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And Paul Benoit, who could forget him? "my little brother's friend "three brothers just like my family. I remember driving by when Paul's older brother was cleaning his motor bike, kickstand up and the motor running. We hooted something, and he looked up, and the chain cut off his thumb. Finally, after a search in the grass, we found it "like a pale shrimp. Paul, however, had a kind of elfin blond sparkle to him. He didn't last long in Nam "murdered with an M-16 by one of our guys. I remember his mother's perpetually sad face. Maybe, I suppose, you could add my little brother to the list; twenty-two years old; his grave says Vietnam. My older brother went into the Navy. The government had a veritable franchise; Me, I was drafted number nine into the Mac-Army. And then there was that quiet intellectual kid in the travel club who said, with visible anger, that he was tired of our country getting kicked around by the communists. A few years later, I saw him limping with a cane. "Shrapnel, he simply said.
Of course, there was good buddy Boyd, who couldn't get into the Peace Corps after school, so he joined the Marine Corps. Today, after several college degrees, and marriages, he is in China, chasing the Buddha and Chinese women. After a trip to a monastery in the Himalayans, his Master informed him he was a wanderer. And Russ down the street? "another Marine "actually came back and finished school, after a stint in a mental institution, and divorce. I remember him and Doss arguing about Recon "Doss saying, "if you ain't Recon, you ain't sh*t, and Russ firing a revolver through the ceiling of his rented house to punctuate a point. It all seemed somehow normal. Actually, it was Doss's old lady who was the instigator; she sensed that Russ did not like her, and said he reminded her of some other "sawed-off runt that she knew. Bar fly mistake; you should have seen her smile drop. But Doss just kept smiling, a steely blue collar smile, that had a kind of arc weld light to it. He was not like us; he worked at the steel mill, and his father was some kind of metal worker. Maybe that was it. Maybe steel does not run, like the night we were drunk and the cops tried to arrest us "and I did run. Of course, I was faster than Doss. But like the Khe Sahn photo shows, running was not Ken Doss's forte.
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