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COLEMAN BARKS Becoming Milton Milton, the airport driver, retired now from trucking, who ferried me from the Greenville-Spartanburg airport to Athens last Sunday midnight to 2:30 a.m., tells me about his son Tom, just back from the Gulf War. “He’s at Fort Stewart with the 102nd Mechanized, the first tank unit over the line, not a shot fired at them. His job was to check the Iraqi tanks that the airstrikes hit, hundreds of them. The boy had never even come up on a car accident here at home, twenty-four years old. Can you imagine what he lifted the lid to find? Three helmets with heads in them staring from the floor, and that’s just one tank. He has screaming flashbacks, can’t talk about it anymore. I just told him to be strong and put it out of his mind. With time, if you stay strong, those things’ll go away. Or they’d find a bunker, one of those holes they hid in, and yell something in American, and wait a minute, and then roll grenades in and check it and find nineteen freshly killed guys, some sixty, some fourteen, real thin. They were just too scared to move. He feels pretty bad about it, truthfully, all this yellow ribbon celebrating. It wasn’t a war really. I mean, he says it was just piles and piles of their bodies. COLEMAN BARKS ✦ 69 Some of his friends got sick, started vomiting, and had to be walked back to the rear. Looks like to me it could have been worked some other way. My boy came through OK, but he won’t go back, I’ll tell you that. He’s getting out as soon as he can. First chance comes, he’ll be in Greenville selling cars, or fixing them. He’s good at both. Pretty good carpenter too, you know how I know? He’ll tear the whole thing out if it’s not right and start over. There’s some that’ll look at a board that’s not flush and say shit, nail it, but he can’t do that, Tom.” 70 ✦ COLEMAN BARKS ...

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