Inheriting the War Read online

  I knew this story. The story my mother revealed to explain why she’d never told anyone Butch was my father. I waited to see how he’d finish it.

  He continued, “Your Momma’s always been a little crazy, but I really loved her back then. She was my first love, and I think I was hers.” He took a drag from his cigarette, thinking. “That’s why I can’t figure out why the hell she ain’t tell me about you?” He half-asked, half-fussed. He seemed to have no idea anything wrong might have happened that night.

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her,” I said, looking away from him.

  My mother told me they’d fought in the hotel. “I guess nowadays they call it rape . . . ,” she said, almost sighing, as if she were still trying to figure out what happened after all these years. “I was too embarrassed to tell anybody I was pregnant. Definitely not him and his mother. When she died, it was the thing I regretted most.”

  I remember Miss Rebecca. She was a tall, serious woman my mother and I visited when I was a boy. Something like respectful fear or fearful respect emanated from my mother in this woman’s presence. Maybe she was waiting for the moment Miss Rebecca truly saw me. Waiting to tell everything. We’d sit quietly for hours in her den. There might have been portraits of people who looked like me around her room: her sons, daughters and grandchildren, her deceased husband. They never spoke of them. They never spoke of me. My mother told me babysitting for Miss Rebecca was her first job.

  Having now told me things she thought she’d take to her grave, my mother talked, as she rarely did, about what it was like for her growing up. She, her sister, and two brothers were raised by a single mother in one of Columbia’s first government projects. Before moving there they’d lived in a tiny tin-roofed house with her grandmother and two uncles. Her own father lived in New Jersey with his wife and legitimate children. She only saw him a few times before he died. She remembered when Butch’s father died in the war. “I remember the money Miss Rebecca got after his death,” she said. “I would sit on my steps across the street from their house and watch all those kids opening sodas, and then leaving the half-full cans on the porch. I wanted to be part of their family.” Then, as if she’d forgotten what she told me about Butch, she reminisced fondly about him. How he was the first boy tall enough to touch the ceiling when they were in school together. How all the other girls wanted him.

  I felt like a coward for not asking Butch if what my mother told me was true. Or maybe I felt it would be wrong to accuse him. But, really, it was why I’d come. Had I been born as a result of rape? What did that say about who I was, about the kind of blood that made me? I had to see the man to know the truth, and sitting across from him I still didn’t understand. I strained to see the person he might have been beneath who he seemed to be. I thought of the boy in the photograph. He looked incapable of violence. I know that’s a foolish thing to say. Maybe he looked drunk. Maybe he drank because his father drank? Maybe he drank because his father was dead? Everything riddled with “maybes,” and who could answer these questions? All I knew of my past was that my grandfather had died a Vietnam war hero. Everything I tried to understand about Butch was tied to this fact.

  Nearly two years later in January 2006, I spoke with Butch in person for only the third time. I wanted to know more about my blood, my grandfather, our history. What was his earliest memory of his father? Could he describe the last time he’d seen him; what did he remember about the day he learned his father was dead? I wanted to know how losing Earthell Tyler changed the family.

  Butch had moved between two or three places since I’d last seen him. He was renting a room now in a motel off the highway and had a new construction job out of town during the week. He no longer lived with Ronnie, kicked out because of his drinking, but he asked me to meet him at her place. I hoped to catch him before he was drunk.

  “My daddy didn’t give a fuck!” Butch said, half slouched at the table, a beer in hand, a cigarette between his lips. I knew there should have only been the two of us for the interview, but I could tell he didn’t want me to see where he lived. We sat drinking with Ronnie and her best friend, Brenda. Ronnie’s 10-year-old son watched two older boys play a video game, their taunt and laughter blending with the sound of “What’s Going On,” Marvin Gaye calling “Brother, Brother, Brother . . . ” from a tiny CD radio. I propped a tape recorder in the middle of the table, hoping Butch’s voice would cut through the noise. He was talking to me, but he was talking to Ronnie as well, half-boasting, half-testifying when I asked him his earliest memory of his father.

