.Deer and Tiger Stars
2003 by Deanne Young
  "La Vie du Christ," the musty-smelling little book said, it's spine peeling like old waxed paper. "Dan Les Chefs-D'Oeuvre De la Pienture." He was trying to reproduce a face by Nicolas Froment, "1461-1482:La Re'surrection de Lazare."
Personally, he liked another face in plate 37, that of Lazarus himself : half skull, with a huge mouth of teeth  including the parts usually hid beneath the gums, deeply-socketed eyes. But his father /boss wanted the apostle next to Christ, who resembled cheery chubby Brother Nick, a friar up at the client church. Big eyelids, lots of curly black hair, shapeless robe concealing the condition of the body.
As he worked, he looked again at the cover art, faces looking as if lifted with silly putty and then stretched vertically to draw the mouths down in grotesque imitation of humanity. The Virgin's baby had the wizened face of an ancient soul, and the five digits of his right hand clung to the Lady's disproportionately  large thumb . He wanted a face like these, but a full-frontal was what the approved sketch had, and the Brother Nick fellow was one of the few full-frontals in the library. Not being a portrait artist, giving this church one of their own friars in glass intrigued him.
He used pencil first, filling in the blank face on the full-scale layout on his light  table with an enlargement of the tiny face from the slim book spotted with yellow dots of fungi , with roach poop stains in the centerfolds. He 'd erased and redrawn the droopy eyelids when his father stopped at his back, looked over his shoulder, patted it . Said he did good work.
"Thank you, " said the teen.
"I've got some bad news for you, I'm afraid," said his dad, the hand still on him.
"Yeah? What's that?"
"I want you to finish this character," the father said."He's looking great. But. But . But you have only 6 weeks, I'm afraid."
"I got a letter."
"It's too bad you're so damn healthy," the father said , heavily."That I didn't have the money to send you to college, get a deferment like the better-offs They say it's a poor man's war."
"I passed the physical," the boy said dully. He erased a perfect eyebrow, mechanically.
"Basic  training, son, December 8."
"Before Christmas?"
The father  watched him enlarge the bridge of the nose. Then he said,"You want to go to Canada? I can ask for a draw, fly you up there."
The son was silent.
"We wouldn't blame you."
"It's too damn cold up there , Dad. "
"And it's too hot in Viet Nam, kiddo. Think about it. We're behind you, whatever you do."
"No," said the boy."I wouldn't be able to come back ." He closed his lazy eye to see one nose.
"I don't know if you mean  from the war or from Canada , but you alive means more to us than no you at all. See here? So think hard about it."
Immortalizing a friar lost much of its appeal about there. The 18-year-old lit a Marlboro, lead dust on his hands be damned. He stood back to see the mural effect  it would have from the back of the sanctuary.
"I thought your eye would keep you out of this mess," his father said, reeking of depression.
"They don't," the son said.
"I gather that. I know this won't be an easy choice for a boy who's never been out of Florida. I can't tell you about the northern climes myself. Been here my whole life, too."
"I guess I'll go."
"Where?"
"The Army. I want to be able to come back , Dad."
His father left him then, walking through the office brightened with stained glass windows and into the yard of sunburnt grass. The boy stood, staring  at the beginnings of a church window that could last a thousand years. It's perfection was no longer high on his list. His list no longer existed at all.
For the next six weeks he grappled with the window, cutting glass to the pattern sheets, laying it over the design, now retraced in India ink. Tracing it with paint. Firing a few pieces on the asbestos block --head, hands, toes--in the floor- to -ceiling kiln, cooling them, adding matts, firing again, modeling and shading, until he had flesh-looking arms, leather-looking thongs. He worked over the curly hair , highly stylizing it . The curly -ques were soothing to make, took no thought .He painted stylized tree canopies and trunks so worsted they looked wrestled from ropes. He made the distant mountain tops a soft purple, gave the sheep the curliest wool ever seen in church art, but their faces looked real. He was best at faces. His sheep had mournful eyes. He worked so hard his right hand began to cramp on him . He'd never worked so long, so hard, on anything.
After work December 6 he tried to cup Sheila's breast with his cramped hand but she called him a pervert and pushed him away. It surprised him , because she'd initiated it all by placing that rough paw on that very breast a year ago. He didn't understand.
Not until the letter  came a week after he'd arrived in Nam. She must have written it the moment she'd seen him off, standing there with his family, pretending she was his girl still.
She didn't want to give up her youth waiting for someone who might not return . The very reason he hadn't chosen Canada, so he could return, and then this.
She was sorry.
Vietnam . He'd spent 8 weeks in basic at Fort Jackson, South Carolina,  doing more brass polishing and boot shining and training to look sharp  than he'd expected and 8 more  in AIT (Advanced Individual Training) learning combat engineering  --disassembling mines, clearing mine fields, building bridges and expedient roadways,  and demolition with C-4  and exploding detonator cord, which they'd line up across the length of a football field on poles with the one cord going through all the poles and the cord exploded so fast, all the C4 seemed to go off at the same time (which you could show to captured VC before wrapping one around their necks so they knew they weren't going anywhere) at Fort Leonard Wood,  Missouri, which was just out of St. Louis,  and which they called "Fort Lost in the Woods". The soldiers  sometimes  found snow outside their tents when they awoke. Stateside, the Army gave them bacon and eggs from a mess tent; which they did not get in Viet Nam--just C-rations on the road ( a can of turkey or spaghetti and meat balls and a can with a biscuit, a can of fruit) and B-rations( dehydrated eggs, dehydrated potatoes) in the compound.
His first view of Viet Nam was at Cam Rahn Bay, gorgeous country with picture-perfect sandy beaches and prettier palms than those that grew in central coastal Florida . Double-bowed sampans with thatched round huts and  occasional Navy destroyers and aircraft carriers  replaced the sailboats , yachts,  tankers, tugs, barges and freighters dotting the seascape of Tampa Bay.
Before his parents could develop his photographs and send copies back to him a jeep came for him, four men , to take up A1 to Ninh  Hoa. The men looked like they'd just crawled out of a desert and  sand-blasted their boots --shirtless, they held dusty old M14s and M79s, one M60 machine gun laying across a dude's knees.
The Florida teen thought,  What the fuck did I get into? Where am I going that will make me look like these guys? They all sized him up and one said,"Hey, Cherry, where'd you get the tan?" In Nam, he learned, tans sweated off too fast to keep.
"How long will it take me to look like you guys?" He said. They laughed and one said "Not long" and another said "A lifetime."


Going through his first roadside village  was a cultural shock. The homes were crude hootches ; old women walked down the road with long poles balanced on their shoulders with fruits and vegetables tied to one end in a basket an chickens in little cages on the other end. Almost everyone wore pointed straw hat. Old and young men sat on a little open porch at a table drinking tea and smoking and looking very solemn as the Engineers drove by them. A boy no older than ten stood by the porch smoking. Bicycles and motorcycles flew past the jeep both ways. After a long time the jeep pulled onto a two-track about a furlong in length that went past a Korean  infantry compound and an American guard house with a bunker behind it ending where  the 14th Combat Engineers   were building barracks  while sleeping in tents, 13 soldiers to a squad , dozens of squads in the company called  Charlie.  The latrine, the mess hall, and the CO command post were the only solid structures.
He met the Captain and First Sergeant and collected a rifle, flack jacket, poncho, helmet, and ammo from the supply tent .
Each tent had a wall of sandbags around it at chest level .His first job was to fill sandbags along the river  to fill up the compound area. It was a Sunday so they worked a half-day. The Sarge, called "Sarge", saw the newcomer eye bridge abutments on either side of the rive and said,"You'll be working on that tomorrow .But right now you guard while we fill sandbags. By the way, lock and load your rifle and keep it that way, always. One in the tube with the safety on for as long as you're in this part of the world." 
