John Burns
The thing was Billy and Eugene were draft bait and couldn’t land a decent job because they were draft bait and they, meaning the managers hiring at the mill, or at the pharmaceutical plant, always asked if you’d fulfilled your service. Why would they train you on the line at Upjack, or in the mill, if you were going to be yanked out? They joined up because they felt it coming, if you know what I mean. Billy’s old man could’ve landed him a job. His old man worked at Ford and could’ve gotten him something down there, for sure. Eugene’s old man was a manager, but he started out on the line, I think, and worked his way up. He hauled a lunch bucket like the rest, though.
Buddy Anderson
I’m thinking his draft notice came right around the time he was just starting to write the first draft, which no one ever really got to see because he burned it and rewrote it when he got back. At least that’s what I remember him talking about. He was saying he was closing in on the end. His grandfather had been on the board years back, but from what I know that didn’t do no good with pulling strings and his number came up anyway.
Gerald McCarthy
You remember that recruitment ad the Army ran? You’d see it at the post office, or in school. It said, “Make the choice now — join, or we’ll make the choice for you.” That’s the way it was for us kids. I mean, it’s not like we had much of an option, not like the rich kids on the other side of the river who could get a doctor to write up some bullshit crook knee, or someone heading to school full-time. Billy Thompson was part-time in school for a while, but that didn’t do the job with the board because you had to be full-time. His old man just couldn’t afford it, and he knew he’d be drafted so he figured he’d sign up and make the choice like most of the other guys did.
John Frank
Operation plans during Nam were often written after initial contact. In other words, you’d go in and draw fire and fight and then they’d name an operation after the mess and the mission statement would be backdated to the start of the fight and written after the fact. Singleton and Rake were in Operation George Washington, I think. Singleton must’ve known at the end, tracking Rake, he was in Operation Duel. The way I read it, the guy knew the entire thing would be rewritten after the fact, after he caught Rake, to look retrospectively like it all fit together. Then it would seem as if there were intuitive — some might say conspiratorial — factors involved. I look at it as that kind of deal. That’s what led them into contact — that kind of delusion that was in the air, the delusion you get when what you’re going through, maybe you know it, maybe not, is going to be written up to make some kind of sense from an operational standpoint when presented to the bigwigs in Washington as a report. That shit was in the air when Eugene wrote this thing. There was still that shit in the air.
Carrie Anderson
Meg used to hang out at Look Park with the other stoners. It was just across the road from the school, so it was where you went when you skipped a class and then decided to skip the whole day. We were friends, I guess, but not close friends because she was one of those girls who hung around with guys more than anything.
Richard Allen
No comment. I’d rather not say anything in response to that question.
Buddy Anderson
It’s like you can’t really get your mind around it when it’s being thrown at you the way he threw it at me all the time, saying I’m going to kill myself if I get drafted. Then he gets drafted and goes. When he came back he worked hard day in, day out, and when he did come out for a drink he’d just sit with his head in his hands and ask questions: What’s the plot, man? he’d say to me. What’s the plot? Thing was, around the time he was drafted we thought the war was starting to wind down, or at least it seemed like it might end any day and we figured we’d be shipped to Fort Whatever, somewhere down south, to go through boot camp and all of that and then we’d come back here, like I did, and live out our lives. When his draft notice came he’d already written me a bunch of the suicide notes, and we thought, at least I thought, they were funny, so when he got back — and he was changed, man, of course he was changed like everyone else — and he started to write them again, while he was writing his book, it wasn’t so funny anymore. I didn’t save those notes. I saved the ones he wrote before he left.
Susan Habb
There was this time these kids beat Eugene. We were walking home and John Burns and some other guys jumped him. They broke his nose and dislocated his shoulder. After that he was different. I mean, this kind of thing happened all the time. It was a tough neighborhood, with a mix of kids from the mills and kids whose dads were laid off and all of that. I’m not saying I saw he was different but now that I think about it, I mean looking back, I think he was different. He began to stay to himself more after that. He had friends, like the guy named Buddy. But things were different.
Markus Decourt
Yeah, yeah, that guy named Rake is a lot like the guy, Johnny Burns. That was the guy who came around to see Meg after Billy Thompson was killed in Nam. This sleazy snake came knocking, so to speak. Real snake, this guy named Johnny. There weren’t really established gangs in our town, but there were loosely associated, you might call them, somewhat organized clumps of young men who liked to fuck things up, and he was one of them. He could exploit her weakness, and I always guessed that he was the one, if there was somebody, who helped her escape the nuthouse and took her up to where they found her body. What would they say in court? I guess they’d say that’s all hearsay. But hearsay means something, too, is what I say.
Markus Decourt
It seems important that he wrote his book before they found his sister’s body, because he had to guess where she was, and the truth is he guessed pretty close to what really happened, except she wasn’t up in Canada safe and sound with some lumberjack like Hank, searching out trees, trying to make a killing in the lumber business. Whatever happened to her up there, she came into contact with some bad elements, rest assured. Actually, those are the words his father used when he could finally speak again, after the funeral. He said, bad elements. She got in with some bad elements, and they took advantage of her. That’s what he said.
Carl O’Brian
Allen had one thing right. You’d write an operation report after the fact and backdate the thing and then it would somehow fit the strange, horrific logic of the battle, at least the initial point of contact with the enemy and the charge up the hill and the number of your KIAed and injured in relation to the number of VC KIAed and all of that, all written in a kind of cable-ese that reduced the complexity of battle; even reports that were not written in the field, by some desk jockey in Saigon and meant for secret transmission, were written in that jargon, that reductive nonsensical, staccato mode. I get the feeling that Billy knew, and I mean we used to sort of talk about this stuff, in our own way, that if he was KIAed over there in his second tour, he’d be reduced to just some bullshit lingo on an outgoing report that somehow rat-tat-tatted out on a teletype machine in some deep basement of the Pentagon.