There's a Man With a Gun Over There Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY R. M. RYAN

  Goldilocks in Later Life

  The Golden Rules

  Vaudeville in the Dark

  THERE’S A

  MAN WITH A GUN

  OVER THERE

  R. M. RYAN

  Hunger Mountain published Chapter Four, in a slightly different version, as “The Veterans.”

  Copyright © 2015 Lost Roads Adventure Club, LLC.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

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  The Permanent Press

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ryan, R. M.—

  There’s a man with a gun over there / R.M. Ryan.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-385-2 (hardcover)

  eISBN 978-1-57962-416-3

  1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.Y393T48 2015

  813'.54—dc23 2014048179

  Printed in the United States of America.

  for Siegfried Lenz,

  author of The German Lesson,

  and in memory of all those we didn’t mean to kill.

  What does any of this have to do with Vietnam, Walter?

  What the fuck has anything got to do with Vietnam?

  What the fuck are you talking about?

  THE DUDE

  The Big Lebowski

  Standing next to me in this lonely crowd

  Is a man who swears he’s not to blame

  All day long I hear him shout so loud

  Crying out that he was framed . . .

  BOB DYLAN

  I Shall Be Released

  PROLOGUE.

  It’s a dream, but then it isn’t.

  The yellow 1969 Dodge Charger slams to a stop—squealing, fishtailing, and then blocking my exit from the parking lot beside the Turley Barracks US Army Military Police station in Mannheim, Germany. The Charger takes up a lot of room on Friedrich Ebert Strasse. It’s the size of two Volkswagens.

  Traffic stalls behind the parked Dodge. A white Citroën flashes its high beams.

  I sit there in my Volvo moving the floor shifter back and forth. I want to be ready so I can take off when the Charger moves. I feel so good. Even though I am in the army, I have beaten the system. At the height of the Vietnam War, I am in Germany, thousands of miles away from combat. I wear civilian clothes and drive around in a good car and drink expensive French wines. I have a sexy German girlfriend.

  The two of them don’t so much get out of the Charger as uncoil themselves from it. They amble toward me. They smile. They have all the time in the world. They don’t notice the honking from the stalled traffic behind their Charger. Their teeth seem luminescent in the twilight, their Afros fuller than those normally allowed on the heads of GIs in 1972. Comb handles stick out from the tufts of their hair.

  One leans against the passenger door of my car, and the other puts his hands on the door beside me. I try to roll the window up, but I can’t. He holds it down with a single thumb. He’s stronger than I am, maybe a lot stronger.

  He smiles, unconcerned about the Germans coming up behind him who wonder what’s going on.

  “Hey, da. Was ist hier los?” one of the Germans yells.

  “No need to anxious yourself, white boy,” he says to me, ignoring the Germans. His voice is slurred, liquid. “No need ’tall. We jus’ here to speak with you on behalf of Bro Perkins.”

  He nods toward the Charger, and I can see the shadowed figure of Staff Sergeant Elija Perkins sitting in the backseat. In my job as a plainclothes military policeman, I took his confession and am scheduled to testify at his court-martial next week.

  “Bro Perkins—he’s a friend of ours, you understand, and we wouldn’t want anything bad to happen with him. Understand?”

  “Well,” I say and wiggle the shift knob rapidly back and forth. “Well, I can’t make any promises.”

  On the passenger seat, I have this new Burgundy I’ll sip with Angelika after we make love. I wiggle the shift lever again.

  “Bro Perkins is a good friend of ours,” he says again and points the index finger of his right hand at me as though it were the barrel of a pistol. “A very good friend. We jus’ concerned about his welfare. You understand?”

  Then he slaps the door of the Volvo, and the two of them get back in the Charger and squeal off down Friedrich Ebert Strasse.

  1.

  Those men stopped me decades ago, in 1972, in another life, so this story should be long over, shouldn’t it?

  But it’s not, no: it plays, just as I’m falling asleep, night after night, month after month, year after year—a little serial in my brain that won’t go away, a loop that keeps spiraling to the same bloody ending.

  The story always pauses as I wait to drive my white Volvo out of the MP station parking lot onto Friedrich Ebert Strasse, heading toward Angelika’s apartment. The gearshift in neutral, I rev the engine, listening to the throaty sound of the carburetor while I look for an opening in traffic.

  This time, I think, as I look at myself in those long-ago days, this time it will all be different. No one will get hurt.

  Once again, the story lures me in.

  I drive out of the lot and merge into traffic.

  I’m thinking, yes, this time things will work out some other way. This time, I hope, the story will change.

  This time, I believe, the story won’t end with a woman lying bloody on the floor in the Weinheim apartment.

  2.

  Now you’ve got to realize that I’m an innocent bystander really. I didn’t mean to harm anyone. Not the woman in Weinheim. Not Sergeant Perkins. It was the times. I want to make that clear right from the start. I didn’t have a say in the matter. I wasn’t in the army by choice. I was just doing what I’d been told to do.

  I was in graduate school studying Emerson and Yeats when the army came calling in the spring of 1968. Those were tough times, remember? They started to draft me for the war in Vietnam.

