Deserter
It’s a rainy early August afternoon and we’re on our way back from an appointment with my son Nate’s orthodontist.
–So what happened to you when you deserted, Dad? What did they do to you?
He’s been listening to a song a bout a young soldier who refused orders to return to Iraq. It’s by a group called State Radio and the song is called Camilo. His name is Camilo Meija.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pt9ccupIoE
As I begin to tell him about the day I went AWOL—I’m seeing another day—the Monday morning I turned myself in to the FBI in Binghamton, New York –the snow falling, drifts of snow we pass by as the government car begins to pick up speed.
Two different realities. But Nate wants to know how it started. And so I go back to the Marine barracks at Sea School in Norfolk, Virginia and the day I reported two weeks late for duty. It was a warm day in late September. I was in uniform, I tell him, standing in the hallway while I waited for the first sergeant to see me. When you’re late in the military they call it AWOL. My leave had expired after three days and then I was supposed to report for training. It was Sea School—dress blues, sword drills, rifle drills, spit and polish nonsense. And they’d given me three days to get from Charleston, South Carolina to Virginia. Without going home. I was less than two months back from my first 13 month tour in Vietnam and I’d only had twenty days leave when I got back—so I decided to take a few more days. I felt like I needed it. As I waited for the first shirt (the First Sergeant), the PFC on duty took my orders and looked up from his desk.
–You’re late, was all he said.
I looked around at the cases of swords, the old dress blues preserved under glass, the relics of past sea-going Marines. How’d this happen? I wondered. My friend DeCarlo and I had both applied for orders, anything to get out of the swamps, and the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston where we’d been stationed when we came back from the war. Our jobs had been as security for the Polaris Missiles entombed in bunkers throughout the base.
–Fuckin’ ass MPs, DeCarlo said.
We’d drive pick-ups at night to check the bunkers or we’d stand gate guard duty during the days or nights. We had to check the IDs of all incoming personnel. They said a full-bird colonel flashed an ID with a dog’s face where the mug shot was supposed to be and the sentry had let him pass without checking it—and then they’d busted the dude down to private. There were stories about a lance corporal who had gone crazy late at night at one of the sub station checkpoints and started to shoot out the windows of the booth with his 45 cal. pistol. Eventually other MPs had to come and take him away in a straight jacket. Another story was about a guard in his pick-up who’d driven it into a bunker where missiles were. He thought he’d seen a gas truck on the road. The base had that effect on you. So De Carlo who had been a truck driver in Vietnam and me—well we put in for the first orders that came up. De Carlo got 8th and I in Washington D.C. better known as the President’s Own. And me, I got Sea School.
But as I listen to my son ask me about the day I deserted—the day I decided not to wait for the 1st Sergeant and the day I officially became AWOL and then after another sixty days—a deserter, I’m seeing something else.
It’s the morning in late December when I turned myself in to the FBI, and I’m not scared just wondering ok—what next. I mean my parents drove me up there to the courthouse and left, and as I climbed the stairs to his office, I had that deep sinking feeling in my gut—that uh-oh, aint this a bitch. And when I get up there to the third floor the agent says:
–Hey I can’t take you today. Let’s go see if the Marine Corps Recruiter wants you.
And then they’d talked awhile and the recruiter decided he’d take me up the Marine Reserve Station near Tully, New York and see if they would hold me there.
–Let the reservists do somethin’ he said. They don’t do shit as it is.
I see the drive north again in the snow. The recruiter up in front and me sitting next to him.
–You can smoke if you got ‘em, he says.
And I do. I’m still smoking Kools then. The snow’s falling. There’s a grayness all around; a dull gray color to the sky, like old clay—so you know it’s going to snow some more, that upstate snow that swirls at you and you get to seeing things. The names of towns go by—Whitney Point, Marathon, Homer, Catullus, Tully. And when we get to the reserve station the warrant officer there takes the papers from the recruiter and brings me into his office. He snorts kind of and then gets serious.
–We shouldn’t be taking you in at all, he says. Not an NCO and a vet to boot. You should have gone back on your own. But I can’t let you do that now. Now we gotta take you to the civvie jail in Syracuse. Onondaga County. Then you wait for the chasers to take you downstate. When you finally get back remember this—it’s wrong and it’ll work for you when you go for the hearing. This aint legal. Wrong under the UCMJ Code.
