Desert Storm: Easy Target for Recruiter

In the spring of 1988, when I was 17 my mother was going through a difficult divorce from her second husband. He’d moved out of the house. Shortly thereafter my brother moved to my father’s house. My mother spent long hours at work, or she would return to the house after work and then leave again to go on long walks. She had stopped eating the previous autumn, and by the spring I had become good at boiling beans, and stretching the food for as long as possible.

We lived in a suburban house in a development with a sidewalk and old men who walked their poodles after work. There was a playground full of little kids at the end of the day. I could smell people with their BBQ. I kept the lawn mowed. I raked the leaves, but essentially from the spring of 1988 onward I had been kind of left to my own devices. I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.

I didn’t really realize this at the time. My mother’s trips to the grocery stores became less frequent. She began to buy staples instead of the kind of convenience food like hot dogs, chips, soda. Instead she bought eggs, bags of rice, frozen chicken, and frozen hamburger. And gradually I became used to boiling beans or thawing chicken and making the food. My mother just didn’t eat anything. When she talked she talked in circles about the trouble with her exhusband. By the spring she had lost a massive amount of weight; some of her hair had fallen out; she was doing very poorly. She kept moving and talking and would wake in the middle of the night and sit on the sofa in the living room.

Mostly though she was gone. I went to school. I did my calculus homework. I played D&D. I mowed the lawn. I made food, and then the food ran low. I had started to apply to colleges, but the reality of college seemed like a remote, fragile thing. I had to enter my parent’s income on the financial aid forms. The schools where I wanted to go -- to a private school in Walla Walla, to Dartmouth, to a private school in Tacoma -- seemed expensive on a level that made it seemed possible to attend. That this, the amount of money required each year in tuition, much less the other expenses of attending school, seemed so preposterous, I just thought there was something I didn't understand. (Nope, they actually twice as much as money per year as my parents had originally paid for their house.) In practicality, even the state school cost too much. My mother encouraged me to apply to schools. My father shook his head. There is no way I will pay for you attend college he said. No one paid my way. I ended up confused and uncertain completely unable to see what my life would be like after I graduated. I was certain my mother would officially move out of the house, and then I was unsure where I would even life, much less what school I would attend.

During this time, an Army Recruiter found me. He was a tiny guy who wore Class As. He was missing teeth. He drove a dented Pontiac that had mismatched colored doors. He wore his hair short and oiled and slicked back over his scalp. He gave me a kind of used car salesmen pitch about the Army and then a handful of literature. Unlike the literature of Dartmouth say, the Army Reserve literature talked a about how much money I would make, they would provide training, and tuition for college. It would take nearly a year to train in the military. On one level everyone in my family had warned me about the Army. They do not tell you the truth; I had been told. But, I had in my hands promises and contracts. And all I had to do was enlist and when I graduated from high school I knew what I would be doing. I would get on an airplane (with a ticket the Army had paid for) and go to Basic Training and then school where I would, the literature said, learn a valuable skill.

I hesitated and delayed the recruiter and he went away. During the summer, my mother began to suffer panic attacks in the middle of the night. She went to bed almost every night and then ended up crying out at some point in the middle of the night. She rushed around the house. Doors slammed. The sink went off and on. She took a bath at three o’clock in the morning. When I woke, she was gone and wouldn’t return until the end of the day. She came home from work dressed in her work clothes with her security badge, and then left again. I lived on rice and beans.

When the recruiter called again, he took me out to lunch. I think that did it. I ate, and having not eaten food I’d (poorly) prepared for six months, I figured it couldn’t be as weird as it currently was and I would make the money I needed for college myself. I seemed like a fair trade. So enlisted. Enlisting suddenly put into my mind a kind of structure, a cap on what had bee happening. When I graduated from high school, I would climb on a plane and something else would happen.

Desert Storm: Why I Enlisted

In the spring of 1988, when I was seventeen I enlisted in the Army Reserve. Looking back now I’m not sure why I joined. I had uncles who had served in the Army during Vietnam. They had both survived. According to my parents, the war had altered them. When they left for Vietnam in the late 1960s, they were both too young for anyone to really know what they would be like when they became older. Both of these uncles were aspiring writers. My father’s brother became a chaplain’s assistant. My mother’s brother became a radar technician.

