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Summer of ’66

By Ken Rodgers

Every morning, not long after sunrise, I stopped the bus in the middle of the road to watch two Gila monsters sunning themselves on a big, round rock. Past both the village of Chuichu and the dirt track to the old Butterfield Stage Station called Jackrabbit. Around a curve and there, the monsters taking in the light like we weren’t there, bus engine rumbling, the drillers and their helpers yelling at me from the back of the bus to get my ass in gear and get out to the jobsite.

Not far from the old Lakeshore Mine north of the village of Komelik where mesquites crowded the road, a ringtail cat would sometimes bolt from one side to the other. I liked how their long tails attached to their short-legged, sleek bodies flew out behind like a striped flag on the back of a motorcycle.

East of Kohatk, I turned off the highway and drove down a dirt road to the core drilling site between the Tat Momoli and the Vekol Mountains.

Sometimes the Santa Rosa Wash rose after hard rains on the border with Mexico and we would park the bus and take off our shoes and socks and walk across the sandy bottom.

By then the morning was already hot and the cold blast of water shocked us.

A driller by the moniker of One-armed Slim always wore riding-heeled cowboy boots to work, and he hated to take them off. I suppose it was hard for a one-armed man, and me being the new guy—the young guy—I got to help him pull them off. He’d sit on a big rock and stick out a leg and I’d step over, my rear end to his face, and gripped with my left hand on the heel and my right hand on the instep. Then he’d take the sole of his other foot and push my butt, and I’d pull a boot off, then repeat with the other boot. After we crossed the wash, I’d help him pull those filthy, oil-splotched boots back on.

The whole time, Slim cussed and bitched about working conditions and “shouldn’t treat a union man this way.” Then he’d rise with his lunch pail in his one hand and walk to the red pickup that would haul us up to the drill site.

It was summer on the Sonoran Desert, and hot. And a long way from town. Besides driving the bus that carried the crews, I delivered oil and mud to the drill rigs, mud being a sacked product that was dumped in a mud pit filled with water from the spigot on the back of a water truck that hauled H2O from the old Lakeshore Mine east of our worksite. I drove the water truck, one of two, depending on the truck. One was a new GMC with a bright red cab, and the other a beat-up old Chrysler product with a three-speed “brown light” transmission that was hell for me to shift when the tank was full of water and we were going up, or down. There were two gear shifts instead of one.

The days were long and blistering. We had two kinds of rigs, a rotary that bored down fast to a certain depth—four or five hundred feet—making a shaft that would be used by a core rig that bored long and deep. When the drill bit was pulled, the core of earth inside would be picked up by a geologist from Newmont Mining—the company we drilled for—and analyzed for mineral content, mostly copper. The Vietnam War was beginning to get hot and deadly, and bullets need a lot of copper as does wiring for radios and jet bombers and other warfighter instruments.

Sometimes I’d become a driller’s helper and climb the drill rig derrick and, using a pipe wrench, connect or disconnect a piece of drill stem as the driller either drilled deeper or pulled out. Sometimes he went fishing down there a thousand feet or farther when the drill bit hung up.

Usually it was Slim I helped, and he bitched at me continuously. He was old and cranky, old at least as I saw him. He was considered the best of the drillers.

Once while in the derrick, I accidentally kicked a pipe wrench and it fell down, down, and almost bonked Slim on the head. I shouted when the tool departed and he was able to dodge the wrench which was heavy and may have given him a hell of a wound or a broken neck. He wore a silver-colored hard hat, but from up there, the wrench would have become a projectile.

When the Saguaro cactus blooms fruited on the big cacti growing on both sides of the dirt road, the locals, Papagos as we called them (now going by their name for themselves, Tohono O’odham), harvested the fruit. A man would drive up in a pickup and unload a horse from the trailer hooked on behind, and two or three women would climb from the truck and he’d mount his horse and one of the women would hand him a long pole with a sharp metal blade at the tip. He’d ride to a saguaro and cut off the fruit and ride to the next and the next and the next as the women scrambled behind with baskets where they’d collect the fruit.

Usually on the evening drive home, the others were quiet, not like morning time when they badgered me about did I get laid last night, did I get any on me.

We parked the bus in front of a bar near the old Skid Row hotel where the crew stayed and I’d climb into the pickup cab of one of the driller’s helpers who lived in town, and he’d drive me home and pick me up again the next morning.

Most nights I wanted to party, but my father demanded I sleep and rest. Having a job and being responsible were important to him.

It was the summer after my freshman year in college, and I’d avoided being a total failure, Cs and Ds marking my report card. All I wanted to do was drink beer, chase girls, and play pickup games of basketball close to the dorm where I lived.

I’d been raised in a home where the folks’ word was law and to break that law caused problems. I broke that law often. Since my parents were footing the bill for my higher education, they thought they had a right to tell me what to do and how to live.

Sometimes I drove out to the drill site hungover like a drunk dog, but I was in good company because most of my fellow workers were hard drinking. “Roughnecks,” they liked to call themselves, veterans of the West Texas oil fields and Oklahoma, too.

I never liked the work. Didn’t like my fellow workers much, either. We were from different universes, and I was younger than every one of them.

My first day on the job, instead of driving a water truck, I went into the hot galvanized metal shed where they kept nuts and bolts and straightened up the mess, making sure this bolt went there, where it belonged, and this nut, this washer, here.

The boss seemed happy with my work and gave me another chore. A semi load of fifty-pound bags of mud compound sat outside. He told me to unload it and stack it. It was probably 110 degrees. Boiling sun. I began. It kicked my butt. The driver stood in the shade of the truck and watched and smoked cigarettes while sweat boiled my eyeballs and I thought I’d die.

Once he said, “Son, I’d help, but I’m a union driver and I ain’t allowed to.”

I managed to get the job done and on the road home felt some satisfaction that I’d survived that ordeal, having pulled every sack off and added to a neat stack.

It wasn’t the only muscle-necessary task. I often had to roll fifty-five-gallon metal drums full of specialty oils—heavy heavy heavy drums—which I’d need to stand up, insert a spigot in the top, roll it, wrestle the drum over to a rack where I’d lay it down so it could be used.

One thing my father taught me when he delivered gas and oil was how to manage a 450-pound drum of oil.

After a couple of months, I got laid off. They told me they were cutting back. They told me it was because I was the last guy hired, but I suspect it was really because I didn’t care about oil, mud, drill stem, core and copper.

Then, out of the blue, I joined the USMC. I never had any direct inclination to make that move. I just did it.

Hauled a friend to Phoenix one morning so he could enlist somewhere before being drafted, and when he went to talk to the Navy, I walked into the Marine Corps Recruiter’s Office across the hall and signed up for four years.

I remember outside the door, hesitating, looking at the posters, the window glass, the door handle. Did I or didn’t I?

