Inheriting the War Read online

  In another box, there were more insignia and bars from his army uniform, dog tags, a few more scattered patches, some spent bullet shells. And, what seemed most precious of all to me, a hard-case jewelry box lined in white satin. Within it, pinned to a satin cushion, was a ribbon and pendant of George Washington in profile: my dad’s Purple Heart. I’m not sure how at eight years old I knew that there was something special about this thing, or even what it was, really, but I intuited immediately that it had something to do with war and bravery. Yet, its being hidden away with other bits and pieces, among things that a small boy like me might keep, along with the film reel, told me that there was a pride splintered with shame. And, I knew, that I could never ask anyone about it.

  I’ve come to believe, from pop-culture and Studs Terkel, I guess, that there is a long heritage of silence from combat veterans, what I’ve heard to be a foundational tenet of the reputed Warrior Code of Honor. To talk openly about combat can be seen as a breach of trust, or at least evidence that whoever is telling the tales didn’t see any real action. This is conjecture on my part; the war that people my age served in, the first Iraq war, I observed on CNN from the safety of couches in the TV lounge of my dorm, and it hasn’t gotten any more personal than that since then. My dad is likely the only “warrior” I’ve known and isn’t an exception to the Code. He spent his year in Viet Nam, 1965, as a combat helicopter pilot, and until recently I’ve known almost nothing about his time there. He’s taciturn by nature—at about 12 years old his mom gave him the silent treatment for two days just so he could see what it felt like—and maybe nurture, too. At 15, in 1958, my dad’s dad, after months of debilitating depression, shot himself to death with my dad’s squirrel-hunting rifle. The sonic blast of the shot, the thump of the body, and the screams of his mother spilling out as she attempted to fit the shattered skull and brain matter back together all happened just a room away from where my father lay in bed. In an era when depression, especially suicide, was taboo, the event was called an accident and rarely referenced again. It must have seemed perfectly suitable for my dad to keep a lid on his experiences in Viet Nam. In fact, I can’t recall a single conversation that I ever had with him when I was growing up, about anything, let alone war or suicide. He wasn’t cold, just distant. We exchanged words, and he certainly told me what to do frequently and, on occasion, explained how the world worked in his estimation. At bedtime, he hugged me and said that he loved me when I said good night, and I felt that he did. Still, I don’t recall any sort of back and forth.

  We talk now, whether it is on the phone or in person, and it is much better, but rarely is it much of a conversation. Now that he’s older, you might say elderly at 73, he’s become a bit of a talker, taciturn turned inside out, but not much of a listener. He’s happy to report on the weather or what is wrong with the world—especially anything connected with the Democratic party—but the war stories have remained locked away.

  Yet, as a kid, I knew that my dad had been in Viet Nam and that he had been a helicopter pilot there, even though I can’t pinpoint how I came to know any of this. It never came from his mouth. Or my mother’s, that I know of. In addition to the clutch of treasures hidden away in the cigar boxes, there were a few other obvious clues around our low-slung suburban house: plaques from his combat unit hung up in the dark and narrow hallway that led to the bedrooms, a sliver of wood onto which a rocket tail-fin had been mounted, along with a cryptic engraving, sat prominently in the family room. Then there were less obvious clues, at least for me: a statue of fat Buddha perched on the bookshelf by the encyclopedias; a black lacquer painting of a quaint Asian sea-side village, composed of a few simple brush strokes indicating villagers donning conical lon la hats, water buckets balanced on long poles slung over their shoulders, the whole scene faintly lit by a watery moon; a silken silvery-blue kimono tucked in my mom’s bureau. Souvenirs of Indochina. Perhaps it was my older brother who told me about Dad and Viet Nam. At four years my senior, for better or worse, he was often a source of knowledge and myth. I suspect, rather, that I’d simply pieced together that our familial silence, Indochine bric a brac, and the generalized cultural angst of the lost police action in Viet Nam were bound up in ways that even I could see at that young age.

  As I handled the pieces in the hush of the closet my dad seemed only farther away. The objects themselves, though, held their own totemic power for something I didn’t understand. Not in the realm of bread as the body of Christ, more slant wise, objects as vacuum, collections of vacancy, anti-matter with mass.

  In the same closet, I found slides and a slide projector buried in a crumbling cardboard box. During my first forays, I merely held the slides up to the single naked bulb dangling in the closet the same way I did the dirty picture, taking in what seemed like x-rays of soldiers, luminous and diaphanous figures glowing in white, very difficult to make out. In later trips, I dug out the whole operation and projected the slides onto the fake wood-paneling of the living room. In the whir and quiet of the fan in the projector, slide after slide after slide loudly clicked by of men in flight suits, soldiers standing next to helicopters, men by tents, quonset huts, jeeps, men gathered in front of palm trees, crowded city streets teeming with Vietnamese. Never my dad. Looking back now, I can figure it out. He was the one taking the photos, of course, but as a kid all these slides pointed to the same thing I knew of him as a father, his ghostlike qualities. He was there, but not there.

