Ghosts of Tom Joad (24 page)

Each night felt like four weeks at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where I was basically trained, being made to eat and sleep and shit close to other men. It was there for the very first time I spoke with both a Southerner and a Negro, and on the same day ate a thing called grits. You know we're not necessarily racist in Reeve—we have Negroes living there and possibly Southerners, I don't know, but we did not readily mix. It was not something we were proud of, or not proud of, or offended by, or even gave much thought to, as we were born that way. We never had enough of the Coloreds in Reeve to become too prejudiced. Fact is, before we later all got told we was white, a lot of people in town hated men named Stephanowski, Battaglini or Abramowitz.

After many nights of absolute terror over absolutely nothing happening, we all experienced one of the most intense emotions of war—boredom. After the first night when nobody came to kill us, followed by a second, third and eighth night where nobody came to kill us, we all began to believe that on subsequent days and nights it was likely no one would come to kill us. This feeling was hastened by the reality that it appeared no one existed outside of Hill 124. We had no contact with any Koreans, except to occasionally see old women, sometimes with
kids in tow, wander around in the woods, pushing aside the snow to dig around for something we came to learn was a kind of mushroom they ate. Food was scarce in Korea for the natives, but we had quite a bit of it, even though it was in the form of C-rat cans of Spam and some goop we called in a sing-song fashion, “Fruit, Peach, Canned, Syrup-Type.” The Korean women and their kids would wear tin cans salvaged from us around their necks, clanging and clinking to warn us they was coming. They wanted those damn mushrooms and did not want us to shoot them, which seemed reasonable. We all waved at 'em at first, and Miles one time shouted something that meant “hello,” to him at least, in Korean talk, but they'd never look at us or call back. Clang clang, dig up some mushrooms from under the damn snow, and clink clink away. Except for “hello” in Korean, which Miles claimed as his own, none of us spoke nothing but English anyway.

Even the Sergeant seemed to lighten up a bit after boredom became our general state of affairs. He may have had a name, in fact had one stenciled on his clothes like all of us, but no one here was his mother and no one would call him anything but Sergeant. Sergeant had been an occupier of Japan before bringing his skills at yelling at people to the fight in Korea. He would tell us long tales of that time in Japan, most of which revolved around having sex in exchange for food, sex for money, sex for safe passage, and then more sex. It was kind of shocking to hear it said like that. Even though we all talked about screwin', it was always kind of like we was talking about someone else, like describing a movie we'd seen, keeping a certain distance.

What appetites we had we generally kept hidden away. Sergeant was crude, saying Oriental don't matter because they all looked the same upside-down. They're little dolls over there, he'd say, can't tell the boys from the girls even turned sideways, but they'd take you away for not much money or even in exchange for a C-rat can. Had a mom, then her daughter, sayin' anyone would do anything if they was hungry enough. Paid money to some local kid who pimped out his sister in return. For an extra dollar the kid'd make her say, “I love you” in slurred English. Kissed her one time and tasted soured milk, Sergeant said with a smile. That was his element, and he fit like a fish at a swimming lesson. He said they even had fun trapped on base. One time they shoved this female dog in heat inside a cage, let her moan until every stray mutt in Japan was clawing to get in, then they opened the cage and drank beer and laughed while them dogs just about tore her apart. Said them males were so crazy they even started humping each other until someone just hit the bitch with a shovel and ended it. Can't have fun like that back home, Sergeant said.

The snow tended to absorb the sound, especially the sounds that weren't made by metal clanking against metal, so loud noises were kind of unusual, even, Miles said once, unheard of, and everybody laughed, includin' me, though I didn't quite understand everything Miles said that made people laugh. At first I thought maybe some of what he said was aimed wrong at me, but eventually we became something of friends. Anyway, one day started with a SPLAT, then another until I ended up at the bottom of my frozen hole, face pressed as hard against the frozen mud at the bottom as I could, hoping if I pushed harder
then I could get deeper away from whatever this new thing was. It wasn't until I looked up finally, saw Miles standing over me and then felt the SPLAT of a well-thrown snowball hit me square in the mouth.

