The Staff NCOs marched us into a room with rows of metal chairs. Gunnys and staff sergeants and even a master sergeant stood around the crowded room—their arms folded across their chests as gunnys like to do—staring at us as we lined through the door. The room’s dark browns and dark greens, like camouflage paint. I sat down and a low hubbub circled through the corners, bounced off the dark brown ceiling.
About blood.
The room’s shiny red floor reflected overhead lights. What looked like a stage hidden by dark, heavy drapes commanded the front of the room. The scent of sweat, cigarette smoke, and aftershave lotion hung in the air.
One of the gunnery sergeants bellowed, “Attention on deck!” and we all jumped to our feet, our eyes straight ahead, our heels locked at the correct position, our arms alongside the outside seams of our Marine Corps-green dungaree trousers. He laughed, “Got your attention, didn’t I.”
He looked like all the staff NCOs I’d seen in my short time in the Corps. Muscled arms, thick neck. A lean and hungry jaw. His dark eyes drove spikes.
He yelled, “Be seated.”
A sergeant major strode into the room, the thumping of his spit-shine boots echoed.
He looked like a knife as he strolled. A hard man, definite in his stride, and as he walked between the rows of desks where we sat, waiting, he recited a mangled version of the Twenty-third Psalm. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil!” I knew that scripture, but what followed forced me to suppress a giggle: “Because I’m the baddest motherfucker in the valley.”
He put his hands on his hips and stared at us, one Marine at a time. When his eyes met mine, I tried like hell to take him on but ended up averting my gaze to the hands folded in my lap.
He finally said, “Your Marine brothers are dying—dying right this second, because we don’t have enough blood to give the wounded down in that fucking Vietnam. Transfusions that will save their lives, send them home to their wives, to their kids.”
I looked down the row to the right and wondered how many of us had wives, had children. Not many, I thought, and I wondered about the hyperbole coming out of the sergeant major’s mouth.
He barked, “We need blood, Marines!” The word blood boomed around the room, off the walls and off the floor, the ceiling.
I winced.
“We ain’t going to make you donate, but we are asking you, please”—no sergeant major, master sergeant, gunnery sergeant or staff sergeant I’d ever been around said the word please—“Come forward, for your brothers down there in that Vietnam War shithole who are dying right now, this minute, this fucking second, from lack of BLOOD!” He shouted the last word in the sentence. He stared at one of the gunnys and barked, “Okay, Devil Dogs, who’s going to do the right thing to save his brother.”
Every time I’d given blood, in college, in boot camp, in ITR, I’d nearly passed out when I tried to stand up after they pulled the needle out of my arm, so I didn’t intend on donating. And neither did most of the rest of us from the way everybody sat around, cleared throats, looked at the floor, drummed their fingers on their knees.
The gunny who first called us to attention said, “There will be a shot of good bourbon for everyone who steps up and volunteers to share his blood to save a brother Marine.”
I cringed at the word volunteers, and I wanted to leap up, not to step forward, but to get the hell back to the barracks before I passed out and banged my head on the floor after a corpsman yanked the needle out of my vein.
I understood, we were expected to give blood. We sat in the room because we needed to deliver.
Needed.
To save our brothers.
A chunk of my stomach fell to the bottom of my feet. I didn’t like the nasty bite of bourbon and I harbored a childhood fear of needles. Shots, transfusions, even the needles my mother used to dig slivers out of my dirty little fingers.
I wondered if the Marine who sat next to me liked bourbon.
To save our fellow Marines.
I shuddered to think of the sergeant major leaning over me, his bad breath melting my eyeballs and confining me to a life—a reputation of cowardice. My body felt as if it might rise like a hot air balloon. Rising because I hadn’t chicken- shitted out. Even though I wanted, needed, to chicken-shit out.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and my arm shot up like I meant it.
The sergeant major yelled, “What the fuck’s your name, Marine?”
I jumped to my feet. Someone behind me laughed and I felt stupid.
I gave him my name, “PFC Rodgers, Sergeant Major.”
“Let’s hear a loud ‘Oorah,’ for Rodgers.” Voices called out, “Oorah.”
The sergeant major bellowed, “LOUD. Fucking LOUD.”
It was loud. I felt like a man trapped on a cloud.
He boomed, “Louder, Marines, LOUDER!”
It hurt my ears.
My uncle, who’d fought with the Marines in World War II, and my dad’s friend who’d been in the Marines in Korea, had told me to never volunteer for anything and right then I felt like I’d been snookered, but something about those shouts, the “oorahs” and hearing the sergeant major say my name made my head spin and my chest poofed out like I was important. Like a man, a real man, a real Marine ought to feel.
Not many of us stepped up at the beginning. But quickly my original suspicions about retribution were borne out when the sergeant major screamed, “Every one of you motherfuckers who fails to step up to save a brother is a fucking scumbag, a maggot, a fucking coward.”
That’s something I didn’t want to be known as: coward, even though sometimes I suspected I might be one, and I cringed.
After they drew my blood and yanked the needle out of the vein there was a Marine standing, waiting, so the Corpsman hissed, “Next,” and I stood up and my head swooned and I almost fell on my ass, but someone caught my head in his big hands and later I thought that person who saved me from cracking my skull was kind of like me giving blood, saving my brothers.
I stood in line for my shot of whiskey, feeling pretty damned bad-boy. But the flavor of cheap bourbon hadn’t changed and I gagged after I threw the shot down my throat. Someone laughed.
On the way back to the transient barracks, I walked by the room where we’d assembled to hear the sergeant major’s plea. Most of the NCOs were circled around a group of Marines cowering in a bunch of chairs. The lingo spewing out of those NCOs’ mouths reminded me of the meanest, crudest drill instructors imaginable, and I wondered why those men just didn’t give in and donate blood.
Outside, the damp evening hid the sky. I looked south, down there, in Vietnam where the war raged. Where I’d soon be. I thought of my brothers. My blood headed south.
I imagined myself wearing a mantle of courage, gunfire-filled jungle, dead men, the business end of my weapon still smoking. Me. Courage.
Two F-4 Phantoms streaked overhead and I looked into the sky. My head spun.
Something surged in my guts. A rumble, a roar.
I threw up.
Ken Rodgers is a poet, writer, and filmmaker from Vail, Arizona, whose poems, stories, and essays have appeared in several fine journals, most recently Allium, Hypertext magazine, Collateral Journal, and Limberlost Review. His flash fiction piece titled “Black Crows” is due to be published soon at Bull. Ken is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a nominee for Best American Short Stories.