The Fat Man

“Well, come on all of you big, strong men Uncle Sam needs your help again

Got himself in a terrible jam Way down yonder in Vietnam

Put down your books and pick up a gunWe’re gonna have a whole lot of fun.”

   I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag

         Country Joe and the Fish

      YouTube Woodstock

         The Fat Man was a truck driver. Teamsters Local 470. He was the Fat Man because he collected animal fat and bones from butcher shops and supermarkets that somewhere down the line became soap, make-up, and nitroglycerine.

         The Fat Man also packed a hefty 250 lbs. on a 5’9’’ frame with forearms I could never wrap my hands around. In short, The Fat Man was built like the proverbial brick shithouse. He was also my father.

         The Fat Man left the house around six in the morning and came home around seven at night. He always wore a clean green work clothes in the house, changing from the blood and grease-stained uniforms he wore on the truck.

         The Fat Man was in the seventh grade when his father got him a job parking cars. The family needed the income, it was the Great Depression. I think it always bothered him, maybe even the impetus to secure the best education he could for his two sons. “We could be anything we wanted as long as it comes with a college degree” became The Fat Man’s mantra.

         We ate dinner at five. When my father sat down for dinner around seven, I’d sit at the table with him for a few minutes and tell him about my day. That’s where we were when my brother, older than I by almost a decade, in his second year at Penn State, the very first member of our family to attend college, the guy who slept in the bedroom next to mine, and whom I only saw was at dinner, nonchalantly parades into the kitchen in a full- blown US Army dress uniform with brass buttons, gold bars and braids, and a badge emblazoned with CARESTIO.

         “Hi, pop, “ he says opening the refrigerator. “Sorry to be late, mom.” He ignores me as usual.

         The Fat Man looks up from his steak and potatoes. “What’s that you’re wearing?”

         “I joined the ROTC, the Reserves Officers’ Training Corps. I go directly into the army upon graduation as a Second Lieutenant for two years,  and the army pays for college. You’re off the hook, pop.”

         The Fat Man was born with a clubfoot, an automatic 4-F draft classification during World War II. “You joined the army without talking to me? You just thought it was okay to do that? Leave me out of the decision?”

         “I just said the government is going to pay for the rest of my college. I thought you’d be happy.”

         “Did you ever hear me complain about paying your tuition?”

         “No.”

         “Back to my question, you think it’s okay to join the army without discussing it with me first?”

         “Pop, I don’t need to ask your permis……

         The Fat Man pounces on his first-born cub like an enraged bear, dropping him with a short right to the gut. It was the only time my father raised a hand to us. Standing over the crumbled cadet, seeing everything he worked and hoped since getting pulled out of seventh grade was lying in a heap on the kitchen floor.

          “Who made you the boss! I don’t break my back twelve hours a day for you to get your head blown off in some jungle war nobody gives a shit about!! They shoot officers first!!! I don’t care what you have to do but I don’t ever want to see that uniform again!!!!”

         The Fat Man helps his son to his feet, cups his face with his huge hands and whispers, “We don’t volunteer. If they want us, they’ll come and get us. We’ll deal with it then. But we don’t ever volunteer.”

No Tattoo for You

“And it’s one, two, threeWhat are we fightin' for?

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn Next stop is Vietnam

And it’s five, six, seven Open up the pearly gates

Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.”

         On September 22, 1969, one year to the day that The Fatman died of a massive heart attack, I receive my draft card, I am 1-A, meaning the US Army could seize two years of my life should they feel the need. And the need was growing in Vietnam. 

         By the fall of 1971, a few guys from the neighborhood had joined the Marines and went to Vietnam or Okinawa. Two had been wounded in action. One, Danny Palermo, recovered at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, three blocks from the house he grew up in. 

         The Draft Lottery was in full swing like a hangman’s noose. A possible date with Vietcong literally hung on your birthday.

         ‘Fuck that’ was the attitude expressed over much of the summer. ‘If we join instead of waiting to get drafted, we have a better shot of going where we want to go. Germany, Japan, Hawaii. Maybe we dodge Vietnam all together’ was the concept.

I don’t recall discussing it with my mother or brother. I was bored. I wanted something new. I had forgotten about the crumbled cadet on the kitchen floor.

         It was the first Sunday in October; The Philadelphia Eagles National League Football team was hosting a U.S. Army swearing-in ceremony during halftime of their game with the San Francisco 49ers. My street corner gang had an official tattoo; an eagle flying out of a rising sun which we interpreted as a positive omen.

         The Saturday night before the game, we six rowhouse kids, from a working class pool the military has been drawing from since the American Revolution make an alcohol-drug-fueled journey across the Ben Franklin bridge to derelict neighborhood even by Camden standards to get our eagle flying out of a rising sun inked into our left forearms forever.

         Dracula is the tattoo artist, a toothless vampire who works in a black cape with blood red satin lining. The freak takes hold of my arm and flips it over and starts cackling like a wounded hyena,  “You one skinny-ass boy! Them eagle’s wings will wrap around your whole goddamn arm twice. How about a robin?”

         “We’re joining the Eagle Division, not the robin division.”

         “Come back when you grow some muscle. No tattoo for you.”

         The rest of the night was…I dunno. I only remember being called ‘No tattoo for you’ about a thousand times. We agree to meet at Franklin Field at 11a.m. to sign the enlistment papers and rehearse the swearing in ceremony. As I turn up my mother’s street, I’m thinking that the whole tattoo thing is definitely not a positive omen.

         I don’t remember getting into bed, I don’t remember falling asleep, but I do remember this:  “We don’t volunteer. If they want us, they’ll come and get us. We’ll deal with it then. But we don’t ever volunteer.”

         I swear I felt the Fat Man’s weight on my bed. I don’t know how long I lay there. As dawn began to leak through my bedroom blinds, I finally open my eyes.

         I never made it to Franklin Field that Sunday, and I never got drafted. I graduated Temple University, I raised a family, I have led a good life. 58,220 US service members killed in Vietnam never got that chance.

         I never did get the tattoo.

 Well, come on mothers throughout the land,Pack your boys off to Vietnam.

Come on fathers, don't hesitate, Send 'em off before it's too late.

Be the first one on your block To have your boy come home in a box.