Shooting the Moon Read online

  shooting the moon

  OTHER BOOKS by FRANCES O’ROARK DOWELL

  Chicken Boy

  The Secret Language of Girls

  Where I’d Like to Be

  Dovey Coe

  The Phineas L. MacGuire Books

  (illustrated by Preston L. McDaniels):

  Phineas L. MacGuire … Erupts!

  Phineas L. MacGuire … Gets Slimed!

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Frances O’Roark Dowell

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Michael McCartney

  The text for this book is set in Impressum.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dowell, Frances O’Roark.

  Shooting the moon / Frances O’Roark Dowell.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When her brother is sent to fight in Vietnam, twelve-year-old Jamie begins to reconsider the army world that she has grown up in.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-2690-0

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4169-9860-0

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-2690-9

  1. Vietnam War, 1961-1975—United States—Juvenile fiction.

  [1. Vietnam War, 1961-1975—United States—Fiction. 2. Military bases—Fiction. 3. Children of military personnel—Fiction. 4. Separation (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Soldiers—Fiction. 6. United States Army—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D75455Sh 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2006100347

  For my father, Brigadier General Dulaney L. O’Roark Jr., United States Army, Retired.

  And for my mother, Jane Fowley O’Roark, who also deserves a star.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would like to thank the following people for their support and encouragement: Caitlyn M. Dlouhy; Susan Burke; Clifton, Jack, and Will Dowell; Amy Graham; Kathryn and Tom Harris; Virginia Holman; Carie McElveen; and Danielle Paul.

  one

  The day after my brother left for Vietnam, me and Private Hollister played thirty-seven hands of gin rummy, and I won twenty-one. They were speed-ball games, the cards slapped down on the table fast and furious. My brother, TJ, was going to war, and I was fired up hotter than a volcano. TJ and I had grown up in the Army, we were the Colonel’ children, but that was not the same as being a soldier in the very heart of combat.

  “Whoa, hoss, slow down,” was the first thing Private Hollister said when I’d charged into the rec center that morning, ready for action, but not exactly knowing what to do with myself. I’d been a rec center volunteer for three whole days, which had mostly involved picking up crumpled Coke cans from under the pool tables and handing out Ping-Pong paddles to soldiers. But now I couldn’t settle myself down enough to go check the chore list on the clipboard Private Hollister kept on his desk. I wanted to spin around in circles, do jumping jacks, drop to the floor for a hundred push-ups. Big things were happening, and the excitement of it all was running through my veins and winding me up tight.

  “Here. Sit.” Private Hollister pulled out his desk chair and motioned for me to take a seat. “You got the look of a girl who don’t know whether she’s coming or going.”

  He sat down across the desk from me. “You ever play cards? ‘Cause back home in Kentucky when we’d get too rowdy, my mom would get out the cards and get us playing poker or Hearts, just anything to make us sit down for a few minutes and relax.”

  I nodded. All at once my excitement had found a place to land. I took a deep breath to calm myself and tried to look innocent, like a girl who maybe played Old Maid or Crazy Eights from time to time.

  “Well, then, reach into that top desk drawer and pull out a deck of cards. You know how to play gin rummy?”

  I nodded again. “I think so,” I said, sounding doubtful. As a matter of fact, the Colonel had taught me how to play gin when I was six and there was no one alive who could beat me two games in a row. But I kept a straight face as Private Hollister explained the rules to me, told me about runs and knocks and how to keep score.

  Private Hollister leaned forward and picked up the cards. “I’ll go ahead and deal first, just to get us started. You think you understand how to play?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” I said. “Just tell me if I mess up.”

  He smiled. Private Hollister had the face of a ten-year-old, about a thousand freckles across his nose, sticking-out ears, eyelashes like a girl’s. It was hard to believe he was a grown man. But looking around at the soldiers playing pool and pinball, it was hard to believe any of them were full-fledged adults. They all looked like TJ, barely five minutes out of high school.

  “So what’s got you so full of beans today, anyway?” Private Hollister asked, shuffling the cards. “Or are you always this way and I just ain’t noticed it yet?”

  I swayed in my seat, the excitement rearing up in me again. “My brother just left for Vietnam. He’s going to be a combat medic for the 51st Medical Company. He’s the third generation in my family to join the Army. I’d join too, if they’d let me.”

  “How old are you, anyway? Eleven? You think they let many eleven-year-olds enlist?”

  “I’ll be thirteen in December,” I told him, sitting up as straight as I could so maybe I would look old and mature. Not that I cared what people thought about my appearance. But even if I wasn’t pretty in an obvious way, if my hair was just-barely-blond instead of a golden yellow, if my eyes were gray instead of blue, even if I was as scrawny as a bundle of twigs, there was no doubt in my mind I looked at least twelve and a half. “In fact,” I said to Private Hollister, “my mom’s due date was in November, only I came later than they thought I would. So I’m closer to thirteen than my birthday would have you believe.”

