Robert Lee, SGT. (US Army Reserve). Recalled to active duty for current emergency plus six months. Report TDS Fort Riley, Kan. by 1300 hours, 6 July 1950 for retraining and overseas deployment.
Oh-dark-thirty, 6 July 1950
Nobody else on the road but Sally and me.
No houses or lights.
Nothing on Sally’s AM radio but static and the occasional preacher.
I leave it on.
Can’t hear the radio anyway, my ears are ringing so bad.
Sally’s one good headlamp carves a yellow tunnel into the black night. The other one burned out somewhere two states back.
My eyes are burnt out, too—no sleep and highway hypnosis.
I light up another cigarette. The smoke stings my eyes, keeps them open.
Fuck Garryowen and the horse he rode in on
Custer and the 7th Cavalry got fucked at the Little Big Horn. Alan, Bob, and I, we went right down to sign up the day after Pearl Harbor, wound up in the 7th Cav, and got fucked on Leyte.
I’m the only one of us that came back with two feet. The others, parts of them anyway, or just sandbags and dog tags, have six feet in military cemeteries somewhere.
That’s a joke, folks
Now here I am again, going off to fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way in some other backwater shithole called Korea.
Know where that is, Sally?
No? I had to look it up, too. Know where China is? On a map, China looks sort of like a fucking chicken and Korea’s its fat fucking beak.
The joke’s on me
Doesn’t matter where it is, of course. I wanted to get home after VJ day in 1945, so me and a lot of other guys signed up for Uncle Sam’s sweetheart deal. Be the first to get out and go home to the US of A just for signing up for the Army’s active reserve.
A sweetheart deal. The war’s over. Won’t be another. Even pick up a little extra cash for the annual training.
Not such a great deal as it turns out.
Good old Uncle Sam owns my ass, and I’ve got to go where he sends me.
I don’t want to go
Steering Sally with my right hand and trying not to ash on myself with the smoke in my left.
I can say this at least, and Sally agrees: the Highway to Hell is paved with good American asphalt.
Highway 40 is smooth as a baby’s ass.
Good highways, and lots of them. Before all this, I was making good money helping build those roads back in southern California.
I flick the cigarette butt out Sally’s window like a sparkling tracer in the dark. Dumb ass, giving away your position.
I light another cigarette using my Zippo with the bullet dent in it, then flip the lid closed with a loud snick.
Bang!
Shit! Someone’s shooting at us. I tell Alan to radio in for friendly fire before we fire back. We huddle in the muddy foxhole and wait for a response.
Pitch black night no moon nightly rainstorm wet socks sweating under our rubber rain ponchos.
Three cigarettes left. I get out the Zippo, we huddle under our ponchos, and I light us up.
Bam!
Not here, not now. Back then back there on Leyte. Doesn’t matter. Bob says it’s real.
I slam on the brakes, fishtail to a stop in the middle of the empty road, shut off the headlight.
Never ever show a light
Heart wants to rip out of my chest. Every fiber of me is on fire. Death is near.
Back in the foxhole
The Zippo in my shirt pocket stops the sniper round after it passes through Bob’s head. Feels like a punch in the chest, hot round falls in my hand.
Bob’s brains and blood are everywhere.
Royally pissed, Alan throws away his blood-soaked cigarette. “Three on a match, dumbass. Bob’s dead. Worse yet, our smokes are shot to shit.”
We laugh. It’s a bad joke, but if you ain’t laughing, you’re crying.
I reach over and take the clean smoke out of Dead Bob’s mouth—it’s our last one after all. I pull the smoke down into my lungs, then share it with Alan.
“He was kind of an asshole,” Alan says, takes a long drag on the cigarette. He stares everywhere but at Dead Bob’s ruined head, pretending it don’t hurt.
Surrounded by asshole buddies
The next day, Alan tries to collect a dead Japanese officer’s sword. The body was boobytrapped. It blows Alan’s legs off, along with other parts. The Graves Registration guys had to use body parts from both men to make up enough to bury.
Alan was an ass, my brother in arms, but still an ass. It hurts, and this hurt hasn’t healed.
Sally and I pull out and speed on down the highway.
After thirty-six hours on the road
I must be out of Colorado and into Kansas by now. Can’t tell. It all looks the same to me, wide, flat, black, and lonesome. I’ve been here before, answering the trumpet’s call, but never Here Here as in Kansas before, if you get what I mean.
I’m still angry
Need another smoke. I light up, no sniper this time. I pull the smoke down deep into my lungs.
The highway is lined with what looks like dead hedges.
Curious, I pull over to the side of the road, get out to take a piss and check it out.
Turns out the hedges are just piles of tumbleweeds hung up on the barbed wire fences on both sides of the road. Two deep, three deep, four deep, they run forever off into the dark beyond Sally’s single headlight.
Get back in the car.
Sally and I race on.
My pounding heart matches the building speed of her pistons.
Sally’s headlight burns out.
Oh, crap, it’s black
My racing heart skips a beat.
I tell myself I’m still Here Here, but in my head…
I’m back with the bodies again
Toasted, roasted, butchered, and strung out on the barbed wire like dead fish left to rot until they’re just bones.
