Montana Scribbler

This is the place where I put some stories.

BOZEMAN BB

I got my first BB gun that year in Bozeman: a Daisy. I was walking out in one of the open fields around our single-wide trailer house. It was a grey, coldish early spring day. I was shooting my BB gun at nothing much when I looked up and saw a swirl of birds flying around a tree against a cloud-blurred sun up above. I just did it. I lifted my gun, cocked it, squinted up at the area where the birds were swirling and casually pulled off a shot - certainly not expecting to hit anything. To my astonishment, one of the birds instantly stopped flapping, dove upwards briefly, then sailed down heavily, limply, rolling straight into the creek beneath the tree. I was stunned. I ran over to the creek bank and saw the bird rolling on its back over a dark wave and disappear down current. I had shot the bird. I had killed the bird. I had never… OH, wait. I almost said never killed anything before. What a joke. I’d killed millions of bugs by that point in my life for sure. So, I’d never killed anything besides bugs (and probably a decent number of fish… so yeah, worms, too. What Else have I killed!?) I felt really bad: in my inner bones bad about it. He was just happily zipping around with his mates up in the sky, and bip: I shot him and he died. As a 10 year-old, I did not like that feeling at all. When I think about it now, it’s the same. Man. Writing some of that just now made my heart speed up - quite a bit.

Marching in Bozeman - 1965 - To My Sons

So… Bozeman. Haven’t been back in ages, but I understand it has become quite a fancy town for rich folks. I hope the locals only get slightly trampled upon. For my first (and only) year at Wilson Elementary, I joined the marching band in 5th grade as a drummer because brother Bruce (Uncle Bruce) was a drummer. In the spring, I marched in the Memorial Day parade, playing the only song we knew: The Green Beret Song… “Fighting soldiers from the sky…. fearless men… who jumped and died…. men who mean….. just what they say…. these are men….. of the Green Beret". No kidding. Pretty sure that’s the lyric. Or not. Sounds bad, the ‘jumped and died’ part. OK, dammit: I’m going to the internet…. hold on.

OK, I’m back. So, I was close. It’s ‘fearless men who JUMP and DIE’ not ‘jumped and died’. Then it’s not ‘these are men’, but rather ‘The brave men…’. I know it might sound bad to say this, but I did wonder about the 'men who mean just what they say' part. How can you not? I remember thinking at the time.

So, during practice for this song, we were in the band room, and my snare drum was niftily resting in front of me on a stand built specifically to do that. However (and this kills me to think about - killing me with a kind of laughing disbelief), it wasn’t until the day of the parade that we were given the drums that we were actually going to use to march in the parade. I’m here to tell you, these drums were mightily different. They were FIELD DRUMS. Big honkers that weighed a ton and were hard to handle. We were given these skinny little white straps to hold the drums around our shoulders like some kind of large paperboy bag or something. BOY WERE WE EXCITED. We lined up on the blocked off streets with tons of people crowded on either side. Cop cars everywhere. Well, this was Bozeman, Montana in 1965, so there were probably 2. That was a lot.

The Green Beret Song is a bit of a dirge, but I recently learned it was the only military song that became popular during the Vietnam war. As a teenager in Montana, I marched in protest against that war. It was a bit dangerous to do that in a place like Montana but I had some buddies with me. People might laugh at that ‘dangerous’ reference, but Montana has never been a bastion of liberal thinking… whatever a bastion is. I got my head slammed violently into my school desk and the words ‘cut me’ written in ink on the back of my neck as Mr. Morris - my 7th grade science teacher - held me down. He thought my hair was getting too long. This was truly not a remarkable event. It was forgotten as soon as it was over. No one was ‘reported’, I didn’t complain to anyone (never occurred to me), students didn’t talk to me after, nothing like it happened again, I didn’t cut my hair.

We started marching finally and we sounded good! Naturally, I and my fellow 5th grade drummers were marching proudly in our drum row, each of us pushing that big drum forward with each step in unison. Perhaps best of all: we had all been issued an actual beret, yes a green one, to wear for the occasion - our only piece of uniform. Dang, I think we all looked pretty good. Fighting Soldiers… the tune came to us from the trumpets, trombones, clarinets, saxophones, tubas and flutes ahead of us (for some reason, I’m thinking of Harold Hill, guys - look it up, listen to it). I think I heard people clapping at us sporadically. That felt great to hear. I and my comrades were whacking our drums with gusto!

You can probably guess right now that something bad happened, and you’d be right, boys. Those field drums had long, thin metal tubes running down the sides to help keep tension in the upper and lower heads of the drum. Those tubes rubbed hard against my upper left thigh as I pushed that leg forward to move the drum along with me. Pretty soon, that rubbing feeling on my left thigh started to feel painful. Eventually, it became a torrent of black, raging pain from the top of my left thigh, all the way down to my knee. It was truly agony. I was in agony with each step, pure misery ALL the way, but I WOULD NOT STOP, man, because it was the Green Beret song, it was MEMORIAL DAY for God’s Sake, and I had a duty, a responsibility to continue, no matter the cost! I HAD to jump and die.

The middle part is blurry. Musically? My left hand, cradling my now useless drum stick, was clutching the rim of the field drum, trying desperately with each lunge to prevent the drum from further ravaging my now near-useless leg, while my free right hand, provided one feeble whack per downbeat . I don’t remember how the misery finally ended, but it did. Throbbing doesn't describe my thigh.

Strange thought, guys, and here goes: That mangled left thigh from the parade supplied most of the material (including an artery) that rebuilt my tongue during surgery after cancer.

I have always believed in recycling.