Inheriting the War Read online

  The trip back to Vietnam had been difficult for Travis. He’d only been on an airplane twice in his life—once when he was seventeen and enlisted in the Marines, and again three weeks before this moment. His first days back in-country he couldn’t even look a Vietnamese person in the eye, especially anyone in authority, for they all wore the uniforms of the Vietcong. Even the “mama-sans,” he couldn’t look at them. He told the director a day before we left America that he was planning to bring a small sidearm with him, for “protection.” A gun? she asked, incredulous. She called me and asked if I thought he was serious. As far as I know, I said. She called him back—Travis, you can’t bring a gun with you to Vietnam.

  Fuck it, he said. I’ll buy one over there.

  So Travis and I spent the first few days in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) searching the markets for a gun, or even a big knife, but in the end he settled for a bag of marijuana and a massage.

  Outside the My Lai museum building is an open field, with small plaques marking the sites of what happened—a spot where some huts stood, a well where a baby was thrown down, the ditch the women and children were herded into. A woman, maybe in her forties, was seated on the grass, her legs folded under her, weeding the lawn very slowly, one stalk at a time. Travis watched her for a while. From a distance I watched Travis watching her. It was as if she was meditating on each blade, considering whether to uproot it (And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves). I found out later the translator whispered into Travis’s ear that the woman had been a child at the time of the massacre, and had survived by hiding beneath the body of her dead mother. Travis nodded, asked if he could speak with her. The translator went to the woman, knelt down, spoke some words, looked back at Travis, gestured for him to come. I watched Travis walk up, say something for the translator to translate. I watched him kneel down before this woman, still seated on the grass, take her hand, kiss it, ask her to forgive him, to forgive America.

  TRAVIS REDUX

  (2007) I spend a day driving route 100 north, the entire length of Vermont, to see Travis—a few years without a face-to-face have slipped past again. I made the trip to ask him about torture, I told myself, but now, sitting across from him, it seems enough to simply catch up. Sue was with a guy for a while, Travis tells me—he’d been in Iraq, came back with a short fuse. Sue is his daughter. It must be hard, I say. If they were there for a reason it might be different, Travis mutters. Twelve years ago, when we first reconnected, we’d talked about the first invasion of Iraq, about how he went off the rails—breaking into his estranged wife’s apartment, standing at the kitchen stove, burning her clothes item by item on the open flame, until he noticed the blue lights swirling outside. He kicked out a window, crawled on his belly to his truck, outran the cops for a hundred miles. The next morning, once he’d sobered up, a cop knocked on his door—they all knew him—so he turned himself in. The judge went easy, sentenced him to group therapy for vets with posttraumatic stress at the V.A.

  A few years later, when we went to Vietnam together, it seemed he’d righted himself—no new stories of run-ins with the law, a jewel-like cabin in the woods he was building for his new girlfriend, his house a little less chaotic. We went to lunch with his kids.

  And now, eight years later and three years into another war, I ask him how he’s faring. He goes to bed early these days, he tells me, wakes up at three or four, watches the news for an hour or two, then goes to breakfast at Flo’s. The other workers—carpenters and plumbers, electricians and mechanics—push some tables together, talk about the war. Did you know that in Camp Lejune (a Marine Corps base in North Carolina), five out of seven wells were contaminated, and the government knew, for five years, and still let the army wives and children drink from them? I shake my head, but I’m not surprised. The Walter Reed Army Medical Center is in the news these days, paint peeling from the ceilings, roaches in the food, soldiers with head injuries wandering from building to building like an army of zombies, looking for help. We talk about how soup kitchens are set up on bases now, run by church groups, how the rate of suicide among military personnel is the highest it’s ever been. Travis is remarkably well informed—The corporations are getting all the money, he says, just like always. When the war started he went off the rails again, got another DUI, lost his license for eighteen months, got caught driving on a suspended, and ended up spending ten days in lockup, just as the bombs were falling on Baghdad. I bring up Abu Ghraib. Seems like things got out of control on the night shift, he says. I tell him about the memos from the White House, about Charles Graner getting high marks for the work he was doing, about how the photos were cropped so that we couldn’t see the CIA spooks and the private contractors just outside of the frames. He shakes his head, but it doesn’t surprise him. We look so bad now, he says. Invading Iraq was like opening Pandora’s box, now no one knows how to stuff everything back in. We talk about our trip to Vietnam, about My Lai. I tell him that the moment he kissed that survivor’s hand and asked her forgiveness was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever witnessed—utterly transformative. I tell him that the same guy who released the My Lai photographs released the Abu Ghraib photographs. Travis shakes his head.

  Here for a purpose, he mutters.

  Memorabilia from our trip to Vietnam hangs on his walls—a woodblock print of a water buffalo, a straw hat.

  Inez is pregnant, I tell him.

  Get ready, he smiles.

  TERRANCE HAYES is the author of How to Be Drawn (Penguin Books, 2015), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006); Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2017.

  THE LONG SHADOW OF WAR

  Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient.