Bone hedges.
Smells like pork
I smell it, I know it’s not real, but I still smell that coppery, shit smell of death.
I’m holding Sally’s steering wheel dead straight with both hands, a death grip on the wheel trying to keep her in the middle of the road, both of us hurtling blindly ahead.
Their skin’s all gone by now, picked clean by murders of crows, all I see is bones, mile after mile, both sides of the road.
Skeletons, reaching.
I brake hard to a stop, forget to push the clutch, kill the engine.
Sally is pissed.
I don’t want to stop
Sally doesn’t want to stop either, but her hot engine backfires and finally dies.
Ca-chug, ca-chug, ca-chug . . . wheeze . . . the flywheel spins one last time and stops.
Silence.
Dead in the middle of the road.
Again.
My ears ring in the silence, the tinnitus triggers my fear. I rest my head on the steering wheel and look out through a bug-smeared windshield, black sky full of bright stars and…
I’m hiding out on Leyte inside a burnt-out tank
Caught in the open when the enemy artillery barrage begins, I hide in a burnt-out tank. One of ours. It’s not pitch dark inside the tank, what with all the punched-out shrapnel holes.
Like the black sky full of stars here in the Here Here.
The tank saves my ass.
The shooting stops, I climb out the top hatch and see a painting of a naked blonde with the name “Lucky Sally” painted on the turret.
Death is near and my head’s swiveling like an owl’s. I’m looking everywhere but where I’m going, and when I jump down I land on the crispy critter remains of one of her crew. It crumbles like cigarette ash.
I puke.
I’m gonna puke Here Here, too. I don’t wanna, but it happens—
Puke all down my shirt front and Sally’s front seat. I can’t get my hands to let go of the steering wheel or I’d take the shirt off and use it to wipe up the mess.
Sally is pissed.
I hate the dark
The enemy comes in the dark with sharp knives, slices the throat of the fucking new guy next to me in our foxhole while I sleep. The bowel stink wakes me up in the morning, ankle deep in bloody mud and feces with flies crawling all over our faces.
The FNG. James? Jerry? He was probably an asshole, too.
Thank you, God, it wasn’t me. Not yet, anyway.
Fingers are scratching
Someone’s scratching on Sally’s door, on the passenger side door, too, too low for me to see them, hiding, but I know they’re there.
Trying to get in
The bony fingers of the soldiers I burned in those tunnels, the screams of those men they told me were the enemy.
Human torches burning bright. No eyes or faces, tongues and lungs burned away.
Mute in their agony. Clawing and scratching at the stone floor.
Scratch scratch scratch
Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch-
Please, no.
Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch—
In here with me now
Oh, God! Their bone knives cut me a thousand times. They bury me and my poor Sally.
Am I dead?
I’m not dead.
I really want to be dead.
I—
Really need to pee
I pry my gummy eyes open.
It’s dawn. Clock on Sally’s dashboard reads seven a.m.
I groan, stretch, look around.
My trusty Sally is buried roof deep in dead tumbleweeds. Shaky, staggering, I finally manage to force her car door open and squeeze out. I almost piss myself, I have to go so bad. I get clear and unbutton my fly.
Take a healthy piss on dead tumbleweeds.
Piss on the fucking tumbleweeds piled up on Sally, impaled on the rusty, barbed wire fences.
Piss on the bone-yellow tumbleweeds that took my head back where I never wanted to go.
Piss on those undead memories of hell.
Shake it off
I button my fly, yank off my puke-stained shirt, wipe up the worst of the mess on Sally’s front seat.
Throw the stinking shirt to the Gods of War to clothe the bones, an offering.
Put on my old fatigue jacket to stave off the shivers although it must already be 80 degrees out here.
Got six hours to reach Fort Riley. Recalled to duty. Damn!
“You shouldn’t have joined the fucking army if you can’t take a fucking joke,” says Alan.
“Pucker up and be a man,” says Bob.
The FNG doesn’t say anything. His throat is still slit. A single tear and a voiceless scream.
I unbury Sally and drive
Do it by the numbers.
Switch on the ignition, push the starter button on the floor with the left foot, transfer left foot to the clutch pedal and push it down, pull the stick shift on the steering wheel column towards me and down into low gear with my right hand, ease out the clutch with my left foot while lightly giving Sally some gas with my right.
Repeat for second and third gears.
And away we go
Sally rumbles over tumbleweeds, her tires crushing tumbleweeds, tumbleweeds desperately scraping and scrambling along under us trying to hang on as we drive off.
Sounds like a tank running over infantry.
Going faster now, 50 . . . 60 . . . 80 . . .
The wind rushing in the window is the torch whoosh of my flamethrower in the tunnels. I begin to hear the screams again.
Sally’s radio comes back to life.
KFBI in Wichita. They’re playing this week’s number one song on the Hit Parade, Perry Como’s “Hoop Dee-Doin’ It Tonight.”
I turn it up LOUD and I sing along LOUD to drown out the three dead passengers in the backseat as me and Sally roll on down the smooth-as-a-baby’s-ass highway lined with barbed wire and bones.
Sally is still pissed.