  The mind of an eight-year-old can be powerfully computational. It knows a limited world to some degree, yet can tell that the world is much, much larger than that limited understanding. As adults we get used to pressing up against the thresholds of our knowledge and, often, shy away from what we don’t know. Children, at least me as a kid, don’t recognize that limitation. I believed knowledge to be finite, like a mapped out world, merely a place I hadn’t been to but could easily journey toward with patience and persistence. I kept digging. I found reel-to-reel tape recordings, and a tape player, dark green and smelling strongly of early-era plastics, what I imagine heated Vaseline to smell like, a scent that somehow deepened the secrecy of what I was hunting in my expeditions into the closet, like some half-living fossil exhumed from a plastinized earth.

  The tapes were labeled and were all from my dad’s war stint. They were messages to his mom and to his wife, and theirs to him. I tried to play them, but it was difficult to understand the words. Many of the tapes were distorted and warped from age, but long moments of semi-clarity emerged too, though the voices could seem like those on newscasts altered to protect anonymity. I heard my grandma, her voice brighter than what I was used to, but slowed during the playback, recounting her fears. She had not lost anyone to war yet: not her husband to WWI or WWII, not her eldest child to Korea, so she felt she was statistically fated to lose her youngest to Viet Nam. Her fear was bound into the tape, occasionally wailing like a hired mourner. I heard my mother, her Texas accent stronger than it was once we were living in California. She said she missed my dad, but had trouble recalling what he looked like and how that saddened her. I heard my dad, giving brief, stilted updates about the weather. All these disembodied voices coming from a weak little speaker, stretched and pulled long and low, hung in the air around me as I computed some sort of picture of so much I didn’t know of the world and the people I loved, images that failed to coalesce entirely, more like fun-house mirror faces bubbling through my mind. In the distortions crept the shame that I sensed; the shame of juxtaposition of dirty movies and Purple Hearts tucked under t-shirts and my shame for sneaking to fill in the gaps of someone I lived with but didn’t know very well. I knew my digging was a violation. I felt, too, that there was a deeper violation that I couldn’t attach words to at the time, only a sense of dread, one of another juxtaposition: a record of my dad’s voice pressed into tape that called up so little for me while the oily scent and the heat emitted off the laboring old tape player offered a type of companionship. It touched upon, even if ligh
tly and vaguely, the erotic charge of spying, of scrolling through film frames to find a woman with a beehive hairdo suddenly sprawled out nude on a motel bed, of peeking inside a brown paper sack and finding what looked like dried up dog’s balls, fearful, too, that the real reason I was so curious about the sacks of poisoned figs was that I wanted to eat them and that the real reason I rummaged through my dad’s most private things is that I wanted to be caught, hoping that any anger that could emerge from my dad would prove something to me.

  My parents have been retired for many years now, having buried their parents, several friends, and some of their siblings. Nostalgia reigns. They’ve moved to the hinterlands of central Texas and have few hobbies beyond church going and keeping track of cable news and the Weather Channel. My dad has taken up with a local group, a band of former military pilots that gather once a month or so in a small conference room of an area motel to have lunch and listen to a presentation about some aspect of military aviation history. These talks are given by invited guests or by selected members. Afterwards, they sit around and shoot the shit over pie and coffee. My dad has invited me along to a few of these luncheons—they seem to coincide with my trips out to see them. At first it seemed like it was just another attempt to convince me of the hero worship of the military and veterans that has been a deep, and vocal part of my parents’ worldview since 9/11. But, I soon figured out it was my dad’s way of opening up to me. He clearly felt the chasm between us too.

  The pilots come from every branch of the military, and, from what I can tell, all of them have been in combat. They are all old. Some flew in WWII, some in Korea and Viet Nam. My dad might be the only helicopter pilot. They’ve become friendly, I suppose, the band of ex-pilots, but none of them knew each other till they saw an ad in the local paper and decided that spending the afternoon over a fifteen-dollar-a-head buffet in a motel banquet room sounded like a pretty good idea.

  After they shuffle through the buffet, minding that their windbreakers don’t dip into the ranch dressing, they get down to the business of catching up on ailments and bits of news, pulling out business cards, receipts, or newspaper clippings jammed into a shirt breast pocket along with a reading glasses case. Eventually, they recount flying tales while in the service. They like to interrupt each other to ask questions about type of aircraft and other technical aspects, which they dutifully report. Many of the conversations I’ve heard remain in the realm of facts, military branch, where stationed, when, what aircraft. A few stories broach combat missions, but also only factually. Whenever a story comes close to anything very hairy, touching even glancingly upon some emotion, the talk often turns to war policy, or some other diversion. One WWII pilot spoke of flying patrol over Japanese islands during the Occupation, supposedly a time of peace. On a new route he suddenly came under attack from the ground. Bullets pierced his plane in several spots. At this point in the story, the old man said something like, “ho golly!” and lifted his cap off with a big grin. “Did I think my goose was cooked!” These patrol missions took place nearly two years after the treaty had been signed. Despite that, this was the first incident of gunfire of many that then repeated from the same location. Later, it turned out, a Japanese soldier in the area was captured. He was a pilot that had crashed, hiding, not knowing the war was over, shooting at American planes whenever they went overhead. The old men gathered round the table listening to this story simply nodded, took a sip of coffee, pulled on the brims of their caps, chuckled a bit while shaking their heads, then talked about the necessity of dropping the A-bomb. One man asked about the plane he flew and “what the Jap flew,” skirting what I wanted to know, what I think anyone would want to know who hasn’t been in that position. What is that moment like when bullets flip through the thin skin of a plane hurtling through the air? What do you say to yourself or the guy on the ground shooting at you? How many years does it take before you can feel that no one is shooting anymore, or that you don’t have to keep the plane of yourself aloft? Within a few conversational beats they somehow moved onto the aircraft used in the Iraqi invasion.

  At one of these ex-fliers meetings I attended, the speaker for the day was a member who had also been self-publishing mystery novels for years. He had joined a writer’s group through a writing class at the local satellite campus of an Austin junior college, and he had the writing group bug, and the drive to capture stories. He proposed that the group write out their war experiences so they could be gathered in book form that they would publish together, as the presenter said, “to record the history for friends, family, and others before it is lost.”

  The men were game. The press of old age was in a lot of the faces nodding “yep.” The idea was that it was time to get these stories scratched onto paper before there was no one left to do the scratching. My dad was moved to contribute and started right away. In fact, though he didn’t say what he was up to, he spent much of the rest of my short visit at the computer, seemingly vomiting up words. A few weeks later when I was back home in New York he sent me an email asking for advice about how to shape and edit what he came up with before he sent it along to the group. A natural favor to ask of me as a college writing teacher. It was titled, simply, “My War,” and ran to nearly 50 single-spaced pages. At 42 years old I was finally getting the stories that he’d been carrying around for years. Like me, his story didn’t start in the moment—his year in Viet Nam—but first with a preface that meandered through a thrilling and beautifully rendered encounter with a mountain lion while on foot as a Border Patrol agent in south Texas, the place where he gathered the tails of rattle snakes and found old Indian arrowheads as he scoured the desert for undocumented migrants. Then he sketched out the history of his dad as an airplane mechanic, and then his own childhood as a partly orphaned farmhand, punctuated with philosophical reflections on how war shapes and has shaped people and our country more than any other source other than God. These were fascinating stories to me, to hear my dad spilling out reminiscences about people I wished I knew better (him, my aunts and uncles, my grandma, the grandfather I never met) but the more I read, the more distant the war seemed. As more and more little stories and background filled paragraphs and pages, he was becoming a smaller and smaller speck within them, even as they were about him. It was difficult to read without getting the sense of a man in avoidance, slowly stalking his prey, tacking left and right, but never directly approaching.

  Flight school takes up more than half of the narrative, then comes a section heading simply titled “War Stories.” He starts with his arrival in Bien Hoa airbase, but then backtracks into a history of the Viet Nam war and, to him, misguided war policy conducted by Kennedy and Johnson, finally righted by Nixon, but then frittered away after his resignation. Yet, behind all of this deflection I can feel him straining to reveal, to cut down to the marrow, only to slip past whatever it is that is sitting there.

  The most revealing sentence about the war is not about the war at all, but about a childhood nightmare unrelated to his combat experience, when, as a five-year-old saturated in anti-Japanese propaganda of WWII, he dreamed of menacing Japanese fighter pilots attacking his home. He called it the most vivid and frightening nightmare of his life, except for one other. He recreates the image of a snarling pilot, taking aim at him and his family. As I read pointy-toothed demons filled my mind, images my dad declares as imprinted in his memory, images he can conjure at will or sometimes still faces against his will as he sleeps. He then calls it again the most frightening nightmare of his life, except for one other. The other, he says succinctly, is a recurring dream about the war in Viet Nam. That is the depth of the description of the dream he ranks as more terrifying than a propaganda-induced, demonic-fiend out to slaughter him and his family. The rest of his war stories come out like the tales of the old guys at the fliers’ club lunches, mostly emotionless facts or ginned-up hullaballoos as masquerade for brushes with death. And, I’m left to wonder what my dad means by saying that war shapes a person and a country
more than anything besides God. What is that shape?

  Whatever that answer is, the question of what it would mean to me as an editor—not a middle-aged son reading the packed away thoughts of his dad’s service years—seemed moot. I was rooting through the depths of the closet again, this time with permission, but the taint of violation bubbled up.