Leroy's Blues

by Terry Sanville

  They don’t build ships like those anymore. These days, cargo vessels are floating bricks, huge container craft a couple of blocks long. But in 1969 freighters that could haul maybe 7,000 tons steamed upriver to Newport, a supply terminal a few klicks outside of Saigon. I worked there as a stevedore in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Can’t say for sure how this college guy ended up on the docks unloading four-holded freighters in the blistering sun. Bad luck I guess. More likely, it was my bad attitude.
I lived on Long Binh Army Base, in a corrugated metal hooch with twenty other G.I.s, part of a company of nearly three hundred truck drivers and stevedores. I’d been assigned to the office, to prepare Morning Reports and other paperwork. But I mouthed off to a Sergeant and disobeyed an order, got busted back to Private, then assigned to a ship platoon. I knew nothing about ships or unloading them. But then, neither did Leroy.
Big, black and from the Watts neighborhood of LA, Leroy kept to himself, read Ebony magazine, and listened to soul music on his tiny record player. Being white bread from Santa Barbara, I had little in common with him, except for music. At night I’d haul my guitar outside onto the raised boardwalk that connected all the hooches  and clumsily play ’60s protest songs, folk music, and a little rock.
“Where’d ya learn ta play?” Leroy asked one night shortly after he’d arrived.
“Ah, ya know, just picked it up.”
He stood over me, his hulking body blocking the glare from the descending flares blazing in the black sky above the base perimeter.
“Ever play blues?” he asked.
I grinned. “Nah, too many notes.”
“Just play the right ones.”
“Can you play?”
He nodded.
“How can you stand being without a guitar?”
“I can’t.”
Leroy slumped onto the boardwalk next to me and leaned back against the hooch’s metal wall. I passed him my ax. He used his big thumb and fat fingers on his right hand to pluck the strings while bending them with his left hand fingers. Blues sounds poured from my little Harmony.
“That’s damn good,” I said.
“Feels good.”
“Yeah.”
After work and chow, we’d meet on the boardwalk. Sometimes we’d smuggle a couple of beers out of the EM Club to prime the pump. I’d let Leroy play for an hour or so, then beg him to show me some of his moves, strange chord fragments and notes flying past. He’d hum along as he played.
“Why don’ ya sing something?” I asked.
“Don’ like ma voice. But the damn sound jus’ comes out. Can’t stop it.”
“Yeah.”
The rest of the guys pretty much left us alone. But a few joked that a white boy didn’t have the soul to play black music. As the months passed I caught glimpses of where that music came from as Leroy’s life story slowly leaked out, mostly a cliché by today’s standards but strange to me, a twenty-year-old Catholic kid that never knew poverty, abuse, or overt racism before shipping out to Vietnam. But Leroy had his own unique wrinkles: quitting high school after the Watts riots in ’65 burned down his family’s grocery; living next to the LA River in a hobo camp; hitchhiking to San Francisco to check out Haight-Ashbury. With no skills or student deferment, he got drafted and landed on the same docks as me. The Army was good at throwing people together that normally would never meet.
Every morning in the dark, we stevedores boarded deuce-and-a-halfs and rumbled south along Charlie Road to Newport. We worked twelve-hour shifts. Of all the jobs, Leroy had one of the better ones. He operated a winch that lifted cargo out of a freighter’s hold and safely placed it on the dock, to be whisked away to storage sheds by huge forklifts. While he sat on his deck seat in the afternoon breeze, operating the winch, us shirtless stevedores struggled to hook steel cables to pallets of cargo, down in the breathless holds where temperatures topped 110.
At lunch, Leroy and I hung out behind a metal storage container and smoked a joint bought from one of the dockside mama-sans. He talked about blues and soul music, one of his favorites being Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding – a good song for stevedores, “Watchin’ the ships roll in…”
“Yeah, it’s kinda pop…but sad too,” Leroy told me.
“Can you play it?”
“No sweat, man. I’ll show ya.”
It became my favorite tune, an anthem to my year spent in Nam. When I play it now it takes me back to Newport and those hustling docks where a bunch of yahoos from all over the states unloaded ships and dreamed about going home.

