Old Man Hendricks

Not a real photo. I didn’t take any that morning.

“My favorite are them white phosphorous warheads,” the old man said with a wicked smile. It was spoken through a thick antebellum drawl I didn’t know existed anymore outside of reruns of Gone With the Wind. Slender, bespectacled, and unassuming in his dark blue t-shirt and khaki pants, the man was nevertheless full, as the old saying goes, of “spit and vinegar.”

He spoke about munitions with a giddy reverie that most men reserve for recollections of the first time they fell in love. He’d spent decades as an engineer, designing weapons systems for military contractors. He’d blown things up on test ranges across the country. He could tell you the precise caliber and the exact number of rounds per minute fired by a wide array of different guns, from stationary Gatlings to helicopter-mounted miniguns. He talked about infrared flares that could only be seen through night vision goggles, and fuel-air bombs detonated high enough in the atmosphere that they “looked like a damn nuke.” He told me about an aircraft-mounted flechette weapon that had filled a man with hundreds of metal shards so small it took him two days to die.

Mr. Hendricks—let’s call him—was among the last of a dying breed. 85 years old, born on Long Island — but only because his father was a military man stationed there — he grew up in the pine forests and gently rolling hills of central North Carolina, and no amount of time spent traveling to far-off places had dulled the sharp twang of his curdled English.

“I made my money in Texas,” he said, not for the first time that morning. “I don’t need anymoah, and I’m not lookin’ to make it heah. I just want to honor mah daddy’s request to take care of his farm.”