September 1977, NATO Campaign Reforger, I was twenty-one years old and I hadn’t a shower in as many days. I sat in my Jeep in a cold rain, no doors, rainwater drizzling off the canvas top, a poncho over my lap and the engine running for heat. I was reading Critique of Pure Reason and trying to understand the nature of a priori knowledge. I’d read about Kant in a crappy novel and bought his book. It was a big read for a guy with a lousy high school education, no thoughts on rationalism or empiricism, and who’d never heard of Hume or Descartes. I was driving a Jeep for an umpire, Captain Sawyer, an M151A2 with its gutless four-cylinder engine, 4-speed manual transmission, knobbed tires, drum brakes, no seatbelts and no roll bar. Our mission, Captain Sawyer’s and mine, was to make sure nobody cheated at war.

Reforger was an annual NATO exercise spread out across the West German countryside commandeering roads, barns, farm fields, forests and small towns and leaving behind broken concrete, damaged crops, Germans cussing us in German, and an oily diesel-stink that hung in the air long after a unit had moved on. The Army hadn’t recovered from Viet Nam and moral, discipline and attitudes were poor. A favorite way for tankers to share their discontent was carving the letters FTA, “Fuck The Army”, into farm fields with their tracks, neat pivot steers at the intersecting lines of the squared letters so that the crops were ground into the soil and the letters stood out clear and neat against the field; the only people who could read them were the officers and crews chopping over us in Hueys. Lots of butt-chewing at the unit level about maneuver damage, but command ranks never knew which track commander and crew inscribed those notes in the German dirt. But we knew, we all did, and we fist-bumped the philosophers and scriveners for leaving our mark.

*             *             *             *

I went through Basic and AIT at Fort Knox with Cal and God. Basic Training is where recruits get physically fit and learn the fundamentals of war-fighting: how to salute, make a bed, hot wax a floor, wash a pot, peel a potato, spit shine boots and low quarters, polish brass, stand at attention, march and run in formation. We also learned to use radios and the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie…), shoot and clean various weapons, throw hand grenades (pro tip: don’t use your teeth to pull the pin), use a gas mask (training that included several long minutes in a concrete building filled with tear gas), bandage wounds, crawl through sand at night under concertina wire and red tracers shot from an M60 machine gun, and all the rest. Also, in Basic Training, I ran a 5:36 mile in fatigue pants and boots, maxed the PT test, two of us in the company did that, God and me, and shot Expert with an M16 rifle and M60 machine gun; the high moments in an otherwise unremarkable three-year military career.

AIT, Advanced Individual Training, is where we were trained in our Military Occupational Specialty, “MOS” in Army speak.  Our MOS, Cal’s, God’s and mine, was 11D, Armor Reconnaissance. We learned to drive and fire M551 Sheridans (shitty aluminum tanks with a 155mm main gun that mostly sank when we tried to swim them and were mostly broken the rest of the time) and M113 APCs (aluminum boxes with tracks), observe and report enemy action, read a compass and topo map (and learn the difference between a kilometer and a mile and the importance of contour lines, especially when they’re close together), fire and movement, call for artillery, search and destroy, harass the enemy with tanks and small arms, rear guard delay actions, advance and retreat under fire, and blow things up with C4, bangalore torpedoes and claymore mines. In AIT, God and I got tattoos, God lost his virginity, Cal drove.

Cal was from Berkeley. His father was a doctor and a college professor and taught at UCSF. His mother was an artist, she used a spare bedroom with a view of the bay for a studio and drank for inspiration. Cal was a couple of inches over six feet and pasty with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and flouncy butt cheeks; he looked like a paunchy white Jesus. He went to Berkeley High and spent his junior and senior years protesting Viet Nam and Nixon on the grimy sidewalks of Telegraph Avenue waving signs, smoking weed, and fucking hippie women in People’s Park. After he graduated, he spent a couple of years at UC studying physics. His sister Cece was killed in a helicopter crash in Viet Nam, she was a nurse and a captain. A few months later, over Christmas break his junior year, he signed a recruiter’s papers. He didn’t tell his parents he’d joined the Army until the morning he got in his Porsche to drive east, a faded yellow ’67 911S with an air cooled flat six, five-speed transmission with first gear left and down, wooden steering wheel, low-back black vinyl seats in front, little vinyl seats in the back. It had been his father’s car, he’d bought a new one. His mother hugged him on the driveway, there was bourbon on her breath. His father had a class.

