1966
I know all the words; but not their meaning, yet I sing them
all the time, feeling like I did when me and Dave were cadets, with me blowing
my horn and Dave beating his drum.
But who exactly are the Green Berets? And what do they want?
I know they are fighting in some place called Vietnam, where
my Uncle has gone, though I know he’s not a Green Beret, just a soldier.
I shouldn’t like a song, but I play it all the time, even
when the radio doesn’t, having recorded it with my three-inch tape recorder that
makes it sound tinny, blasting it out the window of my third floor bedroom just
the way I blast The Beatles and the Stones, this song feeling strange inside of
me as if it should mean something I don’t understand, coming from across a wide
ocean, invading me the way Dave’s father did Normandy Beach, a haunting sense
of pride that leaves out the sound of gunfire, the smell of mortars and grenades
and the sticky ooze of bleeding men dying.
Of my uncle dying, who has not died yet, sending pictures
back to prove he hasn’t died, so as to make his mother, my grandmother, feel less
scared, though my aunt, his sister, looks at the photos showing him holding a
beer in some remote bar and asking who the women are that he’s with.
I don’t know much about war except from the reruns of the TV
show Combat I catch on Channel 9 from time to time, a show I liked a lot more
when I was very young and still played with plastic soldiers and still had a
plastic gun to shoot imaginary enemies – when now all my enemies are real, and
not in some distant jungle, hiding in the halls of the junior high school I go
to where they hope to beat me up.
This war doesn’t even make the news like my uncle’s war does.
Nobody is telling anybody to stop the bullies the way the government tells us
on TV about our need to stop the communist, talking about dominos falling, and
I keep thinking they mean real dominos when after awhile I realize they don’t.
I roam the halls of Christopher Columbus Junior High School
constantly looking over my shoulder, the way my uncle must when he’s deep in
the jungle. I hardly ever go to class or when I do, I sit near the door to make
sure I can see any possible traps outside for when the bell rings and I have to
leave.
Christopher Columbus is like mausoleum where I used to hide
in the grave yard across the street from my house when I didn’t want to go to
church but my uncles pushed me out the door to make me go.
I feel safer on the streets, roaming around with Dave,
knowing that he’ll be joining me at the school in year if he ever manages to
get out of the 6th Grade in School 11, a place where he’s been left behind so
many times, he’s two feet taller than any of the other kids and taller than most
of the teachers, too.
I ache for him to help me get even with all the bullies I
have to fight all by myself, and with some teachers who are as bad as the
bullies.
Sometimes, when I roam the halls I sing the song, just as Dave
and I sing it when we’re in the streets.
We even pretend that we are soldiers dropping from the
sky. I guess we need heroes since we
already have more enemies than we can handle.
I sing it to impress Sue, the girl next door, a blonde headed
girl about Dave’s age, and who we both have a crush on, but won’t admit it, and
who hates us both, though I think she hates Dave more than me, or at least, I
hope so.
We’re always picking on her, teasing her in the halls of the
school and when we see her somewhere between school and home.
She thinks we’re silly, and insists we stop singing our
silly song, which makes us sing it louder and more often, and makes her huff and
tell us to grow up, when we’re too young to grow up, and too scared, thinking
that if we grow up too soon we might just become Green Berets or soldiers like
my uncle, and have to send pictures home so my grandmother knows we’re still
alive, and my aunt can wonder what we’re doing with the girls in the bar, the
way my aunt does when she looks at my uncle’s pictures.
I don’t care about those girls. I’m just glad he’s still
alive.
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