  “Oh. Well, you look eleven. I got a sister back home in Kentucky who’s eleven, so that’s how I know.” Private Hollister began dealing. “You really a colonel’s daughter?”

  “Yep.” I didn’t want to sound snobbish about it, but I didn’t want to sound so friendly that he thought it was okay to mistake me for an eleven-year-old.

  “Full bird?”

  I nodded.

  “Man, oh man.” Private Hollister shook his head. “I better not mess up around you. I might find myself in-country too.”

  “In what country?”

  “Vietnam. That’s what they call it when you’re there. They say you’re in-country. But me, I want to be way, way out of country, if you know what I mean.”

  I shook my head in sheer disbelief. “You’re a soldier. You’re supposed to fight.”

  Private Hollister put down the deck, picked up his hand. “Maybe,” he said. “But from what I’ve heard, I’d rather be here than there. No offense to your brother.”

  “Actually, he wasn’t planning on going,” I said, fanning out my cards to see what hand I’d been dealt. “He was supposed to go to college. But then he changed his mind. You want me to start?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.” Then Private Hollister cocked his head to one side and raised an eyebrow, like what I’d said just hit him. “Your brother could’ve gone to colleg
e, but he went to ‘Nam instead?”

  I discarded, picked up a card from the top of the deck. “I guess he got his priorities straight.”

  “Man, oh man, giving up college for a chance to dance with a Bouncing Betty. One of them things falls at your feet, whammo! It blows right up in your face.” Private Hollister shook his head sorrowfully, discarded, drew a card.

  I picked up his card, discarded, rapped my knuckles against the desktop. “Knock.”

  Private Hollister practically fell out of his chair. “You’re knocking? How can you be knocking already?”

  “Beginner’s luck, I guess.” I spread out my cards on the desk, a run of five, seven of diamonds through the jack, plus a pair of threes and a pair of queens.

  “You scammed me!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just give me your cards and let me deal.”

  Then it was one hand after another, cards slapping, knuckles knocking, and me staying ahead the whole way through.

  “All right,” Private Hollister said when game thirty-seven was over. He looked at his watch. “I think I’ve gotten you calmed down enough. You ready to do a little work?”

  “Combat ready,” I told him.

  Private Hollister laughed. “You’re Army all the way, ain’t you?”

  “I’m Army through and through,” I told him. “I mean it, if they’d let me go to Vietnam tomorrow, I’d go. I could be an ambulance driver or something like that.”

  “You even know how to drive a car?”

  “Of course I know how to drive a car,” I lied. “I’ve been driving since I was eight. We were stationed in Germany then, and in Germany they let anybody drive who can see over a steering wheel.”

  Private Hollister stood up. “Now I know you’re lying. You gotta be eighteen to drive over there. That’s a fact.”

  I shrugged. “Must be a new law.”

  “Well, you might want to go to Vietnam, and you might be happy about your brother going to Vietnam,” Private Hollister said, walking to the supply closet. “But I know your mom ain’t happy about it.”

  “My mother is an Army mom,” I said. I took the broom he handed me from the closet. “She knows that wars have to be fought and we need soldiers to fight them.”

  “What you’re talking about is philosophy,” Private Hollister said. “I’m talking about feelings. Ain’t no mother happy about her son going to war.”

  “She’ll be happy when we win,” I told him.

  Private Hollister looked skeptical. “If you say so.”

  “I don’t just say so. I know so.”

  And I did know so. I knew it like I knew my name: Jamie Dexter. I knew it like I knew my birthday: December 10. I knew it like I knew the flag: fifty stars, thirteen stripes, red, white, and blue, all in all a piece of cloth worth going to war for.

  I was six months away from turning thirteen and I thought I knew everything.

  two

  We were stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, a flat piece of real estate that threatened to burst into flames every afternoon from June through September. The Colonel was the chief of staff, which meant for all intents and purposes he ran the show.

  The Colonel was born to run the show, and he had a drawer full of medals and ribbons to prove it. One of his medals was for saving another soldier’s life out in the field. I used to sneak it from his top dresser drawer and turn it over in my hands, feeling the power of it like an electric pulse running up and down my fingers.

  It had always been my dream to shine in the Colonel’s eyes as brightly as one of those medals. My brother, TJ, had no problem in that regard. He was a varsity running back three years straight, made every football team he’d ever tried out for. The Colonel loved football. It was number three on his list of most loved things. Number one was everybody in our family—my mother, TJ, and me, in that order—number two was the United States Army, and number three, hands down, no questions asked, was football. College football, professional football, a game of touch football in the backyard, it did not matter to the Colonel.

  More than once the Colonel had told me that if I had been a boy, I would have been a star football player on any team you’d care to name. Well, maybe he didn’t say it in those words, but that’s what he meant every time he yelled, “Look at her arm! Watch that girl throw a spiral pass! You can’t buy talent like that, no sir!” Some nights after dinner, we’d throw the ball around, the Colonel still wearing his uniform, his everyday battle fatigues and shiny lace-up combat boots that didn’t seem to slow him down a bit for all their heaviness. He’d toss me the football, turn and pound across the backyard grass, and I’d cock my arm back for the pass, then let the ball fly. It would spiral smoothly through the air for a few seconds before the Colonel pulled it down with one hand, no problem, and tucked it under his arm.