I climbed out of the hole to see almost every one of them soldier boys running in circles, throwing snowballs at each other and shouting, laughing and throwing more snowballs. Boredom and young boys don't mix well, and after what seemed like forever sitting on Hill 124 doing nothing, we had found something. I packed a tight one, pulling off my gloves so as to let my hands melt the snow enough to form an ice ball. With some element of a practiced eye, I hurled that snowball as hard as I could at some boy about twenty yards away, smacking him straight on his nose. He looked over at me more surprised than anything and when I saw him laugh, I laughed too and went over to make sure there were no hard feelings. His nose was bloodied all right, as I had something of an arm back then from playing football, with the red blood dripping on that white snow. As he laughed, his head moved, flinging drops of blood in a wider circle around us both. It was kinda pretty, the red and the white, the drops giving off a bit of steam and melting just a tiny bit into the crust of the snow. We shook hands and laughed, him saying he was from Indiana, which was next to Ohio and enough to form a bond of sorts that day on Hill 124.

“How old are you anyway?” I asked him. “Eighteen. Next month,” he said.

I never felt old before. I had just myself turned nineteen.

I looked over and Miles had a bunch of boys making snow angels in formation, flopping down in the snow and waving their
arms around, swinging their legs open and shut, then hopping up just as quick to make another, until most of us were lying in the snow making designs, laughing at the fun of it, happy for the first time to be on Hill 124. We saw some Koreans clinking their way toward their mushrooms and waved, some of us even getting up long enough to throw a snowball at the kids towed along behind their mamas.

It will be no surprise that the Sergeant's voice cut through it all. Sergeant began running up the hill, kicking boys still half buried in snow, grabbing their arms and pulling them back to their holes, yelling at us for being idiots out in the open and that we had a job to goddamn do.

There is nothing in the world that sounds like a mortar. No time to be brave or scared at first. Later, when you have time to sort it out, you recall a distant, hollow thunk, then a whistle, then an explosion. Them three sounds come one-by-one but feel when they happen like one big thing, but they are distinct. The thunk comes as the shell ignites in the mortar tube somewhere far away, the whistle as that shell moves from there to you, and then the explosion. You feel that thunk in your chest as much as you hear it, and it stays with you so as to make you jump twenty years later when something hollow hits the floor behind you, or when your goddamn son stomps up the stairs, Earl. We had learned at Fort Polk that mortar shells are well-designed, simple enough to have been around for many wars, but improved in World War II to include specially cut grooves and ridges so that the explosion inside the shell turns the casing holding it all together into white-hot pieces of scientifically designed metal fragments, each blown into a razor-sharp edge. The large pink-faced
Southerner who explained this to us in basic training likened it to a Tootsie Pop, as the hard candy shell was good to eat as well as the casing holding the whole Pop together.

We did not know whether it was the noise we made, the movement we made on Hill 124, or simply one of those coincidences that caused mortar shells to fall on us twenty or so boys making snow angels. Maybe some of us was marked to die a long time ago, even sitting on the bus from Inchon, and this was just when it happened, or maybe every round was To Whom It May Concern, like a car accident. We did not know if the mortar shells were fired by our men, North Korean men or spit out by an angry God, but they did fall on us and it did not matter why or what we thought about it. The snow did its job, deadening the sound of the explosions, catching some of the shrapnel, which, white-hot, made tiny puffs of steam as it melted through the frozen crust, and then absorbing the fluid of several boys, one from Indiana still suffering from a bloody nose. I was fine, not hurt, some dirt blown into my mouth and on my teeth, just watching the impressions of snow angels fill with blood around me as Hill 124 tried to kill us.

In a decent world that would have been the end of that day. I would have walked home, had dinner, maybe asked my own dad about what had happened. Going to a warm bed and waking up the next morning usually solved problems in Reeve, as many times the smell of a new day absorbed what had passed the night before. But I was not there, I was as far away from there as it was possible to be, so I heeded the Sergeant and ran to my hole. I hated him for seeming necessary then, hated Hill 124 for making men like the Sergeant necessary, and hated myself for
knowing so little about the details of what was necessary now to save my own life. It was clear that whatever that Sergeant knew about whores and cursing, he did know equally about the real side of war that had just been visited on me, so I ran to my hole and, following his shouts, prepared and aimed my rifle forward expecting the North Koreans or maybe Satan himself to emerge from those woods.

