TIM CUDZILO AND THE EXTRA MILE

I didn’t know this guy real well, the guy who came in The Last Mile with the woman Bo Cherry Burkhardt, nice woman, very pretty. The guy did some time in the Army, his name was Simonetti, damned if I knew his first name. But since I knew Bo, and Bo had asked me to sit down, I sat at a table at the back of the room, a small table and Deano at the bar saw me and brought me something I don’t usually like to drink, but I guess Deano was rewarding me that night. He brought me an Odoul’s.

Bo’s story was that she was divorced, been married to some guy named Burkhardt, and was obviously hanging around for the night with Simonnetti who, I believe, was also divorced.

Now it had rained slightly that night, this was a couple of weeks ago, just into April. I’m always thinking about things in April — spring easing in, baseball begun, and rain.

Simonetti was friendly enough, a kind of tall guy who’d served with the Army in Korea in the early Seventies, just like me, so he’s no spring chicken, as they say. No, no spring chickens in spring and April always reminding you of that.

Bo and he were chatting (Bo is maybe fifty. She likes Chardonney and drinks nothing else, one, maybe two glasses max. Simonnetti was having a draft. He’d only have about two as well.)

“Greg, you were in Korea, right?”Bo s aid.

I nodded.

“So was Charlie,” she said. And now I knew Simonnetti’s first name. I knew he came from Everett originally, lives in Arlington now, has a couple of grown kids, owns some kind of import/export business at the airport and so he found his way to The Mile once, met Bo, and comes back every so often. We talked for a minute about which Army outfits we’d been hooked up with.

“I met a lot of good guys in Korea,” Simonnetti said. And I stayed out of Vietnam.”

“Same with me,” I said. And then — I don’t know how it happened, I thought of one guy in particular that had done me a great favor over there at a crucial moment. He was a guy a lot of guys didn’t like — one of those guys who took his job lightly even though it involved being on a mountain looking into North Korea and keeping track of any hostile or other tramsmissions. Serious stuff. Crucial stuff. Serious business gathering information that went all the way back to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade on a daily basis. The guy I was thinking of just decided to laugh in the face of life at all the serious moments, maybe be a bit of a clown, maybe a little immature. Whatever. I liked the guy.

I was saying all this to Bo and Simonnetti and he asked me, “what was the guy’s name. I might know him.”

“Cudzillo,” I said. Tim Cudzilo. Blond, average height, big smile.”

“I knew him, can you believe that?” Simmonnetti said. “A real goddamn small world.”

This did surprise me.”How’s you know him?”

“Met him in Japan on leave. Spent some time with him walking around the clubs in the Ginza. A fun guy. Met him at the USO. He said a lot of guys over there in Korea didn’t like him. He never said why. He didn’t seem to care. “

“I think it was that he goofed off a lot, am I right? You knew him. Sounds like you were both in a spy outpost.”

“Army Security Agency.”

I was thinking how a lot of those guys were pretty serious when they had the headsets on and were up the mountain. It’s when they came down to the main compound and all the quansett huts and concrete buildings, every one of which had probably been zeroed on some chart by the North Koreans. They went to the Enlisted Men’s club, got drunk, mixed it up with the women.

But Simonnetti and I both knew Cudzilo to be very serious in his own way. He wasn’t a big drinker. Didn’t get mixed up with women.

Simmonnetti said, “I think C, as I started calling him that night, was pretty steady with a girl back in the world, back in Arizona, if I recall correctly,” Simmonnetti took a drink of his draft, thinking about those times. “He was probably kind of a cut-up, right? But he didn’t mess around with women. He had that over me. He pulled me back from the brink a couple of times that night.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that describes him. I just know one guy on our compounmd told me how they kept a daily weather report on the mountain look-out and electronic monitoring post and somebody suddenly noticed that for a couple of weeks, Cudzilo, or ‘C’ as you call him, had been writing, CHILI TODAY, HOT TAMALI for the weather report. He could have gotten an Article 15 for that. Or court marshalled if the weather report ever became important on any given day when we came under enemy attack which, thank God, we never did.”

“So,” said Simmonnetti, ” what’d he do for you?”

So I told the story….nothing really dramatic, but important and meaningful to me….

How I had gone into Seoul for a break just before I was due to take Temporary Duty Leave in Japan. They called it a “duty” leave, but it was just a technical way to be granted a vacation leave. It was a leave from duty, not for duty.

