Читать книгу Christmas Presents and Past - Janice Johnson Kay - Страница 7

Two weeks after Christmas, Will’s Dad drove him to the Army base.

At first Will’s letters were hopeful. Basic training wasn’t so bad. Dinah wouldn’t believe the muscles he was developing, he bragged.

She and his mother exchanged news, phoning each other the minute a letter arrived. Dinah was now calling his mother by her first name, Barbara, instead of Mrs. O’Keefe.

With support waning for the war, Will wrote, he and the other recent draftees believed they might never end up abroad at all.

The 3rd Marine Division was sent home at the end of November, and the 3rd Brigade 82nd Airborne just a few weeks ago. Why would they withdraw experienced troops and then send a bunch of us who have to be taught how to tell the barrel of a rifle from the butt?

Dinah wanted to believe he was right, but she read in the paper about how the government was spying on everybody who participated in any kind of antiwar protest, and that didn’t seem to her the action of an administration committed to ending the war and healing the country. And even though troop levels were declining, CBS News reported there were still 475,200 U.S. military personnel left in Vietnam at the end of 1969. With one-year enlistments, hundreds of thousands of those must need replacements, and the draft had been held for a reason.

She didn’t say that aloud to his mother, though, or in her letters to Will. As it turned out, she didn’t need to. A hastily scribbled note arrived, telling her his battalion was shipping out.

Dinah kept writing almost every day. She was afraid that her day-to-day news must seem pedestrian to him, but Will assured her that wasn’t true. So she hid her worries and continued to write about classes, local gossip and her own struggle with her parents over her future.

We settled on a compromise, she wrote, pausing with her pen above the paper as she remembered the last in a long line of scenes. Beside her burned a tall, twisted candle, the first she’d lit to measure the months until Will would be home, filling her room with a sweet, fruity fragrance that reminded her of Grape Nehi.

The latest scene had taken place over the dinner table. It seemed as if half the time Dinah and her mother ended up silently scraping most of the food into the garbage. Nobody had much appetite when they were fighting. If she and her father weren’t clashing, then Stephen and he were. They fought over Stephen’s hair, his grades, his friends, his music. Dinah, at least, was still torn between the desire to please her parents and her outrage at the world her generation would inherit. Her brother was far more outspoken and unapologetic about his rebellion.

But Stephen hadn’t been home for dinner tonight. Lucky her, she had her father’s full attention. Face apoplectic, he’d slammed his fist onto the table, making dishes rattle. “You’re going to college and that’s final!”

Dinah’s heart was pounding so hard she could hardly breathe, but she kept looking at him with outward calm and said, “What if I don’t?”

Her mother hastily interceded. “Dinah, you have your whole lifetime ahead of you! We simply want to make sure you have the grounding you need to succeed. You’re too good a student to quit now….”

“If you don’t go, you’ve had the last penny of support from us,” her father roared.

“Are you going to tell me what I have to major in, too?” she yelled back. “What if I go for Women’s Studies?”

“You know that’s not…” her mother started to say.

He bellowed some more. Dinah jumped up and fled to her room, so upset she was ready to throw some clothes in a bag and take off. Susan’s and Christina’s parents were too conventional to let her stay with them, but she bet Monique’s mom wouldn’t care if she moved in until graduation. She could get a part-time job to supplement her summer’s earnings and help buy groceries.

She’d actually started grabbing clothes from a drawer when there was a soft knock on her door.

“Who is it?”

“May I come in?” her mother asked.

After a moment she sank down onto the bed, hugging an armful of shirts to her chest. “It’s your house.”

Opening the door, her mother said mildly, “I’ve always respected your right to privacy.”

Tears prickled in Dinah’s eyes. “I know you have.”

“May I sit down?”

She nodded.

They sat side by side for a long moment.

“Honey, I know you’re sure cooking is what you want to do with your life. Your dad…well, he just doesn’t see it as a profession. He thinks short-order cook.”

She rolled her eyes. “If he’d just educate himself…”

“Let me say my piece. You’re seventeen…. Yes, almost eighteen.” She waited while Dinah started to protest what she knew was coming—you’re too young to make smart decisions for yourself, blah, blah, blah— then subsided. Mom started just as she’d anticipated. “We all think we know what’s best when we’re your age, but most of us find out somewhere along the way that we were wrong.”

