Short Story - 2007

THE SECRET OF MY FOUNTAIN

I don’t remember exactly when I first started collecting rocks. There are a couple of blurred early memories that flash in my mind but I just can’t remember which event actually took place first.

In one of the memories my family was driving across the country on one of our mandatory three-year return trips to east Kansas to visit the in-laws. I must have been four, maybe five. My father was a Navy officer and we were stationed at Newport, Rhode Island at the time.

Somewhere in Missouri we stopped at one of the roadside rock shops that used to dot the highways from one side of the country to the other. I saw a small stone that was unique and using my hoarded allowance, a quarter a week if memory serves, bought the rock. To this day I can remember my mother smiling at me and saying –“This will be a special memory for you, and only you, will know what it represents.”

It took awhile for me to figure out what she meant.

About the same time, I can’t remember if this was before or after the Kansas trip, we made a drive to the Catskill Mountains and I found another unique rock.

At any rate, my interest in collecting rocks from different parts of the world was developed at an early age. They became my diary – each represented a point in time of my life. They had value to no one but me; but to me, they were important.

My dad had graduated from high school in Kansas in 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression, and because there was no way of continuing college or even finding work, he joined the Navy and began what was to be a 32-year career. On the morning of December 7^th 1941 his submarine, the USS Pompano, was outside of the entry to Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese attacked.

He never talked much about his wartime experiences but I learned that he did seven combat patrols in submarines in the Pacific and had a chest full of medals including the Silver Star and the Bronze Star. Although he had a bullet hole in his chest from a grazing Japanese bullet he didn’t wear or put in for the Purple Heart. When I asked him about why he didn’t he just nodded.

“Didn’t earn it. I helped bury those that did, many in unmarked graves at sea.”

Parents have a way of talking in riddles that later in life become sage words of wisdom.

After the war my dad, nicknamed “Bulldog” by the sailors that worked for him (A lifetime of sea duty and war had given him snow white hair and his skin the texture of leather), married my mother and they embarked on the lifetime of travel that the Navy afforded to its career sailors.

Moves came in rapid succession – Hawaii, California, Michigan, Kansas, Virginia, Kansas again, Rhode Island, Virginia again, Connecticut and culminating in four wonderful years at the San Juan Naval Base in Puerto Rico. We usually lived in a place two to three years then packed all the belongings and headed somewhere else. Along with the miles came the kids. The testosterone charged fighting men of WW II were home.

Moving all the time and never growing any roots had its psychological plusses and minuses. The biggest benefit that this lifestyle offered was that it allowed military kids to see the world from a child’s eye. Somehow the world was simpler then. More important, the concepts of right and wrong were clear and defined. Politicians were honest. Priests were honorable men.

Another big plus for the gypsy life was learning the art of adaptability. To survive, you learned how to make friends and to look for the good things in the new place. It was easy. Making friends came naturally and every place had it’s own uniqueness.

Switching schools in the middle of the year was traumatic the first time but then morphed to an easy process as I developed the necessary people survival skills. The schools were always filled with kids just like me, born right smack in the middle of the -- “Baby Boomers.”

On two different occasions and different schools the LBA (Local Bad Ass) went out of his way to pick a fight. I learned early that the guy making the most noise is seldom the toughest and the sooner that you faced down the bully the better. You didn’t have to be the toughest kid on the block but you did have to be willing to fight if you had to. Meeting new people was always interesting. The geography of the cities was different but the people, once they trusted you enough to lower their shields, were pretty much all the same. Some of them were good, some bad with most somewhere in between.

On the downside, moving all the time as a child sometimes has a devastating effect later on. Because a military kid is trained to understand that every two or three years that he or she would be pulling up stakes, their mind, purely as a defensive measure, rearranged itself so that getting too close to anyone was impossible. You knew that “Goodbye” was always on the horizon. Goodbyes were painful and it is difficult to love what you knew you were going to lose.

Sometimes this fear of loving lasts a lifetime.

At each layover of life’s journey I would always find some unique rocks and take them with me on to the next stop. Each rock was different and each had its own story and the tale was not always a pleasant one.

After Rhode Island we moved to Norfork, Virginia. There, I got into a dirt clod throwing battle will some other kids. We were in the second grade I think. I remember watching the dirt clod being thrown high, arching toward me and then descending. I turned my head down at the last instant and it hit me on the top of my head and opened a wound. The rascal had thrown a mud-covered rock and not the authorized dirt clod as specified in the unwritten Rules of Engagement. The thrower, sensing that he was about to get smacked for breaking the rules, was real apologetic. I kept the rock -- a reminder to keep my head down.

