Free Dragon Lady by Gary Alexander Page B

John’d later.
    I returned to the table and it wasn’t long before the suds were doing our talking.
    Some of the guys were considering enlisting. It’d cost three or four years instead of a draftee’s two, but at least you had options in duty and assignment.
    Doug said, “What’s the difference? It’s all shit, just a different color.”
    “This recruiting sergeant told me that the North Koreans are tunneling under the DMZ,” a beanpole with a crew cut said.
    In 1964, Vietnam was a sidebar. We were sweating South Korea. Rumor had it that if you were drafted, you were automatically assigned to the infantry and shipped there, where you’d freeze your ass off sleeping in tents as the first line of defense against the commies, who were itching to come across and slit your throat and stuff your balls in your mouth, not necessarily in that order.
    “My buddy’s older brother was in the Korean War,” said a guy, who wouldn’t quit bellyaching that his feet were a whole bunch flatter than they said they were. “He got overrun twice by the Red Chinese. The Chinks, they went on over his foxhole, blowing their bugles, hopped up on opium.”
    “If Goldwater’s elected President, he’ll H-bomb Red China so it won’t make no difference.”
    “Cuba,” was spoken through a belch. “We’ll be invading.”
    “Nope. Don’t have to. My dad says Castro’s days are numbered. The CIA’s gonna slip a stogie loaded with TNT into his cigar box.”
    “This friend of mine has a cousin whose best friend chopped off his trigger finger on purpose.”
    The table quieted down.
    “The army made him into a southpaw marksman.”
    We booed him, and this general line of conversation went on and on, growing goofier and goofier. We liberally and loudly used “fuck” in all eight parts of speech, so the banter was colorful if not always intelligible.
    Doug had stopped contributing. He was staring into his glass, brooding, normal behavior for him after seven or eleven beers.
    Suddenly he looked up. “Goddammit, it ain’t fair! We gotta go in while college boys have these fucking deferments. We work for a living and pay our fucking taxes and don’t spend our fucking lives in college. No offense, Joe. I’m talking rich frat rats.”
    “None taken,” I said, mildly offended.
    “How come we gotta go and they don’t?”
    We looked at one other and nodded. Doug was making perfect sense. We hoisted our glasses and said goddamn right it wasn’t fair.
    Doug shook his head. “Now we gotta go and protect them against communism. The motherfuckers, they graduate and get management trainee jobs that pay upwards of four hundred dollars a month and marry the best-looking girls. We’re out there digging foxholes. Know the money we’ll be making? A buck private draws seventy-eight clams a month.”
    “We oughta fucking go and fucking tell those fucking draft-dodgers what we fucking think of their fucking candy asses,” somebody yelled.
    That was a mistake. A big mistake. It qualified as a dare. I’d witnessed Doug’s dares. Somehow he’d lived through them. Jumping off bridges into cold water, lighting firecrackers in unusual places, and such.
    It got Doug to thinking, like he’d been thinking when he swiped his mother’s pink silk panties. From the way he fidgeted, I knew he still had them on.
    “On to the University District,” he responded. “We’ll tell ’em a thing or two! You guys with me?”
    Of course we were with him. This was no time to be a pussy. These were the days when everyone smoked (me the only weirdo in the group who didn’t) and nobody got too excited if you drank a brew in your car. We stocked up on weeds and six-packs of cold Olympia stubbies, piled into Doug’s ’51 Chevy Bel Air, and off we went.
    He’d had that red-and-white Bel Air hardtop since he was a junior in high school bagging groceries at the A&P. He’d customized it in small ways--like spinner hubcaps and a necker knob. He Simonized it