Inheriting the War Read online

  During the decades my father didn’t live with us, he remained for me that same hero he’d been when I was eight: an artist whose half-finished, paint-by-numbers portrait of John F. Kennedy awaited him in the hallway, a music lover who left his Curtis Mayfield and Roberta Flack records behind for me, and above all a true soldier, a man of honor. He once collared a young private for strolling through an amusement park with his uniform’s shirt untucked. I watched with a mix of fear and awe as the white boy straightened himself up, and then saluted my father. I remember my mother smiling broadly at the scene. In many ways, he was always attentive and responsible during those years, forwarding her money for bills, sending my brother and me clothes and souvenirs from abroad (gaudy mugs from Germany when I was in fourth grade; a jogging suit with my name stitched across the pocket from Korea in eighth grade), but he was mostly a husky, long-distance voice whose main refrain was “listen to your mother.” He was her weapon. “I’m going to call your daddy” was a phrase much like “I’m going to call the cops.” He was too far away to ever do anything, but her threat stilled me. As the man of the house in his absence, I wanted his respect. I never wanted to let him down.

  By the time he retired and moved back to Columbia, though, the myths had clouded over. I wished the white boy he cornered at the amusement park had said, “I’m just here having a good time, man. Relax!” I was in my early 20s, measuring my idea of manhood against James L. Hayes. For a long time, I didn’t think about how those years had affected my little brother. Just four when we moved to South Carolina without our father, he was 18, about to move from home, when he retired. I doubt he remembered a time when we all lived together in the house. We spent summers, and often when our parents fought, weekends, in military quarters during the years he was stationed in Fort McClellan, Alabama. Our mother almost always stayed behind in Columbia. I remember the tanks and jets perched around the base like bland oversized toys, the distant camouflaged men. To me, the military was a world of stale rituals and mindless regulations. It took my father from his family, and I assumed my brother harbored the same resentment for military life. Then he enlisted. Ironically, the Army sent him to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, his birthplace two decades earlier.

  It broke my father’s heart. “The military is no place for a black man,” he told my brother. It shocked me to hear such a thing from someone who’d spent nearly half his life in the Army. In the same album where I’d found the photo of Butch and my mother, a newspaper clipping showed James L. Hayes receiving an award for his stellar recruiting record. I don’t believe he lied to the poor black boys he talked into joining the Army. He had wanted to offer them the same kind of escape from poverty or rootlessness, the same kinds of opportunities the Army gave him. He believed his own sons wouldn’t need to escape anything. “You’re going to college,” he often told us, but never said how he would make it happen. There was no money, no knowledge of grants and fellowships. When I graduated from high school, I went on a basketball scholarship. I wouldn’t have gone to college otherwise. Four years later, my brother was offered some partial academic grants, but not a full scholarship. He tried paying his way through for a few semesters, but eventually decided—without discussing it with anyone in the family—that the best way to pay for school was the military. It’s a familiar story: when he arrived after returning from Iraq, he had a handful of college credits, but no degrees. He had a new wife and bad knees.

  Like my father, I was broken-hearted when my brother entered the military. Perhaps even more so when he retired without fulfilling his dreams. I feared the military might make him into a dumb machine, that he would be ruined by learning to act without asking. But mostly I dreaded he’d have more in common with our father—with his father—than I did; that James L. Hayes would have more respect for the son who’d been a soldier. Some days I watched them, James L. Hayes, the first and second, standing side by side at the grill. I wondered how much of who my brother was had to do with blood. They gestured and laughed as if they were the same person, possessing the same mix of gentleness and toughness, the same wide smile, the same devotion to our family.

  I believe our father returned home after retirement because of this devotion, which is a world like love, to his family. Or his devotion to the idea of family. I want to say blind commitment to one’s family is as dangerous as blind commitment to one’s nation; that sometimes it is more courageous to question or even abandon that which one loves, but I’m not sure that’s what I believe. Was Earthell Tyler, Sr. blind? Was following an order the cause of his death? Was he, like my brother and father, a man devoted to words like “duty” and “honor,” to ideas that could be held, but never touched?

  “Tell me something you remember about your father,” I asked Butch when the room quieted—just Ronnie, him, and me drinking and smoking: the CD player still playing music from the 1970s in the corner.

  “I wasn’t that close to him. I never really knew him,” Butch said, lighting another cigarette, calm enough to seem sober.

  “But you wanted to know him,” I said.

  “I really did. My mom wasn’t too close to him either. But he just wasn’t there.”

  “Do you remember him making people laugh? Was he shy, was he serious?”

  “He was serious. But on the other hand, he was like me. He wasn’t the kind of guy to kick the door in and shoot you for fucking his woman. He wasn’t like that. He was a good guy. He died trying to save the life of one of the guys in his platoon. That’s how he was.”

  “You never thought about going in the Army?”

  “I went in the Army,” Butch said.

  “You did? What happened? How old were you when you went in?”

