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camera bag. “For the obvious reasons.”
    Sgt. Byrd was not my only source on the lifestyle and culture of the Vietnam War, however. There were also my students.
    Just like Private Hollister had said, there were soldiers who wanted to learn how to develop and print their own pictures, and now I was the resident expert, if you didn’t count Sgt. Byrd, and sincehe didn’t actually work at the rec center, I didn’t count him.
    The first soldier I helped was Corporal Yarrow. Cpl. Yarrow was the saddest-looking human being I’d ever seen, hangdog eyes worse than a basset hound’s, bushy black eyebrows that sagged to a point above the bridge of his nose. That he always had a joke or a smart-aleck comment coming out of the side of his mouth was my first surprise about him. That he was so smart he could cuss in German, French, and Spanish without anybody having ever taught him how was my second.
    His first surprise about me was that I was twelve years old. He’d come hollering into the darkroom, “Hollister said somebody back here could help me with this film? That wouldn’t be you, would it?”
    â€œIt’s me, all right.” I was hanging some prints on the line to dry. “What do you need help with?”
    He came over and stood beside me. “Nice pictures. Who took ’em?”
    â€œMy brother. He’s with the 51st Medical Company, in Phu Bai.”
    â€œOh, yeah? I was with 1st Battalion, 69th Armor, in the Binh Dinh province. I was a gunner.”
    â€œA gunner?”
    â€œYeah, a tank gunner.”
    I took that in. Tanks are serious business. Shooting a gun rapid-fire from the top of a tank is very serious business. It looks cool in the movies, but in real life it has to be a tough job. But Cpl. Yarrow didn’t look tough. He just looked like a sad, nice guy.
    â€œSo anyway,” Cpl. Yarrow continued, “I went fishing down at Big Bend while I was on leave a couple of weekends ago, and the only thing I caught was what I caught on film. If you catch my drift.”
    â€œFish weren’t biting?”
    â€œThey might have been biting something, but it wasn’t anything dangling off the end of my hook. Still, the scenery was great and the beer was flowing, and I have lots of warm and fuzzy memories.” He held up his film canister. “Not too fuzzy, I hope. I was gonna drop the film off at the PX, but then this friend convinced me I ought to develop it myself,since it’s black-and-white film, and he thinks I need a hobby.”
    So I taught Cpl. Yarrow what to do, and his pictures came out great, so then he brought in his buddy, Pvt. Garza, the one who told him to develop his own film in the first place, and Cpl. Yarrow and I taught Pvt. Garza.
    I was a good teacher, which surprised me. I am not the world’s most patient person, and I don’t always do a great job of translating the thoughts in my head into words. But it was easy talking about how to develop film and print pictures. It helped that Cpl. Yarrow and Pvt. Garza picked up on everything fast and found the process interesting. I remembered what Sgt. Byrd told me the first day we worked in the darkroom together, that he was a process guy. I knew what he meant now. Every part of the developing process was interesting to me. Whenever I made a discovery—that a certain kind of paper worked better, or that I got better results if the developing chemicals were a degree or two cooler—I was in a good mood for the rest of the day.
    On the days I printed TJ’s pictures, I alwaysdrew an audience. It was like Private Hollister had put a sign out front: VIETNAM PICTURES ON VIEW TODAY IN DARKROOM. He always knew when I came in with a roll of TJ’s film, and he’d always be the first one back to take a look. “Don’t show me nothing bloody,” he’d say when I told him the pictures were up on the line. “I can turn on the TV if I feel the need