A Cold Misty Rain

Misty rain fell as I walked through the neighborhood tonight. It reminded me of a similar rainy night that I spent during basic training at Fort Polk in Louisiana.

I spent years trying to forget my tour of duty in the Army. Now that I’m older, I sometimes have trouble remembering exact details of things that happened in the past. No problem! I’m a fiction writer. If I can’t remember the exact details of an event - Well, you get the picture.

This event took place during the last week of basic training. Despite an aging brain and attempts to forget this period of my life, it remains branded in my memory with blazing detail. There were four of us, Tommy, Robert, Bob and me.

We spent the last week of basic training camping out and undergoing exercises designed to test our resolve. The four of us were a team in a game called “elude and evade,” or at least something to that effect. A truck dropped the four of us off on a Louisiana road deep in the forest.

We had no light, food, water, or compass. Our mission was to make it back to the base camp, a mile or two away, without capture. If the enemy captured us, they would torture and abuse us, the drill sergeants told us. It was raining, a mild drizzle, but still wet.

“No one’s catching me,” Tommy said. “I been huntin’ since I was five and I can get around in the woods like a fox.”

Uh huh! It was dark within the hour, the four of us completely and totally lost, the trees so tall we couldn’t see the stars or the hazy moon. Since we had no watches, we didn’t know the time. We only knew how tired we were and how desperate we felt.

“Shit, my feet hurt!” Robert said. “Maybe we should just give up.”

Tommy shook his head. “You see or hear anyone out there? Who you gonna give up too?”

“Then what are we going to do?” Bob from Wisconsin asked.

“They are patrolling the dirt road. Let’s catch a few hours of sleep. When the sun comes up, we’ll go out to the road and follow it back to the base station. If we hear a truck, we’ll just hide in the trees until it passes.”

With no better plan, my three companions accepted my suggestion. The ground was hard but I was asleep soon after I closed my eyes. It was morning when I opened them again.

“Which way is the road?” Bob asked.

“That’s east because I can see the reflection of the sun,” Tommy said. “Follow me.”

We eventually came out on the dirt road, turned right and followe it. We soon heard an approaching truck and dived back into the forest. Once it passed, we got back on the road, walking for almost an hour until we reached the base camp. No one seemed to notice, or to care as we straggled into camp, going directly to the food line and not caring that a cold misty rain was falling on our aching backs.

No one ever told us, but we were the only team that made it back to base camp intact and not captured. I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, but I guess it’s just that when you have a problem that seems unsolvable, sometimes the best thing you can do is sleep on it.

Fiction South

Conscripted Soldiers

During my stay at Fort Polk, I became close friends with a fellow draftee named Tommy Picou. We went through Basic Training, Leadership Preparation and Advanced Infantry Training together. There were only four draftees in my AIT; all the rest were in the National Guard. Because of this, the four of us performed every KP and sh-t duty that came along.

During the summer of 1970 at Fort Polk, draftees were the lowest of the low, at least in the minds of our superiors – literally everyone, even the cooks. Picou and I became best friends because we had many things in common. We were both recently married and both from Louisiana, although I was from north Louisiana and he from south Louisiana.

Picou was of French-Acadian descent and spoke fluent Coon-ass French, a language we both assumed identical to the Mother tongue. A series of events that happened during AIT proved us both wrong.

We were at a rifle range, eating lunch when the MP’s brought a new addition to our training company. The young man, like all of us, was dressed in fatigues. None of us was very happy but this fellow seemed particularly indignant. When we tried to talk to him, he replied only in French.

”What’s he saying?” I asked Picou.

Picou shook his head. “Beat the hell outa me.”

“I thought you speak French.”

Picou grinned. “He damn sure don’t speak the same French I do.”

“Try saying something to him,” I suggested.

Picou rattled off a few questions for which he received only a quizzical look from the Frenchman, a universally understood open palm gesture and a shake of his head covered with thick dark hair.

He seemed to understand when I said, “Want something to eat?”

We got the young man a hot plate of chow and sat with him beneath the trees as he ate. When he finished, he said, in passable English, “My name is Charles and I’m from France.”

Charles just shook his head and grinned when I said, “Tommy’s French. Didn’t you comprehend what he was asking you?”

“Not a word,” he said.

Charles proceeded to tell us how he was a flight attendant for a French airline. On a layover in New York, the U.S. Army conscripted him.

“They have no right to do that,” I said.

“Apparently they do,” he said. “But I won’t stay here for long.”

“What’ll you do?” Picou asked.

“Escape as soon as I can.”

“Then what? They’ll hunt you down.”

“Make it to an airport where my airline flies and catch a flight back to France.”

“But they’ll just come after you,” I said.

“I’m a French citizen. They can’t touch me in France and I don’t intend to serve in your war.”

“We’re not too happy about it either,” Picou said.

“My brother was a soldier in Vietnam. He died at Diem Bien Phu,” Charles said. “My family has already lost too much to that damned country. I swear they won’t kill me too.”

True to his word, Charles was gone the next day. Picou and I both ended up in Vietnam, me in the First Cavalry and he in the 101st Airborne. We both made it home safely and kept in touch for several years.

I don’t know if Charles got back to France or spent years in an Army prison, but I know one thing for a fact – he was a man of resolve and had no intention of ever going to Vietnam and fighting another country’s war. I can’t say as I blame him.

Louisiana Mystery Writer

Taking the Bus

I didn’t get much time off during my stay at Fort Polk, maybe two weekends. One of them I spent in Chalmette, visiting wife Gail and her parents. I traveled there on the bus and the trip was memorable, not in what I saw but in what I felt.

Leesville is the Louisiana town just outside of Fort Polk and one word describes it - seedy. The Leesville bus station fit the bill. I can’t remember how I got there but I probably hitchhiked from the base. The lobby reeked with the vague odor of despair. The station was empty except for the lady that issued my ticket without seeming to see me, and about a half dozen GI’s; like me, they were all privates.

I sat alone in the back of the bus, reveling in the legroom but saddened by its darkened loneliness. We were fifty miles out of town when one of the GI’s began to sing. I wasn’t very old but this kid was younger, probably no more than eighteen.

There was a song out at the time called And When I Die. Laura Nyro wrote it but a group called Blood, Sweat and Tears had a hit with the song. The young man had no accompaniment and sang it much slower even than Nyro’s version. His words tore the heart right out of my chest.

The young man was an Eleven Bravo, I an Eleven Charlie. We were both infantry bullet-stoppers; bound for the human gristmill that was Vietnam.

Like me, he was probably afraid of death. I was afraid of something much worse - the decisive act of taking another human life. I didn’t know if I was up to the task even though I’d had the act of ultimate enactment drummed into the very essence of my brain for the past four months.

The song’s lyrics ripped at my soul but didn’t make me cry. I was drenched in the steel resolve of personal survival at the time. I would do what I had to do. I hoped that any act of violence I might perform wouldn’t corrupt my soul – at least not forever.

Fiction South