I don’t remember ever telling anybody about my box of multi-colored rocks. Where they came from and the points in time that they represented were my secret and my secret alone. I have two sisters and somehow they never developed an interest in my rocks.

My diary in stone remained secure.

As families go I guess that I was blessed. At least when compared to many families today. We sat down for dinner nearly every night together. The meals were always fairly plain but wholesome – an entrée (usually cholesterol laced meat) and two different colored vegetables, bread, and desert (something with real sugar). The time we ate depended on when my workaholic father took a break from his always-demanding jobs. He would walk in the door, set his Navy hat on the counter and then announce – “Let’s eat.” His exterior was hard but just inside his leathery skin was a decent, yet complex, man.

One of the things I remember most about him was his almost unnatural relationship with animals. He could almost talk to them. Sometimes, we could come upon some strange animal and within minutes it was like my father and the animal had been friends for years. The animals somehow sensed that he wasn’t going to harm them and responded almost immediately. Mom said that animals and people were the same – both responded to kindness.

At home there was never any question whom the boss was. Dad might have been the Captain of the ship but mom had the helm. Military wives are tough. They have to be, because when the man is away for literally years at a time the bills still had to get paid, kids had to get to school and life went on. Sometimes this caused some friction, at least initially, when dad got back from his long ship duty assignments. He would do something to establish that -- “The Man of the House was Back.” Mom would promptly, and in crystal clear terms, explain to him how cows eat cabbage. After they locked horns a time or two we settled in for long periods of peace. Our calm and steady helmswoman somehow kept it all together.

On the round, we were a non-violent family. Other than the time when I hit my older sister on the head with a hammer when I was three and the two times that I can remember my father spanking me and my older sister (once each) there was little actual violence. I think my father spanked us once just to prove that he could but my mother’s threat that -- “I’m going to tell your father,” hung as a heavy deterrent over our heads.

I learned that hitting another person in the head with a hammer was unacceptable conduct, although I think that the spanking issued by my father was more painful for him than it was for me. Right after he spanked me he took me down to the sporting goods store and bought me a new baseball glove. He never spanked me again although I remember some Bull Halsey glares that could melt plastic.

Connecticut was our next assignment. Dad had been given command of the Naval Reserve Center at Bridgeport but we lived at Fairfield that was about 20 minutes away. New England was wonderful. It was a melting pot of many cultures – Jews, Swedes, Greeks, Arabs, Poles, Italians, Germans and Russians. Each with their unique beliefs and life styles adapted from the Old Country to fit into the cultural mosaic that we called America.

Our house was a big two story next to Smirnoff’s Grocery on Stratfield Road. It had steam heat and no air conditioning that wasn’t really necessary in the mild summers of New England. We lived in that house for three years but when I went back to Fairfield, over 40 years later, it was gone. Smirnoff’s was gone too, replaced by a chain supermarket and they had torn the house down and put in a parking lot.

I have learned that going back and visiting a place that you have lived years before is generally a mistake. Places change. People move away. Sometimes they die. Things are just different and always much smaller than you remember them. A memory is a vision of a point in time, nothing more. It cannot, and should not, be changed.

Connecticut has a variety of rocks. I kept two. One small stone is a garnet that my friend, Marty, and I dug out of a large rock using a hammer and a chisel. The second keepsake is a flat piece of mica that we chipped out of a rock formation. Mica is brittle and we had the dickens of a time getting a three-inch piece out without damaging it.

When we left Fairfield, transferred to the San Juan Naval Base in Puerto Rico, Marty gave me his prized possession – a small switchblade knife. The knife had a pearl grip and a blade that was about an inch long.

To get to Puerto Rico we took the Navy MSTS ship, the USS Randall, from Bayonne, New Jersey. This was the same ship that had brought us from Honolulu, where my older sister and I were born, to San Francisco when I was about six months old.

For some reason, when we were directly over the Bronson Deep (my father had explained to me that this was the deepest part of the Atlantic) I threw the knife into the ocean. I may have decided that this act was somehow establishing a forever bond with Marty. Either that or I was saying – “Goodbye.” Marty and I lost touch over the years but nearly every day, when I look at the garnet and mica, I am reminded of our childhood friendship.

These rocks are part of my fountain.

