Old Friends

I’m driving down the road toward the town of Cutbank, Montana (Pop. 2,000), cruising along about seventy. My buddy, Rat, is seated beside me, riding shotgun and weaving a fantastic fable about a daredevil stunt bird named Charlie. Charlie is chasing my car, doing Barrel Rolls, Immelmans, and other aerobatics while recklessly diving in front of it to the warning (but delighted) shrieks and cries of his feathered buddies. They're watching this whole improbable event with horrified titillation from a safe distance above us.

I’m laughing so hard at Rat’s imaginative fabrications that I’m in serious jeopardy of having an accident myself. Finally, to frantically chirped cries of, “Pull up, Charlie! For God's sake, Pull Up!” the inevitable happens. An emboldened Charlie dives too close to my hurtling grill. There’s a muted “Thump!” and poor Charlie goes the way of the dinosaur; he’s performed his last avian stunt. So much for showoffs. All this came about because a bird actually did fly in front of my speeding car while Rat and I were driving the long, empty forty-four miles from the radar site to the little town of Cut Bank. Rat’s fertile imagination immediately kicked in and was off and running on all cylinders…

I slowly come back to myself; it's 1966. Instead of sitting behind the wheel of my brand new ’63 Ford Galaxy 500, cruising down a lonely Montana highway, I’m perched on some sandbags. I'm looking out toward a horizon where flashes of light in the muggy night sky give mute evidence of a distant firefight. This is accompanied by the far-off, almost subliminal rumble of continuous explosions. (When that rumble finally paused during the Christmas Cease Fire, its absence was a little eerie.) I’ve been ‘watching the war’; Cut Bank is on the other side of the world. There’s a different Charlie performing tonight, and Rat isn’t around to make light of his activities.

This time the guy seated beside me is named Larry - Richard “Larry” Moore - not Rat. But in his own way, he’s just as talented as Curtis “Rat” Mallory. Larry plays the guitar and sings, and he’s pretty good at both. Larry and I would sometimes sit for what seemed like hours on the sandbags protecting a mortar pit near the radar shack on Trang Sup. We talked about everything and nothing. Rat had made the isolation of the remote Montana radar site bearable. Larry was now doing the same thing for me here in Vietnam. It's impossible to gauge the worth of such friendships.

Well, back to the present: It’s been many years since I saw either man, right around forty for Larry, a year or so longer for Curtis, but I have never forgotten them. Each, in his own way, touched my life at a time when a friend was very much needed, whether I admitted it or not. They made me smile when times were not the brightest, and when they went on their ways out of my life, they took a little bit of the light with them.

Curtis made me laugh at times when I truly felt like killing some really shoddy people. I hasten to add this had nothing to do with Montana itself. Assholes are everywhere, and the people I speak of weren't even from Montana. Larry set my heart at ease at a time when somebody had it in mind to kill me. Totally different people with different personalities and outlooks on life; but they were just what I needed at the time I met them. Curtis was Air Force, a telephone/teletype repairman gifted with a Richard Pryor-like, ribald wit; Larry was an Army Green Beret and a talented musician. They were not much alike: I mostly listened while Curtis held forth; with Larry, I did a lot of the talking.

I never told them so, but I am forever grateful that God saw fit to allow them to intersect my life at those different times for the brief months that we were together. I hope they both knew that I loved them, though I doubt if I ever showed them much evidence of it. I hope they got as much out of our friendships as I did. I suspect that they did not, as I am rather reserved and they were both outgoing. I wish I could tell them now how grateful I am for having had the opportunity to know them. I miss them both.