Later, I told everybody I enlisted for two years. I thought, after I’d signed the papers, I was suddenly stupid and I didn’t want anybody to know I’d committed myself for four years active duty.

Maybe I went for four because they guaranteed me Air Wing, but that never happened. I was a grunt and after surviving Vietnam, kind of proud of it.

Nevertheless, after enlistment, I had no job, so I thought about spending days asleep, nights out raising hell and drinking, so the first thing that happened, I went off to Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, with three friends.

We got to the border just before closing time and we had to bribe the guards to let us cross into the town of Sonoyta. We cruised the streets at night in our dark blue Chevy, looking for a whorehouse, I suspect, but didn’t find one and maybe we weren’t excited enough, so southwest we went to the coast, and ended up parking the car at Punta Pelicano, trying to sleep until the sun came up.

We didn’t sleep much, but when the sun did rise, we donned snorkeling gear and flippers and carried spear guns into the water to try to kill some fish. The tide was strong and it beat me against the rocks, cut my legs, arms, wore me out. I never saw a fish. The others talked about shooting at big fish, but they missed, or so it seemed, since we came out of the water empty handed.

Contrary to all advice and warning, I drank the water, chewed the ice, ate the chili and refried beans and flan and got amoebic dysentery.

My buddies managed to get me home after my threatening to beat them with a two-by-four in the cabin we had broken into and appropriated because one of my friends knew the owner back in the States.

I ended up in the ICU for seven days where, in my high fever hysteria, I punched the night nurse. So they straight-jacketed me and tied me to the bed to keep me from harming the staff or from getting up and falling, banging my head.

“For your own safety,” they said. But damned inconvenient when your bowels run like an open faucet day after day after day.

But I survived. My doctor told me he hadn’t seen that “bug,” as he called it, since New Guinea in World War II.

I survived and went to my Marine Corps physical so I could go to boot camp. I passed, never telling them I’d been sick with dysentery, or that I’d been out of the country, which, when I initially enlisted, the recruiter told me not to do.

On the Greyhound bus from Phoenix to San Diego, my old fifth grade mate, Ray Short, rode with me into the world of the United States Marine Corps.

The highway to San Diego was empty desert dark and what waited at the destination unknown, a big mouth ready to swallow me. From failed college kid to reluctant core driller’s helper to the ICU, veins loaded with needle holes from IV feedings of whatever they gave me to keep me from dying, to United States Marine.

And what I became, besides.

And I survived, and here it’s sixty years gone.

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Dead End Street?

Photo by Ken Rodgers

It’s been nearly six years since I last put up a piece of writing on this site. When I placed the last post, something told me, “I’m done.” And I thought I would move on to another frontier above and beyond the irregular musings I had been writing for this website about war, remembrance, country, travels.

If I recall correctly, I even decided I might not ever write again. But when COVID endured, I found myself on the back porch, in the morning dark, writing short poems about dog barks, mysterious bird calls, motorcycle engines revving.

And now, here I sit, pecking away at the keyboard.

And why?

I am pushing eighty years of age, and I have had lots of thoughts about when is a good time to stop traveling, writing, taking photos, learning. Am I done, and if not, when will I be done, and the unthinkable that keeps kicking out the windows of my thoughts: when will I be gone?

Earlier this year, my former Boise Radio writing program co-host Rebecca Evans invited me to join a panel of combat vets at the 2027 American Writing Program’s (AWP) annual convention in Chicago next March to talk about war and veterans and aftermath of combat.

Chicago. In March. Made me think of Lou Rawls and the song he sang about the hawk, the wind. The song was called “Dead End Street” and in Nam, all my soul brothers sang that song and I liked it.

Not sure I’d appreciate the cold, snow, bluster, ice now.  Did I want to fly into that? And hang out around thousands of people, almost none of whom I know?

Did I think I really had something to say that would matter, that hasn’t already been said, that might change things about war and remembrance and survival and coming home—the long home, the lonely home, where once you’ve tasted the blood of combat, becomes for the most part, a home lived in by you alone.

But I said yes.

And AWP wants photos and bios and websites, and I have a website. This one, and I have others that I am associated with.

I gave them this website’s address and there it was, boom! The posts on the site were from a gone-by time and I suddenly felt like a naked kid at the swimming pool in the middle of the day, with all the cool girls watching.

Yikes, all my writing old and stale…well, maybe not stale, but old.

So, If I’m going to do this, I need to get cracking with some writing for this website.

So, today it starts.

Betty and I have summered in the mountains looking for elk and bighorn sheep, mule deer and pronghorn.

We’ve had enough rain from Summer’s monsoon to dampen the woods and limit the fire danger.

The flowers, asters and daisies, primrose and penstemon, the sneezeweed and sunflowers and mullein have been in full regalia: yellows and purples and reds and whites and pinks. The rainbow of color stops you in your tracks.

And mushrooms—some red, deadly and psychedelic and others edible—thrive, although I don’t trust my ability to tell the difference.

The Mountain Bluebirds tinted as blue as I have ever seen, although maybe they were that blue last year and the year before and the year before that.

Nevertheless, birds have bred and nested and fledged in multitudes, and the insect population is long and strong, so the birds that eat bugs must be happy.

The weather prognosticators predict heavy moisture for the year here in Arizona due to an anticipated Super El Niño. We are, as the old timers say, “drouthed out,” and have been for over twenty years. The federal government has cut the Colorado River allocation for farms and big metro areas in Arizona by something like 27%.  That hurts, but still the politicians promote growth and with it, the concomitant extras—parks, swimming pools, golf courses and locations and activities that consume a lot of water and which are not part and parcel to our natural desert environment.

To complicate matters, lawsuits about who gets what water and how much have begun and will take decades for the law to sort.

Some tree ring records for this part of the world from back in the 12 and 1300s indicate there was a drought that lasted a hundred years, or maybe more…one hundred twenty, one hundred twenty-five.

We need snow in the mountains for years to come—maybe ten or twenty—in piles and drifts and blasts of cold. That also needs to happen in Utah and Wyoming, and Colorado and New Mexico or this region is going to dry up like a winter leaf and blow off in massive curtains of brown dust and all the human dreams of happiness and wealth and industry, and what then?

Are we doomed to be ruins like Mohenjo Daro in the Indus River Valley or the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia? Are Phoenix and Tucson going to be nothing but remnants, like the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, or Chaco Canyon? Or Montezuma’s Castle outside Camp Verde, AZ?

The powers that be are scrambling to find water. When they should have been paying attention to this, twenty years ago or longer, they were selling land and begging people to move to the Valley of the Sun.

Well, what now?

