Inheriting the War Read online

  Maybe all I really felt was simple filial humility. I recalled the famous schoolyard question: Can God create a boulder so large that even he cannot move it? Similarly, could a child ever feel bigger than his parents? I was not thinking of size. Rather, could a child feel existentially bigger? I did not believe so. I doubted it. And with that the various sleep aids I had ingested began, once again, to bring on the ugly process of manufactured sleep: eyelids as heavy as anchors, mind blown out like a candle, head in free-fall . . . .My nose smooshed hard against my father’s shoulder. I sparked upright.

  My father adjusted himself in his seat, still reading. Then, in an instructive singsong voice: “If you sleep now you’re going to spend the first few days completely jet-lagged.”

  Moments before our first flight this morning, I had taken an Ativan, an antianxiety medication. I took another Ativan right after we lifted off. A few hours later I took another. In Tokyo’s airport I washed down another with a Diet Coke. I had taken a Sominex about an hour ago. I had also drunk a Sapporo. None of this was so I could sleep. The odds of my falling asleep on an airplane were cosmologically long. The reason I had taken the pills was to relax.

  I was now touching my head with fascination. “I think my hair has lost its curl.”

  My father looked over at me and asked, almost fondly, “How can anyone who travels as much as you be so afraid of flying? It’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course it’s ridiculous. All pathological fear is ridiculous. It’s not as though I’m afraid of much. Flying, sharks, snakes. The classics.”

  My father shook his head, the overhead light igniting around his head a dandruffy nebula. Thankfully, he changed the subject. “Do you know that today is the Marine Corps’s two-hundred-and-twenty-eighth anniversary?”

  “No kidding?”

  A single nod. “November tenth.”

  “Are you thinking this is a good omen or a bad omen?”

  “I’m not thinking anything. I just thought it was a neat coincidence.”

  He returned to his reading. I stared out my window at a moon so close and bright I could count the dark wrinkles around its craters. Flying to Vietnam on the 228th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps: “a neat coincidence,” indeed. While growing up, I had associated nearly everything about my father with the Marine Corps and Vietnam.

  There were two types of Vietnam veterans: those who talked about the war and those who did not talk about it. My father talked about the war, though, if anything, this only deepened the abyss between us. I had learned something from discussions with those who had veteran fathers. This was that our fathers seemed remote because the war itself was impossibly remote. Chances were, the war had happened pre-you, before you had come to grasp the sheer accident of your own placement in time, before you recognized that the reality of yourself—your bedroom, your dolls and comic books—had nothing to do with the reality of your father. This strange, lost war, simultaneously real and unimaginable, forced us to confront the past before we had any idea of what the past really was. The war made us think theoretically before we had the vocabulary to do so. Despite its remoteness, the war’s aftereffects were inescapably intimate. At every meal Vietnam sat down, invisibly, with our families.

  Inspired, I pulled out my handheld tape recorder. “Hold on. I’d like to get some stuff down.” I pushed the plastic brick toward my father’s mouth.

  His dubious eyes took their time traveling from me to the tape recorder before they returned to his guidebook. “All right.”

  “I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about why you joined the Marines. Why did you join the Marines?”

  He did not look up and spoke very softly. “I’d always wanted to be a Marine, so I enlisted after I graduated from college. It was that simple. I couldn’t get any other job.”

  “But you went to Georgetown. You couldn’t get a job after Georgetown?”

  “Do you plan on letting me read?”

  “You can read in a minute. Let’s get this down.”

  “What was your question?”

  “Georgetown. You couldn’t get a job.”

  He sighed and looked straight ahead. “Well, there was a huge recession then. I suppose I could have worked in a department store or something. But I liked the Marines. I enlisted, and once they found out I could spell ‘college’ they sent me to Officer Candidates School.”

  “You did this knowing Vietnam was coming.”

  “We all knew it was coming. Keep in mind we did not train for Europe or the desert or mountain warfare. We did not go to northern California. We went to the swamps of Virginia. We knew exactly where we were going. Our drill instructors told us. Our officers told us. ‘We are headed for Vietnam. You and me, brother.’ ”

  “Did it ever bother you that Johno and I didn’t join the Marines?”

  His face scrunched thoughtfully. “I don’t know if I would say it bothered me . . . .It could have been something for me to feel some pride in, yeah. I don’t know.” Back to reading.

  “Let me ask you about these Marine Corps commercials they have nowadays . . . ”

  He looked tired. “Which commercials?”

  “The one with the knight defeating an evil sorcerer, getting hit by lightning, and turning into a Marine. Or the one with the guy fighting a magma monster in a volcano, getting hit by lightning, and turning into a Marine.”

  His hand moved in an oblique, conjuring manner. “I’ve seen them.”

  “But have you ever seen Soviet propaganda? One major difference is that Soviet propaganda had some connection, however deranged, to reality. Is being a Marine at all like fighting sorcerers?” No response. “Doesn’t seeing those commercials bother you, as a Marine?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Come on. You don’t find it a little bit weird?”

