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by Frank Light
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In the spring of 1969 my father cut Accountant Wanted ads from the Philadelphia Bulletin I’d delivered as a teenager. I’d find them by my dinner plate, two or three every night. He and his father ran a lumberyard. They had higher hopes for me. Don’t want Philly? he asked. How about Norristown? Pottstown? Superior Tube, on whose grounds I’d played Little League?
“If you get a girlfriend,” Mom said, “don’t you think the jobs will follow?” Her friends’ daughters weren’t my type, and I wouldn’t have been theirs.
“If he doesn’t have a job”—Dad again—“how does he get a girlfriend?”
“Chicken or the egg?” Mom could be funny if you listened for it.
When I came home from Vietnam the summer of 1968, people said give him time. After catching up with friends from high school, I converted my savings into traveler’s checks and flew to Europe for five months on a trip I’d previously asked for as a college graduation present, class of ’66. What was I thinking? My parents couldn’t afford it. Our circle vacationed at the Jersey Shore or the Poconos. Now that I’d returned to the States and idleness, June almost upon us, family and friends began to wonder.
In other words, Junior, get off the dime. Earn some billable hours. I sold my motorbike and bought a ‘54 Saab the color, sheen, and shape of an engorged tick. You mixed oil with the gas like in a rotary lawn mower and it wasn’t much faster. On warm days I had to turn on the heat to cool the engine. Even that didn’t get it over the hills in one go. I’d have to pull over.
With that as my steed I set out for Chicago because Illinois didn’t require work experience for a CPA, only that you pass the written test, which I did as a college senior to my professors’ and my own amazement. Two nights before the exam, an emergency room doctor wrapped my right hand for second-degree burns from a torch I carried—while feeling no pain—to herald a fraternity track meet. I had to hold the pencil like an icepick. Fellow test-takers and monitors might have thought here’s a guy who could benefit from a stint in the service. Well, as accountants should know, benefits had costs, and neither revealed themselves fully at first. Life certainly would have been different had I followed my parents’ advice to go for the grad-school deferment that came with an MBA. It credentialed you for the rat race. Draft boards culled the strays. Even would-be accountants were fair game.
***
Halfway to the Windy City, July 1969, I pulled off the Pennsylvania turnpike to visit an Army auditor who’d taken me under his wing. He too was looking for work, sort of. He lived with his mom, a widow with a resolute smile. The mill had shut down, and the neighborhood tavern lowered the blinds at closing time but kept the taps open. After we had our fill, he drove us to a diner for pre-breakfast fries and gravy. His car veered into a creek. We had to go in deeper to get out. Hilarious. That was DJ, as hunched and thin as ever. His eye for the absurd had served us well at sites where accounting was, understandably, a low priority. We found the fries more iconic than edible.
Next up: John, who’d preferred the routines on base—mess hall eggs, lunchtime basketball, “Playboy Club” in the evening. We both separated from active duty in the summer of ’68. He then hopscotched around Europe before entering an MBA program in Michigan. I tracked him to an antiwar rally where, given his leanings, I least expected him. “Best place to pick up chicks,” he said. “Tell ‘em, ‘I was a Green Beret; help me understand.’” He looked the part—tall, dark, haughty, and handsome. We almost got together in the fall but I connected only with his former girlfriend, a German graduate student holding out for commitment. Her stance confirmed for me that which I’d long suspected—girls grew up faster than boys. They saw what was coming.
A smokestack palisade on the approach to Chicago discouraged any notion of a quick and easy CPA. How could I exit the interstate when so many of my generation were California dreaming? Hometown friends had already acted on it. They put me up the summer of ’67 when I stopped off in Los Angeles en route to the overseas replacement station at Oakland. An old teammate who’d gotten into the Reserves and two former cheerleaders picked me up in his convertible. “Your eyes watering yet?” they asked. Even the smog excited them. California, holy cow. Shoes, socks, haircuts, button-downs, and bras marked you as a nonconformist. I quickly adapted to Orange Julius, Disneyland, Sunset Strip, and the coastal highway on a motorcycle borrowed from one of the gang then at sea with the Navy. Lean in. Let it out!
***
LA served up a sugar high, cotton candy on the horizontal. Having subsequently seen Paree, I now hungered for heartier fare, abalone if not steak with a sizzle in the city’s rival by the bay. Or I could go all meat and potatoes. Plus corn. Fresh picked—nothing better. A family favorite. With Chicago behind me, opportunity awaited in the plains I’d overflown going to and from the Coast. Until then I’d never been west of Ft. Benning, Georgia.
The corn belt represented a quintessentially American ecosystem, and I knew a denizen. At a gas station pay phone I dialed information for the number of a barracksmate from Benning. Mick, I’ll call him. Blue Earth, Minnesota, was his home. “Only place in the world the river flows uphill,” he used to say. My laugh caused him to laugh harder. “North,” he’d acknowledge. “I mean north.” The operator found a listing with his last name. His mother answered. I asked for Mick. She said he wasn’t in.
