Chapter 26: You’re in the Army Now

Part V: Sly Cortales’s Story

SLY:

“Sometimes I’m thankful we had only one,” Bea said. I could see her point. Just one. I sighed. “Oh, Sly, I’m sorry. That was heartless of me.”

“No, Bea. I’m thankful I have one and the girls Lily and I adopted,” I said. It had been a struggle to overcome the loss of Lexi. And then Lily. “The sadness I feel still is tempered by the love of my daughters and grandchildren. Even that scalawag, Brian Junior.”

“I must say, Samantha was surprised,” Brian said as he came into the room with cinnamon rolls and fresh coffee for all of us. He’d shown up a few minutes earlier as soon as the rolls were ready to frost. I’d probably have a sugar high after this if I didn’t get some protein.

“Well, I’ll be glad when they all get back from this filming in Canada. What is it your cónyuge is working on this time?” I asked.

“Nikki agreed to help Hannah write about her experiences as a teen if Hannah allowed her to write about them in one of her books. They haven’t come to blows yet, so I’m guessing it’s going okay.”

“What does Hannah’s life story have to do with Canada?” Dinita asked.

“That was one of the conditions. Nikki would help write it if it wasn’t set anywhere near Indiana. Tyax is about as far from Indiana as you can get.” We all laughed and Brian turned those deep blue eyes that captured my daughters on me. “What was it like, Papa Sly? You’ve shared so much with me. Have you told the other parents?” I shook my head and Brian left the room. Not another word was spoken as everyone turned their eyes toward me. Shit.

“It was like John said...”

“Don Sylvester, my family and I wish to express our condolences for your loss. Don Baptista was a good man and respected by my father and all who knew him.”

“Thank you, Don Joseph. My mother and sisters will be pleased your family remembered them. And I thank you, Little Joe. I’m glad to have you as a friend.” I was Catalano and Little Joe was Italian but our words for formal greetings were the same in both Spanish and Italian. I knew that the formality of his statement meant it came from his father.

“Sly, we’ve known each other since grade school. I’ve got your back.”

I thought about our friendship. We weren’t real close, but all our early classes and class pictures showed us standing next to each other. Alphabetical order. Cortales then Cortelli. We played varsity football in high school and I took handoffs from him or protected him when he passed. I was easily five inches taller and outweighed him by fifty pounds. Part of what kept us in different worlds was nationality. Oh, we were both born in the US, but my parents immigrated from Spain—technically Catalonia. My father never let me forget that Franco’s suppression of Catalonia had been the reason he fled and took mother with him. I’d pieced together some bits that indicated he was a leader of the Republican resistance in the Civil War and Franco’s people targeted him for elimination.

On the other hand, Little Joe was from an old Italian family. The presence of his bodyguards all through school was something we’d all grown to accept. They were like peacekeepers in the school. At Joe’s direction, they had stepped in to stop a couple of thugs from giving me a good beating in junior high. I’d never been bothered again after he let it be known I was under his protection.

“My father wants me to enlist.”

“It’s going to be a shitstorm,” I said. “He trying to get rid of you?”

“He figures I’d be safer getting shot at by gooks than being here in Chicago. He figures the tensions are going to mount and there will be riots in all the major cities. He wants me out of town. What do you plan to do?”

I hadn’t given much thought to my future. The past year had been tough. Dad was sick and I had to take care of my sisters while Mother took care of Dad. Unlike Little Joe, we didn’t have a lot of money. And I didn’t have an army to back me up.

“Maybe I should join up, too. At least then I’d be able to send my paychecks home. The pay is better than minimum wage. I stick around here, I’ll just end up becoming an enforcer like my father.”

“This isn’t the best time to discuss it. Grieve for your family. But even if you don’t join up, you’ll probably be drafted. Before you decide, talk to me. My uncle served in Korea and said they have a buddy system. It would be nice to know someone had my back.”

I did have a lot on my mind. I was smart enough, I suppose, but not college material. When I went to the Selective Service Office and registered on my eighteenth birthday, I could see the writing on the wall. Literally. A chart showed the number of inductions since 1947, the last year there were none. During the Korean conflict, over half a million were inducted one year. The chart showed 82,000 in 1962 with the number rising to an expected 200,000 in 1965. Joe could avoid the draft because his father had power and pull in the government. I couldn’t.

I talked to Joe.

“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” The billboard outside Fort Knox has a picture of John F. Kennedy. It was June of 1965 and Little Joe and I had arrived for basic training.

