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the wall and yelled, “Ya’ll be careful now, you heah!” Joe Bob gave it the gas and punched an olive drab hole in the wind shear at the north door and skidded out into the jaws of death. Ten minutes later a L.A R.C. tied off between two trees somewhere out in the maelstrom called to report that he had just seen a truck roll down an embankment and sink in a bayou. He further reported that the truck had been wrapped in the sparkling wires of the light pole which had fallen on it knocking it off the road. We asked if anyone got out. He said, “No.”
We all drifted into the command post and sat down around the walls with rifles and packs askew. The Coleman lantern burning in the middle of the floor lent a World War One besieged bunker quality to the scene. I got to thinking about Joe Bob. I was sorry I had yelled about the broken window, and felt bad because I had objected to his spitting tobacco juice onto the exhaust stack by my window when I was driving and he was riding. He did it because he like to hear it sizzle, but it made the truck smell like a fire in the Bull Durham factory all day. He thought it was studly. I was sorry that I had tried to strangle him the day he talked me into warming by C-rations by wiring them to the manifold and then laughed when I had had to scrub blown up and heat dried stew off all the engine parts. Joe Bob was a good ole boy. I would empty a fresh can of Copenhagen and a pouch of Beechnut on his grave every guard drill until I gout out. The thought occurred to me that the' English never held so dear the Tower of Big Ben and the dome of St. Paul until they were silhouetted against the backdrop of German fire bombs. So it goes.
The lieutenant and the unknown sergeant stood hunched over the desk shining flashlights over maps and muttering. The rest of us out on the floor began a slow inexorable creep toward the back wall as the wind broke into, reached, and then surpassed one decible range after another. For the first time I was glad I had a high frequency hearing loss. All cussing eased off and then all talking stopped. No voices, but lips moved in the lamplight. Mine, too. When my catalog of sins proved too lengthy for quick and easy repentance, I took another tack along the line of how the Lord ought to let me squeak by just one more time on account of how I had just learned a whole bunch of stuff to teach and all. I soon perceived that this, too, was but a striving after wind.
The accoutrements of civilization had vanished one by one. The TV had died along with the electricity. The phone had finally
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died. Only one commercial channel still operated on the battery powered radio. The announcer said he was somewhere on an upper
floor of a beach front hotel in Biloxi. As we listened to him, we reached the back wall and began to sort of pile up in a pyramid of
rifles, packs, and bodies as if that offered security. We looked like a
Matthew Brady photograph of the Confederate dead at Gettsburg
after Robert E. Lee had sent them storming across the wheat fields
into Yankee guns.
The announcer’s voice got really shrill, but he yelled in effect: Ladies and Gentlemen out there in Radioland, if you are still out there, I told ya’ll I was gonna stay here a-bringing you all the news that is news ’til there was icicles on the Spanish Moss in Southern Hell, and I’m a-doin it. I want to remind you to go by Ledbetter’s Service Garage and get your brakes checked after all this is over, since he's paying for this portion of our show tonight, if you can find it or him or your car damar. Be sure to mention that you heard about him on our show and tell him we sent you.
This just in — Camille has hit 230 miles per hour and better. We don't knowhow much better ’cause the wind gauges just tore up and blew away. Someone in the pile moaned and then boomed out, “Oooooh, Gawd! Unnnnnh, Hah! I don’t know about Robert E. Lee, but I’m giving up!” When I realized that it was me, I fumbled in my pocket for one of those bullets to bite, but I went in somebody else’s pocket, and he knocked my hand nearly off. I gnawed on my rifle butt. I felt the cinder block wall moving back and forth along my backbone. I thought it was just me shaking. I was, but I was shaking north to south — the wall was moving east to west. Then came the announcer’s last communique from the front:
We ought to give a big hand to those boys at the National Weather Service. They said this was gonna be a bad’un. They said the wind would go over 200. They was mighty right about that. And they said we’d get a twenty foot tide with a ten foot sea on top of that. All told, that's a 30 foot wall of water. Well, I'm here to tell you, they was right about that, too. She's a-standin right outside the winders of our third floor studios here in downtown Bi-The rest of it drowned out in the crash of shattering glass and the bumpity-bump of tables moving around. Then nothing.
A classic scene from the movie ’’All Quiet on the Western Front” danced across the silver screen of my mind. Paul Braumer, played
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