We have fires so monstrous they create their own weather and defeat the firefighters’ attempts to put them out. The trees are sick. Bark beetles are eating them to death. Every year I come north to the high country, lines and spots of chocolate brown pine and fir and spruce infest locations where once the green beauty of the land stunned me.

Again, what now?

Pray for rain?

Pray for cold?

Pray for snow?

Dirty Jim Morriison, in the Doors’ song Soft Parade, shouted, “You cannot petition the lord with prayer.”

Most people who know me will not be surprised when I say I tend to agree with Dirty Jim.

We’ve been sending out kind thoughts and prayers for all sorts of disasters large and small, but the prayers don’t seem to stop anything from happening, and they don’t heal the wounds caused by so much of what happens in this world.

So, then what?

Don’t misunderstand what I am getting at here. This essay won’t be about me bitching about human-forced climate change, yet maybe it is, and maybe we will only know sometime in the future.

For decades, I fought the notion of climate change—human-induced—and maybe it is happening.

But what I am writing isn’t about you necessarily giving up your big pickup.

Your big car.

Going electric vehicle or any of that.

This is about water.

Or no water.

And what if the drought ends in one hundred years, or eighty or fifty, do we think we can continue on like we are, drinking and drinking and drying out this land, and still exist as we have been?

Maybe I’m missing something, but I wonder if, in some instances, saying a prayer isn’t a way to say to yourself, “Well, I did something.” I suspect I will get a little hostility from some of my prayerful friends, but I wonder if they might think it’s time to do something else, too?

Yeah, kneel, pray, chant.

But how about we try some action, too?

The big lakes that store our water and help make power are dangerously low.

Our rivers are out of gas.

My uncle hand dug a well outside Maricopa, Arizona, in the 1920s and powered it with a Model T engine. Now the water level in that location is hundreds of feet below what it was one hundred years ago. Aquifers all over the west, and even the Midwest, are being drained and not recharged.

Yeah, maybe we can pay someone else in the Colorado River system to not use their water and to sell it to us. But if we remain dry longer than hoped, that’s going to be a tough sell to keep them from at some point telling us to go float a boat.

Or we can desalinate. Expensive. But the pipelines and the vulnerabilities of that: terrorists, culprits, earthquakes, etc., etc., etc.

It’s all going to cost us a hell of a lot more money than what we’ve paid for water in the past and now.

But maybe expensive is an answer to the profligate uses of water. The more we have to pay, the more efficient the use. Think Dune, the book by Frank Hebert, and the movies made from that tale that showed how a place with almost no water could maintain humanity.                                                                                                                                    

I reckon we better get our butts in high gear. Fill in swimming pools. With dirt, like my father did in the late 1980s when everybody laughed at him for such idiosyncratic, even crazy, behavior.

Make lawns harsh landscapes of cactus and rock. Plant species native to this environment. Kill your grass.

We wasted water.

We grow crops that are not suited to this land.

What are we going to do when our crops can’t grow because there is no H2O?

Maybe we will end up eating hearts of Agave cactus.

And mesquite beans.

I ask myself, Is this a dead-end street?

We shall see.

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WestPac Murderers

Blue skies, warships in the harbor—bells, engines, clangs, horns, scent of diesel fuel, the rasps of claxons, tang of the ocean’s ebb and flow—and standing inside the sally port of the brig, the Westpac Murderers who, every couple of months, appeared at our facility. Chained together, hands and arms. And legs. Ball and chain. Like the gangs we saw in movies set in Alabama and Florida and Texas.

I woke yesterday thinking of long-gone days, youth, the USMC, my time serving at the brig, 32nd Street Naval Station, San Diego.

The Westpac Murderers arrived from Okinawa and we screened them before shipping them on to Portsmouth Naval Prison. Convicted by courts-martial, the worst of the worst: murderers among our troops in Vietnam.

Most of the regular prisoners inhabited our brig for hating the Navy, going over the hill to get away, disobeying orders; but these Westpac prisoners toted a different import. Most of the murderers were Marines. Rarely a Corpsman or a Seabee.

The first time the murderers appeared in the sally port, ball-and-chained and surly, I was working the brig’s isolation row which contained cells with a wall-mounted metal rack and thin mattress for sleeping, a washbasin and toilet.

We locked tough guys, rabble-rousers, rule-breakers on the isolation row and certain Westpac Murderers.

32nd Street Naval Station, photo courtesy of Wikipedia

That initial time, we confined two of them there. Deemed dangerous and a threat to good order, they spent their time locked in, no windows, one overhead light, let out once a day to shower and once a day for a few minutes of exercise.

My duty at the time consisted of pacing from one end of the long, thin row and back again, listening to echoes of my footsteps on the concrete deck and the metal walls of the cells, watching the reflection of the overhead lights bounce off the deck, smelling the chow when it arrived, as well as the faint scent of feces from the heads. And watching the prisoners.

Three times a day a detainee delivered a tray of chow to each of my Westpac Murderers, set the big silver tray on the deck, then stepped back. Sometimes, I’d take a good gander at the slabs of ham, the fried spuds, the white bread.

An hour or so later, the delivery prisoner would return and pick up the empty tray, or sometimes not so empty, depending on whether the chow could be stomached.

The smoking lamp was never lit on the isolation row. But one evening I caught drifts of tobacco smoke coming from the direction of one of the murderer’s cells.

I couldn’t sneak up on the offending convict. He flushed his tobacco down the toilet before I could capture him. And I couldn’t make accusations without evidence.

I wondered where the contraband smokes came from. Another con? One of the other three Marines who stood duty on the isolation row?

Every shift I watched, and finally hit a lick. When the delivery con picked up an empty tray from the cell, I noticed three unfiltered cigarettes had appeared on the deck just inside the hatch, against the bulkhead.

Blogger Ken Rodgers, photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers,

Ebullient, I yanked the delivery prisoner out of the hatch and reached in to grab the smokes when the big black hand of that Murderer Marine reached down and touched the back of mine. As I looked at him as if he were an enemy I might need to kill, he whispered, “Hey, brother, have a heart.”

We stared into each other’s eyes for what seemed like minutes, me in my half-crouch and he leaning over, our hands meeting over those Camels or Lucky Strikes or Pall Malls.

For years I’ve thought about that experience and scolded myself for the decision I made, for letting that convict keep those cigarettes.

Later I eased over to the screening department where they stored records on all the convicts. I talked the duty NCO into letting me read that murderer’s file. He was convicted of tossing some Vietnamese prisoners out of a helicopter during a soiree above rice paddies not far from Danang. The Marines in the chopper had been questioning the prisoners about NVA movements.

I wondered as I read the file why they conducted the interrogation in a CH-46 instead of in a company or a battalion command post. But I knew the answer to that. In my experience, one of the means employed to make a Viet Cong talk was to drag him—or her—through the treetops while suspended on a cable hung from a helicopter. I’d witnessed that. Or if you had a couple of prisoners, just toss one out a hundred feet up in the air and after he—or she—careened through the air on a very short journey to die on the deck below, the survivor would usually tell you anything you wanted to know.

Then I wondered about my convict on the isolation row, if he’d thrown the Viet Cong out the door under orders, or if he threw him out for other reasons, and then I thought about how war offers all kinds of reasons to kill people we wouldn’t kill under other circumstances.

I hated the war in Vietnam. The mud, the rain, the leeches, the snakes. The lack of sleep, people shooting at you, you shooting back. The fear. And there is never a resolution, one war leads to the next and the next and the next.

I know! I know! Hitler was a monstrous hombre and maybe that war was indeed the good war but In Korea and Vietnam, we just fought to maintain the status quo and in the meantime, lots of deaths and all the aftermath we still struggle with and nothing has really changed. We fight wars and kill and then, in many, many cases, turn around and trade dollars for yen and swap cotton for computer parts with our former enemies.

Before that convict showed up on the isolation row, I hadn’t analyzed how I really felt about what we do as humans when it comes to organized killing. How I was trapped between war and peace, duty and rebellion. For fifty plus years I’ve fretted about this stuff. I’m pretty loyal, and when I agree to something, like an enlistment in the Marine Corps, I am very serious about holding up my end of the bargain.

When that man’s hand touched mine and he looked me in the eye, it rocked me back on my metaphorical heels. Why was I messing with him? Why mess with anybody like we did back then in the brig, in the Corps, in the war? Why? Why lock men up for killing folks when what you do in war is kill people?

It confused me. And still does.

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At Home–1968

January is a month when Khe Sanh veterans sleep less, wrestle monsters in their dreams, and battle with recollections of death, maiming, and savage fright that slashes like a wolf’s bite. Combat’s aftermath.

One of today’s memories: Arizona in 1968, me home from Vietnam, stunned and weak, yet elated to be out of Khe Sanh.

At night on my 21-day respite from the USMC, I hung with my old hometown buddies and struggled to understand what had come between us. During those thirteen months of being gone, I’d wanted as much as anything to be with my friends, but now they weren’t like they were before and it wasn’t their fault.

And besides raising hell with my old mates, I wanted to do something wild. I’d learned some things over in Nam—wild and inane things that warriors trapped in a world between being boys and men discover.

I recall one of the nights on leave, with a friend’s girlfriend.

She wanted to be tough and to let her prove it, I lit an unfiltered Camel and we put our arms together, her hand at my elbow and my hand at hers so that the lower biceps were in tandem, and then I placed the Camel where our flesh met, and we let it burn. First one to say “ouch” lost.

For years the burn scars crawled across my skin like centipede tracks. I’d done it more than once, although not with her.

I’d done it in Nam with Marines I do not remember and I’d done it on Okinawa waiting to go home, with Marines I do not remember and here I was, doing it at home. And why did I do it? Why did other Marines do it with me?

Betty told me it was like “cutting,” self mutilation. Was it a cry for help? Was I trying to feel something real, sensual beyond the numbing fear that had, over a two-and-one-half month period of time at Khe Sanh, rendered me incapable of feeling? I think I still exhibit some elements of that—not feeling—and I don’t mean in my fingers and toes, but in the den of the soul where the important things we learn and know hide.

And that wasn’t the only wild behavior I exhibited.

After those riotous nights on my 21-day leave I’d surrender and crawl beneath sheets after my parents were abed. I didn’t want them to witness me drunk on my butt. Then, long before they got up, I arose and drank bad black coffee and took my mother’s blue Buick and drove, seeking beer and morning-long sojourns across the country looking for…I don’t know what I was looking for.

Blogger Ken Rodgers at Khe Sanh, January 1968. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

When I left the house the liquor stores were closed so I worked out a solution: buy a case of Coors the night before and leave it with one of my buddies, RA, who lived in a cinder-block-walled apartment behind the old mortuary.

I’d show up there at 5:30 or 6 AM, wake him, and if he refused to ride along, I’d corral a six-pack or maybe two out of the fridge and start driving the back roads between the alfalfa and cotton fields.

Hitting seventy or eighty miles an hour, I’d crash through the muddy puddles where the irrigation ditch banks had busted and water surged across the road. I’d whiz past farm worker hovels, scaring the hell out of the jackrabbits and the cottontails. And woe be to any errant hound that sauntered into the road to contest my passing.

If RA rode with me, he leaned back in the seat like that might help if I rolled the car or smashed into one of the gigantic cottonwood trees that grew along the sides of the roads.

Once he said, “What’s the matter with you; are you crazy?”

I remember that really well, but not my answer. Maybe I didn’t have one. And why did I do it? Was I trying to emulate that endorphin high I’d become addicted to in the death and chaos of Khe Sanh?

One morning I came upon a band of sheep crossing from one alfalfa field to another. One of my old herding buddies with whom I’d worked back in ‘64-‘65-‘66 stood in the middle of the road waving a red jacket to make me halt until the sheep finished their short journey.

Music blared from the Buick’s radio—Jim Morrison and Van Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Linda Ronstadt and the Spencer Davis Group. I sipped a cold Coors and praised its saintly buzz.

I watched the hooves of the sheep leave imprints in the dust, blue and black and white Australian shepherds circling them, circling.

After the sheep crossed the road, bleating and skipping, I pulled up to my old mate, JR, and rolled down the window. The smell of sheep, lanolin, and their droppings invaded my nose.

I said, “Hey, man, how you doing?”

He stared at me for a long time. Then he mumbled, “Shit, man, I thought you were dead.”

Blogger Ken Rodgers. Photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers.

He turned and walked behind the sheep, his jacket slung over his right shoulder.

As I watched him, I wanted to jump out of the car and shout, “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive. I ain’t the same kid you knew back then, but I’m alive.”

But I didn’t. I drove on, caroming from mudpuddle to mudpuddle, watching the trees fly by, the tractors cultivating the cotton fields.

I spent nearly every morning putting miles and miles on my mother’s car, and at night I drank more, often finding someone to put a forearm next to mine so I could light a Camel and lay it on the juncture of skin on skin and watch the red glow of the end as it sizzled—the scent of burnt flesh.

Waiting to go back to the Marines, back to war and the unknown, to my fright.

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Alles Gut

Not all who wander are lost.

~J. R. R. Tolkien

I am an intellectual vagrant, used to finding something new every few hours to occupy the way my mind likes to flit and skip and discover, similar, in my mind, to the way a Northern Harrier hunts; pause in flight, hover, flap wings and move on, hover, dip a wing, left or right, climb, dive, hover.

