Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [77]
Getaway Car
THE WAR WAS NOW in its sixth year and I was running out of time. I had just turned sixteen, and the possibility of being drafted felt like someone’s hot puke breath all over the back of my neck. Nine boys from my high school—nine—had already come back from Vietnam in flag-draped boxes. The best thing you could say about that back then was: at least the box was American made.
I had long ago stopped standing for the National Anthem at the Friday night football and Tuesday night basketball games. Fortunately I wasn’t alone in this reckless protest. Hippie membership had grown significantly by the fall of 1971 at Davison High School, and the jocks who desperately wanted to throw us off the Main Street bridge and into Black Creek were now outnumbered. But they could still break any of us in two like a matchstick if they got their hands on us. So we hung in packs. If a jock or a redneck wanted to dish out a dose of swift justice to a hippie, he was forced to lie in wait and grab one of us walking home alone after staying late for French Club or choir.
Two of the Davison Vietnam dead lived on my street. Statistically that had to be an outrageous percentage, considering the residential portion of my street extended for only four blocks. If every four-block street in America was required to cough up two young boys for The Sacrifice, then how many of us across America would be dead by now? Millions, right? I became convinced that my street, South Main Street, was a marked boulevard, singled out by Nixon or that creepy Angel of Death for some reason I couldn’t quite comprehend. I was determined there would be no offering made to their cause from my house.
It was back on the morning of May 5, 1970, that I snapped. Earlier in the year, I had convinced my guidance counselor to let me take Government class as a sophomore, a required credit usually reserved for seniors. Mainly, I wanted to get out of gym class. Two years of gym was required to graduate, but I lied and told my counselor that when I was in the Catholic seminary they made us take two gym classes a day so therefore I had, in effect, already taken my two years’ worth of gym, see? She approved the waiver to let me take Government class.
On May 4, National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio had taken aim on and killed four students while wounding nine others. This unglued me. “OK, so let me get this straight—I don’t have to go to Vietnam any more to get killed, I can do that right here at home?”
The next day, our ultracool Government teacher, Mr. Trepus, skipped the lesson plan and had us discuss what had happened in Ohio. Many of the senior boys in class agreed that the future looked mighty shitty. Some were quite angry, and one student suggested a walkout. As I was two years younger than the rest of the room, I kept my head down, doodling in my notebook. On one loose-leaf sheet of paper I began drawing little crosses on graves, the kind I had seen at Arlington Cemetery, just nothing but rows upon rows of crosses, so many crosses that they bled into the horizon.
On one 8½ x 11 sheet of paper I drew 260 crosses in 26 straight rows.
“Whatta you doin’?” asked Bob Bell, the long-haired senior in moccasin shoes who sat next to me.
“I was just wondering how long it would take to draw one of these for every grave of every soldier who’s died in Vietnam.”
“Ain’t that a lot?”
“I think Mr. Trepus said it’s like almost fifty thousand.”
“Huh. I’d like to see that,” he said with a curious smile on his face.
And so I began. I had about a hundred sheets of paper in my notebook. One by one, I drew the little grave crosses. At some point, Mr. Trepus noticed I was doing something and walked down the aisle to see what it was.
“I want to see what fifty thousand dead looks like on paper,” I told him, hoping I wasn’t in trouble.
He thought about it for a minute. “Good. I’d like to see that, too.”
It took