There was something just a little sad in her mother’s voice that made Dinah ask tentatively, “Did you?”

“If you mean, do I wish I hadn’t married your father, no.” She laughed a little. “Despite his occasional bullheadedness. But I hate my job, and I hate knowing I could do better than the men I work for. So yes. I was sure at eighteen that all I wanted to do was get married and have a family. Now I wish I’d gotten an education first. I wish I’d majored in business. I’m thinking about starting to take some classes.”

“Really?” Dinah asked in surprise. She was ashamed to realize that her mother’s grumbles about her job had just been background noise to her. She hadn’t really listened. “That’s great!” she said. “Is Daddy okay with it?”

“He’s the one who’s been encouraging me. It’s taken me a few years to see he’s right.”

Dinah blinked. “Daddy?” Her father was willing to surrender some of his creature comforts, maybe even some income if Mom cut back to part-time, so that she could find more personal satisfaction in what she did?

Seeing how stunned Dinah looked, her mother shook her head. “You don’t listen to him any more than he does to you. You’re both bullheaded.” She hesitated. “Whether you’re willing to see it or not, the truth is, he wants what’s best for you. He’s just convinced he knows better than you what that is.”

Dinah grimaced. “I noticed.”

“You and Will both talk as if college is like being on a chain gang. Everybody I know who went thinks those four years were the best years of their lives.”

“But I don’t want to be a teacher, or…or…”

“Most of what you learn in college isn’t vocational. Would it be so awful to develop analytical skills, or become a better writer? Maybe more informed about world events?”

“I’ve been in school for thirteen years.”

“College isn’t like high school. And there’s no reason, even if you go to a state school, you couldn’t live in the dorm. You’d be independent, without actually having to pay the bills or cook and clean.”

She’d thought her parents would expect her to commute to classes to save money. That it would be another four years just like high school.

Still…it would be four more years.

She said slowly, “What if we made a deal? What if I agree to go to college for two years, and then if I’m still sure I want to go to culinary school instead, you and Daddy would let me do that?”

There was a moment of silence.

Excited by her idea, she continued, “I’d be twenty then, not eighteen. You’d been married a whole year by the time you were twenty. So Daddy couldn’t argue that I wasn’t ready to decide what I wanted to do with my life.”

“No, he couldn’t, could he?” her mother murmured.

“Doesn’t that seem fair?” She held her breath, waiting for an answer.

“Yes.” Her mother nodded, at first a small bob of her head, then a more decisive dip. “Yes. I’ll talk to your father. But it sounds like a deal to me.”

Dinah wrote to Will about the situation.

Daddy agreed, so I’ve applied to both San Francisco State and the University of San Francisco. My parents winced at that, because tuition is so high at private colleges, but I’ve applied for a bunch of scholarships, too. At least I know getting into S.F. State won’t be a problem. I don’t want to have to go farther away, even to Davis or Chico. I want to be here once you come home.

It was a whole month before she heard back from him, and it didn’t sound as if he’d gotten that letter from her yet, because he referred only to things she’d said earlier.

Flying in, I thought Vietnam was beautiful. Lush and green, laced with brown rivers, these perfect squares of rice paddies and rubber plantations laid out like checkerboards. But, man, it’s hot here. By the time we carried our duffel bags across the tarmac to the truck, we were all dripping wet, it’s that humid. And it stinks. I mean, the whole country, as far as I can tell. I keep asking guys who’ve been here for a while, and they say it’s untreated sewage and rotting vegetation and who the hell knows what else, but this one guy who is on his third tour in-country says it’s death. Bodies rotting. Seems to me he’s enjoying trying to scare us, like an older camper telling ghost stories, but it made my hair stand on end, I gotta tell you.

Dinah called Will’s mother right away to tell her she’d gotten a letter, but when she read it out loud, she left out that last part. She skipped right from “who the hell knows what else” to his next paragraph, where he told about landing at Bien Hoa and riding in a convoy past shacks of corrugated tin and skinny children chasing the trucks and begging.