God, the name stamped on his dog tags was Godefredo, grew up in his great-grandfather’s wood shack on a bayou in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, cooked on a cast iron stove stoked with wood he’d split and from kindergarten, piloted his grandfather’s flat bottom wood bateau with its ancient two-stroke Evinrude outboard to the school bus stop where he ran it up the bank and tied it to a tree. He dropped out of school when he was twelve and started mudbugging full time, that’s what he called crawfishing; setting the traps after dark with fish heads for bait and in the morning selling the catch out of the back of the pickup to neighbors and restaurants so he had money for food, 2-stroke oil for the Evinrude and gas for the truck.

God’s father was a construction superintendent. Before work, he’d pour half a fifth of rum into his coffee thermos. By lunch he was tripping over building materials and cussing the trades, by quitting time he was sound asleep in the cab of his truck, a faded red 1960 Apache C10 with a white top, 235 inline six, three-on-the-tree transmission and wrinkled door and fenders on the passenger side from banging it into the live oak in the front yard coming home drunk. At home, he’d keep drinking into the night and there’d be arguments with God’s mother. Sometimes he’d bloody her lip or yank her shoulder out of the socket and a couple of cops would show up and say hello by name and take him outside and lecture him in soft and gentle tones so God and his mother couldn’t hear the words and his father would sit on the hood of the patrol car and cup his face in his hands and cry and say he was sorry over and over and the cops would pat his shoulder and leave and the next week or the following week it would happen again just the same, except maybe she wouldn’t call the cops.

When God was eight, his mother left. She didn’t leave a note. About that time, too, local contractors quit hiring his father; he’d earned his reputation. He took a job as a traveling superintendent remodeling motels around the country; he left a five and some ones on the kitchen counter when he left. He left his truck, too. At first, he came home every couple of months or so; as God got older, he came home less frequently until he stopped coming home at all. On his seventeenth birthday, God joined the Army; his father sent him back the signed enlistment forms without a note; he was on a project in Salt Lake City when God got on the bus in front of the recruiting station in Orange, Texas, just the other side of the Sabine River. He left the pickup in the parking lot.

God was short, five-two, maybe five-three, and wiry lean so in the barracks barefoot and wearing just skivvies, you could see the blue veins and long muscles in his arms and legs and abs ripple and bunch under his skin as he made his bed, dressed and undressed and polished his boots. He had deep green eyes, wavy dirt blond hair, shoulder length and greasy before the Army cut it off, a broken front tooth, black crescents under his ripped and jagged fingernails, and a nose that was French and narrow at the bridge, wide and African at his cheeks and twisted like it had been broken and never set straight. Living alone, he hadn’t bothered much with personal hygiene.

At Fort Knox, barracks for Basic Training were open-bays with a 10’ center aisle, double grey steel doors at one end. On both sides of the center aisle, 40 grey steel wall lockers and 20 steel bunk beds with Army-green wool blankets, folded sheets and pillows stacked at the ends were aligned straight and square with the beige-on-beige checkerboard floor tile. The room was lit by flickering 8’ fluorescent lights. Cal and God were assigned bunkmates, I shared the next bunk with Freddie, a guy from St. Louis who doesn’t figure into our story. I had the bottom bunk and we didn’t argue.

“I’ve got top,” I heard Cal say.

God, who’d been living alone for years, had lost the habit of negotiation and even conversation. He glanced at Cal then he put a hand on the on the top bunk, jumped and spun and sat on the mattress in one effortless move and made it his.

Cal said it again, the top was his, and God looked down at him.

“Fuck you. I’m not sleeping down here.”