We spent four days at sea and arrived at San Juan on my thirteenth birthday. I can remember as if it were yesterday coming into the mouth of San Juan harbor and seeing the breath taking sight of El Moro, the gigantic Spanish fort on the east side of the harbor. It gleamed white and shimmered as the blinding tropical sun refracted off of it. It was as if it were alive, a shining beacon lighting the way to the adventures that awaited.

They had a band playing Latin music using steel drums at the pier in Bayamon when the Randall docked.

We had arrived in paradise.

For a young male staring puberty square in the eye, San Juan was close to heaven. My dad had been assigned as the Operations Officer of the base in San Juan and he was involved with just about everything, including the boats. One of them was a 44-foot seagoing vessel they called the -- “Crash Boat.” In the almost four years that we lived in San Juan I went on dozens of excursions all over the Caribbean in this vessel.

One event I remember vividly. My dad had asked me if I wanted to go on a ride in the Crash Boat. He said that one of the Destroyers, during gunnery practice, had shot a target loose and it had drifted into a rough part of the beach on the north side of the Island. There was a storm somewhere far out to sea that was causing larger than normal waves to hit the rocky atoll where the target had lodged itself. While we were attempting to get a rope around the target so that we could retrieve it I looked up and saw a small tidal wave about to hit us broadside.

I yelled. Dad looked down on me from the helm of the boat and, just as cool as ice, said simply -- “Hold On.” He jammed one engine throttle forward and the other in reverse to get the bow of the Crash Boat into the wave.

“Hold On,” indeed. I was wrapped around a support rail tighter than a kitten on a tennis ball. I looked at the sailor that was with us on the boat and read his lips -- “Oh S--t!” The wave hit us flush and knocked the glass out of the cabin windows. Fortunately, the Crash Boat was designed to take water without sinking. Dad turned the pumps on to drain the bilges, we snagged the target and got out of there -- mission accomplished.

As we were pulling out of the atoll I found a small, seaweed encrusted rock that had somehow been washed onto the deck. Later in life, when I was facing some nearly insurmountable challenge, his calm words – “Hold On,” got me over the hump.

The Navy Base in San Juan was Valhalla. There were two swimming pools, a large gym complex, baseball fields and three free movies every night. It had an eight-foot hurricane fence around the entire base and a gate with armed Marines. There were two military beaches available -- the Enlisted Beach near the Escobar Baseball Field or the Officers Beach on the road to Old San Juan that was around five miles from the Main Gate of the Navy Base.

There were a number of other military bases and forts on the Island at that time. We went to school, riding a military bus, at Fort Buchanan. The Army had this fort, Henry Barracks and Fort Allen. The Navy had bases at San Juan, Roosevelt Roads and Sebana Seca, where we kept our horses. The Air Force had Ramey Air Force Base.

Each base had a “Teen Club” with dances every Friday or Saturday night and it was not uncommon for the kids from different bases to see each other fairly frequently. Kids were rated into three distinct groups – Super Cool, Cool and Duds.

There really wasn’t too much conflict between the groups. You just kind of figured out the pecking order and then did your best to fit in. Thinking about it, I guess there was considerable overlap between the groups because I can remember having good friends in each group.

Because there were no liquor laws on the Island in 1960 alcohol consumption was pretty heavy during the dances. There were no age laws and if you could get your money to the counter you could buy -- no questions, no ID, no nothing – “Gracias.” Bacardi Rum, light or dark -- 81 proof, was a dollar and ten cents a fifth. On occasion someone would spend a dollar fifty for a bottle of 151 proof Purple Label and we would suffer the blinding effect of this semi-toxin. It went down with the smoothness of a razorblade.

The Island had some other interesting beverages. “El Canario Dulce Vino” was akin to radioactive waste. It used to cost 16 cents a pint and that was probably overpriced, valued at current, or pre-1974 dollars. It will hurt you. During my one and only meeting with El Canario, I fell out of a mango tree and then staggered back to the stables at Sebana Seca looking like a war refugee. My mother saw me and asked a sailor to help me.

I can still remember parts of their conversation.

“Is he hurt?” mom asked.

“No, he’s drunk,” the sailor replied. “Dead drunk.”

A sailor, of that era anyway, would know.

That got me grounded forever. However, after I spent the next week practicing on my bongos my mother relented and ungrounded me. Bulldog glared but mom had ruled.

Another interesting beverage that somebody came up with was a homemade concoction called “Coconut wine.”

We tried this once.

