Read Online Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell - Free Book Online

said, holding up a picture of my mother looking up from the book she was reading,
Pride and Prejudice,
her favorite novel of all time, her forehead furrowed with deep lines, as though they had drawn them on. Her expression was clearly saying,
I get five minutes to myself all day, so you best back out of the room slowly and leave me be.
    â€œThat’s not going to be her favorite picture in the world,” I said. “I’d think twice before showing it to her.”
    â€œYeah, maybe you’re right.” TJ put the photograph down on the floor and picked up another, this one of the Colonel getting out of the car after work. It was what they call a candid shot, which means the Colonel didn’t know TJ was taking it. His face was halfway in the shadows of the carport, but the sunlight caught the shine of his polished boots. I was surprised by how tired he looked.
    â€œWhen did you take that one?”
    TJ shrugged. “A couple of weeks ago, I guess. He looks like an old man, huh? I guess that’s another one not quite right for the family album.”
    I took the picture from TJ and examined it more closely. There were bags under the Colonel’s eyes. He was carrying a briefcase, but by the slump of his shoulders, you’d think he was carrying a suitcase full of cement.
    There was no doubt about it. The Colonel looked like a man who hated his job.

nine
    Working at the rec center, I was learning more about Vietnam all the time. It was in the air you breathed if you were spending your days around GIs, some of whom had already done their tour, some who were gearing up to go, and a whole bunch who had their fingers crossed the war would be over before their units got called up.
    Sgt. Byrd gave me daily vocabulary lessons. Sometimes it was like he was still in-country, and there were days I thought maybe he wanted to go back. Every once in a while he made me feel scared, the way his face got dark and cloudy over something he saw in one of TJ’s pictures. But therewasn’t ever a time when he didn’t want to talk. He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words’ sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you spill them out the right way.
    â€œIf you recall, you call that a cracker box,” he said, pointing to a picture of an ambulance I’d printed from TJ’s fourth roll of film. “The
bac-si
rides in the cracker box—
‘bac-si’
is what you call a medic, it’s a Vietnamese word—or they go in the traveling medicine show, which is what you call the medevac helicopter.”
    â€œHow come they do that?” I asked. “I mean, how come they make up words for everything that already has its own word?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe it makes it less real, more like a cartoon, something that’s not happening directly to you. Or else it’s just fun to do it. The human animal is an endless creative creature, in my experience.”
    So I learned “chop chop” was food and a “daily-daily” was the antimalaria pill GIs had to take. Medics were called “Docs” and “band-aids” and
“bac-si,”
and infantrymen were called “grunts.” An Army helmet was a “steel pot,” and camouflage uniforms were nicknamed “tiger suits.” If you were KIA you’d been killed in action, and if you were KBA, you’d been killed by artillery. A “glad bag” was a body bag. “Expectants” were wounded soldiers who were expected to die.
    â€œWhat did they call you?” I asked Sgt. Byrd when the vocabulary lesson got too filled with body bags and wounded soldiers for my comfort.
    He grinned. “I was a 1st Cav grunt and a Cheap Charlie because I never spent any money in the bars. Other than that, mostly I got called Ted and a few other names too improper to repeat. Oh, and Kodak. I got called Kodak.” He held up his