The Floridian said, " Uh, Sarge, How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys?"
"When they start shooting at you, " Sarge said and walked away.
Isn't that a little late? the teen said to himself. He was in the middle of a trail with villagers walking past him both ways and he had no idea what to do about it.  When a half-crazed soldier had cornered him in the latrine his first day ,the Florida kid  made his eyes bug out like the ones in the Christian art book, and, since his lazy one  was going in a different direction than the other , the soldier backed off , dropped his shovel, and said "You a blue-eyed devil!"  So here, he tried glowering at the passers-by...
The  14th Combat Engineers , Charlie Company  were a Brotherhood.  The stained glass artist was quickly in it. It was a tight thing--all these Americans, afraid and homesick, together. The kid wanted to feel his girl in his arms , see his mother cooking supper in the kitchen, run on the dunes with his dog .
So did all the others have preferences. Everyone smoked. The Army sold Camels and Marlboros for a dime a pack. Vietnamese boys on bikes and foot approached the soldiers on guard duty offering marijuana cigarettes already rolled in sealed cellophane packages , five joints for 500 p. It was so crystal-packed, the soldiers didn't care what it looked like. It blew them away. There were stories of kids approaching convoys as if for handouts, then tossing grenades, but the ones the engineers saw brought only good things. The Vietnamese people, the Florida boy decided, were respectable, although they'd relieve themselves roadside without hangups; resourceful, they re-used everything broken  for something else. The girls on bikes in cone-shaped straw hats were fine creatures, essential to the boy's desire to save their country and earn their respect.
Every engineer pulled guard duty once a month, sometimes for a couple of days straight. When his turn came, he joined 3 soldiers in the barracks on the far side of the motor pool , far from the CO, mess tent, and new barracks. Even the maintenance bay of the motor pool was on the far side of it from the guard shack, leaving the guards the closest Americans to the Korean camp sharing their two-track.
The Americans worked all day building barracks and then the bridge over the river , and now , at 7:30 p.m., the Florida kid and the other engineers on guard duty took turns sleeping four hours, serving two.
The Florida kid was exhausted as always by nightfall. Convoys had hauled in wood from mountainous Delot,  a pine forested area that reminded him of South Carolina. They brought creosote poles, 2 by 4s, 6 by 6s, 12 by 12s of fresh pine. The engineers drove the poles into the river bed with a piling driver to be the main support for the bridge. That day a guy was on a 12 by 12 extended over the water from the bridge when a pin broke on the crane and the whole pile driver came down and broke the 12 by 12, sending engineer, pile driver, and 12 by 12 into the water. The Florida boy, who'd done cave-diving for years with his older brother in Crystal River, Florida, and found mastodon teeth and wagon parts diving  in the Hillsborough River in Tampa , dived into the 20- foot- deep water and pulled the other man out, earning his first of three bronze stars , maybe; nobody ever explained why he got three bronze stars. He had to guess.
Now , his first guard duty that night  was uneventful, except that he and the other 3 guards became closer, playing a card game called Budman. Tree was a skinny fuck from Alabama, Rooster a chubby , naturally happy guy from Atlanta, and the other guy was a Samoan from Hawaii .
The Florida boy, on guard alone, could hear everything around him, see up close and far away, pick out shapes, colors, anything that didn't belong. There was a haze over Ninh Hoa, a glow over the village across the rice fields while  the Florida kid sat on a 2 by 6  as his three mates slept behind him in the bunker. He could hear his heart beat. He couldn't believe he was there.
