It seemed strange to be in a passenger jet with nothing but soldiers, headed up out of Newark Airport bound for Frankfurt. Dylan strained to see the lights below through the darkness and wisps of clouds. At least they weren’t headed for Tan Son Nhat Airport, he thought. That was always the fear. Odd, nine months ago, he was getting up every day at 4 o’clock to write radio splits in the Quonset hut for UPI in Helena.

 

Then the draft notice came and he was suddenly at Butte and then Fort Ord. It was like he was piece of wheat chaff blowing out of a combine. He went from being a young married newspaper reporter to being the old man in a group of country boys head, most likely, for war. He was 23 years old. And now his seatmate was Cassius, a kid from Harlem. He had never even spoken to a Negro before the Army – and couldn’t much relate to Cassius now, who was saying shit man, fuck, and Dylan knew what he meant. F.T.A., they said. Fuck The Army. And what that meant.

 

Strange rules like walking your post around an empty bunker in a snowy freezing night, with an empty M-1 Carbine. Four hours on, four hours off for 24 hours, 36, 48. Of course carrying an empty weapon. It meant spit shining boots before wearing them on a 20-mile forced march through dirty mud. It meant going to kill gooks in the jungle, even though they had done nothing to you or your country. Fuck the Army.

 

After a while, Dylan dozed alongside Cassius. The airplane would hit rough air, waking Dylan in a panic. Then he settled again, and then woke. Dawn crept into the cabin, and they were descending. Down. Down to the terminal and the roll to the terminal. The order was to grab your duffel and assemble for a march to the post. It was three clicks through town, Sgt. Hemmelgarn said. Faorwaarrrd…hmarch!

 

Along the cobbled streets of Frankfurt they marched, still an occupying army in Germany, two decades after the war. The woman in the shawl scowled at Dylan. Scheisskopf, she said…He looked down and kept marching. He felt his face redden, as it did when Coach Peck put his foot on his back at football practice and told him to do pushups. He couldn’t. There was nothing he could do but be ashamed. He wasn’t a soldier.

 

But neither was Cassius, and there they were in Germany during the Vietnam War on the other side of the earth. F.T.A., man. F.T.A. By the time his train reached he Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof, he had begun to enjoy he Germany world. He bought a 2-Mark Wurst at a stand and went looking for the bus to take him to Seventh Army Support Command. By the time he found it, darkness had come and the sleepy specialist driver, also Black, had nothing to say. In an hour he was at the old imposing Panzer Kaserne, a fortress post that Rommel had used to train tank troops in World War II. The NCO on duty pointed him upstairs to a bunk. He dumped his gear and fell into it, not even taking off his clothes.

 

The dream was of Mary and the first time they were together at the drive-in movie in Missoula. They’d each had a coupe of beers at Dean Blumberg’s house, then took off alone. He couldn’t keep his hands off her, and she melted when he kissed her. He knew it was serious for him, his pulse was racing, the urgency in him was rising, he couldn’t stop. His breath was out of control. When he came, he woke up groping in the darkness, his shorts wet and sticky.

 

He couldn’t see. He couldn’t get a grip on where he was. It was pitch dark. Jesus. In the morning in the office, he met the SMAG. A vet of the old brown-shoe Army, SMAG was always looking for the main chance. He sized Dylan up fast, told him to take time off until Mary arrived, and they could get set up in the economy. You mean take leave? Dylan asked. I’ll cover you. SMAG said, don’t worry. So Dylan caught the red bus into the city and spent the next 18 hours meeting every train from the north, hoping she’d be on it. Finally, when he had about given up hope, she was.

 

That was the beginning of a dream, he thought, now as he looked back on it 40 years after – after loving her, raising children with her, betraying her, and being unable to leave her. The dream went on and on. After all, did SMAG really give him unofficial leave for a month, or was he simply AWOL without being reported. He didn’t know, he realized. Maybe no one cared. Maybe no one noticed. It was like when Gary Delph went to Paris on leave and came back a few days later saying he’d been mugged and his money stolen. Was that really what happened? Delph was the one no one knew, the one reading “Catch-22” and loving it. He was Rossarian. He knew, before we did, F.T.A.

 

And there was Ciotti who just wanted to go back to Cincinnati to his new wife. And Merrill W-W Plaskow, III, who wanted to go back to South Philly and see his boyfriend and go into business. And Campbell just needed to go home to Omaha and finish high school. That’s what he remembered, true or not. In any case, it was true that SMAG did ask for Dylan’s ration card. That he did buy Dylan’s allotted liquor and most of his cigarettes. That SMAG’s German girlfriend did sell those items on the German black market. That was true. Foskett was the loner of he office. Quietly fuming, he read a lot. And when he got out of the Army, he went to Cuba. To work in the cane fields, he said. Did he do that? Or did he just go back to Indiana to teach school. Dylan didn’t know.

 

What was clear was that non-one from the public information office at SUPCOM in 1967 went to Vietnam. They all just worried, expected, feared they would go. The closest they came was in the six-day war. When Israel clashed with the Arabs and the office boys were issued M-1 Carbines (no ammo) and rode around Germany in the back of Deuce-and-a-halfs for two days “on alert.” Then they went back to Panzer Kaserne and sat in their offices again. F.T.A. They all read the “Oversexed Weekly,” which was the non-“Stars and Stripes.” It always had a seminude woman on the back page. Taken by today’s standards, he was thinking, it wasn’t much.

 

But in the toilet stalls down the hall from the PIO office the boys satisfied their fantasies poring over the cheesecake for a moment’s release. Now, Dylan paused over his notebook and looked at the crowd of tourists passing by Santo Domingo Cathedral in Oaxaca and gazing wide-eyed as they entered and surveyed the gold-infused interior.

 

It was strange to be closing in on 70 now. The pat unfurling before him, the years so long ago present again. But filled with questions. Is that how it was 50 years ago? Did he remember it right? Did he invent it? Did he select the parts he preferred and embellish them to his liking? Did he forget that he went willingly when LBJ called him into the Army? Was it out of patriotism? Was he just an ignorant country boy who did what he was told? Now, he would like to think that he had no choice. But, of course he did.

 

He wasn’t aware of a choice. He didn’t want to see the choice. It was a fearsome path, one that would have required him to run against authority. In 1965 he had no capacity for that. No defiance, No desire to say no. Mary had none either. They just went along. Many Montana boys did, too, right to their deaths in paces like Khe San. They didn’t know better. Fuck the Army.

 

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