  “It’s an honorable career.”

  “That’s not what we’re talking about.”

  He held out a flattened hand, palm up. “What is a Marine’s job? A Marine is a professional soldier, trained to kill. He’s not trained to do anything else except kill, sustain himself in a horrible situation, do whatever good he can, and accomplish what he’s told to do by his superiors. Or her superiors. Like it or not, that’s a Marine’s job. It’s not always right, or correct, but that’s what Marines are sworn to do.”

  At this he retreated back into his guidebook. I decided I would leave him alone, switched off the recorder, and watched our bunned and kerchiefed Japanese stewardesses wander up and down the 777’s plastic corridors. Finally I was left staring into the blank shallows of the television screen mounted in the seat before me.

  As a boy, I dreaded those evenings my father had had too much to drink, stole into my bedroom, woke me up, and for an hour at a time would try to explain to me, his ten-year-old son, why the decisions he had made—decisions, he would mercilessly remind himself, that had gotten his best friends killed—were the only decisions he could have made. Other nights, he would remember fondly the various women he had courted in Vietnam, of which there seemed an extraordinary number, given over my still-unformed imagination to bizarre thoughts of myself as an Asian boy. With my school friends I would tell elaborate stories about my father. How he had single-handedly fought off an entire company of “gooners.” The day he had gotten lost rafting down a river and survived a waterfall plunge. The time he had been multiply shot and how a kind black soldier had dragged him to safety. Some were true; most were not. The war had not ended for him, and soon it was alive in me.

  Sometimes it felt as though Vietnam was all my father and I had ever talked about; sometimes it felt as though we had never really talked about it. Oddly, the Vietnam War had given me much for which to be thankful, such as the fact that my father’s friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo ultimately became my literary mentor. My father makes a brief appearance in Caputo’s A Rumor of War, which is commonly regarded as one of the finest memoirs of the conflict and was the first Vietnam book to
become a major bestseller. When in A Rumor of War Caputo learns of the death of his and my father’s friend Walter Levy, who survived all of two weeks in Vietnam, he remembers a night in Georgetown when he, Levy, and some others went to a bar “to drink and look at girls and pretend we were still civilians.” And then this: “We sat down and filled the glasses, all of us laughing, probably at something Jack Bissell said. Was Bissell there that night? He must have been, because we were all laughing very hard and Bissell was always funny.” I still remember the first time I read that sentence—I was twelve, thirteen—and how my heart had convulsed. Here was the man of whom I had never had as much as a glimpse. Here was the man whose life had not yet been hewn by so much death, whom I did not find in bluish, 2 a.m. darkness drinking wine and watching Gettysburg or Platoon for the fortieth time. In A Rumor of War I saw the still-normal man my father could have become, a man with average sadnesses.

  I used to stare at his famed purple heart (“the dumb medal,” he always called it) and, next to it, a photo of him taken during his training at Quantico: BISSELL stenciled across his left breast, friendly Virginia greenery hovering behind him, my smirking father looking a little like a young Harrison Ford, holding his rifle, his eyes unaccountably soft. How I had wanted to find that man. A dinner with a magazine editor, during which we were supposed to come up with ideas I might write about, led me to talking about my father and, inevitably, about Vietnam. The magazine editor, having regarded my earlier ideas as “terrible,” looked at me, leaned back, and said, “That’s what you should write about.” I was almost thirty years old, my father just past sixty. It staggered me, suddenly, how little relative time we still had left together. I knew that if I wanted to find the unknown part of my father I would have to do it soon, in Vietnam, where he had been made and unmade, killed and resurrected. Months ago I told my father over the phone that a magazine was willing to send us to Vietnam. He was quiet, as quiet as I had ever heard him. “Gosh,” he said.

  Now, on the plane, the Japanese captain made the announcement that we were “making our final approach” into Ho Chi Minh City, his English pronunciation that of a man whose tongue had been injected with codeine.

  My father’s head tilted at a doglike angle. “What did he say?”

  “I think he said we’re ‘baking our final perch.’ ”

  “I thought he said we were ‘making our finer porch.’ ”

  We laughed, and then my father’s large hand clamped down on my knee. He squeezed too hard and for too long. “You okay?” I asked him.

  He nodded, then smiled. “Nervous.”

  “Well, I’m nervous, too, if that makes you feel better.”

  He thought about this far longer than I had intended, which was not at all. “That does not make me feel better.”

  STAR BLACK was born in Coronado, California, and raised in Washington, DC, and Hawaii. Her father graduated from West Point and served in the US Army for 31 years, with three tours of duty in South Viet Nam. She visited the country, briefly, six months after the Tet Offensive, while working as a sound girl for a Swiss television company filming a news story on the safety of Saigon. She is the author of Guide to Bali, a travel book published in 1970, four books of sonnets, including Balefire, a book of double sestinas, Double Time, and a collection of free verse, October for Idas. She has received grants from The Fund for Poetry and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

  TO A WAR CORRESPONDENT

  I am here, and shells are quaking over the cracked city,

  taking, randomly, its besieged citizenry, one by two by

  three, as they, ripped by shrapnel, enter swift mounds

  crowding the rubble. I am here, among “fair trails” and

  sea salt, thinking of you amidst burials and howitzers,

  and how, when you return, there will only be small talk,

  strange T.V. channels, vapid parties, and how you will see

  everyone scrambling in weird, uninviting careers that

  mean nothing pertinent to honor or belief but seem

  like flaxen fish aswim within a turquoise aquarium,

  quirky and mesmerizing to those who have time for

  them, and how the social pages will appear so crazy,

  sports events so distant, how you’ll pray to be swept

  back, out of irrelevance, to hell’s urgent significance.

  RECOLLECTION

  The verified random green,

  its mossbacked canisters and C-rations

  its spiky bamboo

  hacked from pulsant jungles,

  rumbles like a helicopter,

  above the mind,

  zinging fire into shut-eye,

  wambling like a diseased wasp,

  its intruding scrievings

  locked within. The blade’s buzz,

  its “Friendly” wallop,

  I’ve heard it—the medevac, the dead—

  seen the memorial’s enwreathing green

  placed upon the stone-deaf.

  LILY KATHERINE BOWEN received her MFA in poetry from The New School. Her work has previously been published in Best American Poetry Blog and in Clemson University’s The Chronicle. Her graduate thesis focuses on her relationship with her father, a poet and Vietnam War veteran, and the lasting emotional and physical consequences of the war that she observed through his experience. She received a BA in English from Clemson University in May 2015, where she was the recipient of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Award in Poetry.

  LANTERNS

  A slight breeze bends paper lanterns

  and we are swaying

  on a swanky rooftop bar

  in downtown Saigon.

  “This is where the officers stayed,”

  my father whispers as

  waiters bring us drinks.

  “No place for us soldiers.”

  Reaching for my mother’s hand

  he guides her to the dance floor,

  I take photos and imagine

  my father—

  twenty-one again,

  shy and unfaded,

  his Irish skin tanned

  from long days in the jungle,

  my mother, brother, and I

  intangible—

  the lanterns sway again,

  an earthquake in Laos.

  FALLING

  Before I left I watched him—

  sinking into a stupor of draught Guinness

  and old whiskey.

  I assumed it was one of those nights—

  sleep robbed by unforgiving ghosts,

  extracting his cranial walls

  like leeches, once inebriated off

  his freckled legs in the jungle. His fall

  had rejuvenated the flashbacks and

  lately it seemed like every night

  was one of those nights—

  my mother holding him upstairs,

  old boyfriends asking me what’s wrong,

  smiling and telling them to kiss me.

  Waking up before dawn,

  because I didn’t want his apologies.

  Running until the sweat collided with tears,

  dripping down abandoned streets at sunrise.

  I imagine that’s how he felt too.

  Abandoned. Maybe he wished no one ever

  found him, only ten am when his skull

  crashed into icy, black concrete.

  Blood splattering, with it releasing,

  oozing, every beautiful word

  from his right hemisphere—words that

  painted the parking garage walls

  red like the pasta sauce

  thrown in the kitchen sink, because

  he can’t do anything right.

  And he took to his bedroom to dull

  the pounding like a pan against

  the metal. Over and over, like gunfire,

  surrendering to his battered brain,

  persuading pills down a liquored throat,

  down like the spaghetti we were m
eant to enjoy

  at the dining room table. As a family.

  EMILY BRANDT is the author of three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Recluse, The Offing, Lit Hub, the Wall Street Journal, and other journals. She’s been in residence at Saltonstall Arts Colony and a Fellow at Poets House. Emily is an editor of No, Dear and at VIDA. She earned her MFA from New York University, where she facilitated the Veterans Writing Workshop for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her father, Richard H., a USAF veteran of the Viet Nam war, served with the 6th TCS, 3rd MAS, and 732nd MAS.

  We must know what materials are needed to build airplanes.

  —from “Air World Map by American Airlines, Inc” (1944)

  from Air Age

  PETROLEUM

  Kick dirt from your boots and get

  up on the bus now, survival

  camp is closing in.

  You startle, lie, it’s fun

  it’s neat.They drop

  you offthey dropyou off

  a knife and string and matches. You

  survive. What else to do?

  Today you playmock torture.

  They oil ropes.

  You scratch your hands, your thumbs

  and plunge into the water drum. They slide

  slick ropes like snakesthey rope your bodybolt

  but no way out. Remember this. The ropes a drill

  in case you’re caught. And then you’re off to war.

  KAPOK

  Downy fluff from seed pods of kapok