Man, people tell me not to wish for the rainy season, but the dust has us dirty all the time right now. You couldn’t recognize me. The dirt here is red, and when you sweat—all the time—it sticks to you. I already feel like my skin is stained with it.

His letters for the next couple of months were like that. He described water buffalo, enormous beasts with rings in their noses. Even small children seemed to handle their family buffalo with ease, as if they were pets.

Although I don’t think the buffaloes like Americans. Every time I see one, it eyes me and snorts.

She laughed at that, and at his claim that the rats over there were as big as terriers. She didn’t laugh when he wrote about voracious mosquitoes or leeches or centipedes, but she kept thinking, As long as a few bug bites are the worst thing he has to worry about.

But she couldn’t seem to forget that first letter he’d written from “in-country,” and two things he’d said.

When we got off the airplane, guys who were heading home were waiting to board. They looked so much older than us, even though they’d only been here a year. It was their eyes, I think. They looked as if they knew things I don’t want to know.

There was that, and then there was the smell.

It’s death.

After the things she saw on TV, she believed it.

After even a couple of months in ’Nam, Will felt himself changing. It wasn’t as bad here as it had been a year or two before, he knew that, but it was bad enough. Not for everyone—guys with any pull at all got themselves assigned to support and stayed put in Saigon or Cu Chi, where the living was good. There were officers’ clubs, enlisted clubs, swimming pools. Will had heard of one guy who was drafted, too, only somebody found out he had his lifeguard certification and now he was putting in his year as a lifeguard at a base swimming pool. Will spent his days guarding engineers sweeping the roads for mines, and his nights, after what sleep he could snatch, stumbling through the jungle and splashing through rice paddies on some kind of patrol looking for the enemy, scared the whole time. Where was the justice in that?

Being bitter wasn’t new. Having a good reason for it was. Lying on his cot trying to sleep but thinking about home instead, he was embarrassed about how much he’d resented his parents and for so little reason.

He was hardening. Not in ways he liked or was proud of, but he didn’t think he’d have survived if he’d stayed as naive as he’d been, or as affected by the sight of suffering and death. Man, even in Cu Chi, soldiers smoked weed right in front of God and their superiors, shot up heroin with little more discretion, refused orders and bought sex with local prostitutes for a couple of bucks. Yeah, Ma, life here is a little slice of America.

What bothered him most was that now he could look at dead bodies lying beside the road and feel nothing. He’d quit wondering what Vietnam had been like back before so many villages had been bombed or huge stretches of the landscape had been denuded by napalm. He’d discovered quickly that you didn’t want to get to be really good friends even with your fellow soldiers. There was an intense closeness, sure; when a helicopter dropped off six or seven of you somewhere in the darkness, man, you might as well all have been attached by umbilical cords. You breathed together, you listened together, you stuck together. Nobody was cocky at night. Charlie was better in the dark than American soldiers were. Nobody disputed that.

But the other guys got themselves killed sometimes, and Will found he couldn’t let himself care so much it paralyzed him.

Mines and booby traps were the big threats. If there were any big NVA concentrations out there, Will’s company never found them, though that was the stated goal of the nighttime forays. He was in a few firefights, where branches around his head exploded and he emptied the magazine of his M-16 into the woods where he saw answering flashes of fire from enemy weapons. But most of the deaths happened when someone stumbled over a trip wire or when the engineers missed a mine buried in the road that went off when the next truck rattled over it. The first time Will saw a guy get his legs blown off, he lost it. But it got so he was just so damn grateful he wasn’t the one to have put his foot wrong, he didn’t waste the energy mourning the guy who had. No, that didn’t make him proud.

One of the things that got to him was the fact that the U.S. was making no headway. Guys were dying, but for what? The U.S. never seemed to gain a foot of ground. The NVA melted away when American or South Vietnamese soldiers entered a village and reappeared as soon as they were gone. At first when he went out, he didn’t even know where he was going, but after a couple of months Will began to realize he was seeing the same stretches of river, the same rubber plantations, the same banana trees, over and over. They weren’t fighting a concrete war that was earning them anything to write home about. And nobody thought the South Vietnamese troops, to whom they were gradually handing over responsibility, were going to be able to hold back the North Vietnamese.