Sure. What were the chances? “Tell him I called.” The road beckoned, and the tank was full.
“How does he know you?”
“Tell him it’s Frankie the First.” Nickname for our first sergeant, late of Vietnam. One good thing about the Army, we used to joke, it kept psychos like Frankie off the streets.
“Hold on.”
A minute later Mick came on the line, laughing himself into a wheeze. He was out of the Army but needed to be careful. There’d been a misunderstanding at Ft. Carson, and the FBI was hot on his tail.
He wasn’t that careful. He had the same muscle car as at Benning—raging-bull red and barely muffled. Big engine. Hemi this, quad that. Might have been a Pontiac, a GTO. After dinner and a tour of the family farm, we hit the local bar. Midweek, the women he wanted me to meet weren’t in. On the way to the next town he tailgated a crew-cab pickup. “Lookee there.” He swung around it, cast aspersions, thrust his middle finger toward my open window, and forced the pickup onto the shoulder. Bad blood traced back to older brothers. Five guys younger than us got out. We did, too—t-shirt, ball cap, and shorts the uniform of the day. No one dressed with apparent intention. That was the point.
“Come on,” he said. He would have been state wrestling champion, he claimed, had he made weight at the finals. One pork chop too many. His feet shuffled like a boxer before the bell. He raised his dukes. “Two of us, five of you. Fair fight!”
Uh-oh, two included me, more pacifist than pugilist and the only one present with glasses. Drafted again! Right or wrong, you stood by your host. His mom had prepared a farm-table feast with little notice. The guest bedroom was decorated minimally, like a Scandinavian hostel, with a needlework spread.
“Come on.” Built like a bollard, he kicked dust in the fivesome’s direction. The sun was setting behind our backs, its radiance all around. “What are you waiting for?”
They squinted. “Assholes,” one of them muttered. Taller than us but with frames yet to fill out, they retreated into the pickup and drove on.
We roared by then slowed to a crawl. He wouldn’t let them pass. He’d speed up and slow down. Finally he pulled over. They raced ahead. We cleaned the car of empty beer bottles he tossed into a cornfield. That wasn’t a crop for human consumption, not directly. Pigs and cattle ate it before we ate them.
Two police cars blocked the road at the edge of town. He flung open his door and stomped out, arms waving, and shouted, “Way to go! You got ‘em! You got ‘em!” The Blue Earth Five slouched against their pickup behind the police. “Those sons of bitches—that’s them!—they cut us off.” He accused them of doing what he did.
The police shushed him and the Five, who writhed in indignation.
The cops’ chins dipped. They knew the youths, they knew Mick, and they knew the parents. They inspected IDs and registration. Pennsylvania drivers license—I had to explain. In the absence of evidence they told everybody, with a warning about the muffler, to go home.
The sky darkened on the drive back. Stars emerged. Ground level was two-lane blacktop, a path through the corn. “They need to get out,” he said of the kids, who’d been spared, apparently, by the luck of the draw. The draft had moved to a lottery, and overall numbers were down. “I was trying to help.”
Chicago, I suggested for his own getaway, Denver being too close to Carson.
He was thinking Minneapolis-St. Paul. Or Mexico. Canada was for draft dodgers.
At Benning we were payroll clerks, a mismatch. I was overeducated, Mick overactive. He would have been a hero or dead had he gone to Vietnam. If like me he was neither, it might have redirected him.
***
The prairie beyond Blue Earth held onto a less cultivated American dream: haze, buzzards, and yellow-green hills, an adumbration of mountains to the west. Dirt roads trailed off to the north and south, some straight, others curved, all promising… nothing. The buffalo were gone. Horses, too, far as I could tell. Toothpick-chomping cowboy-booted natives had a leg up on the jobs and chicks. Of course: they were in for the duration. Lifers.
After country-fried steak to gnaw on, Folgers to counter the Coors, and a Marlboro to ease the transition, I pulled out of a truck stop, the closest moving vehicle a semi rising out of a dip in the road. Going my way. Barely visible. That diesel-snorting hellhound gained ground faster than the Saab’s two-stroke engine could rev. An air horn crescendoed into a Doppler effect as the cab’s image overtook my mirror. Yes, objects really were closer than they appeared. In Vietnam it’d been the opposite. I swerved off the two-lane, gravel flying. Vroom! The Saab trembled in the backwash. That air horn again, this time descending.
***
America the scenic wonderland put on a show, with even more depth, range, and intensity than the majesties of which we schoolkids used to sing. Seeing no place for myself, I pressed on. At the California line a whiff of the sea crept into the air, and the Saab balked at the border inspection station. The agent helped me push it behind her booth. The little engine that barely could needed regular rest breaks until we crested the Sierras.