  “I was 18. And I had three kids. I had twins and a little girl, and I went in the Army because I was trying to make it better for us. Everybody in my family was in the military. Your Uncle Walter, your Auntie Vickie. She was a lieutenant.”

  I thought of Fort Jackson’s shadow looming over Columbia. It covered so much territory that we all seemed destined to pass through its gates. The military was an escape for black people, and during Vietnam, America’s Army was more integrated than ever before. It meant something that Earthell Tyler was a sergeant, an E5; that the men he served and those who served him were black and white. It meant something that later James L. Hayes, who retired as an E9, would serve and be served in the same way. The leadership roles in the military have never been racially equal, but maybe in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, the Army was a model for race relations in America. Not because there was no racism, but because blacks and whites were willing or forced to crawl on their bellies together. Maybe the military was, and is, one of the few places minorities can ascend through service.

  I did not ask Butch why he thought his father enlisted. All I could think about was his mention of three kids. “Where are these people?” I asked. “How many damn brothers and sisters do I have?”

  Butch let out an embarrassed laugh.

  “You know how many children your daddy got?” Ronnie said. “Seven.”

  “I went in the Army for them,” Butch continued. “I was going to marry my children’s mother. Her name was Ella Mae. But it didn’t work out. I hated the Army. And I think the Army hated me, too.”

  I couldn’t imagine Butch in the Army. If he had gone in to be the kind of man his father had been, what did it mean to fail? Had he not succeeded at being a soldier or had he refused to be one? Some black men seize upon the promises of America and some turn from them. Some embrace America for its rags-to-riches myths and others spurn this country because of its racist history. But I should not speak as if the choices we make are that simple. Often these feelings—compliance or resistance, calm or outcry—exist within the same man.

  I was calculating numbers in my head: Butch’s three children by a woman named Ella Mae had to be just a few years younger than me; then came Earthell the Third, who was 21; Rashad who was 16; I was the oldest. It didn’t add up t
o seven. I felt a web of siblings spreading around me and realized I might be related to half the people in Columbia. It was something I’d considered many times in the years before finding Butch.

  “Did your father have any brothers and sisters?” I asked.

  “It was just him and his sister. There’s a preacher in Denmark, South Carolina, right now. His name is Earthell Tyler. My daddy’s sister named her first born son after her brother,” he said.

  “What’s her name?”

  “I never met her. There are a lot of people I work with from Denmark, where he was born. There’s a whole bunch of Tylers. The whole town is Tylers. But my daddy’s uncle raised him and his sister here in Columbia. Uncle Johnny raised them. And every time I would see him—he was a deacon in the church, he raised my daddy—every time he would see me, he would say, ‘Oh My God,’ and kiss me on the forehead.” Butch demonstrated by leaning to kiss me in the middle of my forehead. I could feel the wetness he left there like a small splatter of rain.

  “Y’all gonna make me cry,” Ronnie said over her beer. She was already crying.

  “He loved my daddy just like that. He raised my daddy and his sister. That’s all I know,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t know their momma, and I don’t know their daddy. I know our people from Denmark. Every time he would see me, look at that head, ‘That’s Earthell!’ and he would kiss me. . . . He used to kiss me. You come from a long line of men that love people. Alright. You come from a long line of loving men. Ain’t nothing wrong with loving. That don’t make you a punk. That makes you a man.”

  During the flight back to Pittsburgh, I thought of the interview and how I’d failed at it, but beyond that I mulled over what happened after leaving Ronnie’s apartment. I followed Butch’s swerving old pick-up truck to his ex-wife’s place. She lived surprisingly close, but he’d been there so rarely we got lost two or three times before pulling onto a road dark enough to seem the right place. A few minutes later we stood on the unlit porch with Rashad Tyler: tall, quiet, 16, my little brother; the one Butch said was like me. Like us.

  What is that aura some boys have just before they grow into men? Vulnerability? Openness? It was in Rashad, and it reminded me of the little brother I’d grown up with. It’s the type of goodness that makes certain boys perfect soldiers; makes them dutiful, faithful. It’s the kind of spirit often broken or dulled with age.

  “He think I don’t love him,” Butch joked, palming his son’s do-ragged head. I could tell the boy smiled, but I couldn’t make out his features in the darkness. As we got ready to leave I gave him my phone number, told him to call if he ever needed anything. We’d been there only 10 or 15 minutes. As Butch and I stepped from the shadows of the porch into the late, half-lit evening, Rashad asked, shyly, “You gone come see me, Daddy?”

  It was the bond the three of us had in common: wanting to see and be seen by our father. Thinking about it on the plane home, I had to put my hand over my eyes. “Hell yeah, I’ll see you, baby,” Butch assured him.

  It was nothing any of us believed.