  “Pathfinders!” he’d yell, zigzagging across the yard toward the imaginary end zone.

  “Combat ready, sir!” I’d yell back, completing the old 8th Infantry Division call-and-response we’d learned as kids, which was part of our life, just like answering the phone “Colonel Dexter’s quarters” or making sure we had our military IDs with us whenever we went to the PX or the commissary so we could prove who we were, proud citizens of the United States Army. Hooah, as we liked to say. Hooah, yes sir.

  Even more than football, the Colonel loved the Army. He loved starched and stiff uniforms and boots polished to a high shine. He was crazy about military parades and had dragged me and TJ to parade grounds from Fort Benning to Fort Ord. I’d even seen him get teary-eyed when the troops passing in front of the inspection stand turned right-face to salute whatever bigwig officer was sitting in the catbird seat. It got to him every time.

  “The Army way is the right way,” he’d say to us whenever we piled into our blue Ford station wagon to start out for a new destination—Fort Hood, Fort Campbell, Fort Leavenworth. It was the pep talk he gave us in case we were feeling sad about moving again. “It’s about duty, it’s about honor, it’s about sacrifice.”

  If you weren’t an Army brat, that kind of talk would probably have you rolling your eyes. But we believed it. I believed it. It made me proud to hear the Colonel say it. When he’d saved that soldier’s life out in the field, in the middle of combat exercises with artillery and tanks, he’d risked his own life, came a hair’s width away from getting killed. Sometimes at night in bed I’d get cold and still all over thinking about that, how the Colonel might be dead right now. But in the daylight I wore his bravery like a badge of honor.

  TJ and I loved the Army so much we’d spent most of our time as kids playing Army with our friends, planning out battles and strategies in deep, serious voices, setting up hundreds of little green Army guys out under the trees. I always played TJ’s second in command, moving the green men around as he ordered, gathering sticks and acorns and whatever else he thought we might need in the heat of combat.

  One time, after a fierce battle against Bobby and Charles Kerner, whose troops stubbornly refused to surrender for almost two hours, TJ unwrapped a piece of gum he’d had in his jeans pocket and folded up the foil wrapper into a shiny triangle. He chewed the gum for a minute, then stuck it to the foil triangle and stuck the triangle to my T-shirt.

  “What did you do that for?” I asked him, feeling the wet gob of gum through the fabric of my shirt.

  “It’s a medal,” TJ explained. “For courage under fire.”

  I wore that medal for two weeks, until the gum finally lost its stick somewhere between the school playground and my second-grade classroom.

  The Colonel had been an Army brat too, and he loved telling the story of how the Army had lifted his father up from poverty to a good life. Papa Joe had been the fastest boy in his school, even with his shoes flopping apart, and one day he’d been spotted by an Army recruiter, who told him he ought to sign up for the service the minute he turned eighteen. So that’s just what Papa Joe did. With his first paycheck he bought his mother a new dres
s, the first store-bought dress she’d ever had.

  Every once in a while the Colonel pulled out the box of things he’d saved growing up, when he had traveled all over the place just like we did, from this post to that one. He showed us ticket stubs from train trips through Germany and Italy, and matchbooks he’d collected from restaurants in just about every American city you could think of.

  “Kids,” he’d say, leaning back on the couch, his arms spread out wide, “I am a man of the world, full of knowledge and vision, a lover of international cuisine, an appreciator of fine art and good-looking women, and I have the United States Army to thank for this most excellent state of affairs.”

  “Oh, Tom,” my mother would say, laughing, the music of it all high and bubbly. Then she’d roll her eyes, acting as though she were immune to the Colonel’s charms. “What you are is a man who likes the sound of his own voice.”

  “You love me, woman,” the Colonel would bellow. “Don’t be afraid to admit it.” And then he’d turn to me and TJ and say, “All the ladies love me. They can’t help it,” and we’d blush and giggle, and I’d think that nobody in the world had a father as outstanding as the Colonel. I loved the Army, too, for making him exactly the way he was.

  You would have thought the very idea of TJ enlisting would have sent the Colonel cartwheeling down Tank Destroyer Boulevard, Fort Hood’s main drag. But when the announcement came, over a Sunday dinner in March, a couple of days after TJ’s eighteenth birthday, he didn’t say a word for a long time, just looked down at his plate like the medium-rare steak staring back up at him was about to whisper the meaning of life.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything, sir?” TJ finally asked, when the Colonel’s silence was starting to make us all feel nervous. It wasn’t like him to shut up for any length of time.

  After another minute, the Colonel sighed. He’s a big man, six foot four standing around in his socks, a once-upon-a-time West Point defensive tackle, a regular bruiser, so it was funny to hear him sigh like a Sunday school teacher. He began tapping his finger against the table like he was keeping time to a song playing inside his head.