The notion of vagrant, which means someone who doesn’t have a settled home, which isn’t technically correct in my case, leads one to think of moving, moving, maybe a bum of sorts, on the road, and as many of our friends know, we—Betty and I—like to go, go, go, and being stuck in our house with the Coronavirus blues, for the most part, has crimped our action and I find myself thinking of travel, thinking about it a lot, and some of those thoughts bend back in time to trips we made in the past.

One journey that returns to my thoughts again and again is the time Betty and I flew to Frankfurt am Main in Germany for a wedding.
Our friends Tanja Alexandra Hoch and Rainer Soelkner were getting hitched.

Bacharach, Germany

When we hit Frankfurt, heat sizzled the pavement and there was no place to hide—not the art museum, or Goethe’s house, or our hotel.

Nevertheless, we hiked about the city and saw the sights—all of the art museums, the mall, the riverbanks, the old city, the Roman ruins that only showed up after Allied planes bombed Frankfurt into the ground—and ate kraut and schnitzel, really good stuff unlike what they served us in the cafeteria at Casa Grande’s North School back in the 50s.

The day before the wedding we rented a car and bombed along on the Autobahn to the Rhine River community of Sankt Goar where the wedding was to take place.

The morning of the wedding, Betty and I took the train upriver to Bacharach and looked at the medieval architecture, and we rode the ferry back downriver past the fabled Lorelei, a massive rock on one side of the river that is supposedly inhabited by dwarves who live in caves and a beautiful young siren who sits on top of the rock and sings while combing her hair, causing boatmen to lose their way and crash.

We were two of four Americans on hand, the rest of the folks at the wedding being Germans, some with whom we became acquainted including Rainer’s father, who when we first walked and talked on the streets of the Sachsenhausen district of Frankfurt, announced that when a man visits another man’s country, he should speak the language. So he spoke to me in German, which I didn’t understand, and I spoke to him in English which I think he understood, although he never spoke one word of my language. I tried to speak some of his, stumbling over words that if not pronounced in just the right way, were apparently unintelligible.

I didn’t resent this predicament; it made sense to me, and as the days went by, we—Mr. Soelkner and I—seemed to get across what we intended.

After the wedding in a cathedral in Sankt Goar, the subsequent celebration took place in a castle on a high bluff overlooking the Rhine River in a hotel facility that had been built into what was once a mighty fortress.

At the hotel, we sat outside on a deck looming over the steep banks and looked down on the river, watching the commerce, barges hauling coal and cars and equipment and grain and vegetables. Across the Rhine the rows of vines that ran from top to bottom of the steep banks like minute landslide chutes kept coming under my inspection as I pondered the terrain, the terroir and the wines of the region: Riesling, Grauburgunder, Weissburgunder, Spatburgunder.

The nuptials night, we didn’t sleep much and were up until way after 1:00 am, and even after we retired, the late summer light never died. The slanted rays of June bounced off the dark slate tiles of the roof and kept me sleeping light, and about two hours later, the swallows came alive as the hint of early morning sneaked over the northeastern horizon. The scent of the linden trees floated through our open windows, acting as a sweet reveille.

Vineyards on the Rhine River

That next morning we all met out on the patio that looked down on the river. There were fresh berries of different kinds—raspberries and strawberries—and there was strong coffee that you cut with thick cream, and there were sausages and Bratkartoffen (cottage fries). The pastries on display made your mouth water.

The confabulations of the weary guests bubbled up, and as I stood against the railing of the patio, Herr Soelkner approached and began to speak to me in his lingo. I stood there wishing I were fluent, or hell, if not fluent, knew enough to get the gist of what he was saying to me because at that moment his words hit my face and bounced off like something plopping on the deck.

The maid of honor, a young woman named Anja, came over and began to translate. She spoke English better that I did.

High above the Rhine, he spoke softly and as she translated, the words marched at me like Napoleon’s troops back in the day when they destroyed much of the castle where our hotel now sat. The drum and thrum of his words matched the motors of the barges hauling commodities up and down the river.

He spoke of that moment, right then, and what it would mean to me in the future as I remembered it.

Across the river, the rows of wine grapes running north and south added to the mesmerizing chant of the words in German and then English.
He said, “These are the things that give meaning to our lives.” And he pointed at the bride and groom who’d joined us in these final moments of the memorable celebration of their marriage, and then he pointed to the other guests. He looked at me and smiled.

Swallows darted past our eyrie, their soft sighs like unknown memories caught in the wind.

He said, “And for the rest of your life, you will think of us, here, in Germany, and you will hold images of the people and how we all, you and us, met and mingled and became friends.”

And the damnedest thing happened and maybe it was because I was tired from travel—San Francisco to Frankfurt to Sankt Goar on the Rhine—lack of sleep, lots of big, emotional discoveries, the history, me recognizing that though we were all different, in more ways than not, we were all the same.

Rhine River

And suddenly a trickle of tears began to seep out of my eyes and if you knew how I hate to cry you’d understand my chagrin.

But I couldn’t fight it, so I just let it come and that seemed to alleviate some of the power of the moment, or that probably isn’t the right word—alleviate—but more like making it easier to admit that I was tired and yes, he spoke truth and yes, these people, this place, this moment had marked me in a way I’d never before experienced. And maybe never would again.

And he smiled at me and put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed and said, “Alles gut”—all is good.

Down below along the bank of the river, in the town, cars ran along the highway that paralleled the Rhine. They looked like troops of ants lined up in single file. A ferry boat tooted a whistle. As I turned to leave, I noticed a big, fat strawberry near where I stood on the deck.

And now, confined to the Covid prison, the berry sits in my mind, a metaphor for that memorable time and place.

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A Call for Assistance

There are women across the country, like I MARRIED THE WAR’s Carman Hinson, fighting for their loved ones who live with the trauma of war. Carman’s life changed forever when her husband Courtney was attached to a Green Beret team whose sole mission was to hunt down terrorists and liberate the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.

After four deployments, Courtney came home suffering from undiagnosed severe PTSD and TBI in addition to injuries suffered in a parachute accident.

“I have come to realize as his wife and caregiver,” Carman says, “that I’m not able to fix him at all. His constant survivor guilt, the effects of war, his nightmares, are always haunting him. In my experience, I’ve recognized that when a combat vet starts to withdraw and isolate themselves, bad things can start to happen. They can go into a downward spiral really fast and I knew that I had to prevent that.”

Our nation has barely begun to recognize the vital role that these spouses play. In I MARRIED THE WAR, a documentary film which investigates the lives of eleven women like Carman, we learn how these spouses fight for their marriages, their families, and their husbands, veterans of WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The eleven wives of I MARRIED THE WAR

I am writing about this to ask you to join us by supporting the final stages of this film’s production. IMTW has the potential to help thousands—if not millions—of spouse and family members who have experienced the aftereffects of war. We learn that war doesn’t end when the fighting stops.

Your donation will help us to complete post production, the place where the editor, music composer, audio engineer and other experts do their finishing magic to bring the story to the screen. The ITMW team will make the final trailer, produce DVDs, and prepare for film festivals. Your support is crucial to our effort to bring this film down the last mile and into the public arena.

You can learn more and make your contribution on our Indiegogo page at https://igg.me/at/IMTW If you can’t give but want to help tell this story, please share our Indiegogo page with friends, family and colleagues. With more people aware of this cause, we’ll be one step closer to reaching our goal of educating military spouses that they are not alone and help is available. You will be a part of educating the world about the hidden costs of war.

Thank you.

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Why I Write

Why I write

“My soul, you wanted me to utter and write down all these words. I did not know that you guarded such secrets. I am astonished. You are an unbelievable riddle. But what to make of my astonishment? “
~ C.G. Jung

Lumbering redwood trees thrived along the wet-winter creek and at night the barred owls serenaded us with hoots and every morning a red-shouldered hawk landed on the tin roof above our bedroom and hopped and called for the countryside to waken.

In the mornings and the evenings the tips of the redwoods speared through the carpet of fog that settled in the valley below. We looked out the window to the east, over the tops of the trees towards the towns and the hills beyond.

We lived in a flat above a barn full of tractors and mowers and garden gear and outside the owners ripped out fifty-one acres of apple trees and set vines so the winery in the valley could crush the grapes for sparkling wine.

They planted irrigation and stanchions with wire strung from one end to the other so the vines could reach toward the heavens.

They fenced the vineyard to prohibit critters but at night the alleys between the rows filled with deer. In the glow from the outdoor lights on the corners of the barn, I often watched the deer leap the fences, tangle their antlers in the irrigation tubing or the wires employed to train the vines. And I cheered, silently, for the deer.

We moved to that place from the mountains of southern New Mexico. We’d deserted a laid back mountain community in the southwest for a dynamic and roaring left coast community on the cutting edge of culture and economics.

And that was tough for me. My kind were ranchers and loggers and other mountain folk who were fairly conservative and now we were immersed in a community of progressives.

It took a while.

Blogger Ken Rodgers, photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers

And living in a vineyard wasn’t the bucolic paradise you’d think. It was tractors and laborers outside your windows and in the early hours of morning, 1 AM or thereabouts, the putt-putt of a tractor pulling a spray rig clouding the air with sulfur and other possibly noxious chemicals the truth of which the owners or workers were not ready to concede.

It was a different world for me. After Betty and I had been there about a year, we started to think about looking elsewhere but when Betty’s mom heard our dismay she said, “Well, Bettykay, you’ll just have to come back up to speed.”

Right then images of me running down the road like a skuzzy cur with his tail between his legs spurred me on getting “up to speed.”
And we did.

And one of the first changes in my life and my attitude? I wanted to write.

Betty and I went on a vacation in late 1992 and traveled eastern California and into Utah and then Arizona where I shot Gambel’s quail with my son and along the way Betty and I yarned about places we’d been: Yosemite and Bishop and Death Valley and Lost Wages and St. George and Nam and Maine and the Navajo reservation and Flagstaff and down south of Phoenix.

Sometimes we scoffed at events that spurred our memories and sometimes we laughed and often we stopped talking as we watched the big, high and dry passage of red sand, Ponderosa forest and humongous mountains and all those moments reinforced my need to write.

Because there was a need. Still is.

I wanted to make short stories, so we bought a computer and I began to scratch out tales based on memory and then I signed up to take a writing course with my first mentor, the novelist Jean Hegland, who thought as writers we needed to study all kinds of writing and even though I thought poems were for…well, what—Wimps? Liberals? What?—I followed directions.

I wrote a few poems and something about the process began to grind like the gravel that dove cram in their craws, and out of my mouth—my memory—came, alas, poems. At first it embarrassed me or maybe that’s not the right word, but I felt…gee, I think I felt exposed.

Early on my work focused on the Vietnam War and then it was the war and then trying to branch out, it was the war. It still is.

And I didn’t want to write about the war again and again and again. I didn’t want to bore people or disgust them with my images of death and destruction, my anger.

And now I ask myself, why not the war? I don’t think we are going to stop warring anytime soon and combat often exposes the very best and worst of humanity.

When warriors write their tales a lot of the gasoline to run the compositional engine comes from rage. When people try to kill you, it enrages you although I don’t think you notice it until years later when you try to deal with the leftovers of people shooting at you.

Ken’s journal

And to kill others, I think you need to be instilled with rage, something to make you go against everything you learned as a kid.

And rage like that sticks around, like bad kindergarten memories and the notions of the first girl you thought you loved.

And there’s guilt: survivor’s guilt, and guilt because you weren’t the warrior you wanted to be and maybe your actions resulted in someone else’s death or guilt because you were lucky enough to board a Continental Airlines 707 for home, leaving your mates behind to fight and die.

And shame, too, is another ghost that sneaks in like a night thief and all your on-guard-PTSD paranoia cannot keep it from elbowing into your work, your thoughts.

When I vow to kill someone… and this happens more often than one would think…the moments drag along a sense of shame and outside of war there are other things to be ashamed of: how I treated that girl or that woman or someone who was supposed to be my friend and those times I took something on the sly that wasn’t mine.

My normal thought patterns are zigzags and lightning that carom around my mind and like a bumble bee they land here and then there and then back to the other place they were before. Incomplete, often, and though vivid, sometimes not quite shoveled out enough for me to get at what it is I actually think. (Notice the mixed metaphors.)

But writing allows me to parse it and often I am surprised and that may be the best: where the hell did that come from or I didn’t know I thought that way or I didn’t remember that. Discovery is critical in creative writing.

It’s revelatory for me to go through the process and since I write mostly to see what I can find out about myself and my space on planet Earth, if I thrash about from time to time, that’s okay.

And often, I’m like a rabbit shivering beneath a bush with a golden eagle looking down on me. Then I wonder if that unease isn’t a moment that needs to be investigated, too. An opportunity to get at a slim truth, not necessarily facts, but something more subtle and alarming. An opportunity to uncover an emotional truth, maybe something about the thrill and agony of lust, the thrill and horror of savagery.

Not that I don’t write about other things besides killing and fear and all the emotional detritus associated with war. I compose other stuff, too, including redwood trees poking through the fog reminding me of fishing boat masts, and barred owls and red-shouldered hawks.

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Election of 1967

An election is coming on November 3rd and it’s one laden with lots of angst and fear and hate and hints of the unknown and how bad the future will be if my guy isn’t the one and all of the roiled waters of political and cultural insanity. And that has me pondering elections in the past.

My first election participation wasn’t one I actually voted in: September 3, 1967. The South Vietnamese government held an election to choose a new leader and to embark on a system of government supposedly more representative than the four years of political chaos that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.