Then word came down: they were going into Cambodia. Everyone knew the Vietcong supply lines passed through Cambodia, and supposedly a sizeable chunk of the North Vietnamese Army lurked there. Will was scared but also exhilarated. Finally, they were going to do something meaningful.

On April 29th the combined U.S. and South Vietnamese force pushed across the border. The first camps Will’s platoon found were deserted. They felt like ghost towns. He had the uneasy feeling that eyes watched from the surrounding jungle.

They damn near stumbled over a camp hidden in thick bamboo and found pots still cooking over fires.

“Don’t touch anything!” the lieutenant reminded them sharply.

“Yeah, you think we’re stupid?” McAlister muttered. They’d been warned that everything would be booby-trapped.

Pretending not to hear, the lieutenant signaled them. “Let’s keep moving.”

The bamboo stirred as they started back into it. Will wouldn’t have wanted to be point. Even moving behind others in his platoon, he watched carefully where he put his feet.

The long whistle of incoming mortar gave them a split-second warning. Will threw himself flat onto the ground and scrabbled with his hands as if he could dig himself into the earth. He heard obscenities and prayers all around him and didn’t know if some of them were coming from him. Rounds shredded the bamboo above him. He heard grunts and screams but didn’t dare lift his head. Then the rat-a-tat of a machine gun firing, and Emilio Ramirez, the one guy he could see, jerked and flopped like Raggedy Andy, blood wetting his uniform and the ground.

That was too much. Will brought up his M-16 and opened fire on full automatic. Rock and roll, the soldiers called it, just emptying at the berms he could see ahead now that the bamboo was cleared.

“Back, back!” voices called out.

He crawled to Ramirez and pulled him along as he went, rounds exploding around them. Medics met him, but they were shaking their heads within seconds. He wasn’t surprised, but he couldn’t have left Ramirez there.

“You hurt?” they asked. “Where are you hit?”

He looked down in surprise and saw that he was soaked in blood. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

Helicopters roared overhead.

They looked him over and decided the blood was Ramirez’s. He ran to help load wounded into the medevac helicopter.

In the wake of the gunships, they took the NVA position, but by that time the enemy soldiers had fled, leaving only their dead and a few wounded behind.

The whole campaign ended ingloriously, with no major victory to claim.

Will wrote about it to Dinah, and in her next letter she told him that the nation had arisen in protest when Nixon announced the incursion into Cambodia:

He didn’t even have the guts to call it an invasion. College students across the country are rising to demand the end of this unjust war. I’ve been joining the protests. When I told my parents I wasn’t going to classes, they didn’t say a word. That tells you how deep the outrage goes, when even their generation no longer speaks up in the president’s defense. We’ll bring you home, Will. I promise we will.

In May, she told him about the Kent State shooting, students gunned down in cold blood by National Guard soldiers. He already knew about it, and had seen the photograph of the girl kneeling over a prone body screaming in shock and disbelief.

Dinah sent him a photo of herself about then, surrounded by other protesters at some demonstration. She had changed. Her face was thinner, more determined. She wore an embroidered band around her head, ragged bell-bottom jeans and a short jacket painted with a crude peace symbol. The guy next to her carried a sign that said Stop Killing Babies.

Is that what she thinks we’re doing? Will asked himself in shock. There were stories, sure, and once he’d helped burn the hootches in a village that had been harboring Vietcong, but nobody bayoneted babies. He hated remembering the terror on the faces of villagers they’d herded out before lighting the straw roofs, but they’d made a choice.

He’d been antiwar himself before he came. Now, he didn’t like knowing that part of the reason the troops were frozen in never-never land was that people back home weren’t giving them the support they needed to actually win. Whether the war was right or wrong no longer seemed to matter. Widely reported demonstrations gave the North Vietnamese hope. They could keep melting away. Every time bombing was halted, the outcome turned further their way. All they had to do was outlast American will. In the end, Vietnam would be theirs. Everyone here knew it. And that meant that tens of thousands of American soldiers had died for nothing. Whatever he’d thought or believed before he came, Will had a fire in his belly now when he read about the demonstrators who weren’t just demanding the end to the war, they were implying that he and every other guy who’d come hadn’t had the guts to refuse, or else they’d enlisted or accepted induction so they could rape women and kill babies.

