The Robot Goes Down

Gone for Soldiers, Every One

You know, I could almost get tired of what happens to vets. I could almost get real tired of it. I guess I have a bad attitude.

I met Tom the Robot seven or eight years ago at the Camaleón, a booze chute in Ajijic. He was of average stature, lean, not shave-headed but close, and his eyes said that you didn’t want trouble with him. He didn’t know the crowd at the Camaleón and seemed to be a loner. We talked a little. He made oblique reference to having done some military things that people don’t really do. Most people, anyway.

I took him for a bullshitter. You get a lot of that in Mexico. You know: “I used to be a fighter pilot after I was president of IBM, before I was a SEAL team leader in IV Corps, and an assassin for the CIA. But I can’t talk about it.” Yeah, sure.

Later I got to know the guy. He wasn’t a bullshiter. Bullshitters didn't really know the military lingo, seven-eighty-twice gear, ma deuce, brain-housing group, bloop tube, HALO. We got along. We had both grown up in the rural South, Tom in Florida, I in Virginia. We were citizens of the same world—guns, fishing, hotrods, boats, fast bikes, scuba, etc. He knew that a valve train wasn’t a way of transporting valves, and what Swamp Rat II was. He had wrecked his quota of cars and hunted ‘gators with a flashlight and a twelve-gauge. In short he was a crazy mother in the best tradition of crazy mothers.

And there was Nam. There are two kinds of men, those who were there and those who weren’t. It wasn’t that being there made you better or worse, just that there are two kinds of men. We didn’t talk about it much. Most don’t. Still, there was a bond, a commonality.

More @ Fred On Everything