WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER 

“CHECK this out.”  Tom called to me from the next row.  As I rounded the end of the shelf and walked toward him, I could see he was holding a hand grenade.

“Is that live?”

“No, man.  It’s a dud.  There’s more in that basket.”  And indeed, there were.  On the sheet of aluminum before me sat a milk crate half-filled with the things.  I reached in to pluck one out. 

An hour earlier, we had piled into Tom’s dad’s Plymouth and begun the drive up Route 2, winding our way along the bluffs and backwater of the Rock River from Dixon to Rockford, the second largest city in Illinois.  Though I always enjoyed the scenery, by the time we’d reached the parking lot of the Army Navy Surplus Store, I was only hoping the trip would be worth my bulging bladder, which I’d neglected to empty before we left.  The faded black paint on the sheet of plywood bolted to the wall of the anonymous strip-mall on Forest Hills Road had hinted nothing of the wonders within. 

When Mike Radke pulled open the glass door with his freckled right arm and motioned us through with his left, the smell of old canvas and oil assaulted us, my eleven-year-old eyes took in the interior of the cavernous shop, and all doubts were washed away.  The sight was unreal. 

Against one wall, bomb shells were stacked on pallets like un-split firewood.  Along another, laces of combat boots spilled from the tops of bins like spaghetti sloshing over the rims of colanders.  Gas masks hung from hooks like the severed heads of pigs in a medieval barnyard scene.  A glass counter revealed the sharp glimmer of throwing stars and jackknives.  Behind the cashier, displayed like trophies, AK-47s and M-16s aimed barrels toward the ceiling like fingers pointed at a distant enemy. 

As we walked down aisles crowded with shelves of fatigues, a man in jeans and a Harley shirt picked through a rack of olive coats.  The clasp of an ammo canister clinked open and shut under the bill of a ball cap while someone studied its seal, and I took stock of the grenade in my hand.  It was heavier than I expected, dark green, with a texture like the inside of a waffle iron.  Despite the lack of explosive at the core of the iron casing, as I palmed it, I felt a kind of power that would be hard to explain to anyone who’s never held such a weapon.   

I was ready to lay waste to some gooks.  I can’t say it any other way.  Mamasan, you’d better hitch up your water buffalo and hightail it on back to the rice paddy, cause I’m about to blast Charlie right out of that fox hole.  That was how we spoke, and that was how I thought.  I didn't know at the time the cause of my birth defect was Dioxin my father had absorbed from the mist of defoliants.  I was far too young to consider that the reason Mike Radke was willing to indulge our compulsion for military artifacts might be the fact that the closest thing to combat he’d seen were inmate fights at the Dixon Correctional Center where he worked as a guard.

He was a good man, but he was also, as I recall, bigoted—not in a sadistic way, but in the style of the perpetually nervous, men who puff out their chests and make flagellant jokes about that which frightens them.  And Mike seemed to be frightened of nearly everyone over the age of twelve, particularly if they came from a culture he didn’t understand, which may begin to explain why that day in the Army Navy Surplus he bought the biggest Mag Light they stocked.  It was twenty inches and three-and-one-half pounds of D-Cells and metal, more night stick than flashlight—the type of thing Rodney King was beaten with. 

Who exactly did he mean to fight off with that club?  I can’t say for sure.  Break-ins in Dixon were about as common as new restaurants, which is to say some poor soul might have attempted one every few years, but the chances of entry, particularly on a house with as many locks as the Radkes’, were slender.  But as I cradled that grenade and pulled the pin in and out of the aluminum handle just like I’d seen in so many movies, I couldn’t care less about the motives of Tom’s father.

I was feeling the potency of that oval of iron in my hand and dreaming myself off to the front line.  I was ready for action.  I was G.I. Joe.  I was fire in the hole.  And after I finally found the will to set that empty promise back in the box and continue perusing that warehouse of artifacts, I was wishing my parents had given me more money.  I was wishing I had done more chores. 

IN A speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars during the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan had decried America’s recent reluctance to engage in war.  The “Vietnam Syndrome,” as he called this seeming lack of enthusiasm for military aggression, was a sickness inflicted upon the leaders of the country, especially the Carter administration, which Reagan accused of having cut defense spending to dangerous levels.  The carriers of the disease were the peaceniks of the Sixties and early Seventies, whose demonstrations and scorn for veterans had so emasculated the forces of freedom.  The failures of Vietnam lay at their feet.  “It has always struck me as odd,” he said, his Addams apple moving with his voice, the soaring lines of his suit as still as a missile silo, as he accepted the endorsement of the VFW, the first presidential candidate to ever receive the honor, “that you who have known at firsthand the ugliness and agony of war are so often blamed for war by those who parade for peace…… It is time we recognized that [the Vietnam War] was, in truth, a noble cause.”  Even so, Reagan lectured: 

"There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam.  If we are forced to fight, we must have the means and the determination to prevail or we will not have what it takes to secure the peace.  And while we are at it, let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win."

