Babysan

     I wasn’t in the transient barracks more than a few days before I was assigned my permanent room and bunkmate. The lodgings I had been anxiously anticipating, for the last week, dare I say the last three or four weeks was a six by nine, two-bed, two-footlocker room with no windows and all the shelves you could use providing you could use 2x4 cross-studs for shelves.

My bunkmate was a kid from Oklahoma nicknamed Babysan by the mama sans because he looked like he was about fifteen years old. He was a crew chief who spent his days flying in a gunship and nights repairing bullet holes, all the time looking like a kid who should be goofing off in a middle school.

As hard as Tom Reardon had to work to separate himself from the likes of a hundred other men who were almost totally identical in every way—from drinking in the club every night, the backgrounds they shared, the jobs they performed and the uniforms they all wore; for Babysan, being one of a kind came easy.

Tom was smart and calculating and maybe just a bit conniving, in a good way but Babysan had something even better going for him. He was crazy.

The company had a stray dog that became attached to it like all companies and stray dogs eventually do. And like all crazy people, Babysan attached himself to the dog. The two of them were never out of sight of each other. The dog even flew with him, which means that his pilot who I didn’t know because he didn’t live in our enlisted men’s barracks, was probably just as crazy as Babysan—only at a higher pay scale and with a better club to come home to at the end of each day.

Snow—the name Babysan had given to the mutt on account of its white hair suggesting that not all crazy people are necessarily creative people—slept in our room at the foot of Babysan’s bed. To my knowledge the dog never spent a day in the transient barracks.

These things, in of themselves, wouldn’t have classified Babysan as being crazy. But his attachment to this mutt coupled with the fact that he slept with a knife stuck into the frame of his bed, preparing him to meet any challenge that might present itself in the middle of the night, would have certainly gone a long way to proving the point. But even that might not have been enough if there wasn’t just one more thing.

Babysan had an electric fan mounted to his bed—a fan that was mysteriously missing the safety guard on the front. Every night became a Punxsutawney Phil moment as I’d lie awake watching him sleep and waiting for when he would roll over and his arm would flop near the fan and he’d suddenly awake to the sound of chipchipchip of his fingers rubbing against the fan blades.

If it was me and I was awaken in this manner I would immediately go for the knife and start swinging but Babysan seemed to take to the startling interruption—the countless startling interruptions each night—the way one would react to a simple stiff neck or muscle cramp. His arm would fling back as if catapulted and he would turn over to a new position and go back to sleep.         

He never become agitated or grabbed for the knife in fear, although being suddenly awakened in the middle of the night had to be the only reason for the knife being there. To this day I don’t know why he never put the fan in a different location or found a guard for it or got a new fan.  But this was the world he lived in and he couldn’t be happier and because he was so content in this world he himself created, I decided he must be crazy. But being crazy, in and of itself, wouldn’t have made him a bad bunkmate.

What made him a bad bunkmate, and one I began looking to replace almost from the first day I moved in, was that each night before patting Snow good night and tucking himself in alongside his fan and knife, he would pop himself some popcorn, which he ate in bed.

In the middle of the night, when I wasn’t contending with the chipchipchip of his fingers falling into the fan I had one more problem to contend with. Against the soft humming of the fan motor I could hear the rustling of the rats above my head, as they would work their way into the room for their nightly snack of leftover popcorn pieces.

 

The funny thing is they didn’t bother me. Oh, they may have bothered me at first but once I knew their routine and realized they were not interested in me but only in Babysan’s popcorn, the rats and me got along fine.

I would hear them rustling and chirping the way rats like to do when they’re getting ready to feast on a salty snack, then they would jump on my chest to get to Babysan’s bunk, much like a gymnast might use a springboard to get to the vaulting horse or uneven bars.

Between the fan and the knife and the popcorn and the rats I knew I had to find another room and another bunkmate. But first I had something else to do. I had to fly to Pleiku on my first story.