China Beach

It was jolly good fun to wake so early this brisk fall morning, to look up from my patio wearing not a stitch (Oh God!! Bury that image!!) And gaze upon the waning Blue Moon of harvest tide.  I feel something coming on from Tin Pan Alley rising in my throat to a burst of song!

But the dogs will howl a chorus if I sing. They will mistake my tonal deafness for a passing fire engine.

Our (our!) morning regime has shifted with the cooler days.  Jypsi and Stick can get down from night-night by themselves, but Goofy (Ooooofff!) has to be slowly lifted down; forty pounds of deadweight horsecock salami, at five o’clock in the blessed AM.

I have taken to opening the patio door and the pet gate.  This allows the nocturnal excludees…

(Gawd Dammit, Spellcheck, quit fixing my F****ging syntax, you mindless automaton of zeroes and ones!! It’s EXCLUDEES, not ‘excludes’.  Sorry for the interruption, friends.  Did you know?  If a word is in caps, Bill Gates’ clever little grammar gnome will not see it.  But I’m not writing in caps like some F****ging  cub reporter on a deadline. Nosireee Bob!)

HARUMPH!

…the nocturnal EXCLUDEES…to run wildly through the forbidden rear part of the house, jumping on each other, play growling; Jypsi jumping up to affectionately lick Goofy’s chops, Momma wagging her tail, her rotund little body bending into a U of ecstasy. But, at least they are not serenading me from a locked pet gate with their impatient barking.

Once all greeted and hale-fellow-well-metted, I cheerfully herd them through the back door, close it, lock down the pet gate; and Gadzooks!  Privacy to get dressed, stick myself in the gut and bound forward to coffee…and the office…and the new day.

I fire up the first smoke of three daily packs, suck greedily on my coffee and wait for frigging Windows 7 to complete its ponderous boot-up with all the program patches it neglected to install yesterday.

‘Zo’, sez the little Gestapo creep in Raiders of the Lost Ark, ‘vahut shall vee talk about’? 

Like the rising nausea that comes after wolfing down too many Christmas tamales, ’mind brain zells’ boot up with an irritating prattle; it is time, they ‘zay’,  to get on to talking about the things I don’t want to talk about.

Ummmhuh, yeah, maybe tomorrow. Same-same quitting the cigs…tomorrow is soon enough.  Mebee next year in Jerusalem; but not just…never.  I will lance that timeboil another time.  Right now, let’s take a little spin down to Romantic China Beach, the pleasure palace of I Corps. 

I liked the A-Team; discarded, discounted, disparaged—just a few guys still in battle trim, like all of us couch potatoes.  Sporting multiple war talents, able to pull off the most preposterous missions, we Vets lay cacked out, stoned and drunk on our sofas, our feet forbiddingly up, resting on the coffee table, watching the plot unfurl; secretly yearning that this Hollywood TV concoction would become everyone’s lasting image of us. Such a desire was a truly romantic fantasy.  No reality whatever to the series, but riveting all the same. And none of viewing America; none but us Vets, picked up on this hit series because none of us Vets had spilled our guts about Viet Nam to anyone.

We hadn’t even spilled our guts to each other; we certainly weren’t going to let loose on our families, our friends, our wives and our lovers.  Even if they were receptive, full disclosure would have been problematic at best.

Whereas the A-Team was pleasurable in the silly way of sit-coms, China Beach was a drama that I could never watch.  I may have been in thrall with George Peppard and the boys, but this saccharine drivel centering on the heartthrobs and heartbreaks of a buncha Army Hospital nurses couldn’t attract me; not if they were handing out greenbacks to qualified Viewers.

I never did enter China Beach Hospital, the real one, for the reasonable excuse that I had no business going in there. The real reason was I didn’t want to look inside.  I picked up enough indelible images in-country.  There was no point in adding to them, I thought.  I just shrugged my mental shoulders at the things I could not change.  That shoulder-shrugging act was a common occurrence for me back then.

China Beach, in the heyday of 1970, was a sprawling complex; host to many military operations.  In addition to the hospital and NSA Headquarters, there were army encampments, marine cantonments, warehouses that put Spielberg’s hidey-hole for the Ark of the Covenant to shame, tank farms, fueling stations, yards of Brown and Root Company equipment, yards of impervious building materials sitting exposed to the elements, yards of huge black rubber medicine balls full of concrete mix; and a large in-country R&R facility second in size only to the one down at Cam Rahn Bay.  Hots, cots, and a snack bar; all prepared for showing the troops a rousing good time, three days on the beach, away from the horror and death still waiting out there in the jungle…

On this particular day, I meandered into the snack bar.  Mamasans, a little younger than the standard hired gook, were standing behind the food line.  They were staring and giggling at two black guys, the only patrons in there besides myself.

The young men (Young!  They were my age!) were still dressed in battle fatigues. Army grunts, with their M-16’s still slung across their backs and floppy-brimmed hats perched on their heads, their jungle boots covered in Alabama-red mud, the mud reaching all the way up to the crotch of their pants.  Underneath the hats stood two unwashed smelly G.I’s.  The jukebox against the far wall was belting out a Barry White number at max volume.  The room didn’t just rock; it shook.

Leaning and moving rhythmically to Barry’s sonorous love song, they too were belting out the words, loud enough to match the jukebox.  As they sang, taking on an air of debonair,  they lean against the serving rail and, with arms outstretched, palms upward, imploring,  with the rapturous faces of supplicant lovers, they were serenading the gooks, the only females…the only safe females…in sight.  They were boisterously singing their hearts out.  They were baring their souls for any fool to see.

That spontaneous outpouring was the exultant triumphal shout of life over death.  I doubted if they had jumped out of a Shithook  more than a few minutes before.  Their joy at having escaped, if only for this fluttering of time, from wherever they had hunkered down, was gushing forth from both of them.

As I look back through the portal of years, I can see them again, jumping and jiving to the music, oblivious to anyone there but themselves and the perplexed gooks getting that unsolicited admiration.

 I remember feeling embarrassed and backing out of the room.  Now, I can’t recall if I was embarrassed for their outlandish public display; or for the guilt I yet hold, for not having the war…that they were having.

Did they sing and dance and drink and toke the entire three days of their respite?  I hope so, but I will never know.  Like so many pop-up characters in these mad mad memories of mine, they passed into obscurity, never to be seen again.  But never will they be forgotten in the cemetery of my dreams.

Did they go back in the bush from R&R and return again to China Beach, this time ravaged with wounds, missing limbs, missing minds?

God, I pray that both those miserable souls made it back to the world, intact or otherwise, to live till gray age and grandkids abound.  I fervently pray that that was the end for their story…and not the other ending… for 58,000 of my brothers and sisters.