  Even now, decades later, those three syllables terrify me. Vi-et-nam. Vi-et-nam.

  But maybe you don’t remember the war—or maybe you don’t care.

  Then, in the late sixties, though, the war was everywhere. It was on television every night. A soap opera of death and dying narrated by Walter Cronkite on the evening news. A war with its own box scores—each day’s tally of American and enemy dead right there with the baseball standings and the stockmarket close.

  Reality television all right: dead bodies face down in rice paddies spinning around, as if they’re looking for something lost in the murk; a hand coming out of the ground, frozen in rigor mortis, holding a rifle; a wounded soldier wrapped in bandages until he looks like the Invisible Man; corpses tossed in piles like so much garbage.

  I was scared of dying. I was terrified of being drafted and ending up dead in Vietnam. That was my dilemma. I had to avoid Vietnam at any cost.

  I wanted to stay home and study Emerson, thank you very much, but the government took away my draft deferment. They were coming to get me.

  I still can hear the drums from the ROTC drills on campus. I can’t get the sound out of my head.

  Boom, boom, snare, goes the drum.

  Boom, boom, snare.

  I took this test at an army recruiting station. It turned out I had an aptitude for learning languages, so I enlisted to get a space in the German language class at the army’s language scho
ol in Monterey, California, and avoid the draft. Good duty, right? Sunny California. A way to stay out of Vietnam, OK?

  I mean, look, I didn’t really enlist enlist. I enlisted only so that I wouldn’t be drafted and sent to the Infantry and then to Vietnam.

  The recruiting sergeant told me I’d probably end up in Germany if I behaved myself.

  “Do what they tell you to do, Ryan. Don’t argue with them or ask questions. Don’t make fun of them. Just do what you’re told. Lie if you have to.”

  “Lie?”

  He just looked at me.

  So I went to the language school, just as they promised me, but then they made me a cop. Sent me to Military Police School after I learned German. I hadn’t bargained on that. I was in the same MP unit that trained the shooters at Kent State.

  But why should you care? These are my troubles, right? I should work them out in private. They don’t affect you, do they? They’re not coming after you, are they?

  I was just doing my job when Goldberg and I arrested Sergeant Perkins. I was an investigator and translator. I worked with these former Nazis in my trade-off to avoid Vietnam. When we arrested Sergeant Perkins for theft and black marketing, he was just a little unexpected roadkill on the road to saving me from combat.

  Sergeant Perkins had the bad luck to move in with this blonde German woman and anger the neighbors. You can imagine that, can’t you? I mean, there were Germans who still hated Jews. What do you think they thought of their blonde girls living with blacks? So they called the German Customs Police, who came and got me and my colleague Steve Goldberg, and here we were arresting Sergeant Perkins.

  Yes, I was a long way from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  Look: Sergeant Perkins made some mistakes. He was married and living with a mistress. He’d stolen ten-pound cans of butter from the mess hall. He had more cartons of Kool cigarettes in his possession than his ration card allowed. He broke some laws. He had, as we MPs liked to say, seriously fucked up and had the even worse luck to get caught.

  We MPs liked to go around saying, “Oh, man, he seriously fucked up.” In fact, we loved to say that. It made what we did seem important.

  Of course our judgments were pretty self-serving. To a barber, everyone needs a haircut. To a cop, everyone’s a criminal.

  As Lance B. Edwards, my MP Customs boss, liked to say, “They’re all guilty out there. The world’s filled with criminals, except most of them haven’t been caught yet.”

  True enough. Many people—of course including me—cheated on their spouses without having cops knocking at their doors. Mess-hall theft was probably the most common infraction of army rules. And ration cards—who really cared about those silly rules that regulated how many cartons of cigarettes and bottles of alcohol you could have?

  So why, then, were we making all this fuss over Sergeant Perkins and some property that couldn’t have been worth more than a hundred dollars? Why were Goldberg and I there in Sergeant Perkins’s apartment? Why were the German Customs Police there?

  Well, Goldberg and I and the Germans were protecting our comfortable little jobs: that’s what we were doing. We were also proving how powerful the empire is. The All-Knowing Empire could go anywhere, including Staff Sergeant Elija Perkins’s tiny living room.

  Of course, our version of the empire didn’t want to do anything really dangerous, so we selected low-level criminals who wouldn’t fight back. I mean, we didn’t want to have any trouble, now did we?

  I felt sorry for Sergeant Perkins. I really did. I knew the charges were bullshit. I knew the whole system was just one big charade set up to make someone money. It was part of a racket that must have cost the taxpayers millions and maybe billions. We didn’t need all those soldiers and their equipment in Germany. We didn’t need all the civilians and dependents and PXs and commissaries: the tons and tons of stuff that traveled with the American army. World War II was long over. Besides, the 500,000 American troops in Germany couldn’t really have defended it from the Russians if the Russians had decided to invade. Their army would have had millions of soldiers.

  But, hey, if I had let Sergeant Perkins go, my ass would have been on a plane for Saigon faster than you can say, “Don’t fuck with the man.”