San Francisco marked the end of the road. There a fraternity brother on the career track at Arthur Young, a “Big Eight” accounting firm, let me sleep on his apartment floor for the night. With an MBA already on his resume, he was playing the field and the market. Money to burn. At breakfast he touted the boarding house where he stayed his first week and everybody was from out of town, temporarily jobless and friendless but looking. When the last of my traveler’s checks and a war bond from my father ran out, Arthur Young took me in. Thanks, bro. My parents relaxed. Their eldest had a necktie job at last.
Arthur Young occupied two floors high in the financial district. From that perch, senior partners dispatched teams to area businesses. The city’s hills challenged the Saab, and the authorities towed it when I flew to Pennsylvania for Christmas. Their loss, my gain. I replaced it with a ’60 Triumph convertible available cheap from a colleague whose wife was expecting.
One Friday the paychecks were late. No problem for us new hires. Our obligations were few. But it sorely stressed recently promoted supervisors with salaries double ours and commitments more than double. In advising clients while also directing their audits, these junior partners finessed the regulatory capture that auditors dance around. Dynamics, if not motives, resembled those I encountered in the war. After all, who doesn’t want to get along and get ahead? You resist. You adjust. The hours were long. Wives called the shots at home.
Stick it out, I was told. You’ll retire a millionaire.
On weekends we newbies underdressed like other singles our age, feigning enthusiastic indifference. Fog beat smog, everyone agreed. That boarding house rocked. The whole city rocked. Life was so good it scared me. If I didn’t leave soon, I never would.
None of that crowd saw me as a numbers person. Was I a people person? If neither, what was left? A neighbor across the hall suggested the Peace Corps. Not for herself—she was an artist—but as something to consider. Like the Army, it offered an off-ramp with government backing.
An old high school friend brought it up my first day home from college. Until then the thought hadn’t occurred; the Peace Corps seemed an even greater reach than Europe. So I moved in with my parents, knowing it wouldn’t last, and commuted to one of the Big Eights in Philly. The draft notice arrived that Friday. It led to the year at Benning, another in Vietnam, and an end to holiday homecomings. I missed friends more than they missed me. They made new friends, as did I. Looking back drove me to look forward. And vice-versa. I had things to make up for. Let’s say there’s things I’d do differently, I’d like my country to do differently. Anyway, that’s what I wrote in my application, unsure how it would play with the Peace Corps.
***
Before sealing the envelope, I flew to Nicaragua with a companion to see my best buddy from Vietnam. Call me Win, he’d say, drawing from the first letters of his last name. Win and I audited sites in the Delta, DJ and I in the Highlands. Our credibility rested on the Army’s faith that getting the little things right made bigger things possible. Win already had an MBA, and by 1970 he was back to managing a banana plantation for his previous employer, Standard Fruit. We made the rounds of work and town, mixed rum with cough syrup, revived old stories, and as I left he presented me with a machete for which I’ve yet to find a use. The Peace Corps introduced him to Central America. Not a good fit, he said. Maybe the Peace Corps said that about him. Whatever, Standard Fruit scooped him up. The draft board trumped Standard.
On the flight back to San Francisco, my companion asked if I intended to emulate him—go on an expense-paid vacation, learn a language, quit.
“Been there.” I volunteered for Vietnam, for language classes, to audit for Special Forces. Win, John, and I did jump school in country, DJ at Benning. Two years stateside would have been such a waste.
She smiled. “Other than that, you don’t seem very Peace Corps.”
“Exactly.” I hadn’t seemed very Army, either. Therein lay the appeal.
Red hair, freckles, brown eyes fluttering—she waited for more. When she realized I couldn’t or wouldn’t elaborate, she said she understood. She saw this wasn’t going to work, wasn’t worth the effort.
I had yet to appreciate how distance traded immediacy for perspective. Nor did I fully grasp how successful people compartmentalized, my friend in Nicaragua being a case in point. They triangulated.
***
Combat auditors, we called ourselves. That was a joke we took seriously. Post-traumatic stress wasn’t the issue. Compared to many, we had it good—pay supplements, high morale, traveled the country, none of us killed, Win the only one wounded. I’d say we were experiencing what the Peace Corps calls culture shock, a much-discussed topic in training. The way to deal with it, home or abroad, is have something to do. Nothing too hard, and especially nothing too easy.
Afghanistan, say.
Poor but peaceful, the Peace Corps described it. Either headquarters bought into my application or, like the Army, they had a quota to fill.
Where is it? people asked. Africa?
Perfect.
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At the end of his Peace Corps service Frank Light met his future wife on the Buddha statue the Taliban later destroyed. Assignments during a career with the State Department included Vietnam desk officer, the U.S. Embassy in Laos, secondments to the Pentagon, and Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan. His story titled “Convergence on the Strand” appeared in As You Were: The Military Review, Vol. 8 in Spring 2018.
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