Vietnam’s hot-and-dry season hit hard. The wind off the mocha-colored Saigon River brought the smell of poverty and desperation. We had survived another Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong. Freighters from all over the world crowded Newport and the river, waiting to be unloaded. The Officers pushed us, the Sergeants yelled at us to pick up the pace, with a record for tonnage unloaded being the supposed prize for us low-level stevedores.
Late one afternoon, we’d almost finished with the bottom level of the front hold on a Canadian freighter. Sweat soaked the bandana tied around my head and dripped into my eyes. The steel cables had sliced and diced my bare arms. My lips had cracked. We took a break in the meager shade against the freighter’s hull, breathing hard, pouring warm water over our heads and swearing.
Sergeant Lopez stared down at us from topside. “Hey, no breaks until ya finish. Now move it.”
With grumbled curses, our six-man crew stood and prepared to resume the unloading.
“Fuck ’im,” Johnson muttered.
McPherson snorted. “Yeah, that mother fucker’s probably in the fuckin’ office already, feet up, bullshittin’ with the rest of the fuckin’ lifers.”
As the hours passed and the heat rose, our use of the F-bomb increased.
“Let’s jus’ finish it,” I said.
McPherson climbed onto the seat of his tiny forklift. He used it to move the pallets of cargo from the outer edges of the hold into its center. Once properly positioned, we slid the cables under each pallet and attached their loop ends to the hook that Leroy had dropped down to us. Once secured, Leroy hauled the cargo skyward. We worked hard until there were just two crates left.
McPherson raised the machine’s forks to about two feet off the plates and stomped on the gas. The forklift shot forward and speared a five-foot-tall cardboard crate. He backed up. Foam sprayed from the square holes. We stared open-mouthed at the damage he’d done.
McPherson jumped down and took a whiff, then dipped a finger into the puddle forming at his feet and stuck it in his mouth. A shit-eating grin spread across his face.
“Hey guys, it’s beer.”
With a shout, the rest of us charged forward and tore into the crate, pulling back the cardboard to expose cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Brody produced a bayonet and began stabbing holes in their tops. We greedily sucked out the hot beer, flung the empties into the shadows, and laughed our asses off.
Johnson broke into the crate next to the beer that had Hormel Company labeling. We found a shitload of canned meat. We each grabbed an armful of beers and retreated into the shade to guzzle hot suds and chow down baked ham.
In a little while, Leroy descended the forty-foot ladder from topside and joined us.
“Where ya been, cool breeze?” I asked and jabbed him in the ribs.
“Been keepin’ an eye out for Lopez. Ya know he’ll come back to check on you fools.”
“Yeah, so?” Brody said. “What cun they do? We’re already in hell.”
Leroy grinned. I handed him a beer and he downed it with one quick tilt of the can.
With the temperature well over 100, most of the guys got drunk after only a couple-three beers. The gang quieted, heads drooped against sweat-covered chests.
“Come on,” Leroy said, “we gotta hurry.”
He began grabbing guys and walking them to the ladder to climb out of the hold. But most could only manage a single rung before falling backward, too drunk to make it.
Leroy scrambled topside and yelled down, “Heads up.”
The winch’s hook dropped toward us, an old fashioned cargo net attached. When it hit bottom, Leroy came down and spread the net across the plates.
“Get in and sit down,” he commanded.
We shambled out of the shadows and sat on the net while Leroy looped its corners onto the winch hook. Again, he scrambled up the ladder. Watching him made me sweat even more. In a flash we soared upward, rising from the depths of Hades toward heaven in a tangle of arms and legs. We clung to the netting as Leroy swung us out over the ship’s portside and lowered us to the concrete dock below. We landed gently.
I guess I was the most sober because I managed to unhook the net and we hauled ass out of that thing and staggered toward the trucks parked at the edge of the terminal. In the background I heard Sgt. Lopez screaming, “Get back here you assholes. That’s an order.” But none of us stopped.
That night, Lopez told us that we’d all get Article 15s – a mild court martial of sorts – for disobeying a direct order and destroying government property. But the Army couldn’t afford to slow its freight operations. The next morning, with pounding heads, we rumbled down Charlie Road to unload more ships and bake in the oven-hot holds. And our First Sergeant and Commanding Officer hated all the paperwork that Article 15s required and let us slide. Turns out, they weren’t total assholes after all.
A week later poor Leroy got into trouble. He was working the winch, lifting a four-ton crate out of the hold and had swung it over the ship’s side when, for some reason, he jerked the controls. The cargo abruptly stopped in mid-lift, at least fifty foot up. A cable dislodged and the damn thing tumbled end-over-end to the dock below. The wooden crate exploded and scattered its contents, pieces flying everywhere. It contained air conditioners, most likely headed to some Officers Club or maybe an Army headquarters building. The Lifers would be royally pissed.
In a month, Leroy got shipped out to a trucking unit up north near the DMZ. As far as I knew, he’d never driven big trucks before – but then he’d never operated a freighter’s winch before either.
On his last night, we smoked a joint in the abandoned rubber tree grove, on the hill in back of our company area. The perimeter lit up with flares but otherwise stayed quiet.
“So how short are ya?” Leroy asked.
“I got two weeks ’til DEROS.”
“Shit man, I got four months before I get on that freedom bird.”
“You’ll do okay, just keep the trucks outta the ditch.”
He grinned. “Yeah, ya know, back in the world I don’ even have a driver’s license.”
“It wouldn’t help over here. You see the way everyone drives.”
From our hillside position we could see the base’s perimeter fencing, the guards in their towers, the row-on-row of concertina wire, the ground studded with Claymore mines, the bunkers with machine gun ports. I began to play the Harmony, showing off the blues riffs I’d learned from Leroy. We passed the guitar back and forth for a couple hours. Finally we got up to leave.
I handed Leroy the Harmony. “Here, take her with you.”
He stared at me wide-eyed. “Nah, man, it’s…it’s too much.”
“Don’t sweat it. I’ll be home soon, got another ax there to play.”
“Thanks, man.”
“But you gotta leave the guitar behind when you go back to the world. Give it to somebody learnin’ to play. Make sure they promise to pass it on.”
Leroy survived the war. But what he did or where he went remains a mystery to me. These days, when I play guitar I sometimes think about the Harmony, maybe hanging on some wall in downtown Hue, beat to hell, still leaking notes, but only the right ones.

****

Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife  (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He produces short stories, essays, poems, and novels. His short stories have been accepted more than 380 times by commercial journals, magazines, and anthologies. Terry is also a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist.