TOM JOHNSON: SOLITARY SOLDIER

True Lives; Is Every Man Everyman? Is Everyone a Story? We Drove Nails Into the Phone Book, and Went to Find Out.

There are eight million stories in the naked city.

That was the sign-off line for the 1948 movie "Naked City" and the TV series it spawned. It was an arresting premise: Everyone has a story to tell. All lives are interesting.

It makes for good fiction. Is it true?

On Monday, five writers each took a nail and hammered it into a phone book. Where the nail stopped, the writer started. That person would be the story, so long as he or she agreed to be interviewed.

We used phone directories for the District, Northern Virginia, and Prince George's and Montgomery counties. We used nails from Strosnider's. We used a hammer from Hechinger. We used the stories as we found them: Ordinary. Unembellished. Riveting.

Three needle pricks crawl up his arm, like red ants on a sidewalk. Every evening, a syringe nips his pale biceps; every morning, his butt. The sting releases 44 units of insulin into his blood.

Tom Johnson, 31, wasn't always a diabetic. It wasn't part of the plans he made as a boy, lying on his back in a meadow.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Tom would count out loud in the meadow by the river. He was dressed in green, playing war. His friend had just shot him dead. He had to lie still for 10 Mississippis. The ground was damp and smelled like rotten carp. Mosquitos swarmed around his nose. But Tom lay there happily, picturing his future -- as a fighter pilot or a battleship commander.

Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi. Six Mississippi. Tom itched to get up, to find his friend and shoot him. He was a deadeye, even then. He got it from his dad, a military man, who left their cramped house each day in a lime-green shirt and dark matte pants. His father served his country as an Army computer technician. Tom was going to be a real, mud-spackled career soldier.

Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi. Ten Mississippi. At last, Tom could pop up and pursue his friend -- the enemy.

Years later, at Fort Bragg, N.C., the enemy took shape as the Soviet Union. It was 1983, the waning days of the Cold War. Johnson enrolled in college, but only because he needed a degree to become an officer. He won an Army Achievement Medal. He became a second lieutenant, a rifle platoon leader in a unit deployable to central Europe in case of a Soviet invasion. The Russians, Johnson imagined, would be brutal; they would try to smother him with artillery and chemicals. A guy in Johnson's unit, who had a tattoo of a paratrooper skull with a knife in its teeth, predicted the Soviets would carve the tattoo from his arm and turn it into a wallet.