hell were. My predecessors were awarded posthumous Purple Hearts. No heroics, just atrocious luck. Accordingly, my Vietnam going-away party was grim. I regarded it as a retroactive wake and said so, suggesting that we should’ve had an ice- and beer- filled coffin with a Purple Heart dangling from it. An aunt and a female cousin cried. My stepfather gazed at the ceiling and shook his head, not for the first time. My mother glared at me and my gallows humor.
In bleary bravado, in a vain attempt to undo, I said, hey gang, no sweat. I have no intention of carrying on the tradition. I was confident that I was returning home in one piece, as the sole surviving Joe J. Joe.
As you’ll see if you have the patience to continue reading, I was almost wrong.
The taxi let Ziggy and me out at Tan Son Nhat Air Base’s main gate. The war had transformed Tan Son Nhat from a drowsy tropical airstrip to a tent city and perhaps the world’s busiest airport. Jets flew in and out, day and night, shuttling troops to and from home, predominantly from. We scouted the USARV compound for Jeeps. The pick of the litter was parked next to a mess tent, behind a metal storage container. It had decent tires and not too many dents.
The container had such a dinky padlock that Ziggy said they were asking for it. He snapped off the lock with a rock. There was a lot of crap in it, but we found a case of Spam and a dusty M-14 rifle with five full clips.
Headed downtown, I drove the Jeep while Ziggy read one of the sci-fi magazines he was never without. The cover of this issue featured Troy Donahue’s twin. Troy was in a tin spacesuit, firing his ray gun at a seven-hundred-pound side order of potato salad with claws. I was a voracious reader, but sci-fi passed a light year over my head.
To continue on me. In life I was a nondescript white Caucasian of middling height and weight, average in all mental and physical respects except for scar tissue and the number of times my nose had been set.
The fisticuffs started in the second grade with wordplay on my name: Jo Jo with the underarm digging and call of Tarzan’s Cheetah. I was not one to take a joke when I was it.
I matured from playground skirmishes to saloon brawls, where I quickly learned that when you’re hit over the head with a barstool, it didn’t bust into kindling like they did in the movies. And when you’re thrown through a window, you came out the other side bleeding. In my twenty-four years as of 1965, I had given and received a banquet of knuckle sandwiches.
Years later, Janelle, Wife Number Three, encouraged me to enroll in anger management classes.
“Why?” I’d flippantly responded, on my sixth or eighth or thirteenth beer. “I already know how to get pissed off.”
Janelle had not been amused. I eventually grew up in my 40s, finally admitting to myself that my carload of insecurities made me such a hothead. I gave up the sauce, too, but by then Janelle was long gone.
In the realm of identifying features, complemented by injuries from the Battlefields of Stupidity, I sported an unsolved mystery on my body. At Fort Ord, where I’d attended Basic Training, I’d also matriculated in AIT (Advanced Individual Training)--which, for me, was cooking school. A week prior to graduation, on a dark and stormy payday night, I went out and had a drink or ten or twenty.
I remembered two things that occurred that lost evening. I remembered barhopping in San Francisco . I remembered wanting a Piet Mondrian tattoo on my arm.
My last college major had been art appreciation. I’d fallen hard for Piet Mondrian’s intersecting perpendicular lines and primary colors. A Mondrian was a happy marriage of beauty and simplicity. A classic Mondrian was the order absent in my life. His Composition 1921 was my druthers.
I was not and am not wearing a Mondrian. Instead, I’ve got a map of Montana on my left biceps. It is an outline of the state and an X marked in the southeastern portion,
In bleary bravado, in a vain attempt to undo, I said, hey gang, no sweat. I have no intention of carrying on the tradition. I was confident that I was returning home in one piece, as the sole surviving Joe J. Joe.
As you’ll see if you have the patience to continue reading, I was almost wrong.
The taxi let Ziggy and me out at Tan Son Nhat Air Base’s main gate. The war had transformed Tan Son Nhat from a drowsy tropical airstrip to a tent city and perhaps the world’s busiest airport. Jets flew in and out, day and night, shuttling troops to and from home, predominantly from. We scouted the USARV compound for Jeeps. The pick of the litter was parked next to a mess tent, behind a metal storage container. It had decent tires and not too many dents.
The container had such a dinky padlock that Ziggy said they were asking for it. He snapped off the lock with a rock. There was a lot of crap in it, but we found a case of Spam and a dusty M-14 rifle with five full clips.
Headed downtown, I drove the Jeep while Ziggy read one of the sci-fi magazines he was never without. The cover of this issue featured Troy Donahue’s twin. Troy was in a tin spacesuit, firing his ray gun at a seven-hundred-pound side order of potato salad with claws. I was a voracious reader, but sci-fi passed a light year over my head.
To continue on me. In life I was a nondescript white Caucasian of middling height and weight, average in all mental and physical respects except for scar tissue and the number of times my nose had been set.
The fisticuffs started in the second grade with wordplay on my name: Jo Jo with the underarm digging and call of Tarzan’s Cheetah. I was not one to take a joke when I was it.
I matured from playground skirmishes to saloon brawls, where I quickly learned that when you’re hit over the head with a barstool, it didn’t bust into kindling like they did in the movies. And when you’re thrown through a window, you came out the other side bleeding. In my twenty-four years as of 1965, I had given and received a banquet of knuckle sandwiches.
Years later, Janelle, Wife Number Three, encouraged me to enroll in anger management classes.
“Why?” I’d flippantly responded, on my sixth or eighth or thirteenth beer. “I already know how to get pissed off.”
Janelle had not been amused. I eventually grew up in my 40s, finally admitting to myself that my carload of insecurities made me such a hothead. I gave up the sauce, too, but by then Janelle was long gone.
In the realm of identifying features, complemented by injuries from the Battlefields of Stupidity, I sported an unsolved mystery on my body. At Fort Ord, where I’d attended Basic Training, I’d also matriculated in AIT (Advanced Individual Training)--which, for me, was cooking school. A week prior to graduation, on a dark and stormy payday night, I went out and had a drink or ten or twenty.
I remembered two things that occurred that lost evening. I remembered barhopping in San Francisco . I remembered wanting a Piet Mondrian tattoo on my arm.
My last college major had been art appreciation. I’d fallen hard for Piet Mondrian’s intersecting perpendicular lines and primary colors. A Mondrian was a happy marriage of beauty and simplicity. A classic Mondrian was the order absent in my life. His Composition 1921 was my druthers.
I was not and am not wearing a Mondrian. Instead, I’ve got a map of Montana on my left biceps. It is an outline of the state and an X marked in the southeastern portion,
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