God slid off the bunk and stood in front of Cal looking up and in that moment of exasperation, Cal put a hand on God’s chest and shoved him. I doubt he meant to, but he pushed him hard enough that God tripped over his foot locker and fell backwards. But instead of sprawling on his back, in the four tenths of a second before he hit the floor, God twisted in the air so he landed on his palms and toes with his legs cocked and in the remaining six tenths of that second, he bounced to his feet and faced Cal in a crouch. He held his fists low and curled into hard knots and there was no hesitation; as he was on his feet, he started to jab and cross with punches too fast for my eyes to follow. He didn’t fight like he had training, he fought like he had experience and he punched into Cal like I imagine the prop on that ancient 2-stroke Evinrude cut through swamp weeds, small, fast, powerful and relentless. Cal kept circling away, trying to negotiate a truce, “Hey, be cool, be cool. Hey, man. Hey, take it. Take it, take the damn bunk, I don’t give a shit. Hey…,” all the while he was yelling for peace, he was trying to block punches and taking blows to the head and gut until the floor around them was spattered with blood from his nose.

Cal slipped in his blood and fell to his knees. He grabbed God around the legs and dragged him down so the two of them were rolling and wrestling on the floor. We circled around, a couple of us tried to separate them, most everyone else cheered and catcalled, “stomp that motherfucker,” “beat that white boy’s ass,” until somebody called “ten-hut,” and Sergeant Leonard in his starched fatigues, spit-shined Corcoran jump boots, Smokey the Bear hat pulled low over his eyes and his swagger stick tapping his calf, strolled down the center aisle and surveyed Cal and God standing next to their bunk and the blood smeared on his floor and Cal’s face, “Formation, gentlemen. Boots and trousers. Two minutes.”

That was our first night in Basic and it was a long run that none of us was in shape to do, except maybe Sergeant Leonard and God. As we ran, Sergeant Leonard taught us the first (of many) call-and-response cadence chants, “If I die on the Russian front, bury me deep with a Russian c***….” He was a baritone and he’d carol the words and we’d chant them back, 41 boots hitting the dirt on the syllables. Every few minutes, as we ran through the night, he’d bark, “Platoon halt. Drop and give me ten.” As soon as we were done with the pushups, we were back on our feet and running again.

Cal and God, they became friends during that run; while I was focused on the growing sweat stain on the fatigue shirt in front of me and the panting and cussing around me, both of them were admiring the sky, it was clear, no moon, the stars just out of reach.

Back in our bunks, exhausted and pissed, I heard God say from the top bunk, “Bèl ciel ce soir.”

“Fuck you.”

“Down Louisiana, you don’t see Orion that clear.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“We’d go in the bayou nights, set traps, my mom and me. When the mist was clear, she’d point to pictures in the stars and tell me their names.”

There was a silence for many seconds and I heard springs in their bunk squeak as one of them turned over, “When I was a kid, five, six years old, my mom would drive us up to Tilden, that’s a park up on top of the hills in Berkeley, and we’d lie on the hood of her VW bug and she’d point to the stars and name them to me until I fell asleep then sometime in the night, she’d wake me up and drive us home. Betelgeuse was on fire tonight.”

Some days later, I came into the barracks, the two of them were entwined in tendrils of smoke from the Kool and Marlboro cigarettes poking out of the ashtrays on their bunks beside them. God, in fatigue pants, dusty boots and no shirt, sat with his legs dangling over the edge of his mattress as he read out loud a story from Stars and Stripes, Cal sat on the bottom bunk brushing Kiwi polish into his boots and helping him sound out the words he couldn’t figure out himself. I walked around their bunk so I wouldn’t smell God’s body odor.

“Cal.”

“Let it alone.”

“Last week, God wiped the floor with your face. Now you’re teaching him to read?”

“What the fuck’s it to you?”

God kept stumbling down the columns, one syllable at a time. Until that evening, I hadn’t heard God speak more than a few dozen words besides, “Yes, Drill Sergeant” and “No, Drill Sergeant.” He was a tenor with a drawl and an accent that from time to included some French words, “Piké twa,” he said.

