Author’s note: W and I have been on the road as well as dealing with some family issues, hence the Coastal Empire’s brief hiatus. Now let’s go back in time for another short tale from my migratory construction worker days.

-Marlow

JR, or Jer-ree as a few fellow US Army types called him, was injured during the war by an errant grenade that was launched at his friend and fellow rifleman.

Small fragment damage but no killer chunk or wound. Small scars were still in evidence. After less than day to be stitched-n-bitched and bandaged plus several antibiotic shots, he was back in-the-sh*t with his hearing totally AFU, as in stone deaf, from the blast. An NVA offensive was in its early stages and warm bodies were needed ASAP. I guess he was expected to just “point and shoot” sorta like a soldier Instamatic.

Reoccupying his “small piece of sh*t” frontline post, JR’s buddy was nowhere to be found. He finally found out that he had suffered a million dollar wound and had been medevaced out an hour before he arrived.

Jer-ree felt bad about not seeing his buddy off. That was the way he was. Yet when he got his own million dollar wound, he still missed his buddy. Funny thing about JR — he wasn’t an American. He was Pacific Islander, not Polynesian American but a native island born son of a Rising Sun WW II army grunt. Hence, I was told, his nickname. Fast forward several years later — he was still in the USA and working as an illegal alien. None of us gave a sh*t.

A “Point and Shoot”

We all liked Jer-ree, but he commanded our respect and fear by one peculiarity — his war trophies of several shrunken ears from VC he claimed as kills which he wore around his neck like an ear necklace. He claimed matter-of-factly that taking the ears off made sure the VC were dead. “Mostly we were on the move, so I put ’em on my dog-tag chain and stuffed ’em in a pocket . . . . when we got back to base, I hung ’em up, you know, to dry ’em out. They stopped stinkin’ after awhile and I wore ’em round my neck.”

Needless to say, JR, despite his exotic good looks, wasn’t a hit with the ladies of the American South. He wore his ears like a comforter or good luck charm that kept him from harm. Upon being told that they were repelling women, he replied, “Not worried. Their magic will never go away.”

Post script: Post war, stories like the ear necklace one above weren’t uplifting or made us feel even a small bit of rectitude salvaged from that war’s huge waste. There was no virtue just absolute and uncompromising allegiance to the obscenity and evil of war. Only the pointlessness endured.

Maybe, just maybe, after almost 50 years these weren’t just war stories I had heard. Some now sound like love stories. For sure some were ghost stories.

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