Stories Page
 - some writings and short stories, by Bob Keith -  (scroll down to read)

 A Father's Day

 ‘Cruit: Banished to an Outpost of Paradise
 
                                                  A Father's Day
   I would give a great deal of my resources, thousands of dollars, sign a sordid contract, make a deal with a devil, all to just to talk once again even for just a few minutes to my father. I was fortunate to have grown up on a family farm. In those days children usually worked at various tasks depending on their age, to support the daily operation of the farm. I got to see my father at work from my first memories to 18 years old. From 12 to 18 years old I actually worked along side him. Of course, due to school large durations of this work were in the summers. But there were many winter nights feeding the cows and then tossing bales of hay down the shoot from the haymow to the milking area to bolster the pile of hay for my dad and uncle to later feed the cows the next morning. There were weekends of cleaning the cafe pens.  I learned to back the large manure-spreader straight down the barn aisle.  It had to be backed with the old wobbly-frontend tractor.  The big wheels of the spreader hung over the gutters the stanchioned milk-cows dropped their shit in.  Dropping a wheel in the deep shit-filled gutter meant an ordeal of digging and lifting the tire of the heavy shit-filled vehicle out of the mess.  The first time I made the mistake he just left me to undo it myself. Years later in my blue-collar jobs, I could back any trailored vehicle anywhere. 

   On reflection, after I moved away, I realized I knew things about him even my mom did not know. Men reveal sides of themselves, often subtlety, that one can only see as they work. I saw him quietly reflect on the seasons and the seasonal angle of the sun as we might pause under a tree or the shade of a wagon during combining oats or bailing hay. I say him pause pained as the latest news from the Vietnam War filtered over the radio in the work truck. I saw him berate his own brother for letting some hay get rained on – you can’t put wet hay in a barn. My memories of my father are sometimes tweaked when I find an item that was somehow connected to him. These things are in my box of odds and ends. These things often aren’t in a box per say. They are at many times in a box only in my memory. 

   There is a hammer he got me for some birthday or Christmas. I was probably about 12 – much work responsibility seemed to start at 12. It is an adult worker’s hammer. On the farm, roofs and doors and things are repaired in-house. In other words, we fixed our own stuff. When a child was big enough to participate in a carpenter job, perhaps a new wall to a calf pen, or putting new shingles on a shed, you know you were now in the special status. Farmers prided themselves on straight corn rows, and other farmers knew we all fixed our own barn roofs. If the shingles were lined crooked, it was frowned upon. It was there for all to see – your prowess of making straight corn rows, your straight shingle carpenter job was your character. Your straight rows spoke to your farming ability – your validation of your trade. Children were not allowed to jeopardize that image. When I got that hammer it was like a hunter giving his child a rifle. Without anything being spoken, it was understood that on the next project I would somehow participate. 

   That hammer sits in a low sided cardboard box in the basement of my house. In the corner of one of my bookshelves in my basement study area sits the box. Once my wife learned of the easily accessible tools and moved the hammer to the upstairs office desk drawer. I noticed its absence from the box and there was a quick inquisition of my poor wife; the hammer was replaced to its station of honor in my box of useful tools in my man-space in the basement. 

   I live in the house now he and mom moved to in town. He died in 1988 and she in 2001. My wife rebuilt the whole upstairs to her style. Don’t get me wrong, this is good. She needs to get her signature on a house that came from my family. It must have been to her like moving into a house that belonged to a husband’s first wife. But in the basement and the back shed still sit things I know my dad left there. There is a chisel and screw driver both resting on the door frame of the work shed. There is an oil can I have never moved that sits on a shelf in the garage. Even the remodeling guys did not touch it while eating lunch in the garage. The oil can came from the farm. I remember it from the work shed. You never know when something will need a bit of oil to stop a squeak. I know the last one to have touched it was my dad, now probably over twenty years ago. 

   I have taken to riding my bicycle again to train for a possible oversees ride in Vietnam. Now in my fifties and not having ridden much in decades I will need to reinstate some stamina to deal with the 100 degree days and forty-mile-a-day expectations I will put on myself. But in Wisconsin the weather changes quickly. The other day 20 miles from home the sun set and the chill of fall enveloped me as I meandered down a township road surrounded by corn. Its crisping fall leaves rubbed together in the breeze. My hands began to get cold. In my travel bag on the back wheel frame was a pair of soft brown work gloves. The type my dad used. There were not too many tractor tool boxes on the farm without a pair of them inside amongst the tools. “Hey dad you got a pair of gloves or something, it is getting cold out here in the field.” He would just smile and pull a pair from somewhere, often with holes in them, and hand them to me.” The work would continue. Back on the bike I stopped and found the gloves in the bag. I smiled as I could almost see him hand them to me as he smiled then shake his head a bit without saying anything, most likely amused at my latest scheme with Vietnam.
 