At the time of the election, my Marine Corps unit, Bravo Company, 1/26, was stationed at Khe Sanh.

The monsoon blared in full ugly, soaking, running rampant, flooding trenches, everything sopping: clothing, gear, socks, your socks, your bedding. Your socks.

The local election was to be conducted in Khe Sanh Ville, a few miles away from the lines we manned at the combat base, and the Marine Corps chose our platoon, 2nd Platoon, to provide security for the polling site.

Blogger Ken Rodgers in Vietnam. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara

I haven’t, in the past, thought of the need for security at one of our elections until this year when images come to mind of camo-clothed, armed and angry people milling around the polls as if only they could save our republic. And then I think about them impeding voters from exercising their basic right, and hot fingers of rage scrape at my guts and I imagine if they try to stop me from voting what I’ll do to them: hand-to-hand, foot-to-groin, poke out an eye, crush an Adam’s apple . . . and then I say, “Calm down.”

Then I think, I didn’t lie in the damp grass and protect a polling place in Vietnam without the deeper need to protect my own rights to vote. I didn’t survive the Siege of Khe Sanh to then live to see the destruction of our republic. I think, don’t mess with my right to vote.

On September 3, 1967, after morning chow, the Marines of 2nd Platoon loaded into two six-by trucks and departed for Khe Sanh Ville.

Every time we loaded in the back of those trucks, the creeps sneaked up my spine and buzzed around the inside of my head. We’d been ambushed a couple of times barreling down the roads around Khe Sanh, a few rounds of small arms fire snapping, zipping overhead, some whapping the sideboards of the truck, sending splinters of wood slashing.

I don’t remember taking any incoming fire on that short journey on September 3, 1967, although there was a lot of concern on both the national and local levels of government that the NVA and the Viet Cong would try to disrupt the election process, and those concerns were born out when Viet Cong warriors attacked a number of polling places in the Central Highlands and set up ambushes to discourage voters from travelling to the polls.

Fear, I suspect, roamed through the psyches of the South Vietnamese voters. Danger lurked at every juncture. Phantom threats haunted everybody’s minds, or so I imagine, fed by gossip, rumor, news intended to frighten. Sound familiar to some of the election hubbub bubbling around in the news and on social media right now?

The election in Khe Sanh Ville was held in a school, or maybe it was some kind of other community building. The location was brick with whitewashed walls as I recall, and it sat away from other buildings and the back was bordered by a grassy lot edged by a tree line that would be a great place for the enemy to hide before attacking the polling place.

Being Marines, one would think that we’d have sent a recon patrol out there to sweep through that tree line and into the country beyond, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, we set up a perimeter around the building.

I lay in tall grass out back and sighted my M16 towards those trees and tried to figure out a field of fire from right to left and back to right, imagining what those bad guys would look like coming at us with grenades and RPGs and AK-47 fire. The smell of wet crammed in my nose like damp and rotting leaves, and the taste too, like the garden dirt I used to eat as a kid.

1968 was the first presidential election in which I could vote, and then there was Nixon’s second term and Ford getting whipped and Reagan crushing Carter and Mondale, too, and then the first George Bush and on and on, the list a map for me to view the more recent history of our country and my life.

Even before I voted, elections were big in our house. First one I recall is Eisenhower against Stevenson when my mother was for Stevenson and my father for Eisenhower. My parents supported different people for president and were vocal about it. Unlike so much of our present bitter electioneering, there was a mutual respect between them and for others, too, something about people having a right to vote for whomever they wanted without being harangued, harassed, cussed, and looked down upon.

My mom and dad were from the generation that whipped Fascism and voting was a sacred right to them.

When Kennedy and Nixon ran against each other, our house stood with the Democrats and with LBJ over Goldwater later, and then I don’t know who my parents voted for because voting became something I did and who I voted for was my business and who anybody else voted for was their business.

Ken Rodgers Photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers

As I lay in the grass, trying not to be defeated by the leeches sucking my blood and boredom and the knowledge—the incessant insistence—that at any time I could be dead, I wondered about my role in the election going on behind me in the polling site. According to what I observed, which I have to admit was only from my lonely perspective in a far corner of Vietnam, was that a large portion of the South Vietnamese were for the communists, although who the locals around Khe Sanh—the Bru Montagnards—were interested in supporting was not known to me. Nevertheless, I saw myself as an agent of a government that in some ways was not all that popular and down deep in my innards that notion gnawed and gnawed and gnawed. It still does.

I don’t know if anyone actually voted in Khe Sanh Ville on September 3, 1967. The men who won that election, Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky, inherited a mess and ultimately their side lost the war, and even though a lot of my comrades don’t agree, I think we lost, too.

I know, even though I gained a lot of experience in the ways of war and humanity, I lost a lot of personal things, too: innocence, good friends, and my time.

Hopefully, on November 3, 2020, we won’t need guns and war to settle who wins our election.

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Varmints

I spotted the sleek coyote trotting across a piece of fallow ground on the Gila River Indian Reservation where we ran several bands of sheep. I slowed down and the coyote stopped and sat on its haunches and looked at me.

Besides building fence, moving and watering sheep, my bosses expected me to kill coyotes and dogs, too, if I found them harassing the ewes and lambs. But more than that, I was supposed to kill coyotes anywhere I saw them because…well, because at some place and time they would kill sheep.

I remember when I first got to Nam, on a patrol along a river we spotted some kids on the opposite side of the lazy-moving flow washing water buffalo and our squad leader ordered us to shoot to kill. The kids.

I complained and he explained that those kids would grow up to kill Marines like me, so…I don’t remember if I pulled the trigger or maybe I don’t want to remember.

As the coyote sat there, his tongue out the side of his mouth, I reached down on the floorboard and fingered the stock of my Mauser Karabiner 98k.

The coyote stood and loped off, his bushy tail straight out like a flag caught in a gale. Behind him, San Tan Mountain reared up and he only showed me his ass end. I stepped on the gas and he swerved back toward the road, stopped and sat on his haunches.

Coyote

I slowed, hit the brakes and he leapt and bolted and I drove and he halted and I stopped and then he left again and it went on and on and I never killed him. I don’t remember how long that coyote and I performed the strange go and stop regimen but I do know the memory is in my head like a badger digging at a gopher hole.

I suspect now that I never intended to kill him.

This was in 1971 and I still had the stink and stain of combat and fear painted on my soul. Not that it’s gone now, but then it was heavy and dominant and as such, maybe I thought myself done with killing.

I didn’t tell anyone I never shot that coyote, or any of the others I encountered while working the sheep, and I feared that if I told my boss and co-workers I didn’t shoot those “varmints” as we called them, they’d have laughed at me or chewed my ass.