  —Walt Whitman

  When I met my biological father, Earthell “Butch” Tyler, Jr., for the first time in February 2004, he did not begin by telling me the year he was born. He did not open his wallet to show me pictures of his children or siblings. A small 40-year-old picture of his father was the only thing he carried. He placed it on the table before me, a worn black-and-white photograph only a little bigger than a stamp. Peering into it I saw a head the size of a thumbprint, so faded I could barely make out the man’s features. He told me my grandfather was a war hero. Sergeant Earthell Tyler, Sr., had been killed saving his men’s lives in Vietnam. “There are medals to prove it,” Butch said. A Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He promised to find them and show me. When he moved into his own place, he’d hang them on his wall. Butch lived with his girlfriend, Ronnie. He and his son, she and her two children, stayed in her two bedroom apartment. I’d traveled 500 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the place I lived, to Columbia, South Carolina, the place where I was born, to meet him. I’d driven from the house of James L. Hayes, the man who’d raised me, to find Butch Tyler, the man whose blood ran through me.

  I could already hear myself boasting that I came from two generations of soldiers—even if the soldiers, Earthell Tyler, Sr., and James L. Hayes, were not related to one another. It was the kind of family mythology I’d come looking for. For a moment I thought James L. Hayes, retired Sergeant 1st Class of the United States Army, would be proud to know my grandfather was a war hero. But I was not brave enough to talk about this with him, hadn’t even told him I wanted to find my real father. I was afraid it would hurt him to hear me, his son, utter the words “real father.” Words both true and untrue. The evening I met Butch, I left James Hayes before his big-screen television still wearin
g his correctional officer uniform, his badge and buttons polished bright as mirrors. Ten years after retiring from the Army, he remained a soldier to the bone; still dutiful, stoic. What I was going to do didn’t concern him, I told myself. I thought I could learn a few biological details, a few stories about the Tyler in my blood, and then quietly return.

  “I don’t want anything. I only want to look into your face,” I’d said to Butch when I spoke to him on the phone for the first time. His voice was warm, already familiar, saying he wanted to meet me as soon as possible. That evening I followed the address he gave me to a run-down neighborhood some people called “The Hole.” Outside I passed by boys playing basketball at a makeshift hoop in the darkness. They paused for what seemed too long when I stepped from my mother’s Volvo. No streetlights or porch lights burned at the row houses’ narrow doors. Though it was February, it was hot. I was nervous and sweating in the long black coat I’d worn against the thick snows of Pittsburgh.

  Before his sister, Maimie, told him about me, Butch had no idea I walked the earth. My mother kept her pregnancy from him, kept my father’s name from her husband, and tried for most of my life to keep Butch from me, too. Maybe she’d only told me the truth a year earlier in 2003 because I’d caught her off guard. We were in the midst of a family crisis: my younger brother was going to war in Iraq, planning to marry an ex-girlfriend before leaving. When I asked him why he couldn’t marry her when he got back, he said he just wanted to leave something behind. He feared he might not return, and I laughed at the idea, as cruel or in as much denial as anyone who has never gone to war.

  Foolishly, I thought I understood military life. In Columbia, it was nearly inescapable, as it was home to Fort Jackson, the largest and most active basic combat training center of the United States Army. Several times a week my family moved between the base—shopping at the commissary and PX—and the city, as if the worlds were identical. We lived in a neighborhood where other black military families posed as ordinary middle class citizens. We frequented malls and restaurants where young privates moved among us more like well-behaved exchange students than soldiers in training. It never occurred to me that any of them could be sent off to war, which existed only in history books and Hollywood movies. No one I knew had died for his country.

  My father served for more than 20 years and never saw combat, enlisting during the cooling years of Vietnam and retiring at the beginning of the first Gulf War. It was one of America’s longest periods of peace. I asked him once whether he was afraid he’d be sent to Vietnam when he enlisted. “I thought I’d have to go to Nam,” he said. “But you know where I come from, going to fight in Vietnam would have been a step up.”

  In our family’s oldest photo album, there is a photo book picture of James L. Hayes the day he left Florida for Ft. Jackson. In a picture the same size as the one Butch showed me, he grins like a boy on his way to college. His gold tooth and small afro suggest none of the buzz cut discipline awaiting him. His fist is raised in the gesture of Black Power, as if that was what the military held for him: pride, power. “At the Miami Airport getting ready to go to Fort Jackson for Basic and A.I.T.” is written on the back below the date “November 24, 1971.” I had been born seven days earlier in the state he was headed for. I can’t even say for sure how he met my mother after arriving there. No one talked about those years in our family, I think, because the story of my birth was bound to them. But I grew old enough to wonder why my younger brother was named James L. Hayes, the 2nd, and not me. I overheard the stories they told their friends, who marveled at my height: to some they said it came from James’ side of the family; to others my mother’s side. Even with these slow recognitions, I considered James L. Hayes my father. The word father had nothing to do with blood.

  But when I was 18, in the midst of a quarrel, I told my mother what I knew. The truth flashed between us, and a moment later we were both calling him my father. We didn’t talk about it again.

