I had turned and was staring out his window towards one of the parade grounds. It was all such a waste. I turned back to face him. “That won’t help, sir. It’s not really my place to speak, but my going back won’t help anybody. I’m sorry if I seem cold about it, but there’s very little left for me back there.”
He shrugged. “I can’t say as I understand, but it’s not my business. If you change your mind, my door is always open.”
I snapped back to attention. It was obvious I was being released back to duty. “Thank you, Colonel. I apologize for intruding. It won’t happen again.” I saluted, received a return salute, and I turned smartly and headed out. I had been gone almost an hour, about fifty-nine minutes more than my brother deserved.
In my next letter from Marilyn, she did indeed confirm that my dad had called her and gotten my location. I wrote back and told her what was going on. I felt bad for my father, but he had really gotten himself into this mess, and I had no idea how he was going to dig himself out. He had been letting Mom go on for years about how poor Hamilton wasn’t understood and how it was all my fault and the school’s fault and everybody else’s fault. Anybody but his fault. Okay, I’ll grant that being a certified nut job like a schizophrenic is more than just a character flaw, but I had had enough. If it wasn’t for Suzie I would have washed my hands of the entire bunch of them.
A week later I wanted that emergency leave, but not to go home. Marilyn dumped me. It was all my fault. I have a big mouth. When I was writing her, I let my mouth write my letters. She took exception to something I wrote and told me which way to head in and just how far. She also mailed me back the jewelry I had bought her.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but it was the first time on this trip. She had dumped me between junior year and senior year before, just like now, and for a similar reason, my big fat fucking mouth. She had written me that one of her little brothers, Peter I think, had managed to fall in the fireplace. I wrote back that it wasn’t a problem. She had so many brothers and sisters by that point that she had spares. Big mistake! I was promptly informed that family was much more important to her than I was, and she returned my fraternity pin.
Giving a girl your frat pin was sort of like a pre-engagement. Huge numbers of guys gave their girl their frat pin with the intention of getting in her pants. What the hell, it worked for me back then! We also had a tradition of the Sophomore Curse, which basically stated that any sophomore that gave a girl his pin would end up breaking up with her. Looked at logically, that was inevitable, since how many 19 year old kids know who they’re getting married to. Okay, so I made up with Marilyn, but the curse had done its work by then. This time I didn’t tempt the curse, and I didn’t give her my pin.
Yes, I made up with her then, but it took me the better part of six months. No girl can dump Carl Buckman! I ‘played the field’, messing around with a few girls I had been dating at the same time as I was seeing Marilyn. I was a real pig. Eventually, in January, I get really loaded, lost my pride, broke my resolve, and wrote her a letter begging forgiveness. We met up and got back together again.
Okay, so I fucked up. No, I didn’t say a damn thing about her family. I knew better than that. Now I knew how important family was to her. No, I really screwed the pooch this time. I called her stupid.
No, not really. It was more of an implication. She had finished with her two years at MVCC and had transferred to Plattsburgh State. She would be rooming with her Aunt Lynette, and for some reason had commented that her college degree was the equivalent of mine. Yes, I should have stopped and dropped it, Yes, I knew from living with her for almost fifty years that she was an egalitarian while I was an elitist. Yes, I should have known better because we had argued about this more than once over the years. No, I’m smarter than that.
I replied that, first, Plattsburgh State had just made Playboy’s Top 20 Party Schools, so maybe she shouldn’t brag about the quality education she was getting. Then I really buried myself when I commented that it was taking her five years to go through three colleges to get one degree, while I was taking four years to go through one college to get three degrees! Okay, so I conveniently forgot about Towson State, but I thought it had a certain poetic symmetry.
Strangely, Marilyn didn’t agree with my style of prose. In fact, she actually took offense at my thoughts. Considerable offense. Enough offense to inform me that she didn’t particularly want to hear from me again. Ever. In this lifetime or any other lifetime. Ever.
Ever, ever, ever!
Okay, so I knew how to handle this from the last time I fucked up. I would write her a letter and commit written hari kiri. I did this just about immediately, and enclosed all the jewelry, and promised to never misbehave again and stated my undying love repeatedly to her. It had worked before. I was smart enough to know how to fix this problem.
My letter came back from her house marked Return To Sender. That was somewhat disturbing, so I wrote a really heartfelt letter, not only disemboweling myself, but also jumping off a bridge and hanging myself, and this one I mailed Return Receipt Required.
She refused to sign for it.
I tried calling her house that weekend, after waiting in line at the payphone with a roll of quarters for half an hour. I ended up talking to Harriet, who sounded a touch sympathetic, but couldn’t get Marilyn to the phone and told me to wait and try again later. In a month or two. Or maybe longer.
I was going to have to do this in person, but that wasn’t possible, either. At the end of training, I wasn’t going back to Troy, I was going to Columbus, Georgia, to become a paratrooper. That was three weeks long, and unless a pilot got lost and dumped me in Utica, I wasn’t going to see her for the better part of a month!
After graduation, a few dozen of my fellow graduates and I were loaded on buses, along with our gear, and driven to Columbus. There is no slower form of transportation than an Army bus. I wasn’t sure if we would arrive before the winter came through. After that, welcome to Fort Benning!
Wow, what an incredibly stupid idea!
Think about it — I was going to let the United States Army take me up in aeroplanes and throw my ass out the back end! Ever since then I have wondered at my own mental stability at this, but at the time it seemed like a marvelous idea. Since I had already done basic, jump school was available. A limited number of slots are held open during the summer for officer candidates, and I qualified and was selected for the end of July. A lot of officers end up taking jump training, maybe even most officers, even those who don’t end up in the airborne. It’s considered a useful box to check off on your things-to-do list.
It isn’t all that difficult to learn how to jump out of an airplane. They tie a parachute on your ass and toss you out. Gravity takes care of the rest. As they say in the airborne, ‘We’ve never left anybody up there yet!’ They have lots of sayings like that in the airborne. Another is, ‘If your chute fails, bring it back after you land and we’ll give you a brand new one!’ They’re just chock full of uplifting tales and sayings in the airborne. They even have their own song, ‘Blood Upon The Risers.’, which starts out: