Читать книгу The Big Buddha Bicycle Race - Terence A. Harkin - Страница 20

8–10 September 1971

“Insufficient Documentation”

A week and a day after my hearing, I was sent over to see Lieutenant Billy Hill at the ComDoc orderly room. Hill was a freckle-faced, red-headed, perpetually sunburned good ole boy who gladly filled the dual slots of deputy commander and chief of combat documentation for Detachment 3 in the hopes it would look good on his next efficiency report. Looking at him, I couldn’t help thinking of a Gomer Pyle who had miraculously made it through college ROTC. With his jutting jaw, wispy crew cut and premature beer belly, he was hard to take seriously as a symbol of authority, but when he called me into his office, I saluted. He handed me a large packet in a manila envelope that had come from Air Force Headquarters, Washington, DC. “It looks important, Leary. You might want to open it.”

It contained a thick photostatic copy of my request for discharge along with several pages of comments from officers who approved and disapproved it along the way up the chain of command. I didn’t need to look beyond the cover letter, however. My seventy-page application had been duly processed by the Directorate of Personnel at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas and turned down—for “insufficient documentation.”

I was stunned when I closed Hill’s office door behind me even though I realized that I shouldn’t have been surprised. Link sat in his office pretending to ignore me, but from his vindictive smile, I knew that he knew. Out in the orderly room, Dave Murray was napping, using his typewriter as a pillow. Tom Wheeler, sitting at the opposite desk, stopped typing and looked up. “Not good, eh?”

I didn’t try to hide my disappointment. I had put months into this, providing a stack of supporting letters from teachers and professors and friends like Tom attesting to my integrity and the depth of my conviction, not to mention over fifty pages I had written myself describing my beliefs, their sources, and how they evolved. “I gave them over seventy freaking pages of material, Tom, and they called it ‘insufficient documentation.’”

Wheeler laughed, not exactly the emotion I was looking for. “That’s what they do on all these cases, hoping they’ll just go away. Why don’t you bring your copy down to Ruam Chon Sawng tonight and I’ll take a look before we get wasted.”

I rode through a monsoon drizzle that night on my way to Wheeler’s bungalow. When I pulled the manila envelope from under my rain jacket and handed it to Tom, he just held it in his hand, weighing it. “I can tell you already, you got way too much stuff here.”

“But they shot me down for ‘insufficient documentation.’”

He sat down, and while I looked over his shoulder, he started flipping through my application. “That’s their standard excuse. I talked to one of my contacts over in CBPO who works for Sturbutzel. The whole system’s swamped right now. If you want the brass to actually read it, make it a page or two with lots of strong supporting letters.” He paused a moment. “All this Camus and Sartre and Wilfred Owens stuff—get rid of it.”

“But…”

He wasn’t paying any attention to me, instead leafing through the letters. “What the hell is this letter from Father Boyle doing in here?”

“He was the last priest I confessed to.”

“Throw that out and go see Chaplain Kirkgartner. He’s cool. He’s the dude who came up with the House of Free Expression, right? Have him write something about how your existentialism shit developed out of your wonderful Catholic upbringing.”

“Kinda smooth out my rough edges, huh?”

“What the hell is this appendix!” He almost fell out of his wicker chair, scaring the hell out of me in the process. “You’ve got twenty pages of poetry and speeches in here. How could you send a bunch of colonels poetry! You’re cutting into their drinking time at the O Club.”

I was feeling more than a little sheepish. Tom was completely right. I was so full of my own angst that I completely failed to consider my audience. “I thought that’s what they wanted in item 4, subsection F: ‘have you ever made public expression of your beliefs?’”

“For a bright guy, you sure can be stupid, Leary. Throw out the appendix. You can answer it in a sentence—something about going to peace marches and prayer vigils. Lie and say you’ve even started praying to God lately.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking out a pack of Blue Moon cigarettes and offering one to Tom. “So you think it’s worth resubmitting, eh?”

“Not in the shape it’s in right now. You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.”

I pulled out my little Ronson and lit up before giving Tom a light. Taking a deep, relaxing drag on the Blue Moon, I thanked Papa-sahn that somehow, somewhere in Ubon Province one of his little elves was removing the tobacco from these commercial Thai cigarettes and replacing it with some of the old man’s very potent Khon Kaen grass.

I sleepwalked through work the next day. When I stopped by the base post office at lunch time, I found a special-delivery letter from Edward Poser, Esquire, saying he had received a copy of my CO rejection. He pointed out something that Tom and I had missed: the Air Force had called the application “opportunistic”—inferring I had simply been trying to avoid service in a war zone. He advised not trying to appeal, given that I was serving in a noncombat role and given that Air Force regs required new facts or some other substantial change to justify a second application. He was kind enough to include a bill for over a thousand dollars. My head felt spongy, but somehow that afternoon a murky thought popped up that maybe—just in case—I should look into a foreign passport. I remembered my backpacking brother telling me about reading on the bulletin board in a youth hostel in County Donegal that we qualified for an Irish passport. All we needed to trace our lineage back to the Ould Sod was our father’s and grandfather’s birth certificates, which my father said he would give me over his dead body. Back at my hootch I wrote my brother a short note asking if there was another way of proving Grandpa Leary had been born in Ireland and how long it might take. I wrote another to Danielle telling her I wouldn’t be coming home early but that I loved her and looked forward to the day we could be together.

After mailing the letters, I bicycled in a daze over to the base library and tried to read a Newsweek, an American Cinematographer and a Rolling Stone. Unable to concentrate on any of them, I nodded off for I don’t know how long and then sat up with a start, filled with a need to get downtown. I stopped off at the BX and picked out a stack of albums to bring down to Woodstock Music, where I studied Sommit carefully while he inspected my goods and I decided which albums I wanted duped back onto tape. I might not have been dealing with a hard-core black marketeer, but he was a businessman. I couldn’t say if it was inspiration or desperation, but in any case I asked him if I needed to go to Bangkok to obtain a Canadian passport or if it could be arranged around Ubon. Sommit took me to a dingy office in back of an old warehouse to meet Indian Joe, the blue-eyed Sikh who was a black marketeer and had expanded his operation effortlessly into a consortium of small businesses catering to GIs. Khun Joe told me not to sweat it if I didn’t have passport pictures and said he’d take me to arrange my spare identity the next night.

It was the same kind of little shack run by a wiry, energetic papa-sahn that many of my fellow GIs visited across the river to score dope, only this establishment was not far from Prommaraj Road, in VC town, the off-limits Vietnamese ghetto. This papa-sahn didn’t have any dope for sale, but he took a Polaroid and said he’d have my passport in two days.