Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

By three o’clock, I was ready to snap from aggravation. I hated the visiting room. I hated being a prisoner, but that wasn’t why I was so pissed. I deserved humiliation, but having Patience subjected to it made it much worse. I was selfish. I wanted isolation to sulk, to forget where I was. Visitors from the outside, even Patience, reminded me that I was inside.

We hugged by the door. I gave Patience the one legal kiss I was allowed and we said good-bye. She promised she’d be back the next day. I smiled, trying to suppress my disappointment. “You want to see me, don’t you?”

“Yes. You know I do.”

I watched her walk with Alice out to the parking lot.

When the visitors were gone and the inmates were gone, the A&O inmates remained. The hacks left when inmate Harris arrived. Harris, a greasy guy with broken teeth, hurried around the place, earnestly pulling buckets and mops and brooms out of closets. “We got to clean this place up before the four o’clock count,” Harris said seriously. “If we don’t, we got to come back and do it tonight.”

John and I were assigned to police the visiting yard. I had wondered who was going to pick up the few thousand cigarette butts I’d noticed collecting on the ground; now I knew. We hauled plastic garbage bags around and filled them with drink cans, Styrofoam cups, half-eaten sandwiches, cigars, and even a few disposable diapers. In half an hour, we had cleaned up the trash. Harris then had us hook up water hoses and wash down everything. I was beginning to understand just why this prison always looked so spotless. It’s the kind of thing you just take for granted.

The fifteen A&O inmates made the place as shiny as new: floors mopped and buffed, tables and chairs wiped and set back in place, bathrooms scrubbed, coffee urn washed, all trash in trash cans, and the whole yard washed down—all with five minutes to spare. Harris thanked us distractedly as he carefully inspected our work before letting us go to our dorm. Harris, a former bureaucrat from Jacksonville, had totally focused his mind on the condition of his visiting room. He had escaped.

Count.

Watch the race to the mess hall.

John and I and Jeff walked around the camp, trying to find people we might know who lived in the regular dorms. John and I were especially looking for somebody who’d lend us some cigarettes until the commissary opened Monday. We were both going to quit smoking, we said, but the time wasn’t yet right.

Because of the People photography session, a lot of guys stopped me and said they’d heard about my book, or heard me on the radio, or read about me. By this time, nearly every major newspaper in America had reviewed Chickenhawk or reprinted the New York Times piece. When we met an older guy who’d read my book, I noticed he had a couple of cartons of cigarettes in his locker; I asked him if he’d lend me one. He was pleased to. Proud to.

Amazing, isn’t it? Even as a convict, I was living proof that you could take five dollars’ worth of paper and turn it into a book. Chickenhawk wasn’t yet an official best-seller, and I wasn’t making tons of money. At the moment, though, my fame was worth a carton of cigarettes.

The Sunday visit was worse than Saturday’s and I wondered how I was going to tell Patience I wanted to see her less than the every-other-week visiting schedule she said she’d maintain.

CHAPTER 25

Monday I woke to see everybody bustling around getting dressed and rushing off to breakfast. During the weekend, breakfast was served at ten. During the regular weekday routine, the kitchen opened at five-thirty. At six-thirty, the loudspeaker blared, “Work call. Work call,” and the inmates who worked on the Air Force base gathered at their checkpoints at the entrance to the camp. They were met out front by their Air Force bosses, usually young technical sergeants, and driven off to work. Some inmates—the phone repair people and others—actually had their own Air Force trucks parked in the parking lot which they jumped into and drove to work. I was witnessing a workday at Eglin.

At seven, all the A&O inmates were called to the visiting room.