  When a father is lost, the ones he leaves behind have to make everything up. The man must be set firmly upon the branch of a family tree even if he seemed to speak little or have no history. Raised by his Uncle Johnny in Columbia, kin to the black people in Denmark, let us make the father of Sergeant Earthell Tyler, Sr., a farmer; let us make his mother a tall, brown woman with a love for gardening. Let the thing that separated the parents from their son and daughter, the crime against them or the crime they committed, the nature of the bad luck that befell them—let it remain a mystery.

  When a soldier dies, especially in war, his loved ones make things up. Even the past—which is not the same thing as history. The cool and generous spirit of the deceased; how he sent not only his family, but his sister and Uncle Johnny, money; how whosever child his wife bore while he was away became a member of his family. One must make up the secrets the wife never learned and the secrets the wife never shared. One must imagine the letters that arrived decorated with hearts. One must create the litany of promises and fantasies the man and woman could not keep.

  When a loved one is lost, the people left behind have to make up everything. I would like to make up my grandfather’s future: imagine it beyond the years of service and medals of honor, far into the ensuing years. He might have worked as a postman or a prison guard. I imagine the way the bones of his huge fingers would begin to ache and give off, even 40 years after the war, a vague gunpowder scent. If, in his 80s, he suffered some ailment that caused him to shrivel or dull, if he walked humped with a walking cane or did not walk at all, I would be the one driving him to his doctor, clutching his arm at the car door, lifting him up.

  After I returned to Pittsburgh, while browsing a bookstore, I found, incredibly, my grandfather’s name in a book about the war, Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore’s We Were Soldiers Once. . . And Young: La Drang the Battle That Changed Vietnam. James H. Shadden recounts the battle: “Men were wounded and dead” and among the last six alive were Sergeant Earthell Tyler:

  Tyler gave the only order I heard during the entire fight: Try and pull back before they finish us off. After one of the men was killed the remaining five [men] proceeded to pull back but snipers were still in the trees. Soon I was hit in the right shoulder, which for a time rendered it useless. Tyler was hit in the neck about the same time; he died about an arms length of me, begging for the medic, Specialist 4 William Pleasant, who was already dead. . . . The last words Tyler ever spoke were: I’m dying.

  I say not “begging for the medic,” but asking. Maybe demanding. He led them through the jungle’s foliage of noise, through the bullets and bodies of the enemy falling from the trees. He led them until the trail vanished into the brush, the only one to say, “Try and pull back,” when he saw the limbs of men and trees gouged by bullets. I imagined him in death doing something unbelievable, that he’d jumped on a grenade to save his platoon, sacrificing himself.

  And reading the story and hearing the stories Butch told me, I still imagine him a hero, though not the kind the Army had in mind. This man is my history. He and I, we see the blood on the deep green leaves, and we think the blood smells like gunpowder. We are not supposed to be there leading black and white boys down into the dirt. We are not supposed to be there with an ache blooming our neck, spreading up to our ears and down into our body. We think calmly: I am almost unborn. I have made love to a woman and left her with a son who looks like me. I am not begging for the medic, I am asking if he is alright. I have a son who bears my name as if it were a long shadow, a glorious light. I am not dying.

  JENNIFER JEAN is the author of a chapbook, In the War (2010), and a full-length collection, The Fool (2013). She is the poetry editor of The Mom Egg Review, managing editor of Talking Writing magazine, and co-director of Morning Garden Artists Retreats. She teaches Free2Write poetry workshops to sex-trafficking survivors—many of whom suffer from PTSD. Her father, who she has barely known, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and PTSD following his soldiering in Vietnam.

  IN THE WAR

  I.

  When I was twelve I willed the soldiers home.

  All the men were bright and rank

  and frayed—and blood

  flowed from their hearts unbound.

  They’d died of shrapnel or honor,

  toxin or friendly

  fire. These spirits named and numbered

  deaths by your side, dad, deaths

  by your hand,

  during the eon of your two tours.

  Still, I could not understand the conflict—

  Viet Nam.

  I needed endless intel, and your men

  to be my men and in their camo

  loom above me at the school library,

  echo the barbed text in murmurs,

  lead me through warfare and weather, through white

  lies in letters home. They helped me

  find the hills and huts
r />   you conquered

  by chance, in wonderment, by force.

  II.

  It was easy, dad,

  to believe in you because you lived

  a wizened parallel half-life

  across town—in Hollywood, forever

  in-country—

  drinking your days away

  for my sake, maybe

  desperate to fill my absence.

  In those days I’d curl

  on a chair in my living room, cool and away

  from the scorch

  of a San Fernando Valley summer cig alert.

  Fully giddy, my spirit would crouch

  and conspire with those red

  and flesh and black

  and blue fellow combatants.

  We soldiers

  then launched standard mission procedure: Prisoner of war!

  they whispered, You are one of us.

  Or, You must

  suit up. When he departs, you will be the only one

  who can save him.

  This was what I had always wanted!

  To know your jungle just enough to pull you

  out with pincers, to pull you out

  whole and mewling

  and at my unformed mercy.

  III.

  When I turned eighteen, they said, It’s time

  for search and rescue. So, I gathered my self