Then, before a backdrop of American flags, he pivoted.  Reagan towered over the medals and officers’ outfits of the brass of the notoriously conservative organization like an eagle, symbol of the Union, perched on the highest branch of a lakeside tree.  He told the gathered men that the Russians were coming.  He could see them lurking beneath the surface of the water like fish evolving legs and getting ready to swarm the land.  In the sleepy voice beneath the Norman Rockwell hair—dark, slicked back, full of body, and parted just so—he warned the crowd of “Soviet-inspired trouble in the Caribbean.  Subversion and Cuban-trained guerilla bands,” he said, “are targeted on Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Leftist regimes have already taken over in Nicaragua and Grenada.”

As Reagan saw things, these incursions were caused by the complacency of Carter. “America has been sleepwalking far too long,” he admonished:

"All over the world, we can see that in the face of declining American power, the Soviets and their friends are advancing….Our credibility in the world slumps further….Our allies are losing confidence in us, and our adversaries no longer respect us….We have to snap out of it, and with your help, that’s exactly what we’re going to do."

 As for defending ourselves from the Russians and their communist progeny prowling the beaches and islands in our back yard, “Our best hope of persuading them to live in peace is to convince them they cannot win at war.”   

"MOST national myths,” writes Chris Hedges, “at their core, are racist.”  Hollywood, despite what the right wing pundits say, has almost always been a willing participant in spreading these myths.  The two highest grossing movies of the Eighties to interpret the contemporary military were Top Gun and Rambo: First Blood Part II.  Top Gun, the Jerry Bruckheimer film released in 1986 and nominated for four Academy Awards, portrayed Navy fighter pilots as near rock stars, flying aces playing cat and mouse at altitude with belligerent Soviet MiGs.  The Air Force worked closely with the filmmakers, and when Top Gun hit the theatres, recruiters set up shop in the lobbies.  While their girlfriends were serenaded by Loverboy, and Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis gazed into each others’ eyes on the big screen, young men, charged with adrenaline and patriotic fervor, could slip out to the concession stand to buy overpriced boxes of Mike and Ike’s and enlist.  The campaign was incredibly successful: The years that followed set records for recruitment. 

Reagan’s election had ushered in an era of jingoistic stage craft that American politics hadn’t seen since World War II.  It was only natural that the show should filter down—or trickledown—into American culture.  The Top Gun phenomenon, while high in profile, was merely indicative of a larger theme.  At 10:00 A.M. sharp on Saturdays, G.I. Joe and his band of cartoon patriots protected the civilized world from the forces of Cobra—who had distinctly Eastern European accents—on the screens of Zeniths throughout Dixon.  During commercial breaks kids could drool in bowls of Frosted Flakes over sales pitches for toy aircraft carriers and troop transporters just like those on the show.  Later that night, if our parents let us stay up, and most of them did, we could watch Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Savage beat the shit out of Nicolai Volkov and the Iron Sheik in front of thousands of flag waving fans on the World Wrestling Federation’s Saturday Night Main Event.  The Hulkster would enter the arena while loudspeakers blared “Real American,” by Rick Derringer.  Often, Old Glory would be draped over his body like a body-length flack jacket.  Before long, an animated version of the WWF began airing in the morning, and we could get a triple dose of the American Way on days off, with just enough down time to head outside and play war games in the afternoon.

Just over the Peoria Avenue Bridge, in a copse of trees on the west side of Hennepin, nestled Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home.  My friends and I mostly poked fun at him.  Curt Delhotal coined a song, sung to the tune of “Camptown Ladies.” Cowboy Ronnie came to town, doo da, doo da.  We called the 40^th president “Ron-hole Reagan,” and ridiculed him mercilessly when rumors of his senility started to float around toward the end of his second term.  We all sensed that the only reason he traveled to Dixon, which he did less than a handful of times, was to win political points with the family values crowd.  When he did show up, CNN would invariably run a segment with bare-chested photos of Ron from his days as a teenaged lifeguard on the Rock River at Lowell Park.  He’d reportedly saved a number of lives, although I’m sure the tally, like all legends, had become inflated with time, and we all wondered why the hell anyone would want to swim there.  The shoreline was more gravel than sand, and there were much better places to get in the water not far away.  It became something of a running joke.  Were the photos real?  The hair looked the same.  And the sheepish grin seemed familiar.