To start, we (collective mentality) took several green coconuts and cut a wedge out of each of them. Then we put a few raisins into the milk, put the wedge back in, secured with masking tape, and then buried the coconuts for a month.

I don’t know if this will get you intoxicated but it will get you sick. In Asia there is dysentery that I named after a fierce Asian warlord known as “Samanid” Samanid’s Revenge is like Montezuma’s Revenge on steroids. Think of this if anyone ever suggests Coconut Wine.

Two of the older kids on the Base, Ray and Jack, discouraged us from making any more Coconut wine. They called us – “Dumb Asses.” Both of these boys were leaders and we younger kids looked up to them and would generally follow their advice.

Ray and Jack both died, within a week of each other, in Viet Nam just a few years later. Ray was a Marine 2^nd Lt and Jack was an Army 2^nd Lt.

My dad was never much of a talker but I remember one conversation clearly. It was October 1962 and I was playing in a night softball game on the Base. When the game was over I noticed my father sitting alone in the stands and he waved me over. He was still in his uniform and had to go back to work that night.

He said that it looked like we were going to war with Russia over Cuba and that he would be working around the clock for a while. Then he got to what he really wanted to say.

“In a way, I’m glad that the war is coming now,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because you’re too young to fight in it.” This was one of the few times I ever saw my father get misty eyed.

He knew about war.

I went back to Puerto Rico for my 50^th birthday and was surprised by what I found. Nearly all of the military bases had closed. Fort Buchanan was still operational but that was about it. My wife and I had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant called the Dumas Pelican that was located where the old Officers Beach had been. We sat on the veranda and watched the ships coming in and out of the harbor. The lighthouse on El Moro was a reminder of a different time and I thought about old friends.

While we were vacationing in Puerto Rico we went inside what used to be the Naval Base but the Puerto Rican government now owns it and it was totally different. I brought home two small brown volcanic rocks that I found there.

One for Ray and one for Jack.

These stones are also part of my fountain.

My dad retired, after 32 years of Navy Service, in Puerto Rico and we moved to New Orleans where I finished my last year and one half of high school. New Orleans was a different game but my, I had some fun there. East Jefferson High School had close to three thousand students, all male.

During my first day at East Jefferson I got a reminder that everyplace has its own set of rules. I remember walking down the halls, smiling and trying to find somebody to talk to. I looked ahead and saw the group of young men just in front of me separate and this guy that looked like a human fireplug with his head down came pushing through. He walked right into me and knocked me into the lockers. I started to say something but someone put his hand on my shoulder and whispered -- “Don’t.” The fireplug looked back at me and smiled as he parted the waters of students on his way to his next class.

“Don’t” was good advice. I later learned that the human fireplug with no neck was a guy named Tommy and he could bench press a Volkswagen. Tommy was an okay guy he just had a different kind of way in saying -- “Welcome to New Orleans.”

“You new here? I’m Ricky.” The guy that had given me the warning spoke first.

“First day. Call me Chuck.”

“Where are you transferring from?”

“San Juan.”

“Texas?”

“Puerto Rico.”

“No kidding. Why don’t you meet me here after this next class and we can go to lunch together. I’ll introduce you to some people,” Ricky said as he headed down the hallway to his next class.

I was in. His initial round of introductions led to scores of friends, many of whom I have stayed in touch with, on and off, for over 40 years. Some I could not stay in touch with because they died young.

The student body was distinctly divided into two groups – the Pits and the Frats. Frat meant that you were a member of a Fraternity and Pit was everybody else. The Pits usually came from working class families and they liked to work on cars and race them. The Frats wore Bass Weejuns without any socks and madras shirts.

I decided to be a Frat with Pit friends and somehow managed to straddle the fence on loyalties.

Within two weeks after enrolling at East Jefferson, John Kennedy was shot. That day, during lunch break, I walked to the parking lot and put a small rock into my pocket – for John.

Thinking back, this is probably that last time that things in America made much sense.

Two of my best friends, twin brothers -- Ronnie and Donnie, both committed suicide at different times within just a few years after graduating from high school. Their deaths bothered me for years. In some ways, they still do.

In 1965 young men were looking down both barrels of Viet Nam. The government, in true democratic form, gave you choices – Go to college, get married and have children or get drafted/enlist in another service to avoid the Army.

Donnie joined the Air Force and got sent to Turkey, which he hated. On his first leave home he went to the Lake Front in New Orleans, drank a beer and then put a pistol to his forehead.