  At 25, I found a Polaroid of my mother at 16 in the same album that held the picture of James L. Hayes. Scribbled on the back in her handwriting was: “Butch, Bubby, and Me at El Matador Bay somewhere dancing around. We had a boss time! February 19, 1971.” I had seen the photo before, but never thought of it as anything more than an image of my mother and two friends. When I realized the date was almost nine months to the day before my birth, November 18, 1971, the tall, handsome boy with his arms around her came into focus.

  Still, it was seven years before I had the courage to confront my mother about the image. In the midst of talking on the phone about war and my brother, I asked her if Butch, the boy in the picture, was my father. She stuttered, quieted. Then said with a sigh of relief, “I thought I’d have to take that secret to my grave.”

  After keeping the truth locked up for so long, my mother told me everything. Within the week she’d contacted Butch’s sister, Maimie, the only Tyler she’d been in contact with since his mother, Miss Rebecca, died in 1999. Maimie said the family had broken up since the funeral. “Maybe you’ll be a reason for all of us to come together again,” she said. She hadn’t heard from Butch in two years, but she’d do whatever it took to find him, she told me.

  It took nearly a year. When she called with a phone number, she told me Butch had been sort of wandering from place to place, woman to woman since his divorce. She insisted he was a good man. He had dropped out of school to help raise his brothers and sisters, but he was smart. “I bet he’ll want to read your poetry,” she said.

  “Lord, he look just like you!” Butch’s girlfriend Ronnie exclaimed when she opened the door. I stepped into a small room that was spare enough to suggest hardship, spruced up enough to suggest affection. Half a dozen empty Crown Royal whiskey bottles lined up like museum vases along the top of the kitchen cabinet. Chatter and R&B music murmured behind a door at the end of a short hall. Ronnie sat on the couch before an old floor-model television, half pretending she wasn’t interested in what was about to happen. At the other side of the room Butch drank a tall can of beer at a small table.

  “Come here and let me look at you,” he said, gesturing through a gauze of smoke. He stubbed his cigarette and pulled a crumpled pack out of his short-sleeved work shirt’s pocket. Maimie had told me he had a job fixing air conditioners, that he’d always been good with his hands. He had the long-muscled arms of an athlete, but deep creases lined his face. His eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion and drinking, his slow movements almost graceful. “You definitely got the Tyler head,” he said when I sat across from him. I did as he did, looking for the ways we were alike. Almost without wanting to, I compared him to James L. Hayes. He slouched where my father sat upright even in his sleep. “You got the Tyler head,” he said again, suddenly palming my head. Something like tenderness entered his face. Butch was loose where my father was careful; he was like a wisp of smoke, my father a length of rope.

  “My son Earthell Number Three got his momma head, but his little brother, Rashad, your little brother, Rashad, he got our head,” Butch said, calling for Earthell Number Three to come out and meet his brother. A handsome, lanky 20- or 21-year-old emerged from the back room talking on a cell phone. He wore a basketball jersey, loose jeans, and a ball cap.

  “What up, big brother,” he said in a deep voice somewhere between nonchalant and friendly, as he put his long arms around me. “Nothing. Talking with my big brother,” he said into the phone. Maybe it didn’t surprise him that his father might have a son he didn’t know about. Ronnie asked us to stand side by side. I’m six foot five inches and Earthell Three was an inch or two taller. Butch stood grinning at us, an inch or two shorter than me.

  “Damn y’all tall,” Ronnie said. “He definitely your son, Butch,” she added as if to settle the matter once and for all.

  “You want me to pick up some more beer, Pop?” Earthell Three asked, looking, I thought, for a good way to back out of the room. He still held the phone to his ear.

  “Hell yeah, Baby!” Butc
h exclaimed grabbing the boy’s shoulder as he looked at me. “Earthell is my partner!” The boy’s smile seemed too mature, more like his father’s caretaker than his partner. Maybe he was there instead of with his mother and brother in order to look after Butch.

  “Your Daddy likes to drink too much,” Ronnie said. She said it with ease: “your daddy.” I’d arrived in my mother’s Volvo, an emblem of the most stuck-up members of the black middle class. Mid-week, I’d flown from Pittsburgh to Columbia. I was a college English professor, a poet. Standing in the middle of the spare living room, I felt like I wore the wrong skin. But still, they’d welcomed me in.

  Butch said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

  And it embarrassed me.

  For months after that visit when I tried to remember what Butch looked like, I could recall nothing but a version of my own face; when I thought about the photograph of Earthell Tyler, Sr., I could recall nothing but a shadow. Often I returned to the photograph I had of Butch and my mother. In it they clutched each other at the waist, a young smiling couple. The thick veins looping Butch’s hands and forearms were like my own. I believed I saw myself in the shape of his ears, his brows, and thin lips. I studied my mother’s handwriting, the message that had been waiting for my eyes even before I was born: February 19, 1971. The date was nearly six years after Butch’s father had died in Vietnam, November 17, 1965, and almost nine months to the day before my birth, November 18, 1971.

  Butch smiled when I told him about the picture. “I remember that night. I got so drunk your momma had to drive. She didn’t even have her license yet,” he said.