The World Played Chess (17)

We decided it best to hide out in the parking lot behind the warehouse until the police left the area. We popped beers, our adrenaline pumping, and sped away like thieves in the night, laughing and shouting the “Padre Whisper” at full volume—heroes who had never thrown a punch, never gotten hit, never been in danger. Never in the fight. None of that would stop us from embellishing the story at school to those who had not been present. We would tell them we were right in the thick of the battle. We would relate how Ed had dropped three guys, each with a combination of punches. Bam. Bam. Bam. We’d laugh about how Cap had saved the beer, then had foolishly given it up, and how Billy had driven past screaming police sirens and flashing lights as calm as a man on his way to Sunday mass.

Except . . . as we regrouped in the warehouse parking lot, I realized there wouldn’t be another day at school to share our story. We had only ourselves to bullshit and that was nowhere near as much fun. Graduation had done what none of us would do on our own; it had shattered our glass illusion of who we were. Everything that had happened in high school was now in my past, and none of it would matter to the people I would meet in college.

At some point I stepped away from the group to contemplate this. I sat on the hood of Billy’s station wagon at the edge of the bay. In the distance, lights shimmered in the high-rise buildings of downtown San Francisco and reflected off the dark water’s calm surface. Overhead, lights flashed as airplanes approached the San Francisco Airport runways.

As my friends recounted our night, the enemy got bigger, increased in number, and became more fierce in their attack. But what struck me was that we had just provoked a fight that served absolutely no purpose and for no good reason. We paid for a movie we didn’t see and beer we didn’t drink, and we disrupted the night of hundreds of others.

For what?

I turned at the sound of approaching footsteps in gravel. Mif had two beers in hand, one opened. Of all my friends, Mif was the most in tune with me, and the most honest. He was also a paradox. A man who could bench press more than three hundred pounds at eighteen, run a five-minute mile, and hit opposing players like a ton of bricks, he was also the first to pick them up, pat them on the back, and shake their hand.

He held out the unopened beer. “Nah,” I said, no longer interested in getting drunk just to get drunk. “I got to work in the morning.”

“What’s going on?” Mif asked, but in a soft voice that told me he already knew what was going on, because he, too, had walked away from the crowing and the boasting.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking about what’s next.”

He slid onto the hood and stared out at the same lights, and in that moment of silence, I knew he, too, had no idea, though he did know change was definitely coming.





April 7, 1968

It just got real.

I was in a foxhole with Kenny. We rotated into Firebase Phoenix together, which I guess is why we were paired together. Cruz wanted to get us experience. He was going to put me with Bean, but Bean protested. There’s been some racial tension at the firebase since we learned from a resupply helicopter pilot that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Cruz told me it will blow over in a few days, but I’m not so sure. Morale seems to be at an all-time low.

Inside our foxhole I had my M-16 rifle and my .45 and several additional magazines. I also had frag grenades. My Ka-Bar was hanging from the suspenders of my war belt for easy access. I didn’t have my camera since I couldn’t take photographs at night. I tried to tell Cruz I was embedded as a marine photographer, that I was here to document the war and get classified photographs for the D-II shop back in Da Nang.

Cruz laughed and gave me the same look the supply sergeant gave me, like I keep missing the joke. “You go to boot camp, Shutter?”

“Yeah.”

“Your primary MOS is 0311, infantry rifleman, just like the rest of us grunts.”

“Yeah, but I’m also—”

“A marine photographer. Yeah, I know, but it’s your secondary MOS, not your primary. You’re a marine, Shutter. You’re a grunt, a stone-cold killer, just like the rest of us.” Cruz let loose another of his cackles. “There ain’t no senators’ sons here in the bush, Shutter; that’s why we’re in the bush. You’re a brother now. We’re all brothers. We all got the same skin color. You’ll see.”

Well, shit, I thought for the third time. I thought my photographs would get published on the front page of Stars and Stripes and would someday be my portfolio to land me a job at the New York Times. I didn’t think I’d be pulling guard duty.

I looked at Kenny in the fading light, and I thought, The blind leading the blind. Kenny told Cruz he hunted in Kentucky and he’s itching to shoot a couple of Gooks. Cruz looked at him with an expression that was part derision, part disparagement. “Take it easy, Haybale,” Cruz said. “Just keep your head down and try not to get yourself killed.”

Haybale. Shutter was sounding better and better.

But Kenny was amped on adrenaline. He was all gung ho, apple pie, and God bless America. I was spending my first night on guard duty in a hole with private Gomer Pyle.

Cruz smiled. “Look. Don’t be heroes.”

I thought of the last words my mother said to me before I boarded the bus to South Carolina. Don’t be a hero. Don’t stand out. Just blend in. Blend in and come home.