   “We had a rough time in Kaserine in ’42. We were lucky to get out. Not much about Africa in all the history books,” he said once after I got out of the Army. It was in response to some anxiety I had about being in the military during Vietnam. It was the only thing he ever said about his military service. Farmers rationed words and he was no exception. If he had manipulated the system he could have been exempted from military service, but it was not his way. Farmers were exempt in World War II. A short stint working in the town feed mill while his brother ran the farm got my dad tagged for the military draft. 

   In a box in the basement just a few shelves up from the box with the hammer is a small candy can with some military metals and his dog tags. My mom gave me the box after dad died. “Here, you take this stuff, you were in the Army. You might be more able to figure out what it means,” she said rather sadly. Years later while doing a story on the Second World War for a college news paper I looked up the medals’ significance. They are in recognition of his service in theaters of war, campaigns as they are often called, in Africa that history shows involved some of the United States’ worst defeats in war time. The conditions the soldiers endured, I read, in the African desert were often abysmal. He never once complained, at least to me except that one hint. And that he gave up only grudgingly.
 
   I have no brothers and sisters. I have no children. When I am gone the hammer and oilcan will no doubt end up in a garage sale as my wife purges the man-spaces of the house. Or, perhaps her new boyfriend or husband will leave the hammer on the side of a truck and it will fall in the street. Perhaps he will leave it out in the rain in the garden while fixing a trellis and it will be forgotten until the next homeowner digs it up, crusts of rust on the handle, with the tiller. 

   If I live long enough to become physically incapacitated, I will sit and ponder as the sun shines in my one window in my nursing home room. It will remind me of the basement windows over the east facing wall where the wash tubs were. The morning sun would come through those windows warming the floor for the old dog Ginger. My dad’s dog before I was born. I only remember her as old and her red hair turning grey. On the dusty window shelf of one of the windows was a small hammer with a worn wooden handle. Decades of neglect in the morning sun had cracked the handle. In all the years I lived on that farm before I joined the Army, that hammer sat there in the cobwebs. When I returned after my military service I noticed the hammer was still there. I think it was under stood that it was something my dad’s dad had left there. It was never really mentioned but I just know it was that way.
 
   In my memory part of my box of stuff is a note to myself that I need to talk to my dad. I never asked him much about his own dad, my grandfather who I never knew. The subject would come up but there was work to be done. There would always be time to sort out grandfather’s history. But when my dad retired I had long moved away. There is an open space in my box if that information ever becomes revealed. It travels with me now simply as a folder with the heading “Incomplete information.” 

   I need to talk to dad and ask him if he thinks I’ve done ok. He insisted emphatically that I never be a farmer – that I should error on the side of anything else. I carry that request in my memory box – I live it. Well dad, I’ve done just about everything else but farm. When I ride my bicycle out in the country I need to ask him who used to live where. I moved away for thirty years and came back to my home area. People have moved in, had lives, died, or moved on all since I was here before. I need to ask him how he stayed married to one woman for 40 years.
 
   He visited me one time in Texas. I took him to a farm museum on the out side of Dallas. It displayed old tractors and replicated barns. Some caretakers half heartedly tended to some sad-faced animals. He looked into the hayfield near the rusting tractors the kids played on in the play ground and he said with just his eyes, “Bob, why the hell did you bring me here?” 

   Last year I went to a war museum in Saigon, Vietnam. Professors, students, family, my wife, and friends, all people who had never been there - had never been to the country - had told me I needed to see it. I had avoided it on earlier trips to the country but I finally relented to the pressure. The kids were playing on an old tank. In a covered plaza, people paused uncomfortably at war correspondent pictures of horrible war scenes. I looked at the wall that half heartedly protected the museum grounds. I thought of my dad because I summon his wisdom often. That wisdom accompanies me in my traveling memory box. I brought my dad up in my mind. His baseball cap was on just a bit tilted just like the farmers wear them after a long day’s work and they ride out in the old pickup truck in the evening with a piece of straw in their mouths to inspect a crop in the field. That dad came to me and I saw him in his jeans, dusty work shoes, and a t-shirt with a hole in it that my mother could only sigh at. He gave me one of those crooked farmer smiles and said, “Bob, why the hell did you bring yourself here?” 
 