But snicker as we did, we were not immune to the seduction of the climate created by the man who, during a 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, first called the Soviet Union, “the evil empire,” the man who’d joked, in a mike he thought was dead, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."  In the cinema next to the Pamida, I watched in awe when Rocky Balboa pulled himself off the mat after fifteen rounds of punishment at the hands of Ivan Drago, the heavyweight champion from Moscow.  The entire theatre stood, and bits of popcorn flew from mouths as the crowd erupted in chants of “USA, USA.”  There was national pride in that room, not in itself an awful thing, but there was also hatred.  In that climate, any people with even a loose connection to the Russians, like the Vietnamese, were guilty by association.

The fact that Hanoi and Moscow trusted each other about as much as Washington and Beijing and that the communism of the two governments had little in common but name was nuance that flew over the heads of all but the political scientists.  Reagan, after all, had ascended the throne of American politics by becoming a near caricature of the cowboys he played on screen.  He shot from the hip.  He might not have been smart, but he knew how to deliver a line that would stir the masses.  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.”  Even if you didn’t share the sentiment, you had to admire the delivery.  Unless of course, you were from the Communist Bloc, and the message was aimed at you. 

But the Russians and the East Germans had a leg up on the Vietnamese communists.  They may have been brutes, but at least they were swashbuckling, beer drinking brutes that made weapons worthy of respect and fought in boots with steel toes.  At least they grew dancers with legs and grace and lords of the gym with biceps like trees.  At least they were refined in their violence.  At least they were white. 

IN THE mid-Eighties, aided by Ross Perot, the POW-MIA movement was at full strength.  Images of emaciated service men stuffed in bamboo cages and tortured with Coke bottles and wire strung from car batteries dominated the Hollywood version of post-war Nam, at least the version that played at the theatre in Dixon.  Outside shacks hidden deep in the jungle, the wickedness of these small people from Southeast Asia played out in strange and terrible ways.  The gooks were as bad as Nazis.   

My parents knew better.  My mom had friends from Cambodia and Laos, refugees who served me mounds of delicacies in apartments near Red Fox Market on Chicago Avenue.  Both my parents were active in left-wing political movements.  And having served in Vietnam, my father knew firsthand the xenophobic stereotypes so rampant in small town America had little in common with the complexities of the inhabitants of a country halfway around the world.  But my hand was not the only local anomaly in the Quick household.  In most of the homes of Dixon—Reagan country at the peak of the Reagan years—a different mood prevailed.   

The Vietnamese had neither the advantage of proximity or shared language to soften the edges of ignorance and fear.  Not only were they dark; they were aberrant—little people who ate strange food and wore sandals to battle.  They hung fishhooks from trees and scurried like rats for weeks in networks of tunnels too large to imagine.  They sharpened pongee sticks, planted them in leaf-covered pits along roads, and waited for GIs to impale themselves like carp on spears.  They talked funny and wore conical hats.  They lived in villages and shifted shapes and allegiance at night.  They were devious.  Worst of all, they’d sent the U.S. packing so fast after the fall of Saigon we’d left some of our men behind. 

ENTER John J. Rambo.

While Top Gun glorified the military with sex appeal, the Rambo series starring Sly Stallone of Rocky fame, particularly the second installment, worked overtime to perpetuate two myths.  One: We would have won the war if it weren’t for the G.I. hating war protesters and the pressure they put on a timid government.  And two: There were still men in the jungle being tortured by the NVA.  In one of the most memorable scenes of First Blood, Rambo, the war hero and former POW, venting a decade worth of frustration to Colonel Trautman, his leader in Vietnam and the only man he trusts, screams:

"Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn't let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me? Who are they? Unless they've been me and been there and know what the hell they're yelling about!"   

Rambo: First Blood Part II opens with Trautman proposing a new mission to Rambo, who is breaking rocks on a chain gang as a result of his rampage in the first movie: Sneak into the Vietnam and document POWs who are still being held and tortured by the NVA in remote outposts.

“Sir, do we get to win this time?”  Rambo pleads through the prison fence. 

“This time, it’s up to you.” 

After a parachute drop that nearly kills him, Rambo, clad in black fatigues that do little to hide his oiled muscles, spots movement in the foliage, a blur that turns out to be Co Bao, his Vietnamese guide.  She is lovely, and strangely western looking, perhaps because the actress playing Co Bao—Julie Nickson—has a British father.  With her willowy frame, perfectly parted hair, permanent pout, and facial features that blend the better of two races, she will be the only Vietnamese character in the movie with dialogue.