Miles was also okay. After some time had passed, he shouted my name, “Ray Ray Ray, did they get you?” and I felt more alive than ever to be able to say, “No, I am here.” Sergeant was telling us that the war was most certainly coming, to stay alert, to shoot as needed, to not hesitate to defend Hill 124. And I believed I should do this as strongly as anything I have ever believed.

Time passed, what might have been twenty minutes as easily as several hours. The sun was still high, the sky still that unbelievable blue. Nature had reset itself, even as we cautiously had been pulled out of our holes by the Sergeant to retrieve the bodies of the boys dead behind us. It smelled like copper. I had no sense that people had so much blood in them until I saw it all spread out. It had been red, redder than you'd think, but by then had turned darker, sorta chocolate against the snow still white. Not killed, destroyed. I only looked at one of them faces. I could see blood running like little creeks between his zit pimples.

Sergeant had us organized so that most stayed in their holes pointing their rifles into the woods while one or two were called back to help with the bodies. Sergeant said help was going to come, to start the boys home who had gotten killed and to replace them so all the holes could be refilled on Hill 124. Sergeant seemed to know what to do, and that was a powerful
thing. It made us feel we could fight off whoever came at us through those woods in what he called the follow-on attack.

More time passed, and soon enough the dead were collected. By the time it was my turn to help collect them, the boys had turned stiff from the cold, making it harder to pull them into a resting position. The sudden silence as the work ceased scared us more, amplifying every sound around us. Then came evening. This would be the time, Sergeant said.

The noise that startled me first was harsh enough to make me cry out some kind of sound from deep in my stomach I had never known was in there. I stood up, foolishly, and pointed off to the right where the sound came from. Without warning Miles and several other of the boys began shooting. The last time I'd heard a military rifle fire was in Louisiana, where there was no snow, and so I almost did not recognize the sound as a friendly one here. I could hear the rounds cutting through the air, and I dropped down into my hole. My leg felt warm, unnaturally so, and I realized as it started to freeze that I had pissed myself. I was so scared I felt no shame, or should I say the fear took up so much of me that shame would have to wait its turn. The shooting stopped on its own, not quite as suddenly as it started. It became silent again on Hill 124, purposefully so, and I raised my head.

It was the Sergeant again, yelling at me and Miles to crawl out into the woods and see what had happened. This was a word I had learned in basic training called reconnoiter, but now it was not a word, but my whole being. I was to reconnoiter, and I might die doing it, simply because someone had told me that was what I was to do next. Given that on my own I had shouted like
a girl and peed myself, I had few options left but to do what I was told. Getting out of that hole was how I was going to redeem myself from the failure to act like a man when the moment first called me.

Miles and I crawled forward, not feeling the cold nor smelling the lingering coppery blood smell that would have at any other time overwhelmed us. It seemed in such conditions your brain and your senses reorganized so that some things mattered more than others. I was grateful for the snow, hiding the frozen black stain on my right leg.

We heard another sound, ahead, and came up on our knees behind the birch trees to see further. Both of us raised our rifles, aiming carefully at absolutely nothing, playing soldier, the stances and actions we had seen in the movies overpowering the scant basic training in proper technique. The sound that came from our side as we were aiming the wrong way was a SPLAT, then another, followed by cold snow down the back of my jacket, the collar hunched open as I squinted down my rifle's length. We shouted and ran, grabbing the goddamn Korean kid who had thrown snowballs at us, drawn forward and separated from his mother once the mortar shells flew in from Hell, throwing snowballs because he had seen us doing it, smiling stupidly, a way to reach us without speaking our language, wanting us to join with him somehow. I was angry, I hated that child for almost drawing me into killing him that day on Hill 124.