They rose at 5:30 and ate as usual and worked on the bridge again all day. But today a unit was sent to Delot,  including the Florida artisan, whose brother had just shipped him a Gibson folk-singer  guitar. The engineers sat on a ridge when the work was done and played and sang what they knew, " The Sounds of Silence" "Green Backed Dollar", "500 Miles". It was the age of acid rock, and the sergeants played soul music real loud at night , so they didn't know they had a cache of folk-singers in their midst til now. And then the Samoan took a turn , playing songs he'd learned from guitar masses back home. They were startled by the sound of a chopper in a sky empty as far as they could see. Then it appeared, coming up out of the ground below them . At the same time, an old steam engine pulling about ten cars chugged into view as it wound up the mountain like a garland going around a Christmas tree. The smell of pine intoxicated the Florida kid. As the Samoan , a guy with an extra dollop of spirituality , sang "Today" ...."Today is my story and now is my moment , I'll laugh, and I'll cry, and I'll sing..", the Floridian recognized that tomorrow and yesterday could not really be savored--only now. This lusty moment was to be never again. He felt a deep down sadness, for this was now him, soothed by pine wood smells but never to sleep again without a loaded gun under his pillow. How could he ever leave this and resume watching The Beverly Hillbillies? He could not perceive it.
He was afraid to go home.He'd changed too much. He belonged here.So when Tree and Rooster and a few other dudes invited him to sneak into town with them, he went. They had a brand new sargeant whose unfamiliarity gave them the edge they'd gotten the year before from substitute teachers in high school. As the sarge  yukked it up with some lutenants  and the ancient  first sargeant in the EM tent over some brews, showing off his pet mongoose which rode on his shoulder, the Spec 4s sneaked into Nin Wa on foot and had their first taste of genuine Vietnamese cuisine--dog in an excellant sauce. But the local young men harassed them into leaving before they could visit a hooch , and they left quickly after dining except for a fellow who refused, saying he had a girl to see.
As they walked up A1 the four American soldiers were aware that their Vietnamese hecklers were sneaking up behind them. A language barrier to their advantage, they made a plan and fanned out across the road and, at the count of three, turned and bent down on one knee and took imaginary aim with imaginary rifles. Their only real weapon was the pistol the dude who'd stayed behind had brought.
But it worked--the Vietnamese men split for the rice paddies and swamps to either side of the road even as the Americans vowed that their rifles would be body appendages from that point on.
The Americans ran. They ran to the 2-track and up it , until they heard  safetys click on both sides of them in the dark. Tree  put an arm around the Florida kid's shoulder and the other around the fellow on his other side and began tripping, as if needing their support, and singing "God Bless America" offkey and loudly, as though he were drunk. They weaved and stumbled and belted out the song until they reached their compound safely.
The next morning the sergeant pulled one of them from a line-up --the one who'd stayed behind--he'd raped a woman.It was a relief for the others , who thought they'd been busted.
The new sarge then somehow got movies sent up from Da Nang every Saturday . The platoon built an outdor screen and opened the suds( warm beers and cokes, 10 cents each ) and watched flicks , except those with guard duty.
Which was ,soon enough, the boy from Florida's turn again, and two others, who slept in the barracks while he sat alone in the guard shack in front of them.
A little after 2 a.m. he watched  a weather balloon rise slowly to the east of them , by the coast, that outshone the stars.It had gotten very quiet, and time seemed to stand still.
He heard the tiger about then, a low growl that could only come from a mother of an animal, an animal about ten feet away in the darkness. He'd been sucking on one of the ready-rolls the kids sold so proliferately, cupping the flame so as not to be seen by his own people or others, in an instance where all were temporarily enemies. Back home there was always a big cat of some variety at the pathetic zoo a mile from his house , and he'd heard such a growl while walking his tri-colored collie behind the animal compounds in the park part. it freeked Rex right out, as though the dog, which must have smelled the dander, had not sized the animal until he'd heard the size of the vocal chords.
The young Floridian had been so certain of a generous privacy there on watch  that he'd gotten good and stoned and been off in a day dream. But now the hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention, his butt tightened. Less tan ten feet away in the ditch was an ancient monster with the strength of ten men.With one bound it could pounce on top of him. A friend of his father's had recounted one time an adventure in India while walking down old railway tracks, thick bush on each side, with 10 yards of clearing before it. A tiger sprang out of nowhere, landing inbetween the tracks and  disappearing in a tenth of a second. What  power.  What speed.  What stealth. The front site of the Florida boy's M14 A.R. hit horizontal , the safety clicked off and the selector switch flipped over to automatic fire as if  on their own.