I don’t like ass chewings, even when I’ve got them coming and when people laugh at me, my insides fester like bloody puss in a boil.

Some of the people I worked for knew where I’d been in Nam and they had an inkling about what I’d endured, so they had expectations—maybe true, maybe not. That I was bad. If you messed with me too much, I might kill you. I never tried to belay that impression. So I imagine now that they thought I’d have little trouble blowing coyotes away. But that coyote, that day seemed to be minding its own business although I also know its business is to kill.

And yet I wasn’t done with killing. For years after I hunted quail and chukar and pheasant and turkey and larger game.

Once, when hunting a black-tailed buck on a bright November morning when the snow crunched beneath my boots and the wind swooshed the tops of the Doug firs, I spied a critter slinking along a five strand barbwire fence. Tan with a long, thick, bushy tail. A coyote.

I didn’t even lift the 7MM Magnum to my shoulder. I allowed the coyote to escape and I didn’t say a word about that to my hunting mates who would have scolded me about letting the “varmint” go.

And I imagine that would have led to me having to divulge things about what I really thought about killing and death, and I suspect I didn’t want to do that. And I’m not sure I really want to investigate too much how I feel about killing even now.

Standing here typing into the computer, I’m trying to remember what I really thought back then but most of the particulars have escaped, like the varmint. But one thing I know for sure, I’ve never regretted not blowing a hole the size of a silver dollar in its side.

Once I went out south of my old home town in Arizona in search of a pickup load of mesquite wood with a couple of my Valley of the Sun banker buddies who fancied themselves woodsmen. One of them had a line on a bunch of mesquite that would be good for burning.

I tagged along to go along while they cut limbs off the bottoms of trees that carpeted a section of ground next to some fallow cotton fields.

Not far away I heard the calls of a coyote pack and while the bankers worked, I grabbed my Browning 12 gauge and walked into the mesquite forest to kill one or more of the yapping coyotes.

I’d rather not remember too much of my mindset. Back then, my moods simmered like sour mash and I had lots of reasons to feel like that, some of them legitimate, some not. Inside I seethed.

The morning was chill and the sky the color of lead, drab and dank. The coyotes yapped and yipped and occasionally howled and they cavorted just beyond the limbs of the next trees that stood in front of me, yet when I barged through the thorns that tore at my trousers and shirt, they seemed suddenly behind me, and then to my left, to my right, their calls and comments blaring in my ears. I remember that for sure.


The yapping and the yammer and the nips and low growls felt like they were laughing at me.

I cussed out loud and the coyotes yammered in their coyote palaver and the skin on my forearms seeped red from where mesquite thorns had plowed furrows and anger choked my throat and I swore I’d shoot every goddamned one of them when I caught them out in a clearing.

But there was no clearing and as quickly as they had begun their torment the morning grew silent except for the distant whine of my buddies’ chain saw.

Blogger Ken Rodgers, photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers

I’ve killed mule deer and pronghorn and when in Nam I tried like hell to kill the enemy. So, it’s not like I haven’t been a killer. All my life.

Later in life, Betty and I visited a friend in the vineyards of Western Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. As we readied for bed one evening, right outside the window a pack of coyotes began to palaver just like that morning when in my own personal funk, I had set out to murder some.

They yakked back and forth. Our friend appeared in the door to our room and smiled and we smiled and for just a moment, I imagine now, I thought it was that bunch of coyotes who’d joshed me that morning years before, come a thousand miles to tell me something that I had failed to understand.

What it was they wanted to say was beyond me and the notion of them carrying a message—maybe something about death and life and how fragile our existence can be—probably stuck with me for a moment or two, and then it was just our friend and Betty and me, standing in the light shining from the hall, listening to the music, the talk, the community of coyotes carrying on.

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Highway 1

At Uncle Frank’s I said goodbye to my parents as I headed back to Camp Pendleton.

Highway 1 wove south through Huntington Beach and Newport Beach and Laguna Beach towards the bus station in Dana Point. Uncle Frank sat behind the steering wheel of his Buick, his frame as thick as a big brick, trying, at first, to talk to me about anything but my leaving later that week on the big Continental Airlines 707 for my tour in Nam.

The towns whizzed by like nothing and the long beaches with the long waves where I enjoyed spending hours on liberty rolled in and the scent of surf and the sound of it, too, but nothing impacted my eyes and ears and nose, nothing but my battle to stuff my emotions back into my guts.

Tears would roll, if I gave in, and my words would buffet the roof of my mouth. I would shudder each time I tried to stop all of that emotion from showing up, from showing, from showing.

Ken Rodgers’ boot camp photo. USMC.

Uncle Frank must have known. Of course he knew; he’d been a Marine in World War II and was shot in the head, and his kids in the back seat? They kept their mouths shut.

By then my mom and dad relaxed on a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight back to Phoenix.

In Dana Point we bought burgers and sat on a bench outside and I stuffed my face so no one would expect me to say anything.

I didn’t want to cry.

Once, when I was eleven, I’d stepped across the street to carve Katsina (Kachina) figures with my friends. They handed me a block of cheap pine and a knife with which to carve and I immediately jammed a long, thin and wide sliver of wood between the fingernail and quick of my middle finger. I gnawed my nails back then so the wood buried deep.

After I stumbled home, my father grabbed me in front of his visiting friends, pulled his Case knife out of his Levis pocket, snapped out the shiny blade with the sharp point and squeezing my finger, dug out the wood as I kicked and howled and yanked. My head spun when blood squirted out from beneath my fingernail. I blubbered and whined and when my mother dosed the end of my finger with Iodine, he grabbed my face between his two muscled hands and said, “Son, you cry too much. Life is hard. Hard. Get used to it. You are a Rodgers and we don’t cry.”

So, I didn’t cry.

Until I got on that bus back to base after I looked at Uncle Frank and his kids, my mind with no words small enough to fit through my throat.

Blogger Ken Rodgers, photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers

I plopped in the back and I bawled. Ashamed, I hid my face and thought about never coming home from Vietnam, never seeing my family, arriving back in the State in a black bag. I mashed my face against the window and sobbed. I sobbed for all I’d lost and for what I never had with my mother and dad, with my sister, the moments gone that could not be recovered, the finality of it all, how it could be the end, the end, the end.

For those few miles between Dana Point and Oceanside I mourned the lack of rapport between my father and me. How we’d never had much of a relationship. How he’d said, “My job is to protect you and make you hard, boy. It’s a hard world. My duty is to teach you how to survive.” Never anything more.

And for those last few miles, at least, before returning to Camp Pendleton, I wanted so much more.

Years later, my mother said, after my father had died, “When we flew home from California that time after seeing you, your father did something I’d never seen, not when his mother died, or his father, either, but on that plane sitting there, he burst into tears.”