“Well, I didn’t know it was a big Korean holiday, some kind of harvest festival, kind of their Thanksgiving, in September and I had real trouble getting a little bus back out to the remote island where we were station, there were so many Korean people traveling. I’d stayed over at the USO in Seoul and should have only stayed one day rather than try to get back and finish packing for my trip.

“It was real tense for me, because I was going to have to turn right around and head back into Seoul in time to board the military flight that night out of Kimpo Airbase for Takoda Air Base outside Tokyo. I mean it was a nightmare — had to get off the bus in the village catch a cab out the dirt road to the compound, turn right around and find my way back to Kimpo thirty miles away. If I missed that flight, that was it. I was stuck for the night or more in Seoul.

“I don’t know how it did it — but I got my piece of luggage, got back to the village, then down the road to Seoul, everything still busy from the Korean holiday. And I really had been looking forward to this trip, so I was eager not to miss that flight.

“To my considerable relief, I made it to Kimpo Airbase with not much time to spare and I got to the counter to give the Air Force guy my ticket before boarding and I’m putting all my stuff — my I.D. and the ticket — on the counter in front of him — and he says to me, ‘do you have y our shot record?’

“Suddenly it hit me. That was the one piece of paper, this little booklet record of inoculations, that I didn’t have and that I’d been told you have to have for military flights out of the country. I couldn’t even make eye contact with the Air Force guy, hoping he’d just say, ‘forget about it,’ but he didn’t look like that kind of guy — all business. no sympathy. He said, very coldly, “sorry, you can’t get on that flight without a shot record.” I froze, then sadly started gathering up my other paperwork, still not looking at him. I could have cried. I was real upset. I couldn’t believe it.

“The thing was, I knew nobody looked at the shot record. It was just one of those military things –‘ have it with you because we say so.’

“I was in a miserable pickle. What do I do now? Go thirty miles back to the compound for a third time that day — in the dark? And travel all the way back for the one and only flight the following night?

I had one shot at remedying the situation. I could call the compound, see who the hell answered the phone — hopefully somebody I can get who would go look in my open locker in my barracks room and find my shot record and bring it to me. I was serving with a lot of good guys, but are they going to go to all that trouble? Go search for my shot record? Take an unauthorized jeep? Travel thirty miles on dirt roads to the airport? It would take a real rule breaker willing to take that risk. (My roommate, by the way, was out of town. He couldn’t help me. Even if it he were there, it was a lot to ask. He’d have probably said, tough break, Greg.)

“Yet, almost in despair, nurturing a faint hope, I called the number for the Orderly Room. I had to use an airbase pay phone — and there was no guarantee anybody would be in the orderly room at that hour to pick up.

“Well, goddamned if someone doesn’t pick up. It’s Cudzilo. He must have been filling in for the clerk for the night or something. I tell him my predicament. And he says,’ sure I can do that for you Greg.” Just like that — he says he’ll do it. Keep in mind I don’t really even know him that well. But he WAS a guy who liked to bend the rules. As I said, that’s what I needed at that moment — the only guy on the compound willing to bend the rules like that.

“As I’ve thought about it over the years, thinking about what few facts Cudzilo had told me about his life before the service, I think he was kind of a happy rebel. Probably had had long hair and a penchant for mischief in his teenage years. I know he’d almost been killed in a motorcycle accident — told me he saw his whole life flash before him as the cycle went off the road.

“He told me he couldn’t make it that night ( of course not), but he’d get hold of a jeep in the morning and bring it to me — to meet him at the airport, and for me to hang out for the night at the USO in Seoul. He assured me he’d get a jeep –not an easy task — and get the shot record to me, said he’d wear a disguise if he had to, pretend he was a sergeant or something. (He was kidding, of course, and maybe he had a legitimate reason to be driving a jeep into Seoul that day, though he wasn’t assigned the mail run. Whatever. He assured me he’d meet me at the terminal. I told him where to look for the shot record in my locker.

“Next day, he shows up at the terminal right when he said he would. Maybe he simply offered to do an errand for a sergeant or something. I’ll never know. Fortunately for me, he didn’t have duty on the mountain that day. He couldn’t have gotten out of that. Go AWOL on that and you would get courtmarshaled.

“He handed me my shot record, a little yellow booklet — had gone into my barracks room and got it — and it wasn’t exactly lying out in the open. Cheerful as anything, gives it to me. Says he had no problem. Wishes me bon voyage for Japan, tells me to have a good time. I get on the flight, hand the shot record to the same guy who barred my entry the night before. (And, of course, no one at the other end at Tokoda asks my shot record. Just as I figured).”