Ronnie avoided the draft for years by going to college and changing career fields. It was tough. His dad had died of brain cancer and Ronnie had to try to work and go to school at the same time. The pressure was too much for him.

I got word of his death in 1971 while I was in Germany leading an Infantry platoon. My sister that lived in New Orleans sent me the newspaper article from the Times Picayune. Apparently, after Ronnie got a “Report for Physical” notice from the Draft Board he quietly went to his bedroom and put a pistol to his head.

Viet Nam strained the moral fiber and conscience of America. It should have taught us one thing – We don’t go to war unless the strategic nation interests of the country are genuinely at stake but if we are forced to go to war, we fight like hell. The names of Ronnie and Donnie never made the Viet Nam Memorial Wall in Washington but this futile war killed them both as surely as if they had been shot in combat.

I have collected several rocks from Louisiana but two of them are reminders of the twin brothers that died well before their time, for the wrong reasons.

During my senior year of high school my parents decided to retire for good and bought a small, 15-acre farm, in western Arkansas. Their plan was that the day after I graduated, at the bottom ten percent of my graduating class, that we would move there. Dad loaded a big trailer and left New Orleans two weeks before I graduated so that he could get some needed repairs done to the small farmhouse before we got there.

I had other ideas.

After growing up in San Juan and New Orleans I had no intention of moving to pig-farm Arkansas. The day after I graduated I packed a small suitcase, and without saying a word to anyone, headed for California. I had a good friend, Mike, that I had known in Puerto Rico and his family had moved to Pacifica, just outside of San Francisco. Mike had flown to New Orleans the summer before and spent two weeks with us, so at least I had somewhere to go.

I had a vision and a career field already chosen. About this time I decided that I wanted to be a writer and what better place to learn how to write than Golden California. Harold Robbins and John Steinbeck were about to get some serious competition.

I left New Orleans that night with $40 in cash in my pocket. My plan was to ride a bus or train at night and then hitchhike during the day. I caught a ride to the train station and spent the first night on a train to Austin, Texas. Four days later I arrived at Pacifica with some interesting memories. Parts of this journey were eventful and gave me a later charity of the thing, that you spend a lifetime looking for, that is just beyond reach.

Somewhere in west Texas, close to El Paso, I met up with another hitchhiker. He was probably 35 or 40 years old. The thing that impressed me most about him was that he was smart and knew something about everything. However, his clothing was dirty and he had a noticeable odor. He was a smart bum. He was also an ex-con and a homosexual, most probably a predatory one.

He made several offers and told me of the wonderful times we could have together on the bum in the Southwest. No pun intended.

I told him that I was heading to California, had no interest in his offer and that I had once thoroughly beaten up a homosexual that had gotten too bold. I had boxed in Puerto Rico and New Orleans so this was more than an idle threat. He backed off.

We caught a ride together at El Paso with a man that was driving a brand new Lincoln automobile. It was fancy with automatic temperature and cruise controls. The driver was an executive with a big insurance company and had done well. We dropped the bum off at Las Cruces and then continued on to Tucson. As soon as we were on the road again the driver expressed some relieve that the bum was no longer with us and then we began to talk.

He told me about his life. He had started out dirt poor but rung-by-rung had managed to climb the ladder to success. When he dropped me off at the bus station in Tucson that night he had one final comment.

“I am going to tell you the secret of success. It’s not complicated,” he said as he handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

“What’s that?”

“Work. There is no substitute for hard work.”

I handed him back the twenty. “Thanks, but I need to do this on my own.”

He nodded and smiled. He understood.

As I watched this good man drive off I bent down and picked up a piece of gravel and stuck it in my pocket.

“I’ll remember that.”

I arrived at Pacifica with 16 cents in my pocket and a priceless small rock. There, Mike’s parents received me warmly but I could tell that they were at a little bit of a loss as to what to do with this runaway from Louisiana/Arkansas.

Mike had just finished his freshman year at San Francisco State. When he took me on a tour of the campus there were dozens of protesting students with signs.

“Rebel!”

“You are pawns in the hands of the Master!”

“Hell No. We won’t Go!”

Viet Nam was picking up speed and potential draftees were beginning to question their willingness to die in a war that made little sense to anybody, except some politicians in Washington, although neither they, nor their extended families, would do little of the actual bleeding themselves.

I spent most of that summer in California but couldn’t find a decent job and couldn’t get into a college out there because I was not a California resident. I turned 18 that summer and the Draft Board was about to get a bead on me. Hat in hand, I hitchhiked back to Arkansas and beat the Draft Board by 15 minutes getting accepted at Henderson State College at Arkadelphia. Mom was overjoyed that I was going to be going to college locally. Dad never said a word but I could tell that he was happy that I was home.

Once I got my toes in the mud, I fell in love with Arkansas, its land, and its people.

Four years later, in 1969, I graduated at near the top of my class and had been elected President of the Senior Class. Henderson State College gave me back my dignity. I was the same guy with the same brain that barely squeaked though high school. The man with the Lincoln was right – there is no substitute for work.

Although I had received an Army Reserve Commission through ROTC as an Infantry Lt, I got a deferment to attend Law School. I had gotten married my senior year and my wife, a teacher, was happy that I had temporarily dodged the Viet Nam bullet.

We spent that summer at Centennial, Wyoming where our brother in law, an English professor at University of Wyoming at Laramie, had arranged for us to be caretakers of a lodge high in the Medicine Bow Mountains. I immediately got a job with the Forest Service and spent the most enjoyable summer of my life fighting forest fires and trout fishing.

That summer a miracle happened – we landed on the moon. I have a rock from Mirror Lake, right on top of the Medicine Bow Mountain Range, to remind me. As rocks go, it is unremarkable but what it represented was monumental – man had walked on the moon. We were proud to be Americans and our chests expanded with justified pride. Yet, most of us had come to feel that the war in Viet Nam was wrong. And, we were ashamed.

When the summer was over we moved to near Hot Springs where my wife had a teaching job that paid $350 per month. I spend the next year driving 120 miles back and forth each day to the night Law School at Little Rock. At the end of the year I decided that Law School was not for me. More important, the men that I had gone to college with were starting to die in Viet Nam. I felt like a coward.

After a year of living on peanut butter and Kool-Aid I notified the Army that I was ready to do my patriotic chore. Within a month I got my orders – Ft Benning Infantry Officers School for training, then an unaccompanied tour for a year (Army talk for Viet Nam). For the next two years I was to be a combat fighting man.

Fate intervened. When I got to Ft Benning in May of 1970, the same week as the Kent State debacle, the Army made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. About this time there was a big stink over a massacre at Mai Lai where many civilians, innocent people, died at the hands of American soldiers. The Army decided that it wanted its combat officers to have some line experience before they sent them to Viet Nam so they offered the Officers like me, that had only a two year obligation, a new deal – If you go Volunteer Indefinite (three-year obligation) we will send you anywhere in the world that you want to go and guarantee you one year there before we send you to Viet Nam.

We spent the next 18 months at Baumholder, West Germany. Frankly, I loved Europe but hated the Army. My first platoon was supposed to have 44 men. Mine had 22. Of these, probably half were functional illiterates. They weren’t bad men, just poor, uneducated and mad at the system. They came from small backwoods towns in Tennessee and Mississippi or big cities like Cicero or Watts. These were the people that fought and died in Viet Nam.

Motivating the troops was a leadership challenge. Most of the soldiers had been drafted, spent six months stateside in training, a year in Viet Nam and then, with six months to go in their obligation, the Army sent them to frolic in the snows of Germany.

In Viet Nam two things frequently happened. First, many had picked up a nasty drug habit. Second, all had picked up an --“Attitude.”

Somehow I learned to relate and communicate with my men. However, orders were different than upper management in the Army envisioned. Typically:

“Jerome, get in the APC. We’re going to the field,” said I.

“S--t. Why dat?”

“Because if you don’t I am going to take this entrenching tool and flail the hell out of you.”

“Getting in the PC, L-T.”

I wasn’t going to hit him and he knew it. It was just a game that we were both obligated to play.

Two members of my first platoon went back to Viet Nam and were killed. I brought back three German rocks and many others from the European countries that we visited. The third German rock was from Dachau, near Munich – a reminder of the brutality that is possible.

After 18 months I had had enough of freezing in the snows of Germany and volunteered to go to Viet Nam. My orders came but a week before I was supposed to rotate the Army came out with another deal – You Voluntary Indefinite pukes that have got two years in service can get out. In 1972, Viet Nam was beginning to wind down and the Army wanted to reserve the privilege of Combat for its Regular Officers.

We moved to Little Rock and I spent the next two years going to Graduate school getting an MBA degree. The GI Bill worked out pretty well for me and I joined an Army Reserve unit because I still owed the Army two more years of Active Reserve duty. The unit was a Civil Affairs (military government) Company and it was considerably different than my active duty units. Here, the unit was about 120 men, half were enlisted and half were officers. The average education was five years of college. This is where the smart people fought that war.

The next thirty years have flown by in a blink of the eye. I stayed in the Army Reserves and retired as Colonel several years ago. After I completed Graduate school I went to work for the University of Arkansas Industrial Research Center and spent about ten years learning how to put business deals together. After my apprenticeship, I spent the next twenty years either working for, or owning myself, several businesses.

The first business that I owned myself was a solar equipment business. The oil crunch of the mid 1970’s created some interest in developing alternative energy ideas. President Carter was committed to this and pushed through several programs. Unfortunately, when Ronald Reagan defeated him, Carter took the Solar programs with him back to Georgia. Overnight the fledgling solar industry in America died.

I survived, at least to the extent that I didn’t file bankruptcy, but it cost me my house to foreclosure and a marriage. I have a rock from the yard of that house as a reminder of that painful time, a small memento to a peanut farmer from Georgia that had a vision.

Bruised but still alive, I picked up my hoe and went back to work.

There were some successes and some failures but perhaps the most interesting business was my last. In 1999, I volunteered to go to the Central Asian country of Tajikistan as a consultant for a large American Foundation.

Finding this country on a map is easy. Go to Afghanistan and turn left.

I had considerable anxiety about this trip because most of the information available about it wasn’t good. It was the poorest of the old Soviet Bloc states and 80 percent of its economy was cotton. About 80 percent of the country is Muslim with per capita income less than 40 dollars a month. I was convinced that they were going to hate me because I was an American.

In 1999, there were no direct flights to Tajikistan so we had to fly to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and then drive to the border separating the two countries. The problem was that you couldn’t drive across the border because of ongoing political friction between the two countries. You got dropped off on one side then had to physically carry your luggage across a quarter mile of no man’s land to the other country’s entry point. This was high adventure because there was a lot of barbed wire and mean looking guys with AK 47’s. Fortunately, my ride and interpreter was waiting on the other side.

This began one of the most interesting chapters of my life.

Tajikistan was the tar baby of the Russian union. Some good comrade decided in the early 1920s, when the Soviets took the country over, that it would be a good place to grow cotton. Soil and climate conditions made this ideal. However, a single crop economy is dangerous for any country and when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 it was catastrophic for Tajikistan.

Overnight the country went from Communism to Democracy.

They paid a heavy price.

There was a struggle for power that left at least 100,000 people dead and I don’t even remember this being reported in the western press. By 1999 when I arrived, the country had settled down some but there still was an element of danger that hung in the air.

I learned immediately that there was little to fear. The Tajiks were wonderful. By this time in my life I had already traveled extensively and had learned a wonderful trick when I was in unfamiliar territory – when in doubt – smile. When I smiled, they not only smiled back, they opened their homes and their hearts to me.

One thing led to another and I decided that there probably could be some business here if a person could figure out how to move product out of a geographically land locked country. It was 4,000 miles to the nearest port at St Petersburg and rail had to pass through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. No one had shipped a Tajik product to the United States before.

It was business but I began to get close to my Tajik friends. Based on our backgrounds we had little in common but I felt that we could learn to work together. If they were working and feeding their families, and I helped even a little, they had little reason to hate me because I was an American.

The biggest problem I had in Tajikistan is that if they liked you they would hold up two fingers, about an inch apart -- “Fifty-milliliters?”

This was a trap. If they liked you enough to offer you had to accept or make enemies. “Fifty-milliliters” really meant a minimum of a half-liter of vodka, frequently more, consumed straight up. It took my liver six months to recover from a trip to Tajikistan.

I made two more trips to the country before I settled on machine made Persian rugs and had enough of an idea of how to move the rugs to take a swat at it. I couldn’t handle the money requirements on my own so I took in a partner.

Doing business there was relatively easy once we figured it out. I hired someone at Khujand that spoke English, Tajik and Russian (Tajik is their native tongue but all business is conducted in Russian, a hold over from the Soviet Bloc days). The Internet made communication easy.

Because the company there that manufactured the rugs had little operating capital they required that we pay for the rugs in advance. Fingers crossed, we wired the money.

I had estimated that it would take about 60 days to get the rugs across Asia, Russia and the Atlantic to our warehouse. It took six months, but we did it.