  “You know what, he didn’t give a fuck,” Butch said to the room. “When he came back home and Mother had all those children you know what he said? ‘How y’all doing?’ ”

  The boys playing the video game let out a snatch of laughter.

  “Don’t use that kind of language on the tape!” Brenda said, Ronnie nodding.

  “It’s alright,” I said, beginning to realize how tricky this interview might be for me to moderate, how difficult for Butch to recall any details. “You mean he was easy going?” I asked.

  “Yeah, he didn’t give a fuck,” Butch said.

  “Was it that he didn’t give a fuck, or was it that he was easy going?” I asked. “There’s a difference.”

  “He was easy going,” Butch said, beginning to soften. “He was like me. When he came home—he didn’t come home that much—when he came home, everybody would say, ‘Earthell’s home! The man!’ ”

  “He was in Korea, too, right?” I asked only a little surprised at how suddenly Butch opened up. He could be, at times, the most forthcoming man I’d ever met. Gentle and charming. When I mentioned I wanted to interview him about his father, he seemed ready to tell me every story right there over the phone. When he said his father had served in Korea, it changed my idea of the kind of man I’d thought his father might have been. Not a soldier green going to war in Vietnam, but someone experienced, a career soldier. Now I wanted to know if he’d told his son any stories about the Army—about being a black man in the Army.

  “Yeah, he served a year in Korea. But he was never home. He never was. You know why? My momma wasn’t about that. She could have been with him; I could have been with him. Every time he left, we could have went with him. But she wouldn’t do it. She wasn’t willing to leave home,” he said.

  “Cause she was a strong woman,” Brenda said, but Butch was paying no attention, speaking almost to himself. Ronnie looked lovingly from Butch’s face to mine. Maybe she’d heard some of it before, but I suspect she’d never seen Butch reminiscing this deeply.

  “Before he went to Vietnam he came home. For a minute. He was never there. He came home in a VW. He had a red Volkswagen. He came home. . . . He said, ‘Well, I’m going to Vietnam.’ I think he knew he wasn’t coming back. Me, my momma, my oldest brother, Darrel, and one of Pop’s drinking partners—cause Pop liked to drink, too—one of his drinking partners drove us to Alabama. And he was going to leave Alabama and go to Vietnam. Before that he came home. And he left the VW to Darrel. Now Darrel wasn’t his son! When they got married, mother already had Darrel. He left his red Volkswagen to Darrel because he was the oldest. Whose he was didn’t matter to him. Cause that’s how my daddy was. Darrel was a Tyler and that’s just how he looked at it. After that he went to Vietnam. If he had made it back, he would have retired. But he didn’t make it back, and he died trying to save somebody else.”

  “Do you know what happened? Who he saved, how he died?” I asked.

  “Well, they sent us the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. I saw the official papers that said Sergeant Earthell Tyler did such and such and such. That’s why they awarded him the Bronze Star.”

  “You could probably get that information from the government,” Brenda said. “You’re a journalist, I bet they’d give that information to you.”

  “He’s his grandson, he’s family,” Ronnie added. “They have to give him that information.”

  But I’m not a j
ournalist, I’m a poet. I’m not good at asking questions; I’m good at making things up. What I wanted to know Butch couldn’t tell me. I had not gone to Washington to see his father’s name etched into the black stone, but I’d seen it online: Panel 3 East, Row 96. The only “Earthell” among the 58,022 names, he had been easy to find. “Earthell” sounded both strange and familiar to me—grand and simple at the same time—the kind of name that required a nickname. He might have been called “Slim” or even “Bullethead,” nicknames I had growing up. He could have been the original “Butch.” (I never thought to ask Butch how he came by the name.) In the army they might simply have called him “Tyler” or “Sarge.” Among websites dedicated to veterans, I found slim details of his life: E5, US Army, age 35, married, Delta company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Calvary, born July 22, 1930, died November 17, 1965, cause of death: small arms fire.

