Shooting the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

got to be pretty smart to be a doctor.”
    â€œI’m doctor-smart, but not astronaut-smart.”
    â€œWell, now that you’re joining the Army, maybe you’ll stay in. You could be a general. I bet you’re general-smart.”
    TJ grinned. “Maybe. Let’s see if I’m smart enough to stay alive first.”
    â€œIf you’re going to be a medic, you won’t be in any big battles.” I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed about this fact.
    â€œAre you kidding? Who do you think is out there picking up the wounded? If you want to know the truth, I’d rather have gone Field Artillery. But I thought Mom would swallow the Medical Corps easier.”
    I looked at TJ with greater appreciation. Field Artillery. Now that was some serious business. Those were the guys with the mortars and the howitzers.
    My favorite pictures of TJ’s were of the track team. He photographed the races for the school paper, but the really good pictures were the ones of people right after they’d finished running. He’d get right up in their faces, and if you didn’t know they were runners you’d think they were witnessing momentous events, their faces were so joyful or full of pain, the sweat glistening like tears on their cheeks. I didn’t know much about art, but I knew those pictures were beautiful.
    â€œYou go to college, you’ll have access to somegreat darkroom equipment on campus, I’d bet,” the Colonel said one night after dinner. It was during that period where TJ still had time to walk away from his enlistment contract, and the Colonel couldn’t keep himself from nudging TJ in that direction. I was pretty sure my mother was putting him up to it.
    We were out in the backyard, working in the garden. TJ leaned against the hoe he’d been turning over dirt with and said, “I’ll take my cameras with me to Vietnam. I bet I’ll get some great pictures there.”
    â€œDid it ever occur to you that you might not get sent to Vietnam?” the Colonel asked. He smiled. You could tell this idea had just come to him, and it had cheered him right up. “They need medics in all kinds of places. You might get stuck in the desert around Fort Huachuca. They might need you at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. You want to give up college for a trip to New Jersey?”
    â€œThey’re sending everyone to Vietnam these days, sir,” I informed the Colonel, not so much to argue with him, but to show him I was a well-readindividual. “It was in
Time
magazine. They’re going to draft a quarter-million men to send over there this year.”
    â€œTime
magazine doesn’t know everything there is to know about what the Army does,” the Colonel grumbled. He dropped the subject and returned to his tomato plants, which were just beginning to shoot up out of the dirt.
    But TJ didn’t want to drop the subject. “I’ll be able to take some amazing pictures over there,” he said, sounding suddenly excited by the prospect. “How far south is Vietnam, anyway? It’s not in the Southern Hemisphere, is it? The sky would be completely different if it was.”
    He went inside to look up “Vietnam” in the encyclopedia. And that’s when I wondered if half the reason he enlisted was for the adventure of it. To take pictures of things he’d never seen before. He might never make it to the moon, but he could get an all-expenses-paid trip to Southeast Asia.
    The Colonel shook his head. “He thinks he’s going on safari with a telephoto lens. He thinks he’s going to have a spare second over there to takepictures. Like hell he will. He’ll be too busy trying not to get himself killed.”
    But the Colonel was wrong about that.
    He was wrong about a lot, it turned out.

six
    I only had one friend who had a brother in Vietnam. So when I’d finished developing and printing TJ’s