  “You’ve got to draw a line somewhere,” Lance B. Edwards was fond of saying and then he would draw a line on a pad and hold it up. “See what I mean?”

  I never really did see the meaning of the line between two white spaces, but I took the advice of that recruiting sergeant seriously: I didn’t argue with people who outranked me. What’s more, I learned to lie.

  “That’s right,” I said. “You’ve got to draw a line.”

  “Hey, brother,” Sergeant Perkins said when I arrested him. “You’re kidding, right? You can’t bust me for chicken shit stuff like this. This is 1972. I have a family to support.”

  Me, too, I wanted to say.

  But what I said out loud was, “I’m not your brother.”

  “Fuck him,” my boss, Lance B. Edwards, said.

  Lance was a staff sergeant like Sergeant Perkins, too, but he liked to be called Mr. Mister. Mister Lance B. Edwards.

  It had been years since he’d worn a uniform. In fact, none of us in the Mannheim office of the Twenty-Second wore uniforms. We dressed in sport coats and ties. In a world where officers and enlisted men usually wore uniforms—with their ranks prominently displayed, along with the medals of their combat histories—we seemed too mysterious.

  And menacing.

  All us of were Misters.

  In addition, all of us investigators in MP Customs carried leather-framed credentials, which looked like those carried by FBI agents. We called them box tops. The card on one side of the leather case was in German; the card on the other side was in English. A heavy chrome clip held them in our pockets.

  “Mr. Edwards,” he said, pulling his credentials from his shirt pocket.

  “Lance B. Edwards, MP Customs.” He snapped the credentials open.

  He then snapped the leather case closed, as if that part of the conversation were over.

  Lance B. Edwards thought the production and the closing of our credentials was an important moment.

  “Got to be decisive. Can’t be tentative if you’re about to arrest someone.”

  He sat at his desk practicing how he used his credentials. He made us all practice, so we could do it with one hand.

  “Use your index finger.”

  “You know,” Lance B. Edwards told me when I brought Sergeant Perkins back to our office for questioning, “he should have thought about his family before he moved in with the German babe. It’s his own goddamned fault, not yours.”

  Eventually, Sergeant Perkins signed that confession form. Signed it in quadruplicate. I was scrupulous about the way I took confessions. I wanted everyone to know exactly what was going on, so I wouldn’t be haunted later on by what I’d done. I paid special attention to the rights we read people.

  You have the right to remain silent.

  Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

  I paid special attention to those lines. I always repeated them before our suspects signed anything. I repeated the lines three times. Three times. Don’t forget that.

  No one could possibly misunderstand.

  Of course no one ever told our suspects that complete silence would eventually set them free. Simply possessing black-market items was not enough evidence to result in a conviction.

  “Get ’em to talk,” Lance B. Edwards said. “Guilty people need to have their minds relieved. Besides, the colonel doesn’t like it when our cases don’t hold.”

  Twenty-Second MP Customs convictions were based on self-incrimination. And so, if you didn’t confess, we would let you go.

  But most of our suspects—including Sergeant Perkins—eventually confessed.

  The raid went the usual way.

  The neighbors turned in Sergeant Perkins.

  Herr Diener and Herr Hellma
n, plainclothes investigators from the German Customs Police, came over to our office in Mannheim in their gray-blue suits and their gray-blue, unmarked Opel sedan.

  Rudi, their driver, always stayed with the car. He cut quite a figure. Rudi had hands the size and shape of hams; his fingers were as thick as hammer handles. When he adjusted his bowler hat (which was several sizes too small for him), his hands were bigger than the hat. Rudi had to be 100 pounds overweight. He’d outgrown his suit jacket years ago. It was tiny on his bulging chest. Like a doll jacket fitted on a man. He looked like a hulking Oliver Hardy.

  Herr Diener and Herr Hellman came into the MP office, where they ceremoniously drank coffee and smoked a couple of our Marlboros. Sometimes Lance B. Edwards gave Herr Diener a whole pack. That was legal, but an entire carton given to a German national was considered black marketing.

  Then I got in the backseat of the Opel with Herr Hellman while Herr Diener sat up front with Rudi. Goldberg followed in our unmarked Ford.

  “Ja, hier haben wir die Tickets für das Schauspiel,” Herr Diener said, holding up the German search warrants.

  Here are the tickets for the play.

  Herr Hellman polished his little silver revolver with his handkerchief. He wasn’t supposed to have one of those. The Germans had very strict rules forbidding firearms. The gun made all of us nervous, especially Herr Diener.

  “Was willst du, Hellman? Was willst du? Du wird uns in Gefängnis bringen.”

  What are you doing, Hellman? You’re going to put us in jail.

  Goldberg and I often went out with them after one of these raids for a beer and a sausage. Our Germans loved sausages. While we ate, they told stories, but the stories got a little vague when the subject of World War II came up.

  “Ach, ich hab im Zweiten Weltkrieg wirklich nichts getan; Papierkrieg, dass war alles,” Hellman said.