Loco: Revisited
Michael Sedano
Some memories endure out of sheer poignancy. I can't forget that good-natured kid's innocence. He talked like a street-wise kid. But what did I know about the street, having been drafted out of Graduate School? He was happy being in the Army because it gave him something to do at any given moment. (That was true of my time, too.)
Loco and I shared a sardonic understanding that things could be worse, and joked about it. In the worst crud there's always something to laugh at, if only at pendejos like us for being there.
Loco didn't speak English, pobre vato, so he was perpetually screamed at for being half a step behind everyone. That's the upshot of my memory of the kid I called "Loco." That's him in the foto.
Reprint from Veterans Day 2020. This is one way some people become Veterans. Less than 8% of the entire United Statesian public has ever served in the military. If you know a Veteran, órale; there aren't all that many of us.
I took an instant like to the way this vato ate his food, con ganas and gratitude, like until four days ago, he didn’t know where his next meal was coming from.
“Te voy a decir una cosa, loco,” he huddled over confidentially and started his observations. I agreed with him more than I could say, but, te voy a decir una cosa. I didn’t like that he thought I was crazy.
He kept calling me loco. I called him on it. “No me dices ‘loco.’”
He laughs and explains. Órale, loco, it’s not me, it’s you. This is how we talk. Then slowly, the huero ‘splains it, ‘Loco’ no es loco, es como fren, vato. I get it. I talked the talk más antes, and I studied sociolinguistics and code-switching. It was good to shed that and just talk to the vato.
Seven months later, I've slept one night in Korea when a Sergeant tells me to watch three burly Korean laborers shoveling brass ammo casings. I'm supposed to prevent theft.
The workers shovel brass from one large pile into several smaller piles, then each smaller pile gets shoveled into a waiting dumpster. I recognize the routine. These guys will make the work last all day. How they'd steal anything is beyond me.
I stretch on my back across one of the mounds of .38 cal brass. Yesterday's 18-hour flight, a humid morning, and the relentless rhythms of shovels into brass, play with my fatigue. I hear my own labor, only four years before, shoveling steel mill slag at Kaiser, scrape-scoop-lift-toss-splat. Scrape-scoop-lift-toss-splat. I sleep.
I sit bolt upright. What did that Korean call me?
“Hey! Chingo!”
My ears don’t deceive me. That Korean guy is calling me a “chingao.” I rise with attitude intending to confront this guy.
The Korean laborer keeps his shovel in front of him but he's smiling and laughing.
“Oh, you Metsican G.I. ‘Chingo’ fren. Chingo you fren, chingo.”
He juts a chin, raza-style, toward the quonset huts. Here comes that Sergeant looking to catch me sleeping. Órale. I give the vato a look that says, "Thank you, Chingo."
Loco. Fren.
This Mexicano kid whose name I don’t remember, Loco, he doesn’t survive the third week of basic training, a week following the Platoon portrait.
Rose was the first to go, Day 3.
He gets on the bus in Santa Barbara covered in his father’s tears. Desolation gives way to anger at being drafted and fuck yous at anyone around him on the bus to Los Angeles. Hostility palpable, people mumble Why didn’t you just refuse?
Sullen getting on the bus, five days later, unshaven and wound up tight, Rose stands in front of Company A-3-1 in morning formation on the company street. Rose stands alone between the Company and the building.
Our Captain leans out his window, taunting Rose that he looks like shit. Since Rose won't shave and look decent, Rose will shave right here with a razor and no soap. You will get with the program. We watch, already with the program. We realize, this is the program.
Rose refuses to dry shave. He’s wearing the same green fatigues and field jacket we all wear but Rose gives them a disreputable look that you know there’s something wrong with that guy.
We Double-time away from the ugly scene. Rose and that Captain facing off. They deserve each other. That guy--the Captain--was a disaster. Another part of the program.
What was the vato’s name, Loco? In the Army, people wear our name on our chest, you don’t have to know it. The kid's probably eighteen, or younger if he lied to get in and get fed. He really likes the chow.
We do K.P. together. The kid with no name chatters with energy, disarming, like un locutor del radio, but one who’s totally freaked out. This kid has immersed himself in an English-speaking world and I’m his ally and buffer. I have to listen hard, translate unpracticed Spanish through grad student ears. Once I travelled in realms of gold and now I’m asshole deep in pots and pans and this vato from East El Lay is making it funny. Loco.
The drill sergeants like him, the kid has that effect on gente. Even the Cubano who likes to push my face into the mud with his boot takes it easy on Loco.
The 2LT a ROTC graduate, fresh out of shake-and-bake school making him an Officer, smells blood. Loco makes an easy target; a kid, mystified by the hubbub, physically slight, an inconspicuous trainee doesn't complain and besides, no one understands what he says. Loco's meat to a hungry dog.
We’re two weeks into basic training. We’re getting strong, but P.T. is still challenging. We spend a lot of time on the ground doing push-ups and leg-lifts. Stretching and more push-ups. I’m grateful for respite when some guy’s getting chewed out for doing it wrong because they're not looking my way.
These guys mess up a lot, but a lot of the chewing is equal opportunity ritual. When it’s your turn you take it and speak silent oaths. Mostly, harassment has good nature behind it, classic are you laughing at me? Outrage with a smile “Position of a dying cockroach, Ho!”
(Soldiers flip onto their backs, thrust legs and arms into the air. Sergeant orders that they scream like a Tiger and the men in the position of a dying cockroach scream like Tigers, then louder.)
The Platoon is preparing to do more push-ups when, out the corner of my right eye, I see the 2LT stride over and stop at Loco’s spot. We’re in the front-leaning rest position and Drill Sergeant calls “exercise!” ROTC observes the body at his feet. “1,2,3, one! Drill Sergeant. 1,2,3, 2…”
2LT bends and shouts into the kid’s ear, “Straighten your back!” When the body doesn’t offer a response to his command, the lieutenant yells a little louder, “straighten that back, I said!”
The kid doesn’t move his espalda but keeps pumping out those push-ups, counting out, “1, 2, 3, 4, Drill Sergeant!”
“I said ‘straighten that back’!” Loco’s thin arms tremble with the upward push. Army push-ups use four counts. The fourth push-up represents the sixteenth straightening of the arms. The kid who devours his chow doesn’t have big muscles that flex like elastic bands. His arms shake and struggle to extend. The 2LT is not satisfied at the boy's prowess.
“That’s not straight.” ROTC grabs Loco’s right wrist and pulls it out from under the trembling body.
Mexicans are tough, you know? We can take it. And all Loco says is something like a surprised “ahh” as his left shoulder suddenly tears apart inside. Loco doesn’t even writhe. He tries to resume push-up position and collapses with another soft “ahh”. The lieutenant’s boots back away and out my sight. “…Ten, Drill Sergeant!”
The kid with no name goes through the rest of the day with the platoon. At chow the next morning the kid whose name I cannot remember doesn’t eat with much gusto. That cabron lieutenant chingared this arm so bad, Loco moans. Get on the truck, I tell him. No, I can make it. Get on the damned truck. I read his name and say it. Loco.
Outside on the company street, Drill Sergeant marches us away. Behind us on the spot where Rose stood that morning, Loco, waiting to board the “sick, lame, and lazy” truck to the hospital, must have saluted us farewell.
What if there’s a comfortable house in Montebello where a 100% disabled American Veteran lives after a career as a bilingual 5th grade teacher? What if the teacher’s friends called him “Lefty” because he has a useless left arm that he alternately calls Lieutenant Pendejo and My Golden Ticket Home? I used to wonder what ever happened to Loco?
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| Ft. Ord now Cal State University Monterey Bay |
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