 - by Bob Keith, September 30, 2005 - 

                                        ‘Cruit: Banished to an Outpost of Paradise 
    I had only been in Germany one day.  We military guys never added the “West” before the Germany.  There was a nine-hour flight from Fort Dix, New Jersey, a landing in Frankfurt, and a bus ride to Nuremberg to see my rear duty station for one hour – an old bombed out Nazi military barracks from a by-gone era, repaired enough to house crass U.S. Army Engineers in the 1970s.

    “What the fuck is your story, trooper,” said Sergeant First Class Miller with a glower.  His little ugly dog by his desk leveled a low growl my direction.  Miller was the duty Transition Sergeant down stairs in the barracks.  He was one of those guys that had stayed in the Army over 30 years.  Later in my tour of duty I would see him bounced around to just about every bullshit desk on base – Library; Personal Vehicle; Drug and Alcohol Rehab.; Reenlistment…. He would be around long enough to piss someone important off, but because of his time-in-service they would just move him to another desk. Hell, he had been in World War II for god’s sake.

    Corporal Richard de la Guardia reporting for duty,” I said, rather half heartedly. 

    “You need to take your long-hair-wearing, Italian’d-named ass up to the border DeLingaling. Don’t the Army cut your fuck’n hair back in “The World” anymore, son? 

    “It was a long trip Sarg.,” I said and sighed.

    “I’ll cut your fuck’n hair and I hope you don’t like it asshole; bastards like you have fucked up my Engineers,” Miller said.  He took my written orders and pointed out through the mausoleum type door of the decaying Prussian-esque building. 

    There was a duce-and-a-half cargo truck ride up to the Czechoslovakian border to my Army unit’s field detachment near “The Wall.”  I later found out that no matter what we did, that man-made piece of geography was always in the background somewhere.  A one-thousand mile barrier between East and West – it ran down the middle of Europe during the 45 year Cold War.  Then, it took a detour and cut the land city-island of Berlin in half as well.  In 1972 I arrived at its tangled barbed wire, minefields, and German Shepard guard dogs.  It had long become a fixture of the border culture by that time. Orwellian guard towers loomed on its entire length – nation after nation – one tower never out of sight of the next.  It ripped through the middle of towns and villages, an “Iron Curtain” casting an odious shadow on playgrounds, cemeteries, and markets.  After I will leave the country and my Army obligation, “the Wall” continues to stay up another 17 years. 

    It was already 19:00 hours when I finally got up there to Grafenwoehr.  You really were not stationed in Germany if Grafenwoehr is an unfamiliar place to you.  I missed evening chow by two hours – no one at the mess hall but kitchen-patrol privates washing pots and pans. And, there was the old cook – mess sergeant.

    “You’ll probably find your Engineers in the cantina.  It’s in the middle of the Quonset huts,” said the mess sergeant nodding his head toward some dilapidated World War II style billets.  There were way too many wrinkles on his face.  He looked 50 but was most likely in his mid twenties.  He looked like he had maybe done one too many tours in ‘Nam.  “Lucky you – boy.  Your Combat Engineers are a bunch of drunks,” he offered through his whiskbroom mustache.  He eyed the Engineer castle on my beret.   The pots and pans shook as the big turret-guns from the tanks fired off from the target range firing-pad just yards away from the mess hall tent.

    “Damn glad you’re here,” said First Lieutenant Constantine.  I found him playing cards with what I later found out was his platoon – my platoon.  He waved off my salute.  There were already dozens of German beer bottles strewn about the table and floor in their – in our – piece of the cantina.

    “‘Nam has sucked our personnel resources to the bone,” sighed Constantine.  He continued his pontification on the state of geopolitical affairs unsolicited as he gulped a beer.  “Guys either just go back to ‘The World’ from ‘Nam or new recruits don’t join at all any more.  Germany doesn’t get shit for replacements. The draft is winding down too.” 

    Constantine looked at my stateside unit patch and then asked, “How in the fuck did you draw this shit duty station?”

    “Orders came down one day,” was all I could offer.  Then I added, “I still have a year left on my enlistment.” 

    “How the fuck you manage to stay out of 'Nam?”  Constantine said and then paused…and looked through me. Then he continued, “You enlisted for this shit?”  But he didn’t wait for an answer.  “Where’s my manners,” he said through a belch.  Then he proceeded to introduce me to the guys at the make-shift card table with the pile of crumpled money and billowing cigarettes on it.   Another blast fired off from the target range and the concussion from its intensity raised all the objects off the table and rearranged them an inch or so.