  It was online that I learned he was among those killed during three days of fighting in the Battle of la Drang, the first major battle between the United States Army and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). I had not heard of the battle until I saw his name associated with it, but detailed accounts filled many websites. On the Army’s website, I learned that it was one of the first times in which U.S. forces combined air mobility and air artillery. There were almost no roads into the area, but the new airmobile tactics allowed soldiers on their way to battle and soldiers wounded and killed to be transported to landing zones by Huey helicopters. It was also the battle in which the PAVN and Viet Cong forces learned they could undermine the air strikes by fighting at very close range. They would later refine this tactic, calling it “getting between the enemy and his belt.” Some websites featured animated maps and diagrams, reducing the battle and landing zones to the kinds of lines and arrows you might find in a football coach’s playbook. On one there was even a war game, complete with military figurines and a gameboard for sale. The battle had acquired mythic proportions in the 40-plus years since it happened.

  At wikipedia.org, the yellow-haired Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore is mentioned in relation to the yellow-haired Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who commanded the same unit, the 7th Calvary, in 1876 at the Battle of Little Big Horn. As with Little Big Horn, American forces underestimated the enemy and faced them in perilously unfamiliar terrain. On lzxray.com, the la Drang campaign is described as two fights between November 14 and November 17: the first at Landing Zone X-ray where 450 American soldiers clashed and fought back over 2,000 PAVN forces; the second near the smaller Landing Zone Albany, while the exhausted soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 7th Calvary, took a break in the tall grass of a clearing. I wondered if my grandfather was among the ambushed soldiers. According to a synopsis on the website, the fighting was “a wild melee, a shoot-out, with gunfighters killing not only the enemy but sometimes their friends just a few feet away.” Online I read how the Landing Zone Albany battle lasted through the day and night, descending into hand-to-hand combat. Sergeant Tyler was among more than 155 killed and 126 wounded on November 17, the deadliest day for American forces during the entire Vietnam War. What had he done to earn the medals? I searched for his name on the sites by and for veterans, web pages memorializing little-known fallen soldiers. There were ardent testimonies and words like “Hero,” “Honor,” “Sacrifice” floating against backdrops of American flags and photos of young men, but on the rare occasion Earthell Tyler was mentioned, it was only a name listed among the dead. Big or small, war or warrior, steeped in tragedy and pride, every website pitched with nostalgia, but none told me what I wanted to know. I knew Earthell Tyler was a man whose head was shaped like mine, but I didn’t know who he was: prankster or preacher, did he sing out loud or to himself, was he thinking of his fellow soldiers or his family in the moments before his death?

  “What did she do when she found out he was gone? When she found out he’d been killed?” I asked.

  “I’ll never forget that day. A taxi-cab driver brought the telegram to the house. I’ll never forget that day,” Butch said as he lit another cigarette. “I was right there. I was surprised she broke down like she did. I didn’t really think she loved my daddy. But uh, I was surprised that she broke down and she cried.”

  “How old were you?” I asked, already imagining a boy shocked to see his mother crying for the first time. Maybe initially more shocked by the sight of her weeping than at the news of his father’s death. I could see Rebecca Tyler now, a big woman with a face like that of my daughter, and I could hear the immense sound of her weeping. And the softness of it.

  “I was 11 or 12. I remember when the taxi-cab driver brought the telegram,” Butch said.

  “I need details,” I said, hoping to coax him into a deeper story, something better than my imagination. “Was it a weekend? Were you coming home from school? Were you watching cartoons? Was your mother at work?”

  “I think I was at work,” he said, laughing. “I’ve been working ever since I was 12. I had a job changing tires.”

  “You were pretty much taking care of the family while he was gone?”

  “Yeah, my great-uncle got me a job changing tires,” he said, and I saw him kneeling at a car in 1965, a boy whose body was trained already in the habits of labor. Except it occurred to me that he was working even before his father died. He hadn’t gotten a job to take his dead father’s place as breadwinner like some character in a Charles Dickens novel. What I was thinking when I came to speak with Butch was too easy. I thought if he’d never lost his father, he might never have lost his family. I thought he would never have started drinking, might have learned to love my mother the right way.