“He just told you to get fucked.”

“Fuck you, too,” I said. God went back to reading the newspaper.

Except for letters and care packages from moms, almost always chocolate chip cookies and sometimes shared, and Stars and Stripes, we were cut off from the world we’d grown up in, no newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, or telephone. Our conversations were bragging, bitching and gossip; we had nothing else. The runs, the marches, the blisters, the lack of sleep, the sore and strained muscles, the over-explained and poorly-explained classes, the drill sergeants for their unfairness and cruelty, the lousy tents and backpacks, the leaky gas masks, the air mattresses that went flat in the night, rifle and machine gun if-not-for excuses (if not for screaming drill sergeants, lousy weapons, crosswinds, poorly zeroed sights, target malfunctions, buzzing flies and any number of other the-sun-was-in-my-eyes reasons for shooting poorly), hand grenade throwing scores, PT test scores, the rumored saltpeter in our food (reduces desire for sex, or so went the story), KP, guard duty, bunkmates, the latest guy to DNF, letters from girlfriends, girlfriends gone silent, cars sold and missed, bad and good plays at spades, cribbage and poker.

We graduated from Basic Training, the three of us. On the final PT test, God ran a 4:20 mile.

*             *             *             *

In AIT we were allowed to have POVs (Privately Owned Vehicles) on post, although most of us had sold (or abandoned) our cars before we got on the bus. In Alpha Troop, Cal was the only guy I knew with a car, he’d paid to store the Porsche during Basic. The first night we were allowed off post, we took it to Louisville, Cal and God in front, me twisted sideways on the backseats. Before we left, we stood at attention in front of the barracks while Sergeant Leonard inspected our uniforms, ‘c**t-cap’ sitting square, slice-a-knuckle creases in our khakis, glistening brass, low-quarters spit-shined so you could trim a teenage mustache in the mirror. He gave us the lecture; ‘Don’t get too drunk, don’t get the clap, don’t be stupid, be here for morning formation.’ Even God had taken a shower.

We went to Trixie’s, a strip joint in Louisville, permanent duty guys told us it was the place to go. We spent the night banging shots of Jack and chugging beer backs while watching women get naked and dance and sliding bills into their G-strings; the Army paid new E-1 privates $344.10 a month less taxes, enough for boot polish at the PX and candy bars and beer from the vending machines on the first floor of the barracks. The bills we had were mostly singles, not a lot of action for a buck, even in those days, even less if you were throwing quarters and nickels onto the stage.

Cal’s mom sent him checks. He took a stool at the raised stage and waved a ten at the gal on the pole and she sashayed over in her red stilettos, her shoulders and hips swaying in time to the base line as Tommy James whined about teenage lust. She stood over him and let him stare at her shaved crotch then squatted with her thighs on either side of his face and ran her fingers over his shaved pate and whispered in his ear and Cal squeezed her butt and pulled back the elastic strap as it slid between her cheeks and slipped in the ten and she stood up and turned around and bent over with her ass a foot from his face and give him a long gawk and shimmied away. The other dancers caught on and Cal got attention. God and I stood behind his chair and basked in his money and the clouds of cigarette smoke and the stinks of overflowing ashtrays, cheap perfume, sweat, vag, butthole, whiskey, beer and vomit and stared at the strings as they disappeared into the abyss.

Cal whispered in one of the girl’s ears as she was squatted in front of him and she nodded and turned around then shimmied away with two twenty-dollar bills bow-tied into her butt floss and when her set was done she came around and Cal pointed at God and she took his hand, you could see his face turn red in the bar light. He pulled back and she stepped close to him and whispered in his ear, she was a couple of inches taller than him and skinny, shoulder-length straw-blond hair, smoker skin, red lipstick smudged around her mouth, saggy little breasts with a dark mole centered on her chest between them; she was maybe twenty and naked except for her spike heels and her thong tucked with bills. He whispered back to her and she tugged at his hand and he looked away, more whispering and tugging and then he took a step and another and she led him through a curtain and disappeared backstage.

