As a boy running barefoot in the streets of the city,
In the sandlots and ball fields—running, always running
Till the sheer physical act of it got so lodged up inside of him,
Massing in his chest and legs, that he never quite knew how to stop running,
Until finally to run was to live in a special kind of horizontal world,
Pressed in by everything above and below, pushed from behind by forces he
Hardly understood, nowhere else to go but forward.
But with a singular stride and a power.

***

Came the draft, though: February 22nd, 1952—how could even he, young Thomas Cooper, run from that? Packed troop train ride to Oakland, induction station, sweating out the long days of Basic after—road marches and bayonet training—K.P., firing range, inspections, close-order drill . . .

Till that one decisive morning, they were herded into this gaping field house, where a Colonel Drake, Airborne (razor-pressed khakis, spit-polished boots) came striding out, launching into a loud, intimidating speech, full of words like “pride” and “personal honor”—after which he bellowed, “Anybody here got the balls to jump with me, come sign up now. As for the rest of you,” he sneered, “you can go back to you companies.” For truly they were shit under his heals.

And oh he, this young man, sitting there, how he wanted to remain fixed in his seat, while all about him men were separately rising to a common impulse—the faint sound of their movements, it struck him, like a flush of wings. And why not? The challenge. Could you? Did you have what it takes? Besides, you wanted out of here, all this bullshit and training, road march and obstacle course, sergeants all the time yelling at you, and the foolish tasting like absolute crap.

Why, the answer was clear: go then!
___________

Little did he know that the drudgery was only just beginning. And how he remembered. Could laugh at it now, though, toss his head back and utter a deep guttural laugh at what a damned fool he’d been once, not so many years ago.

Never did so much running and marching as at Benning; and that first real “jump,” one indelible morning, he managed to gather himself mid-sky, hands gripping the cords, two-thousand feet up, suddenly realizing he wasn’t going to die. And it was, the sight below, strangely becalming—“like a field of butterflies,” the thought came to him. And for the first time he knew he could actually pierce down through it all, out of this mad horizontal world—a chance to go vertical. Here I come, ugly mothers! No holding me back now!

And then, like a terrible afterthought, the War—the one that was no war. And all of a sudden things started to get all jumbled up, events coming more and more quickly together. And that one day at the edge of the landing strip, everybody hunched forward in the tunnel, scared, trembling—oh God, what have I done with my perfect young life?

And the “drop,” out through the open door, spun sideways, taking the largest gulp of terrified air he’d ever take—and with such awful consequences that always afterwards, walking the green streets of some camp, he’d never be able to quite rid the thing from his mind—no, not just the failure: but a complete and bloody mucking slaughter. How many hundreds strafed from this world that day? Such a loss as he could never quite articulate to himself; it would remain like a thing caught just out of the corner of an eye, glimpsed and gone—yet always present.

Himself, though, got to say, one lucky sonovagun—come back, whole, and with a second stripe to show for it; and after a year’s cadre duty at Fort Benning, another stripe, then reassigned: Med Company, 2nd Battalion, Eighth Cavalry Regiment, Hokkaido, Japan, where, as field first sergeant Thomas Cooper, he eventually returned to something of his old self—“Coop,” they called him, running machine, that spectacular “crazy” the new boys all talked about, with a mixture of admiration and fear—

Oh, how they would remember those morning jaunts of his, the whole company in tow, just at dawn, running eight, ten miles, a form of muscular forgetting, of losing the past, in sweat and pain, but of regaining something too, something of his own truer self, that boy running barefoot in the streets of the city.

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