UPDATED 3/1/2011

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Short Speeches of North Carolina

by Jon Gugala

       

“In my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the western night.”

1.         Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
   

When I speak of my time in the Marine Corps, I say I was paid to sweat. Really, I was paid to listen.

I was a trombone player in the band, and although I sometimes played music while marching, mostly I stood at attention in a rectangle of other musicians under the eastern Carolina sun, sweating and listening to speeches from older men who tried to draw conclusions. Careers of twenty or thirty years were ending in ten to twenty minutes. “This moment is”—and here they would pause, searching for the phrase that every bandsman knows by heart—“bittersweet,” they would say.

This is inaccurate. This moment, this summation of dynamic years, is best explained in flashes.

In moments.

One day the band was sweating with the rest of the platoons, facing a retiree, his family, and the tents two hundred feet across a lawn. The echo of the PA system rippled over us like heat waves. In the middle of the open grass stood the color guard, four men of which two had the American and Marine Corps flags strapped to their chests.

Then the guy with the American flag detached himself from between his three buddies and stumbled from the group, eyes wide, a shambling parade of one. Still holding the flag. He was a heat casualty. Why one of the guys next to him didn’t grab him I can only suspect was linked to dumb surprise.

The retiree had his back to the whole thing, reading his speech from note cards he’d deliberated over for days for this last moment before his life would change forever. The crowd gasped; the major kept right on reading while the poor bastard fifty feet behind him wandered around, waiting for collapse.

That’s another thing any good bandsman knows: Life keeps moving as you try to remember.

There are smells associated for me with North Carolina that are not for most people. Like pine oil in mop water. Like boot polish and spittle, a lower lip packed with Copenhagen, drying starch and old sweat under an iron. The mildew of yellowed manuscripts in their white boxes and raw plywood shelves, marches by composers a century dead who now live on in the ears and at the fingers of musicians who memorize them and then spend the rest of their lives forgetting, note by note, until a Fourth of July reminds them again.

Carolina smells like the range, of sun block, of burning rifle lubricant and sight-black, the drift of M-16 smoke across a field of fire. It feels like the bite of sand fleas on a cold morning, waiting for clearance to hump downrange. It sounds like the buzz of flies on ammo cans filled with bone paste.

North Carolina is a trumpet sounding Attention in the stillness of a Sunday morning, the rippling of the rising Colors, and just before, the dash to get inside for any man in earshot so you didn’t have to stand at attention through the whole damn patriotic thing. The calling of cadence in the grey dawn as hundreds of men sing about waking in the morning with the Carolina sun and death and blood and bayonets.

It is a place of lusts. With spring rains come the calls of manic frog sex from runoff ponds. The tinted windows of gentleman’s clubs. Live Girls. Little trailers on the side of the road two miles from base, a pair of yellow spotlights and a pickup in a dirt lot. A marquee with half its bulbs burned out. Private Modeling.

Of diners at 5 a.m. when all the strippers get off work.

These are forces of nature: hurricane seasons, confinement to barracks, young men with shaved heads in their flak jackets and Kevlar helmets drinking on the catwalks of barracks, chairs kicked back against walls, waiting for pick-up football to start.

There is the magic of snow in winter. Scrub pine silhouetted against nighttime skies. Moonlight wizening branches into skeleton fingers.

The wind through seaoats on the dunes. Fat, black crows cawing from telephone lines. Cigarettes and oyster bars. Shallow creeks, naked feet.

Hundreds of thousands of spent ammo casings buried in the woods in the bottom of filled-in fighting positions. Cases of 50-cal ammunition dumped from listing helicopter doors into the emerald sea below. An impregnated land and water.

This is my Carolina.

It is February as I write this, but in a few short months with light breezes and cloudless skies the Bradford pear trees on Lejeune Boulevard will bloom white, segregating the two opposing sides of traffic, one into town, and one out. The buds under the blooms push forward, new replacing old, and fine white petals snow into the streets, giving structure to the wind.

I have moved away. My own casings are buried somewhere in those woods. My life keeps moving as I write this. I think back on those years.

This moment is . . . bittersweet.

1. Jon Gugala is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz, California. His work has appeared in Runner’s World, Chicago Life Magazine, and elsewhere.
   

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