Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell

Author:Frances O'Roark Dowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 2008-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

nine

Working at the rec center, I was learning more about Vietnam all the time. It was in the air you breathed if you were spending your days around GIs, some of whom had already done their tour, some who were gearing up to go, and a whole bunch who had their fingers crossed the war would be over before their units got called up.

Sgt. Byrd gave me daily vocabulary lessons. Sometimes it was like he was still in-country, and there were days I thought maybe he wanted to go back. Every once in a while he made me feel scared, the way his face got dark and cloudy over something he saw in one of TJ’s pictures. But there wasn’t ever a time when he didn’t want to talk. He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words’ sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you spill them out the right way.

“If you recall, you call that a cracker box,” he said, pointing to a picture of an ambulance I’d printed from TJ’s fourth roll of film. “The bac-si rides in the cracker box—‘bac-si’ is what you call a medic, it’s a Vietnamese word—or they go in the traveling medicine show, which is what you call the medevac helicopter.”

“How come they do that?” I asked. “I mean, how come they make up words for everything that already has its own word?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it makes it less real, more like a cartoon, something that’s not happening directly to you. Or else it’s just fun to do it. The human animal is an endless creative creature, in my experience.”

So I learned “chop chop” was food and a “daily-daily” was the antimalaria pill GIs had to take. Medics were called “Docs” and “band-aids” and “bac-si,” and infantrymen were called “grunts.” An Army helmet was a “steel pot,” and camouflage uniforms were nicknamed “tiger suits.” If you were KIA you’d been killed in action, and if you were KBA, you’d been killed by artillery. A “glad bag” was a body bag. “Expectants” were wounded soldiers who were expected to die.

“What did they call you?” I asked Sgt. Byrd when the vocabulary lesson got too filled with body bags and wounded soldiers for my comfort.

He grinned. “I was a 1st Cav grunt and a Cheap Charlie because I never spent any money in the bars. Other than that, mostly I got called Ted and a few other names too improper to repeat. Oh, and Kodak. I got called Kodak.” He held up his camera bag. “For the obvious reasons.”

Sgt. Byrd was not my only source on the lifestyle and culture of the Vietnam War, however. There were also my students.

Just like Private Hollister had said, there were soldiers who wanted to learn how to develop and print their own pictures, and now I was the resident expert, if you didn’t count Sgt. Byrd, and since he didn’t actually work at the rec center, I didn’t count him.

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