I went back to drinking whiskey and beer and watching Cal’s private show. An hour later, the woman led God back into the bar. He wasn’t a virgin anymore; the lipstick on his neck, the wrinkles in his khakis, the grin on his face told the story. Cal waved the waitress over and ordered beer and whiskey, “There’s only one first time,” he said.

God lit a Kool, the cigarette shaking between his fingers, “She’s nice, Angela, she’s really nice.”

“She do what you needed her to do?”

“I was the first guy she ever did it with for money.”

Cal laughed, “She told you that?”

“We’re going to a movie next week if I can get a pass.”

“She’s a whore, God. She dances naked and fucks for money. That’s her job.”

“You don’t know her.”

“Where’d you do it?”

“Backseat, her car. We talked after we did it. She said she thinks she loves me.”

“God, she fucked you for your money. Actually, she fucked you for my money. What in hell did you talk about? Did you use a rubber?”

The waitress showed up with the beers and shots balanced on a tray, “To God and Angela,” Cal said and the three of us pinched our shot glasses and threw back the whiskey.

“Cal, she’s his girlfriend, show some respect.” God looked at me hoping I wasn’t joking. I didn’t know whether I was joking or not.

“She wants out of here; she wants out of Louisville, out of Kentucky. She wants a life.”

“I’m sure she does,” Cal said. “And we’ve got PT at oh-six-hundred.”

“I love her.” God turned toward the backstage curtain, he was staggering drunk.

Cal grabbed his arm, “It’s 1:30. We’re out of here.”

God yanked his arm, Cal held on, “I’m going to marry her.”

I grabbed God’s other arm, “She’ll be here next week.”

“Let go, she’s going to be my wife.” He struggled for a few seconds with both of us, pulling hard against our arms, “Piké twa.”

Together, Cal and I pulled him out of the bar; I don’t know that we could have done it if he wasn’t drunk. Still holding his arms and wrestling with him to keep him from falling on the asphalt or going back in the bar, we staggered around the parking lot until we found the Porsche. As we were pulling out of the parking lot, God, in a drooling slur, said, “I want to go to Charlie’s.” Tattoo Charlies was a storefront parlor right on Dixie Highway, we had to drive by it to get back to Knox. Permanent duty guys showing off their ink bragged about it.

I said, “Let’s get some fucking sleep.”

“We’re stopping at Charlie’s,” Cal’s voice was slurred, too, and he was hunched over the steering wheel staring through the windshield like he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to be doing.

“Oh-six-hundred,” I said.

“It’s God’s night. Let’s get him a tattoo.”

God was sitting with his head leaned back against the headrest. “I’m going to marry her,” he slurred the words then started to heave.

Cal slammed the brakes and skidded the little car to a stop. God pitched forward against the dashboard then somehow got the door open and started blowing his guts on to the shoulder, I tried not to smell the vomit or listen to the heave and splash. After a while, he sat up, “She gets a life.”

“Let’s get some sleep.”

“Big night for God. Let’s help him remember it.”

Charlie’s was open for the bar rush. When we walked in, the slinger was finishing a tattoo of the Keep on Truckin’ dude on a guy’s forearm, there were buck sergeant stripes on the collar of his fatigues, “Gentlemen, have a seat,” he waved at chairs near the door. Shaved head, black goatee and mustache, stubble cheeks, wife-beater tank top, a two-inch curved tooth hanging on a gold chain around his neck, and all his skin I could see covered with ink. He handed me a binder, “some ideas if you don’t know what you want to do.” I took it and handed it to God who shook his head, “I know what I‘m getting.”

I handed it to Cal. He shook his head, his eyes half closed, “Too drunk. Not doing it.”

“We could be in our bunks.”

“Only one first time,” he muttered like he was falling asleep.