And his girlfriend was one of them. She was using him as an excuse. She was doing it for him, not thinking that he might be more likely to come home in a body bag if she made it more dangerous for him here.

He didn’t know how he felt about the increasingly strident tone of her letters or the things she was telling him. Eight members of Congress had attended an antiwar rally in D.C. Will’s country had sent him here to serve, and now even members of Congress were saying his presence was wrong. He was confused enough that he kept writing about day-to-day stuff, like the red ants or the ice-cold Cokes they’d been able to buy from Vietnamese peddlers, but not about how angry he had begun to feel at her lack of support.

That month the monsoons arrived, adding new miseries to everyday existence. Storms hit with a ferocity Will had never seen before, drenching soldiers. To cross rice paddies they’d once walked through now required boats or a willingness to swim. Under fire one night, Will had to spend a night in a foxhole, and with the rain hammering down he was chest deep in water by morning. The mosquitoes thrived, and snakes wriggled by in thick streams of water. Will and the other soldiers improvised all kinds of folk remedies to make the leeches drop from their flesh. The one blessing brought by the incessant rains was some surcease in skirmishes.

The rains continued into September. He’d now become a short-timer. Nobody wanted to die, but the idea of dying when you only had months or weeks or days to go seemed worse. He started to think, Maybe I’ll survive, and that was dangerous, so he took to wearing his flak jacket again, discarded an eon ago because the damn thing was so heavy it was all but unwearable in this climate. When he walked by to the latrine or grabbed grub at dinner, guys took to calling after him, “Hey, San Francisco! Gotta wear flowers in your hair when you go home.” At first he laughed, but it began to bug him. Hippies wore flowers in their hair, not vets like him. He started wondering if when he eventually stepped off the airplane he’d feel like a stranger in a strange land, instead of embracing a sense of homecoming.

He had some hope when Dinah told him about the amendment that senators McGovern, Hatfield and others introduced that demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of the year. It might not help him—his enlistment would be up early in January anyway—but at least it would all be over. Everyone would come home, not just him.

But then Dinah wrote him that the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment was defeated in the Senate. The Paris peace talks might as well not be happening. Maybe it would never end.

He asked her whether her brother had registered for the draft and she wrote back:

Stephen’s refusing, and my dad doesn’t know how to feel. He doesn’t like the idea of defying our government, but he doesn’t want Stephen to serve in such a pointless, inhumane war, either.

Maybe he was getting sensitive, but Will didn’t know how he could not feel insulted by lines like that. Stephen wasn’t going, so why had he?

Eventually her brother did register, according to Dinah, but only after insisting that if he drew a low number he was running to Canada. Of course he didn’t have to; Stephen got number 245, she wrote triumphantly. Now he could brag, Will thought cynically, that he wouldn’t have gone, without actually having to make a sacrifice.

Will figured he was down to five weeks—man, was there any chance he’d get shipped out before Christmas? Get to finish out the last couple weeks of his enlistment at Fort Ord?—when he was ordered out on a sweep and search. Seven guys were airlifted to look for NVA activity in a wooded area past a village that had already been burned to the ground. Will, who recognized the valley, took point, something he hated. It was hard to stay aware of their surroundings and also keep his eyes fixed on the ground for booby traps or mines. Is that grass or wire? Why is a stick lying in the middle of the path? They all knew about stick mines, in which the piece of wood was attached to a mine with a trigger device. Step over it? On it? Nudge it aside? Take long strides? Short? Is it better to stay on a path that might have been mined, or beat through the vegetation and make so damn much racket Charlie would hear them a mile away and prepare an ambush?

One second he was walking, worrying, scanning the woods, scanning the dirt in front of him. The next, there was a clap like thunder, and the explosion picked him up, flung him forward and then slammed him to the ground. He felt pain everywhere, like fire ants running over him, biting, but the most excruciating was in his ears. Screams were far off, and he lay with his face in the dirt, too confused to grasp what was happening.