    There were the usual suspects.  There was Smitty, Caps, Luna, MacAmmis, Caffee, Cotton, and Newk.  Their unshaven faces peered through a curtain of cigarette smoke.  They did not have to explain their station in life.  They still wore their Vietnam combat patches on their fatigue shirts.  This is the protocol, you do the time and your combat unit patch accompanies your next unit’s patch on your shirt.  But mostly, I could tell by their auras.  Their eyes – sunken, pupils deep, dark, looked at me through the smoke – had seen God’s temperamental, schizophrenic emissaries of death.  Most of them were finishing out their enlistments in Germany after doing 12 months in ‘Nam.  The oldest amongst them was probably 20.

    “Sorry to pull some bullshit on you right off the plane, brother, but we have bunker duty tonight.  Get with Sergeant Long and he will get you down there when there is a target range ceasefire,” Constantine said.  Before he even finished the sentence he turned and gulped down a beer and started dealing the cards to the guys around the table. 

    “When the big guns fire up it is a shit storm of fireworks,” said Smitty looking up from his hand of cards.  Then he added, “Your Uncle Sammy likes to make a big lot of boom-boom for the Ruskies over on the other side of the Wall.”  There was muffled laughter from the table. 

    MacAmmis asked me, “Hey, new guy.  You know what to do if the Ruskies come charging across the border tonight?”  He did not wait for an answer before he said, “Bend over, reach up with your lips, and kiss your ass goodbye.”  They all laughed, more of a sinister laugh rather than a comedy, inspired laugh.  MacAmmis offered one last caveat, “Six Ruskies to every one of us, new guy.”  They all laughed sadistically again – from their necks, not their stomachs. 

    I found Sergeant Long crushing out a cigarette butt on the side of the beat up one-ton truck we would take down range to the target bunker.  His jacket was covered with range dust.  He looked more like a World War II sergeant from the old movies than one of those modern poster boys they plastered on the recruiting ads in the early ‘70s.  'Nam wasn’t going so well and the PR had to be stepped up.  Yet, with all his John Wayne demeanor Sergeant Long was probably all of 21. 

    “Let’s go, new guy,” Long said.  He smirked like maybe he took new guys down to the bunker and never needed to bring them back.  I imagined him bragging to the card players, yah, I never brung a ‘cruit back from that fuck’n bunker alive yet boys. Then there would be laughter and shaking of heads, but just long enough until the cards were dealt again. Even though I had already spent almost two years in the Army I would still have to prove myself to these worn veterans.  To them I would be a recruit until future notice – ‘cruit. 

    I tried not to think about what could happen down range in a bunker when five tanks from the Second Armored Cavalry sat side by side and fired artillery volleys at the berm of targets that sat directly in front of the bunker that I would spend the night in.  American tank crews sat day after day facing-off across the border with allegedly well-trained Russian tank crews.  Adding insult to injury, the Russian tanks were bigger, more powerful machines.  MacAmmis was right.  The tank crews were also outnumbered six to one.  In the cantina, in a fit of camaraderie, they would not hesitate to pound a whining homesick corporal to a bloody pulp.  That is, one who carelessly made reference to any faults their unit may have – imagined or otherwise.
  
    The bunker duty routine was that, when the firing stopped, the bunker crew hops out and replaces the destroyed plywood targets – one could only hope the tank crews paid attention to the radio directions to maintain cease fire.  A realistic potential was this: The paperwork concerning one accidentally blown up corporal down range by the tank guys is not likely to see the light of day.

    MacAmmis appeared from nowhere to drive the truck to take me down range.  He had a beer bottle sticking out each fatigue jacket pocket.   Long and I rode in the back.  We rumbled down the shrapnel-filled trail to the bunker and Sergeant Long looked at me with an unlit cigarette in his mouth and said, “I was killed in Nha Trang in ’71 you know that new guy?  Them docs in 'Nam brought me back to life.  What were you doing in ‘71, mowing the unit commander’s yard in California?”  He took out a lighter, clicked it open and lit the cigarette.  Up front MacAmmis was slugging down one of his beers as he negotiated a pile of blown-up metal in the road.  It was then I noticed the tipped over can of gasoline in the back with us. 

    “That little spill make you nervous new guy?”  Long said as we bounced in the back.  The gas soaked the soles of our boots.  I looked at Long’s cigarette as ashes fluttered to the gassy bed of the truck as he smoked it down to a butt.  He took one last long drag.  “Fuck you, new guy,” he said.  He flicked the lit cigarette into the gas.  It shot out of his fingers like a small jet.  The fiery butt extinguished in the fluid and at the impact there was a little sound - shizzz.  I shut my eyes for a second and thought about home.

    “Not bad, new guy,” Long said.  He smiled with only one side of his mouth.  Then he continued, “The last new guy jumped out the back of this here truck and broke his collar bone."

    I don’t remember much of what I did in that bunker for 24 hours.  I remember my bunker mate was a private named Wally.  I remember they had given us a whole box of fresh ham sandwiches and a case of Coca-Cola to tide us over.  Wally demolished most of the sandwiches.  The walls were damp and carved with generations of graffiti from soldiers manning the bunker from armies dating back to the Prussians.  FTA – “fuck-the-army” dominated the more recent hieroglyphics. 

    The next day Long and MacAmmis came back with the truck during a cease fire to pick us up.  In the back of the truck with Long rode a man with captain bars on his collar.   Wally and I jumped up in the back of the truck, I started to salute the officer but Wally grabbed my hand and brought it back down. These guys still had their ‘Nam habbits.  They did not always salute officers so as not to give away their rank to the enemy.  MacAmmis put the truck in gear and roared out like he was in a Baja dirt race. 

    After a bit the Captain looked at me and said, “Cross your mind new guy as to why an officer might be riding down range in a piece of shit truck like this?”  

    “Hadn’t given it too much thought, sir,” I said.  There was no spirit in my voice.

    The captain looked at me over his glasses and smiled like an old friend – like an upper classman about to give a freshman some advice as to how to make an athletic squad.  He took his beret off and held it next to his chest as if he were showing respect at a funeral.  His hair was thinning on the top.  He was probably 23 – could have been the captain of my high school football team.  He pronounced his words like he had actually seen the inside of an English book.  He probably had a couple years of college that got him eligible for officer training.  Maybe he even spent time in the seminary or rabbinical – perhaps an English major.

    I pondered the possibility of one savior in a hole from hell – one ally in a geo-global den of iniquity.  The captain stared at me in the back of the bouncing truck and smiled.  My heart warmed at the first sign of sanity in three days. I imagined him as a blue-collar guy who was going down range with his troopers to show them solidarity.   

    The Captain grinned as if reading my mind, and then he pouted.  

    The pout became an ever flaring glower as his faced reddened.  He turned on me like a man just awakened from his asylum bed and hollered, “I am your unit commander new guy and you ‘will’ call me Captain Hell-God.  This is my personal outpost of paradise.   Ninety-nine percent of the mother fuckers back in ‘The World’ do not even know or care this fuck’n place exists.”  Then he added in a poetic cadence, “Paradise, needs not its outposts of necessity known to the banal.”  He paused and tipped his head as if looking through my soul.  Then he continued his rant, “And you – you new guy – you are going to be my musical whore today.  Now sing me the Corps of Engineers battle hymn new guy.  Sing it now - fuck!” 

    Sergeant Long smiled his one-sided smile.  Wally looked out over the tank target range and pulled a ham sandwich out of his coat.  MacAmmis wiped beer foam off his lips as he negotiated around an old skeleton of a target tank in the trail.  I looked at the lot of them.  I looked out the back of the bouncing truck.  I looked out over the moonscape of the tank target range.  I looked up through the driver’s compartment and out the front window.  I imagined just over the tank firing-pad knoll and beyond the tree line could be found the roof of a “Wall” guard tower – the silhouette of a Russian soldier with AK-47 machine gun just recognizable.  My sight focused on the now and a row of odious olive-drab green and camouflage colored tanks sat patiently on the tank firing-pad – ominous gun turrets pointed in our direction – with their overused but patient engines belching out black diesel smoke.  The tank crews displayed American flags from the long turret radio antennas.  The silhouettes of the tanks got bigger as we drove back.  As we got closer I could see the tattered edges of the worn flags.  A haze of heat loomed about the flags and the hot idling engines.  Thirteen months left in the Army.  My heart sank.  

    “Sing you goddamn ‘cruit,” shouted the Captain over the truck engine. His eyes bulged out of his sockets. The words sloshed in the murky sludge in my mind. 

    We are, we are, we are, we are the Army Engineers.  We can, we can, we can, we can, demolish…

 - by Bob Keith, May 9, 2005 -