Riders on the Storm

My name is Sam McCain. There was a time eight months ago when I didn’t believe that. When both a neurosurgeon and a psychologist visited me every day and tried to convince me of it. With no luck for five weeks.

What happened to me was that I went to Fort Hood with four others from my National Guard unit to work on a special project our Guard captain thought would be good experience for us. You know how the Guard is in this piece-of-shit war we’re having with Vietnam. King’s X. Home Free. Got it made. You get in the Guard and the percentage of you going to Nam is very low. Very.

So one night we’re all getting drunk (this was told to me) as we did every night we could and I don’t know who brought it up but one of us said Shit, we should enlist. Look how many guys from our hometown of Black River Falls, Iowa, are over there already. And there have already been six deaths from our town since 1964. What kind of pussies are we, hiding out in the Guard?

We made this pact and somehow we remembered it in the morning and did exactly that. Went to this sergeant we’d met and said sign us up. A week later we got to go into town and do some drinking. I made the mistake of hitching an early ride back with a sergeant who was a lot drunker than I’d first realized. He piled up our Jeep by running into a tree going flat-out. He was killed instantly.

The neurosurgeon operated on me for almost fourteen hours. When I finally got out of surgery (again these are all things I was told) I had no strength, I had no memory except for these strange Poe-like images (Poe as in the Roger Corman drive-in movies which I loved). And except for the fact that some of these stray images scared me and some made me sad and some made me happy and some made me horny I had no real idea of what they meant. Had I just imagined them, or did they relate to this Sam McCain guy they kept telling me I was?

And after my memory returned I almost wished it hadn’t. I was informed that my mom had had a stroke and was now living in Chicago with my little sister. And then I read the letter that my fiancée had written me while I was still not Sam McCain. I have to say that for a “Dear John” kind of thing she’d come up with a pretty good reason for ending our engagement. She’d told me that after her first husband died (in Nam in fact) she’d taken to drink and running around and sleeping around. She hadn’t told me that she’d had a child and that rather than abort it (which she was inclined to do) her lover took it and raised it. She hadn’t seen the man or her daughter since a few weeks after the birth. But they came back through town and — There you go.

The not having a memory thing isn’t as bad as people sometimes think. For quite a while that was one memory I didn’t want to have at all.

Finally I was released. I went immediately to Oak Park to see my mother who was living in this huge house. My sister’s second husband not only didn’t beat her up, he was nice enough to have money and even have one of the large empty rooms on the second floor turned into a small apartment for Mom. Her own bathroom even.

Then it was back to Black River Falls.

It turned out that the odd anxiety I felt as I drove the Interstate was warranted.

The war was not only destroying people overseas, it was destroying them back in my hometown.