I immediately made arrangements to return to Tajikistan to order another container of rugs and made my fifth, and final, trip to this wonderful country. This container took only three months to arrive but when it did I got a shock from my partner. He needed money and wanted me to buy him out. My wife and I talked about it but because the only way that I could come up with the money was to mortgage my paid for home we decided against it. A risk that I would have been willing to take in my 30’s was much harder later in life. Besides, I had already lost one home to the bankers.

In a way I had failed my Tajik friends and this put a knot in my stomach. I took solace in the fact that we had blazed a trail that others would follow.

We sold out and I retired to do the thing that I had started out so many years ago to do – write. I had been thinking about this for years but family and money always got in the way – a career postponed yet inevitable. What I didn’t know is that getting that first great American novel published would be considerably more difficult than shipping rugs through Never Never Land.

I am really not in a hurry. One of the things that I have learned, painfully learned, is that a person that simply refuses to die gets awfully hard to kill. First, I must learn to write. I keep a saying above my computer monitor that I borrowed from the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett:

Fail

Fail again

Fail better

This saying sits next to a small plastic monkey that was given to me by a girl in Tajikistan. This five-cent toy is the most valuable thing that I own. It keeps the fire in my belly when I suffer the nagging self doubts that confront all beginning writers and it gives me clarity – the words are there, in my brain and in my heart. I must merely find them.

During my third trip to Tajikistan, January 2001, I had some free time and someone asked me to speak to a group of students. They were curious to see what an American looked like. I agreed but when we got to the school I noticed that there weren’t any students around. The school was closed that day because there was no electricity and it was close to freezing. When I walked into the classroom every seat was taken and there were some other students standing in the back of the classroom.

I decided that if these kids could come to school on a day when it was closed and there was no heat to hear me talk, that I could give my best motivation speech. The fact that they had been teaching English in schools there for years told me that they were doing their best to communicate with us. All we had to do was listen.

I talked for over an hour. First, I talked about the history of Tajikistan, why things were the way they were and then I talked about the future of the country. My points were simple and straightforward – put down the guns, work hard, give Democracy a chance. Our real choice was simple – we will either learn to live together in a world of ever dwindling resources, or we will die together.

When I was through a young girl, probably 11 or 12 years old, came up to me and she had tears in her eyes.

“Mr. Chuck. That is the best speech that I have ever heard. I want to give you my favorite toy.” She handed me that plastic monkey. This was probably the only toy she owned.

Tajiks are like that.

Another girl that was with her gave me the highest compliment that I have ever gotten.

“Mr. Chuck. You are the first American that we have ever met but if all Americans are like you – we like America.”

Foreign Policy through a child’s eye is not difficult.

Perhaps we can learn.

I have many rocks from Tajikistan and other countries in Asia and given the airline’s heavy tariff for overweight baggage this is quite an accomplishment.

My house is set up for a writer. It’s a four bedroom and I have my own office downstairs away from most distractions and the high speed Internet connection allows me to do easy research and keeps me in touch with my friends that are literally all over the world. For inspiration, I have my yard.

This is where I built my fountain.

When my wife and I bought this house, over 15 years ago now, it was a landscaping challenge. The house is built on a very steep hill and there were big oak and hickory trees that kept much of anything from growing. The soil was rock and red clay. Even weeds would gravitate to other yards.

I spent the first ten years working, in my limited spare time, getting the yard into some kind of order. I put in a sprinkler system, cobblestone walks, terraced and brought in load after load of topsoil that I had to wheelbarrow in from the front of the house because it was impossible to get a truck to my back yard. Slowly but surely I got plants that could grow in thick shade to flourish. I even put in a greenhouse so that I could winter over the tropical vegetation. During the summer when everything is out and blooming it rivals the finest botanical gardens anywhere. A variety of wildlife gathers in abundance.

I sensed that something was missing.

The day that we invaded Iraq, the second time, I started working on my fountain. It is not very large as fountains go, but it is unique.

It is made from a lifetime of memories.

It is a dedicated to Hope.

The fountain is about ten feet in length and three to four feet wide. It is built into the side of a hill in my back yard and the water drops, through a series of cantilevered rocks, nearly six feet to a small settling pool. I used native Arkansas rock for many of the bigger structural parts of the fountain but what gives it its real beauty is the amalgam of small stones from all over the world.

These stones, these memories, get added to the fountain a few at a time.

Each day, when I watch the news I learn of the Americans that died at war. That evening, I take a piece of my diary, usually one or two stones, say a short prayer and then I put the stones into the fountain.

Some would say that this makes little sense.

Perhaps, but it makes sense to me.

Bulldog would understand.