says so right there in the fine print.”

TJ stared him down. “Do you really expect me to do that, sir?”

“We'll talk about it in a few days,” the Colonel said, cutting into his steak. “When you've had more time to think about what you've done.”

“You should go, TJ.” I leaned over and grabbed his wrist, like I'd pull him all the way over there myself if I had to. “I'd go to Vietnam in a minute if they let me. Besides, you don't know when we'll get another war.”

“Oh, honey,” my mother said. “You don't know anything about war. You're just a little girl.”

“I'm starting eighth grade in September, which is hardly a little girl, and I read
Time
magazine,” I argued. “I know plenty about war.”

“That's enough, Jamie,” the Colonel said. But I thought deep down he had to be proud of me, and of TJ, too. He'd raised us, after all. He'd raised us to believe in the Army way. And as far as I was concerned, he'd raised us right.

Once we started playing cards together, Private Hollister and I fit right in with each other. If one of us had been a lot better than the other, we probably wouldn't have become friends. But we were evenly matched, and even better than that, we both were good. It made us admire one another. It made us easy with each other.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked one morning as Private Hollister was dealing cards for a game of rummy. We didn't know it yet, but this would become our game for the summer. Once we got started playing gin, it never occurred to us to play anything else.

“Seven. All of us
B
s, too,” he said, flipping the cards into neat piles.

“You're bees?”

“Like the letter
B,”
he explained. “Bucky, Brenda, Betsy, Burl, Barney, Barbara, Bitsy, and Bob.”

“You've got a Bitsy
and
a Betsy?”

“Something wrong with that?”

I picked up my cards and started sorting them out. “No, it just seems like it could get confusing, having two people with names that are so close together.”

“Nah,” Private Hollister said, fanning out his cards and studying them. “Bitsy's about six foot tall, and Betsy's a tiny thing. You could never mistake them for one another.”

I couldn't believe how bad my hand was. The closest I had to anything was a pair of twos. No runs, no three-of-a-kinds. It was all deadwood. I needed to make some good draws and fast. I leaned forward and took a card from the top of the deck. “So who's your parents' favorite out of all the kids?” I asked, happy to see that I'd picked up the two of clubs. I discarded an ace.

“My dad don't have a favorite,” Private Hollister said, picking up my discard. “He's pretty much lost interest in all of us. But I'm my mom's favorite, no doubt about it. Who do you think taught me how to play cards? It's because I stayed home all the time from school, acting like I was sick. I didn't much like school.”

“Why not?”

Private Hollister discarded. “Because school didn't much like me. Mom taught me cards when I stayed home, and I got so good she didn't mind me skipping.”

“My brother's always been the Colonel's favorite,” I said. “But it's not like the Colonel doesn't like me, too. He does. He and TJ just have a special bond together.”

“That's how it is with fathers and sons,” Private Hollister said. “Well, not with me and my dad, but I've seen it in a lot of other families. Usually it has to do with sports.”

I nodded. “Football. Even though I like football too.”

“Yeah, but you're a girl. No father dreams of
seeing his daughter playing in the NFL. Maybe you should try out for cheerleading.”

I put down my cards. “Do I look like the cheer-leading type to you?”

Private Hollister studied me for a minute. “You might not be peppy enough, that's true. But you'll be cute in a couple of years. I can tell. Bitsy was plain as day until she was fourteen, and then, look out, buddy. That girl blossomed like a sunflower.”

“Hell's bells,” I said. “I don't want to be a stupid cheerleader.”

“You know, I think it's against the rules to cuss in here,” Private Hollister said. He checked his cards again, then knocked, signaling that he was ready to count points. “Anyway, you're too young to cuss.”

“I'll be thirteen in December,” I told him for what had to have been the hundredth time that week. “Thirteen is old enough for cussing. So's twelve, for that matter.”

“For boys, maybe. Not for girls. Girls ain't supposed to cuss at all.”

“That's a stupid rule. Either everybody cusses or nobody cusses.”

“Well, no cussing when we've got customers. That's a fair rule.”

“I suppose.”

I laid down my hand and counted the points from my unmatched cards. I'd managed to come back from a lousy deal, but that wasn't enough to beat Private Hollister.

“Let's keep track of our games, you want to?” Private Hollister asked. He pulled a pen from his uniform pocket. “That's what me and Mom do at home. Just so you know who has bragging rights at the end of the day.” Then he looked at me and grinned. “You know, I think you're working out here all right. I wasn't so sure you would at first.”

“What do you mean, you didn't think I'd work out?” I asked, indignant.

Private Hollister took a second to write down our scores. “Well, (a) for one thing, you're a girl, and a lot of girls couldn't handle being around GIs all the time without getting all silly and giggly and just acting dumb about it. Turned out you're not that way, but I didn't know it at the time. And (b) you seemed kind of young. I think it's because you're
short or something. Or maybe it was the way you were dressed. Of course, that was before I knew you were a card shark.”