“It sounds like a small thing Cudzilo did for me– and maybe it was a small thing. But it took effort by a guy, once again, I did not work with regularly, a guy who barely knew me. I think I’d even yelled at him once for goofing around too much. But I never forgot that gesture, thinking about it as I had my memorable two weeks in and around Tokyo.

“I don’t know when his tour on that compound ended — we were actually on an island near the DMZ. His tour must have ended while I was out there, because, one day he was gone. I didn’t see him around anywhere. I never even saw him to say goodbye, though I’d thanked him for bringing me the record whenever I saw him after that. And, as I say, guys didn’t like him because he was such a cut-up.

“I wish I knew what ever happened to him,” I said.

And Simmonnetti said, “I can tell you that. I looked it up two years ago. This time of life y ou start wondering about people and, just to make sure they’re alive, you search through the on-line obituaries. I typed in ‘Timothy Cudzilo in Arizona.’

“Up pops his obit, Timothy Jason Cudzilo, dead on December 8, 2015 in Tucson, cremation services by Desert Rose Funeral Services. That was a downer. For the hell of it, I added a long memory on the on-line guest book –this was back in April, 2021. Told about all the fun we had in Tokyo, all the nice things he said about his girl (which maybe I shouldn’t have — don’t know if he married her), asked for someone to get back to me about how he died.”

Bo and I were listening to this, and I’m thinking I’ll write about what Tim did for me. “Did anybody get back to you?”

“No, Simmonnetti said. “Nobody. And there was no sign anybody ever read it.”

Now Bo and I were feeling very sad. She said (thinking the same thing I’d been thinking), ” what about that girlfriend. I wonder if he ever married her.”

Somebody played the juke box right about them. Just the noise we needed, maybe, to break through our mood. It hadn’t been played even once that night. I forget the song. But over the sound of it now, Bo said to me, ” you should write his family. Forget the on-line guest book. Do a little detective work. Write a real letter.”

And I thought, yes, I might do that.

And then again, I thought: forget about it. What’s the use? Nobody in any family is going to care about Simmonnetti’s or my brief memory of a very brief time with a guy we knew for only a brief period early in his sixty-six-year life. A guy who came and went in our lives in the Army where guys were always coming and going.

People come and go. Bo, Simmonnetti, me. We’d all come and go.

“I wonder if he had a good life after that time in Korea,” Simmonnetti said. “I mean he didn’t drink a whole lot , but — well, I wondered that night in Tokyo if maybe he didn’t do some pills or something. I believe he may have smoked a little weed once in a while from what he told me. Didn’t everybody back then? I forget if he smoked cigarettes — probably. And as for pills, lots of guys did pills out there in Korea and you didn’t necessarily know about it. There were lots of pills around. Otherwise, how do you stay that ‘up’ all the time?”

“Some guys can,” I said. “I can’t. And I’d never take chances like he did.” And I got thinking hard at that moment. I said to Bo, “I wonder if I would have done the same thing for him if I’d happened to pick up the phone in the Orderly Room that night. Go digging around in his locker, somehow get a jeep and drive thirty miles over dirt roads to the airport, through checkpoints where the Korean M.P.s might have been suspicious of me. Risk getting in trouble all around? Would I have said instead, ‘Tim, you gotta just face the music that you made a mistake, you spend too much time clowning around. You gotta come back out here to the compound and get your shot record. You can always catch another flight. Yeah, you’ll miss a couple of days of your leave — but that’s life. You’ve got to pay attention.’ Is that what I would have said to him?’

I really felt rotten, thinking that. I took a swig of my O’Doul’s.

Simmonnetti said, “tell you what, let’s all have a toast to the late Tim Cudzilo, a toast at The Last Mile to the guy who went the EXTRA mile for Greg here and traveled a glowing Tokyo mile with me one fine night.”

And we clinked our bottles and Bo’s wine glass and it was a slow, solemn sad ‘bottom’s up’ for a man lying in ashes deep in Arizona — a ceremony of remembrance for the young G.I., clowning around years ago in a dangerous time atop a dangerous mountain above No Man’s Land, who decided, in a devil-may-care spirit, to record the military weather forecast as — CHILI TODAY, HOT TAMALI.

I said a prayer for him, too. Rest in Peace, Tim Cudzilo.