I’d been invited to dinner one weekend and Big Joe sat the two of us down for a man-to-man talk. I didn’t think Big Joe was involved in any mob stuff, but sometimes labor organization and organized crime got lumped together, and Big Joe was a union boss. Everyone respected him.

“Sylvester, your father, Baptista, was a good man. Someone I could count on to keep workers organized and focused on what we could accomplish. Workers listened to him. I am very sad at his passing and have missed his presence ever since he first fell ill.” He raised his glass and we all saluted my father. He served some good wine, but I took my cue from Little Joe and only had a couple sips.

“Thank you, Don Joseph.”

“Now I want you boys to talk to my attorney and take your enlistment contracts to him before you sign. Johnson lied when he promised not to send troops to Asia. He’ll lie about your enlistment. Now he apologizes about sending the best of our youth to Vietnam. You need to stick together. People who fight alone, die alone.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the implication that if we fought together, we’d die together. But I was glad we took the contract to his lawyer. They’d already started phasing out the buddy system and the lawyer went back to the recruiter and demanded one of the older contracts for us. We had to sign up for four years active and four years reserve in order to get it. I think after that, we were kept together more because our names came in alphabetical order rather than because of our contracts.

But we survived basic with Expert rating on our marksmanship tests and went into Infantry training for our 11B MOS. Each training unit was eight weeks long but we spent six weeks between the two cleaning barracks and building a fake Vietnamese village at Fort Benning. We applied ourselves and protected each other. We were both brought up in proud families that held the support of our friends to be the noblest calling. Besides, knowing that Joe had my back and I had his made us want to do our best. The benefit of working our asses off and attending daily exercises on the firing range was that we entered infantry training as Privates E2, one step up from the bottom, or ‘E-buck-nothing’ as it was commonly called. Automatic promotions usually came right after or during MOS training, but we got a boost since we’d exceeded 90 days and already qualified as expert marksmen.

When we met Sergeant Stevens, he took us out to the new popup variable distance range and requalified everyone in the platoon on our marksmanship. Little Joe and I both aced it with 40 of 40 hits. We were promoted to Private First Class.

Then we shipped out for Vietnam.

At first, Vietnam didn’t seem that different from Georgia except the people outside looked different. On base, it looked just the same. We went through another two weeks of RVN training when we got there which was mostly jumping out of trucks and firing our rifles from ridiculous positions.

Then it all changed. Our platoon was a mess. We started out well-organized, or as well-organized as anything in the army was. We were at full strength with three squads of two fireteams each and a weapons squad with an M-60 machine gun. Each fire team had a Sergeant with three stripes in charge, a Spec4 with an automatic rifle (me), and three ordinary pukes with rifles. The squad leader, a Staff Sergeant, had four stripes. Our platoon leader was a 2nd Lieutenant with a radioman and a platoon sergeant, a Sergeant First Class with five stripes. Forty-six people. Forty-six soldiers who only had the vague notion of pointing their rifles at the brush and spraying it with fire. We were dropped off in the middle of nowhere and told to clear a path for a convoy.

When we returned to base, there were forty-two of us.

“I killed a man,” Little Joe said. He was upset. For as tough and hard as he was, he’d led a somewhat sheltered life. He had bodyguards and everyone knew not to mess with Big Joe’s son. I wondered if that was why Big Joe wanted him in the army. There was once a time when you could get all the blooding you needed on the streets of Chicago and not worry about repercussions. Times changed. As crooked as the cops were, they still frowned on gang wars and took murder seriously. He sent us to the army to learn to kill. It was more of a problem for Little Joe than for me.

“Good. Only 79,999,999 to go.” I was pretty sure I’d accounted for one or two out there. It was hard to tell. You hear a gunburst and six guys point their guns and spray a couple hundred rounds into the jungle. The gunfire goes quiet so somebody must have been killed. Who did it? Who knows? Little Joe had seen his target headed toward us with a grenade and squeezed off a round center mass. The grenade went off in the gook’s hand. Confirmed kill.

“Doesn’t it bother you that we’re out here killing people?”

“Not people. Targets. We’re just clearing the range of targets. See a target, put a bullet in it.”

“You’re cold, Sly.”

“Little Joe, all you are to them is a target. Piece of green paper to shoot at. Nobody else even saw the gook you took out. If he’d thrown that grenade we’d be having this conversation as they zipped us into body bags.”