Sebastian and Roscoe

Photograph by Staff Sergeant Liesl Marelli of the National Guard

The eight weeks of basic training at Fort Ord were just about what he’d expected. Then he got his orders. Waited, in a set of starched khakis that felt too stiff, too thin in the October wind, with a dozen other soldiers for the bus to the Army Language School in Monterey. It was already an hour late. Another private behind him griped, “Hurry up and wait,” and he turned to see who, but it wasn’t anyone he recognized. When they finally boarded, the hurry-up soldier sat down beside him, stuck out his hand and said, “Roscoe Drummond.”

The language school had been a surprise: he had requested explosive/ordnance training; it could have been a big help up at the claim, learning more about explosives. He hadn’t been very good at French in high school. His mother had talked him into it, just in case he decided to go to college. C minus each semester for three years. His father had just laughed. “You’re sleepwalking, Sebastian. Just going to school to eat your lunch and look at the girls, like I did.”

He was only half listening to Roscoe’s story unfold: enlisted for three years, high school dropout at sixteen, a mother he had to wait in line to see. No mention of a father. Sent to foster homes, ran away; sent to juvenile halls and county jails, escaped. Ten days in the Army stockade for going AWOL. He listened with skepticism, as Linc would say. For him, getting drafted was just a two-year vacation: as soon as he got out in ’65 it would be back to the Sierras to work the claim with Linc. When Roscoe paused for breath while describing his job as a swamper in a restaurant in Ukiah, he inserted, “I was a gold miner myself, worked a claim with a partner, up in the Sierras.” Roscoe wasn’t listening to him, either. He just took up where he’d left off with his own story.

Once they got to the school, they were assigned rooms. When he heard his name—McAdams, Sebastian—called out, his roommate turned out to be Roscoe. “Some guys stay together their whole time in the Army,” Roscoe said as they followed the room numbers down a hall.

But with any luck, not them, he thought, tossing his orders on his rack. He had a weekend pass; his father was supposed to pick him up by the flagpole.

Home to Sunnyvale. Rows of houses, just like a Monopoly game set down willy-nilly in the apricot orchards—that was how his mother described it. His father caught him up with the union first. “Organized the biggest chocolate factory on the West Coast, beat out the Longshoremen. Three hundred and two new members.” He was the business agent for the Teamsters and Warehouse local. Twelve years ago his father had run for Sergeant of Arms and been defeated, but when the whole elected slate was later indicted for extortion and convicted, he’d been appointed interim manager by a judge and then was elected for the next six-year term, and the next. He’d gone from driving an eighteen-wheeler on five-day runs up the coast to Seattle to wearing a suit in an office on El Camino Real. They moved from a rented duplex to a four-bedroom house on a quarter-acre lot. His mother stopped working as timekeeper in the cannery and started college to become a teacher. His father took up photography, joined the South Bay St. Andrew’s Society, wore the McAdams clan kilt on occasion and went to Toastmasters for the practice in public speaking. All this had happened when he was ten. It was like he’d had two different lives, a before and an after. He couldn’t decide, even at twenty-two, which one was better.

His mother’s folks had divorced when she was in the eighth grade...