The street live of Saigon, I suppose, wasn’t good for the chaplain’s assistant. My father has no idea what my uncle saw or did in Vietnam. My uncle Fred mixed his stories, borrowed other people’s stories, and made fun of my father for even being curious. After he returned to Seattle, my uncle spent the majority of the 1970s become a worse and worse drunk. He worked in Seattle restaurants as a waiter, then a bus boy, a dishwasher, and finally couldn’t even got a job a dishwasher. I remember visiting him at the University Bar and Grill, a place with metal tables, a zinc bar, and white table clothes. We lived in the country, and the whole thing was confusing. I think he was the dishwasher there, but he gave us chocolate mousse. Judging from the way he got it for us, and gave it to use, and then stood back to watch us eat it, it was a big deal. It seemed like he had not made it, and he didn’t really have the authority to give us mouse or the money to pay for it, but we ate it. It was bitter to my brother and I since our palate was completely set on chocolate jell-o pudding and not mousse. We smiled and nodded and said it was great. So rich my mother said. He lost his job shortly after that, maybe related to giving us the mousse, but he was always losing his jobs, so we were used to that, and then finally in the early 1980s he killed himself. His entire slide into oblivion was described the adults at the time as a result of the Vietnam War.

That he had been a solider was something mentioned, often, by parents. They said with a kind of wonder, like he had been astronaut or had been to the center of the earth.

As a radar technician, my uncle Pete was a target. He carried a huge amount of gear on his back. There was a constant shortage of techs because they kept getting killed. My uncle kept having his tour of duty extended. He served three tours. The stress of not knowing when he was going to go home was bad enough. But, the event the thing that put my Uncle Peter over the edge, according to my mother, was that while sleeping in his tent one night, a bullet entered his tent mates helmet and exploded the contents of his skull. His tent made died on the spot, but my uncle was permanently addled by this event. He returned to Seattle after the war, he went to school, and kept dropping out. He went to Bellingham and nearly finished and when the police confused him with a serial killer. My uncle lived alone in bottom of a rooming house and matched the description of the killer. The police, according to my uncle, were less then gentle when interrogating him and then after it was cleared up, they encouraged him to get out of town. My uncle worked as a taxicab driver, in construction, at a half-dozen marginal and seasonal jobs until finally settling in as a junk collector and odd jobs guy. The fact that nothing panned out for him, like my uncle Fred, was described as a result of the Vietnam War.

When my uncle experienced some bit of bad luck, like when his car was stolen and then turned up having been used in a series of bank robberies, my parents mentioned his moral standing that fact that he has been in the Army. They the Army as if my uncle had a status conferred on him by the president or something.

Sometime before their bad luck, before the problems that had seeped into them as a result of the Vietnam war had begun to poison then, my two uncles new each other as aspiring writers in the early 1970s, in Seattle. Pete was an old school aspiring writer. He wanted to be like Thomas Mann or Thomas Wolff and write thick, great novels. Pete never published anything. He was working on a book that was huge, monumental, and completely secret. My uncle Fred on other hand wrote ditzy hippie poetry influenced by Dada, the Beats, and John Lennon. He published piles of poetry in mimeographed magazines. My uncle Fred poked fun at Pete’s pretensions. Pete muttered about the self-indulgence direction of seventies writing. He subscribed to the journal New American Writing and had nothing good to say about Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass.

I think somehow the idea that they had been through a war, and survived the war seemed attractive to me. It gave my uncle’s license. They could be writers. They didn’t have to have straight jobs. There was despite my parent’s absolute dislike of the police and the military, a kind of grudging respect for soldiers. These were a kind of other type of person, outside of their lives.

I could see myself then going into the Army Reserve and moving away from home, and when I returned I would be completely thrown clear of my parent’s influence. There wasn’t a war, so I didn’t have to worry about whatever it is that destroyed my two uncles. I didn’t know that I would be activated for Operation Desert Shield. When I joined, the my recruiter said that it took a world war to get the reserves activated The last world war was world war two. The next one would be world war three. And if that happened, it wouldn’t matter if I was in the army or not, we were all going to die.