Backing up with slowly, eyes wide, blood rushing, the boy felt  every crevice, every pebble under his combat boots.When he reached the interior of the bunker  he leaned up against the sandbag half-wall in the firing position  and  yelled for the others to get out of the bunker and atop it.
"Tiger!" His voice rang out into the silent night.
"Huh? Tiger?" The waking said.Tree's voice:"If he sees one  there's only half a one-"
The bunker was made of sandbags but had perforated steel plating on the roof , with more sandbags atop that. Everyone knew you could fry an egg on the PSP, it got so hot.But now it meant safety. The three  soldiers got as ready as possible to smoke a tiger , the Floridan climbing up last.
Just as the last part of him cleared the roof a small buck sprang across the two-track.  Tree was looking the other way,  And so it was the Floridian and the Hawaiian  who saw the tiger rise out of the ditch across the 2-track about 10 feet from them and leap after the deer, both running right past the bunker , through barbed wire and over a mine field soundlessly. The Americans never for a moment expected the duo to make it but the animals breezed up and over a far hill and out of sight, , undetonated, lucky, a beautifully executed performance.The two engineers saw the respect in each others eyes for the beauteous thing they had just seen.
"Damn," said Tree, looking behind them. " Not one mine went off and that field is suposed to watch our backs."
The boy from Florida had had experiences in his youth that elicited accusations of daydreaming or worse, "Somebody get me a shovel". That the Samoan too had seen this impossible scene bound the two youths together as invisibly but as toughly as the shared veins and bones of the Siamese twins living at the cheap motel up the alley from his dad's stained glass shop.God had chosen them to witness the fantastic, way over in Southeast Asia.
Nobody got down. Nobody moved. They were still on top of the bunker when the new sargeant came up the next morning barking,"What the hell are you doing up there? Why aren't you on guard duty?"
"I am," the Samoan said.
"What??!" The sergeant yelled angrily.
"Tiger," said Tree.
The sergeant sort of backed up as his eyes darted all around and he put up a hand to be sure his mongoose stayed on his shoulder. He looked as if he were going to join them but then scurried back to camp.
The mongoose ran off that night and never returned.A few days later they moved to Phan Rang, to a big Air Force base that even had a McDonalds. Phan Rang was very hot and the 14th Engineers stayed on base, watching the jets and C130s take off and land . There was a helicopter graveyard there . They were there to do road work.
The guard duty cycled until it was the Floridian's turn , this time with a fellow named Rat from Pontiac, Michigan and a heavy-set dude with inner peace like Rooster's. There was just one shack, like a miniature house with an open front and a little room at the back not even sealed off from the open front, with two cots in it. When their shift began they watched from afar as a guy came in from a canine corps with his dog.
"How you like to be him," Rat said., as he and the Floridian settled into the bunks. "Them canines got to be crazy mofos, alone with their dogs alla time. I coudn't pull patrol with just a damn dog for company. I'd go insane."
"They probably do,"the Floridian agreed amiably.
"You gotta watch them ones," Rat said.
Around two in the morning the Samoan came out to the guardpost, drunk as a skunk.
"I gotta tell you sompun," he said to the stained glass artist. "Come on, get up." he pulled on his arms.
They got up and listened, smoking cigarettes, as he told them his news. The guy from canine had some great gory stories, if you liked those kind, and a picture of a dead and naked VC that looked like a kid, he was so short. But the Samoan seemed to be holding in  what he'd really come about . Finally he allowed as to how the canine dude had befriended him special and taken him aside and given him a grenade.