I leafed through the pages and pages of color photos of tattoos on every body part, male and female; flags, helmets, skulls, Hueys, Cobra gunships, fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, the sun, hummingbirds, tigers, snakes, wolves, flowers, sheet music, geometric designs, women’s names and portraits, Chinese characters, military branch logos and unit crests, Sheridans and M60s, an M16 on a bayonet sticking out of the ground with a helmet balanced on the stock, plain and fancy Christian crosses, wavy hair Jesus nailed on a cross, sailing ships, the Keep on Truckin’ dude (various colors, poses and legends), clenched fists, rosaries, eagles, lots of eagles. I got an eagle soaring in front of a red sun tattooed on my right shoulder. In all the life I’ve lived since, that eagle has been a ready reminder that drunk decision-making makes for drunk decisions. The red sun has long since faded away and all that’s left is a crudely drawn pale blue bird.

After we graduated, Cal accepted a post at West Point, God was assigned to the 2^nd Armor Division at Fort Hood, Texas, I was posted to the 1/1 Cavalry Squadron at O’Brien Barracks, Schwabach, West Germany. We got drunk and shook hands. I figured I wouldn’t see either of them again. We weren’t letter-writers.

*             *             *             *

I saw God again at the field headquarters for the 2^nd Armor Division; command tent, medical tent, open air mess, division recovery and maintenance. The 2^nd AD had come to Germany for Reforger, they’d shipped over from Hood. There was a couple of dozen or more deuce-and-a-half and five-ton trucks clumped together by section, Jeeps scattered haphazardly around, APC’s, five-ton wreckers and M88 track recovery vehicles, POL (fuel) trucks, tool trucks and trailers, water trailers, Gama Goats, and broken M60 tanks and APCs and trucks. For air cover, the bivouac was scattered under the trees in a dripping wet wood outside a little town. Loops of concertina wire surrounded the area. The wire didn’t keep out the local kids and after school they’d come by and laugh with us in German and spotty English and climb on the tracks and trucks and bounce on the seats and we’d give them the Chiclets from our C-rations.

In a clearing in the wood, the cooks set up serving tables for chow and around the clock they kept a wood fire going under a twenty-gallon pot hanging from a steel tripod and a chain, the pot filled with boiling coffee. A dipper hung from one of the legs of the tripod.  When the coffee ran low, one of the cooks would dump in another five gallons of water from a jerrycan and a No. 10 can of ground coffee and stir it in with the ladle. The coffee was hot and bitter and you had to spit out the grounds that stuck to your lips and teeth. We were wet, cold and exhausted and we’d stand in the mud and drink that coffee out of our canteen cups and warm our hands and feet at the fire and cuss the Army. Best coffee I ever drank.

We didn’t bathe in the field except sometimes in our helmets to scrub the gear, and a lot of guys didn’t do that. And so, we were immersed in stink; mud and wet trees, wet canvas, wet clothes, the damp gray stink of cigarette smoke, wood smoke from the cooks’ fire, reeking breath (sometimes with an after-waft of bourbon or hashish), unwashed ass and pits, diesel exhaust, diesel fuel, gasoline, and the oily steel stench of our machines that engulfed us always. Our fatigues were clammy and wrinkled and bagged at the knees and elbows and stained with food and coffee from eating standing up or in moving vehicles. Our underwear, too, got sticky with the damp and the sweat and the cold and would bunch and chafe and most of us didn’t wear any. Our socks and boots were wet and cold, too, no matter how often we changed them and tried to dry them with the diesel heaters in the tracks.

God was standing next to a Jeep under the dripping trees in the 2^nd AD bivouac. He was some distance away and at first he didn’t see me. The hood was up on the Jeep, he had his sleeves rolled back and his hands were black with engine oil and grease. In his right hand, he held an adjustable wrench. When finally he saw me, he laughed and waved. Even at distance, I could see Angela’s name tattooed on his forearm in a fine and delicate cursive surrounded by red hearts and colored flowers and smeared with grease. Through the grime, the light flickering through the wet leaves reflected the gold on his finger, “Piké twa, motherfucker,” he yelled at me. I didn’t yell back, Captain Sawyer was calling for me. I never saw God again.