This is a hard one. Sharon, Joe who was there, me who draft-dodged.
Real smart guy with a felony drug record, and in '67 the services hadn't
gotten desperate enough for me. I found out later I could not take live
vaccines so it made no difference.
I was never smug.
A man my age lived in the Weequahic section of Newark, where Philip Roth
grew up. He got called to the draft board, they took one look at
him--white Jewish college student--and dismissed him because there were
enough of That Kind in Newark to fill the quota.
Today such things are the few pockets of shame I know.
I knew a guy who lost his 2S deferment and was drafted. Years later I
wrote about him.
BUGHOUSE
(for Phil)
Sitting wasted each night in front of the tube,
we watched Uncle Walter fill the Home Front in
about the latest disaster at some place called Hue
or Suk Mai Wang, and CBS'd run the newsreels,
and if the mood was right and the dope just strong enough,
I'd see the Medevac choppers swarm from the sky
and think how they looked like giant insects,
dragonflys, or the gentle terrifying praying mantis.
And I knew my friend (or ex-friend) Phil
rode the insides of the bug,
post-induction C.O. schmuck whose gentle heart
recoiled not at war but at the thought
that little men he couldn't see, in black pajamas,
could swing from vines out of his nightmares
to kill specifically _him_.
So now beneath the rotors and the screams
of engines and of 19-year-old babies
from Paterson and Providence, ABD-bored
grad school dropouts from Case Western or Wayne State,
western PA high school football stars now sans
legs, dicks, and shame--he, Phil, crawled
through a lurching, slimy tube
of running jungle ulcers, shell-burst seminal vesicles,
unconscious voided bowels, and always always blood
(the reassuring constant),
offering morphine and dilaudid hits
like the Rican dealers we hung with
in the West Bronx, _bueno caca_, man, no charge.
Technicolor imagery floats up from hash-pipes,
an insect, a larva, a cocoon: _Wow, maaaaan,
but it looks so coooool when you're stoned!_
and years later, a man I worked beside told me
about the flowers he grew in the Cambodian jungle,
the spore of the B-52 seeding the earth
from forty thousand feet, and how the dawn
came up like thunder from China 'cross the bay,
and how the colors refracted through the morning clouds
like a science project: so he was not in his work
and his work was not in him.
And I thought then of Phil, shot in one day
from the bug of the chopper into the womb
of a World-bound transport, born and born
again, not in the colors of flowers or
in the imagery of the insect world,
but into Discharge, ejaculation,
the death seed disembodied,
finding disappearance, a sad room,
a grimy street, a silence
only metaphor can describe.
KTW/3-14-96, 8/22/07
The late Michael McNeilly took that poem for some online magazine he
edited. To this day I am honored.
I came across Phil again in 2002 via a mutual friend. I've taken his
last name off because he too is a recovering alcoholic, about 25 years'
sober by now. He is also a practicing criminal attorney in New York and
Jersey. He spent years after his discharge avoiding his old friends and
trying to destroy himself. He succeeded at one and almost managed the
second.
He really did claim CO status after his induction. So they made him a
corpsman.
Because I called him a schmuck I felt I owed him amends. I sent him the
poem. He said "Wow." I guess our peace was made. A bunch of old farts
fixing stuff from years back....
Ken
--------------------
Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
Bernstein/Wilbur, "Candide"
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