Since the night the Koreans had clicked off their safetys as four of them wound through the edge of the Korean compound, the engineers always carried their rifles, round loaded and chambered. But grenades were only handed out, at two apiece, when they were on the road or in the field. The Army was keeping close tabs on them to ensure none made their way to the states.The Samoan showed the grenade to his buddies and then plunged into another story, this one obviously taking an emotional toll on him.
It seemed the canine guy had passed out after a lot of boozing , leaving the Hawaiian alone with the new sarge. The sergeant then put the moves on the Samoan. The Samoan rebuffed him. The end. The Samoan was done talking ."I gotta go get some sleep," he said.
"Hey," Rat said."Watch out for that homo."
At 5 a.m. the Floridian was knocked out of his bunk, clean out of his bunk and onto the wooden floor, deaf for some reason for a minute or two. He and Rat scrambled out of the barrack to the pudgy cat on watch, who had no idea either what had happened, but saw smoke rising in a small plume across the motor pool so radioed the CO's office.. Everybody had heard the explosion anyway so a captain and a luitenant came up along wih the sargeant , with a flashlight, and looked about the motor pool, but all was dark--there was no sign of anything on fire.
"You all go back to sleep and I'll write the report,"said the sargeant. "Williams, keep a look out."
A little later that morning a fellow named Dudley went to the motor pool to work on his truck and saw what had been the Samoan beyond the enclosure, in pieces.
Special Agents came then and picked up the remains.The Floridian and Tree were to report to work under all circumstances no matter what and so were at the toolbox as usual to load up for the day's work when a yellow dog ran up to them with the Samoan's brains in his mouth. Tree kicked the shit out of it and it ran squealing off.
Then it was no longer business as usual. The three who'd been on guard duty, a couple of guys the Samoan had talked to in the barracks, and the gay sargeant were trucked to an office on the base and questioned. The sergeant was gone before anyone had even begun to talk of fragging him.
When the boy who'd hitherto never left Florda finally returned, came back, went home, he found life there very disturbing. The lack of intense, jackknife  living and feeling, the dullness over everything from busses braking on the corner to his family's glazed expressions as they watched television commercials as avidly as the programming, discussing nothing important between themselves, pained him, made him yearn for the real world he'd been blown out of. His tri-colored collie,Rex, had died while he was overseas; they hadn't told him because they didn't want to upset him.
The son had heard that the plump fellow he'd done guard duty with had gone up into the mountains with another company, pulling a bulldozer on his lowboy while a luitenant rode with him. Took a rocket hit in the door that sent the whole nine yards over a cliff.The luitenant had been brought up first and then the Spec 5 was dragged up the mountainside with a chain because of his weight, dying before he ever reached a hospital. The son tried to resume his life, continuing to paint religious scenes on glass for his father. But he  couldn't talk about anything meaningful, nowadays.
Years later, after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was made, a scale model called "The Moving Wall" came to Tampa, and his wife and daughters were excited, because he hadn't left Florida since Vietnam, so hadn't seen the real Wall. They coaxed him into a picnic at the park sponsering it. The lake was polluted and No Swimming signs marred the scenic vista, souring the trip for the wee ones who were hot , tired, and cranky and of a mind to sneak into the water anyway, even though there was an alligator warning sign, too. They felt, deep under, that their heroic dad could save them should a gator pop up, that Daddy could dive in and swim to them with a few strokes and wrestle the gator underwater and come up alone. It was the only tale he told of Nam, the day he saved the guy on the 12 by 12. The family tramped through a squad tent and a guard post made of sandbags and then walked their dad to the black reflective wall.
But no names would come to him. He'd blocked it out --the faces, the voices, the times. Tears came to his eyes, for whoever might not have made it out of a tent by a two-track, like most of the boy from Florida.


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.A story by Deanne Young
IN case of confusion, this is an old man so must be the dad. See how stylistically the bottom art differs from the top--must be the teen's. See the claw of a hand? Must be his demons! Art actually by a father-son Tampa Florida team (oh-oh; is the rest of this story true?) Copyright  Joseph D. Myers, bottom; Daniel C. Myers and Deanne Young, top.