–I’m listening, but outside the station I hear that wind picking up. And then two six foot privates with MP gear on and 45 pistols in holsters come in and get on either side of me. They point me to the door and walk me to the gray Ford outside. An older Sergeant is driving and the two sit on either side of me in the back seat—they pull out their 45’s to let me know they mean business. And I kind of smile when they do that—the sarge watching me in the rear view mirror. They’ve never been anywhere—just two reservists who want to play it up.
It’s still snowing when we get to the jail in Syracuse. The escorts leave me with the jailer and he leads me upstairs. I have to walk past all the cells in the block with my uniform on so they all see I’ve been overseas. Probably a good thing too, just to keep some distance. I spent two weeks in that jail waiting for chasers to come up from the brig in Brooklyn. There were others there who had to be escorted downstate too.
I’d never been in handcuffs before and so the idea of being cuffed and sitting between those two reservist guards made the deserter tag seem real for the first time, it made the act of leaving Norfolk that day in September seem real too. So that walking out past the clerk before the 1st Sergeant could talk to me, getting into the car and driving out past the gate guard who just flagged me through, hocking my watch in a downtown gut pawnshop for gas money, changing out of my uniform into blue jeans and a t shirt in a gas station men’s room—all of it came back.
I tell my son Nate—Well, I just deserted. I’d had enough of it, you know. And I think that’s close to the truth, but I’m leaving things out on purpose. Maybe I’ve got to give him the James Jones’ line about knowing my luck had run out and I’d never make it through another tour—whether it was Sea School first or not—I knew they’d be sending me back overseas. I’m deliberately not telling him how it had come to this, how the story really started. I can’t really see things like that anymore—nothing’s one dimensional.
Instead I tell him about the day I was finally discharged, about getting out of the hospital and taking a cab to the airport, about the riots in Norfolk and Portsmouth—the bus station closed, the trains not running. It was April 9th; 1968, the day they buried Martin Luther King.
He doesn’t want to know about this, he wants to know about punishment, about what happened when I got back to base in Norfolk. And yet, as he sits there across from me—I’m seeing the snow again, the day they took us out of that jail in Syracuse to the airport to ride on the Mohawk prop plane to New York. Slowhawk we called then. This time they had an official MP escort—three lance corporals and a sergeant. The sergeant handcuffed me by myself. The others were handcuffed together. There were five if us in all. Four guys running away from the war, and me. The sergeant wanted to know what I was doing there in uniform. He couldn’t figure it out. It was January 2nd or 3rd—a gray day again with no sun. Standing in the airport waiting room in Syracuse we must have been a sight. The four guys in civvies, and me in my dress greens. The guy next to me named Mel wanted to make a break for it. Where would we go I asked him? Staring out at the runways it seemed like a bleak prospect, and besides I’d turned myself in. I told him, I had to go on with it. There was nothing else.
And Nate’s pulling at me now, he wants to know about the desertion thing, and I have to leave that flight alone. The Brooklyn Naval Yard in January snow, the Brooklyn Brig where we half-stepped to chow in that brig shuffle. The lines when we checked in to be interviewed, searched, given brig hair cuts. I have to stop myself from remembering my own intake—.
–What you readin’ there, turd, what the fuck is this?
The thick paperback was stuffed in my shaving kit. Letting Go. The corporal read the title and smiled.
–Can’t have no fuckin’ books in here asshole. He threw it on the pile of “contraband” behind him. Can’t have comic books, or fuck books, or any kind of books. He smiled again—almost a leer.
–You won’t be needing this steel comb either, he said. You some kinda reader, corporal shit-bird mother fucker? Huh? You some fuckin’ smart ass? Gotta get your hair cut too. First thing you dudes is gonna do is see the barber. All right move out.
When I got to the barrack room of the brig, my sea bag had been tagged and stored and I had been issued brig fatigues, a wool blanket and a towel.
–Move out, move out, the guards kept shouting at me. I stumbled into the bunk area, and the others there looked up at me.
Instead I have to tell Nate about that day in Norfolk, the day a sergeant escorted me back in handcuffs after flying down from New York.