Somebody shook his arm. “O’Keefe? Goddamn it, O’Keefe? Hang in there, we’ve got a medevac coming.” Even the voice was muffled, like real crappy reception on the radio.

He rolled to the side and shoved himself to his knees. No idea how much time had passed. Five minutes? An hour? His brain was settling like a snow globe after you quit shaking it. A mine. It had to have been a mine. Shit. Had he triggered it? That last stick in the path? He’d stepped over it…. No, he realized, mind still working real slowly, if he’d triggered it, he probably wouldn’t be able to kneel.

Oh, God, God. Roaring like a wounded water buffalo, he swung around to see the men who’d been walking behind him. The blood. God, God, the blood. That had to be Van Gorder who no longer had legs, and who was that behind him? He couldn’t be sure, because the soldier no longer had a face and was clearly dead. Others were wounded; the cries were theirs.

Will groaned and flung himself to the side, puking up everything in his gut.

Shit, yeah, he’d stepped over the stick. But Van Gorder hadn’t. And Will was responsible. He’d led them to their deaths.

Things became a blur then: the eventual arrival of a helicopter, blades beating and leaves flying; getting loaded; medics hovering over him. Eventually an operating room in Cu Chi, where he shook with the cold and realized it was air-conditioned.

A surgeon with a mask over his face appeared in his line of sight. “I’m knocking you out, Will. You’re going to be fine, but we need to clean shrapnel out of these wounds and stitch you up.”

He threw up when he awakened, and again after they let him suck ice cubes.

“Lucky you were wearing your flak jacket,” he heard twice. Most of the damage was on his legs, although they’d pulled a sharp piece of metal out of the back of his neck.

Eventually an officer visited to tell him that he might have made it back to his unit under other circumstances, but since his enlistment was about up, he was going home.

“Do my parents know I was wounded?” he asked.

“They were notified.”

Going home took two more weeks. At last he flew into Travis Air Force Base. He’d recovered enough to make his way down the steps himself and to hobble across the tarmac. Wives and parents were crying and holding out their arms. He searched the crowd for faces he knew.

At last, there they were. His mom and dad, and with them was Dinah, older but definitely the girl he knew, not the hippie in the photograph. Her hand was pressed to her mouth, and tears ran down her cheeks.

They collided as much as reached for each other, all four of them. They were all trying to hold him, and shit, yeah, he was sobbing like a baby.

The drive home was surreal. It was evening, and fog hung low and thick. Through it he kept glimpsing Christmas lights. That made sense. He’d left right after Christmas, but somehow he hadn’t even thought of the holiday. Earlier, he’d planned to buy presents for his parents and Dinah before he flew home, but he’d expected to have time. He had only a few souvenirs, but they were all of a war Dinah despised. She wasn’t proud of his service, so his Purple Heart wouldn’t be deeply meaningful to her.

He and she rode in the backseat of his parents’ Buick. She reached over and took his hand. In a quiet voice, she said, “We’re so glad you’re home, Will. We’ve been so frightened.”

“Yeah. Boom—” he clapped his hands “—and, hey, you can go home, O’Keefe. Kind of a surprise ending to the party.”

He felt her surprise at his levity. His mother turned her head, too.

“They said…some other men were killed?” she asked hesitantly.

Bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it. “There was a mine. I was lucky.”

His mother turned to face the front so quickly, he knew it was to hide her distress, though he might have had trouble seeing it in the dark.

Beside him, Dinah said fiercely, “Well, things will be different now.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I brought something for you.” She held out her hand.

Puzzled, he took what she handed him. It was stiff, but cloth. A patch? Headlights coming the other way briefly illuminated it. It was a peace symbol—white—embroidered against a blue background.

She touched the front of his fatigue jacket. “I’ll sew it on there for you. Now you can speak out.”

He wanted to drop the patch, or thrust it back at her. Instead, he just sat there. His voice sounded a little strange. “My Christmas present?”

“Well…” She chuckled, a musical sound he’d dreamed about. “I have others for you. But…yes. A first present.”

Something he didn’t want. Didn’t understand. A symbol that repudiated everything for which the men around him had died.

“I’m so glad you’re home for Christmas,” she murmured.