After their rendezvous, Co Bao leads Rambo to a small encampment of surly bandits on a river flowing with water as brown as shit.  A contraption that looks like a hybrid of a junk and an American P.T. boat bobs beside a ramshackle dock.  Men with dirty faces and dirtier nails swing from hammocks in the mangroves and look up between swigs of beer to leer at Co Bao as she and Rambo pad through the lair.  If they appear vaguely Mexican, it’s because they probably are.  Rambo was filmed in the state of Guerrero.  In 1985 Hollywood, brown was brown.  For the throngs of movie goers, there wasn’t much difference between a wetback and a gook. 

Stringy handlers watching her every move, a naked woman, presumably a sex slave or a prostitute, and not much cleaner than the men, covers her breasts with a towel, rinses her hair in a waist-high barrel, and lifts her head toward Rambo with a mix of envy and desperation.  By this time, Rambo’s long sleeves have come off and the skin hugging tank top reveals every twitch of muscle fiber.  He towers over the inhabitants of the squalor like goliath.  Co Bao speaks in Vietnamese to the leader of the band, an older man wearing a thin mustache, a red beret, and a pot belly—the classic garb of the third world strong man.  The man takes the cigar from his lips, billows smoke into the air, and motions Co Bao and Rambo toward the boat.  Rambo looks betrayed.

“You’re using pirates?”

“Best way to get down river,” she answers in broken English.  “Soldiers don’t get suspicious.”

Before long, the boat will pull up close to a bank upriver, and the captain will shoot a menacing glare at Rambo and Co Bao as they slink out of sight into the jungle in search of the prisoners.  They will stumble on a communist check point where a guard will pull loose a gate in a barbed wire fence and slap a peasant girl in the ass after she re-mounts her bike and pedals through the opening to her waiting lover.  Rambo will pull out his knife, cut a hole in the fence, and shoot a sentry with an arrow.  He will crawl through the compound and spy, on a muddy rise on the far side of a creek, a large bamboo cage.  When he approaches the cage, he will hear anguished moans, and he will see, between the rot of the remarkably strong rods, a dozen emaciated G.I.s.  Rats will gnaw at the foot of one, and a spider the size of a fist will crawl across the legs of another.   After a fierce gun battle, Rambo will be captured and strung naked from a water buffalo yoke in a pit of raw sewage.  Then, Sgt. Yushen will show up, leading two perfectly disciplined rows of Russians.  He will speak perfect English to Rambo before he orders him lashed to the bed springs for torture, and there will be no doubt as to who is in charge of the show.  The message will be unmistakable.  The Vietnamese are trained insects, slant-eyed fleas in the Soviet circus, not smart enough to act on their own. 

But first, on the boat, Co Bao has just rebuffed the advances of the vodka swilling captain and sits close to Rambo.  He touches the jade amulet that hangs from her neck.

“It bring me good luck,” she says.  “What bring you good luck?”

He thinks for a minute and reaches for the sheath on his waist.

“I guess this.” 

The knife is massive.  The serrations on the top of the blade and the clean underbelly run parallel for maybe six inches before the upper edge swoops down and the lower edge curls up to meet each other at the tip.  The blade and black cylinder of the handle are separated by a hilt of dueling screwdriver bits—a flat head on one side, a Phillips on the other, Yankee ingenuity at its finest.  Rambo studies the knife like an old friend.  He holds it in the air and turns it back and forth.  In spite of the clouds, the sides of the blade gleam like prisms, illuminating the boundary between West and East, right and wrong.        

EVEN though my parents worked against the very principles Rambo espoused—vengeance, unexamined masculinity, American exceptionalism—the impressions Stallone’s character made on my worldview were not insignificant.  And I have every reason to suppose the same of the boys I grew up with.  While so many of us had combat veteran fathers, most of our dads did not speak of their experience.  As strange as it may seem, we knew no more about the real Vietnam than our schoolmates.

During the whole of my childhood, the only mementos of my father’s tour—with the exception of my DNA and the shrapnel in his shoulder—were a jungle hat my father wore in the summer, a trench coat with a wool liner that hung in the closet of my parents’ room, a camera and the ammo case that held it, and a Pioneer stereo system my father bought from a PX on base. 

The coat was sold in a rummage sale.  My mother held on to the camera after the divorce and even had it fixed at some cost before it disappeared from a storage unit in Provo, Utah.  The stereo receiver gave out some time in the Nineties.  But the speakers, nearly forty years after their purchase, sit on opposing sides of the living room in my father’s house in Portland, Oregon.  They cast long shadows on the bamboo floor when the summer light streams through the windows, and they still sound better than anything on the market, but try as they might, they tell no stories.