  “So you didn’t think they loved each other?” I asked, realizing the story I expected to hear about Earthell Tyler, Sr., also wasn’t simple. I imagined the words he’d written home to his wife, pictured him as the kind of man who had a deep, almost foolish capacity for love—a man capable of loving even a country or a woman that might not love him back. Such a man would believe anyone could be changed by his love: a country that did not see his race as equal could change if he devoted his life to protecting it; a woman could change by his devotion and give the same back.

  “When they married, they were in love,” Butch said. “Mother met my daddy when they were teenagers. She’d already had Darrel. They were young. Daddy was in the Army. I think the problem was when she didn’t want to go where he had to go. She just wasn’t leaving her family to go to Europe or overseas or Germany—all them places he was going. She said, ‘I just can’t do that, baby. I’m so sorry.’ So he went by himself. Which was a problem. You can’t leave your woman like that. That creates some problems.”

  Ronnie and Brenda and I, we all nodded. His story reminded me of my own. Like Earthell Tyler, Sr., James L. Hayes was a career military man. And like Miss Rebecca, my mother chose to stay in Columbia the years he was stationed on military bases inside and outside the country. Called to Germany when I was eight, he did not live in Columbia again “full time” until retirement 14 years later. It was during those years I first remember meeting Miss Rebecca. Maybe at some point during a visit, my mother asked Miss Rebecca whether she should take the family abroad with James. Perhaps Miss Rebecca told her not to follow him, said it was better to raise children around their blood. Maybe Miss Rebecca told my mother staying was the best way to have a stable family. Except none of it happened that way. As Butch said, leaving your woman behind created some problems. Problems for the woman and the man; troubles for the family.

  There was a little rush of movement. The boys left the room, done with their video game; Brenda rose to leave. More than an hour had passed, but Butch and I were still where we’d started. “But you know what,” he continued, “I’ll say this much about him. He wasn’t even in the United States, and she was having babies. And she named every damn one of them Tyler. And you know what he said? Nothing. When he would come home—before he died he came back to the United States—you know what he said? Nothing. But I be the only Earthel
l Tyler, Jr., baby! My daddy was the only man she ever married. I ain’t no bastard. I ain’t worried about it. My father was genuine.”

  He stood up, smiling and sang, “You know what I’m saying, baby?” He leaned over to palm my head. “That’s why you who you are! You got Tyler blood in you. You ain’t no bastard, baby. You be legit.” He swaggered, staggered into the kitchen for more beer.

  I’d been thinking about the idea of legitimacy. Butch was one of eight or nine children—I never really got a clear number—all of them scattered now across the city. He had not seen most of them since his mother’s funeral six years earlier. His emphasis on legit, genuine, made me wonder if he grew up believing he was more legitimate than any of his siblings. He had been the only one born into a genuine family: a mother and a father who were married. Except his siblings might have seen more of their fathers than he did of his own. . . . As one of the oldest children, he might have seen those men about his mother’s house before and after his father died. I wondered if he called any of them father; if he ever wanted to call any of them father. I didn’t think of myself as illegitimate even when I knew James L. Hayes wasn’t my biological father. I didn’t want to find someone to replace him. I didn’t want a new name, but I wanted to know my family history. Maybe Butch knew what I’d come looking for. He wanted to give me something to be proud of, and the only thing he could offer was his father’s story.

  James L. Hayes had wanted to provide me something else. A man who talked little of the past, he wanted to present his family a future to be proud of. An only child, he’d been born to a 14-year-old girl in Pompano Beach, Florida. He did not discuss the circumstances of his conception, but my mother told me his father had been an older man at the time, that he’d never known him. He grew up shuffled between relatives. My mother said he never bothered looking for his father, how poor and virtually parentless he’d been. He joined the Army as soon as he was old enough to enlist. Perhaps meeting a young woman with a small child when he arrived in Columbia reminded him of his own story. They married in 1974, and, a year later, my brother was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We moved often at first, living in military housing among other young soldiers and their families, but when my father was stationed in Germany, my mother moved back to her hometown, my brother and me in tow.