Inheriting the War Read online

  In the mid-sixties my folks married after a courtship of three months. They met in a small Texas town at a dance, possibly in a bar, that was thrown in honor of graduation from flight school; both my parents are a bit cagey about it now. My mom was at a women’s college at a nearby city, so she and her classmates were invited as a busload of blind dates for the Army boys. My dad was then shipped off to Viet Nam, the reason behind the haste if you don’t consider what must have been a gut-tearing tale of love at first sight, since I know my mom and dad aren’t anything if not deliberate and sober individuals, more than doubly so as a couple. It is utterly inconceivable to me that the same man who checks the tires, oil, and belts on the minivan before heading into town asked my mom to marry him after a couple of weeks. Who was this man who had the emotional wherewithal and open, loving heart to fall for my mom and to have her fall for him in such a short time? If that year after their brief courtship hollowed him out, which is what I think my dad unintentionally means by being shaped by war, then what was there beforehand? It could be that my mother drew up something from him, and the courtship was a brief moment of filling in that was rapidly deflated by the war.

  There is a story that he gives a little more space in “My War,” seemingly as emotionless as the other ones, but the details invite a fuller imagining. For a time, my dad flew Army helicopters off of a Navy ship, the USS Tortuga. Mostly, he was on the Tortuga as a “slick” pilot, that is, to do personnel or material transport when needed, but there was the occasional assault mission.

  As he flew back to the Tortuga after a sortie my dad’s chopper, a Huey Gunship, took enemy fire from below. A bullet came up through the floor, travelled through his thigh, and then grazed his face. He flew on towards the ship, but the chopper, too, had been damaged and it eventually pitched into the water within a few hundred yards of the Tortuga, or as my dad says, lightly, he took a swim in the South China Sea. Fortunately the bay they were anchored in was not extremely deep, since the helicopter sank rapidly to the sea floor. The body of the helicopter was twisted from the collision with the water. One of the large doors could not open, and the other was wedged into sand. Seemingly trapped, my dad kicked out a window just large enough to squeeze through.

  Almost.

  He became stuck about halfway through, around the waist, that is, as all the excess fabric of the flight suit gathered, corklike, and he could move no further. I can imagine this moment in no other way except to see him frantically trying to free himself, kicking legs and arms, pounding on the window frame, tugging at the flight suit. From all the jostling, the big door loosed, the one my dad was not stuck in, and slowly slid open. I guess this ironic insult from the fates gave my dad just enough to get out of the little window, tearing the flight suit along the way. It is easy for me to imagine this scene since I’ve seen movies where cars have flown off piers into the drink. I can see the harried struggle painfully slowed by the thickness of water, bubbles of released breath, hair floating like a sea creature. Though I’m sure my dad’s hair was Army buzz cut I picture it longer, trailing the movements of his head. Because I’ve seen movies, I can hear the bubbles, how they become the only sound inside the blanket of water, how their pitch increases as they rise as if the bubbles were running across the keys of a piano on their way to the surface, how the noise of underwater air is as suffocating to the ears as the water itself is to the lungs. In my non-film influenced imagination I hear the bending and twisting of metal, but I can only picture my dad as part of a movie in my mind so that grinding of steel is absent as I work through the scene in my head. Exhausted, oxygen depleted, bleeding, finally free he floated and swam weakly towards what he took for the light of the sun. It was. As he surfaced, there were already teams of rescue pontoons in the water circling the bubbling above the wreck. It is easy to imagine this scene for other reasons too. Despite his life of near silence with me, replaced with a near silencing of me in later life, I can picture my dad struggle with all his being to fight for his life, but not merely for himself. He may not have ever said this, and he might even be unable to form the words, but I do have absolute clarity about one thing about him. He did not fight to stay alive for himself. He fought for his newlywed, for the promise of his unborn children, for his mother, for his fellow soldiers, for his country, and for his God, for a conviction of rightness that cuts through anything and everything else. He fought to give his children a quiet home, a home safely tucked away at the suburban edge of protective fig orchards standing sentinel, where a few cigar boxes can harbor a few tokens of darker elements of people and the world they live in, gathered under t-shirts at the back of a high shelf in a small closet.

  I sent back very few notes on my dad’s write up for the book that his fliers club will be putting out. I only corrected typos and made a few line-edit suggestions, despite my usual habit with my students’ work to spill a lot of ink on the page with comments and suggestions of structure and cuts. My students must get tired of me writing “more here” on their work, coupled with some challenging question meant to get them to dig deeper and unpack a potent insight rather than gliding over the surface of it. From the perspective of a writing teacher, my dad’s work lacks coherency and explicit depth. Yet, I saw any fix I could suggest as eliding what was there. The inability to cut to the marrow is the story. The inability to speak aloud the shape of what one has become, or how one has carved into unknown lives and families thousands of miles away and four decades past, takes on its own shape, even as it shifts. I said little back to my dad, which I hope he didn’t take as an offense, though I’m not sure I’ll ever know. I said that the writing was particularly beautiful and vivid when he described encountering a mountain lion on a high ridge overlooking the Rio Grande as a Border Patrol agent, and that the conflicting feelings of awe and fright that he captured in his telling of that event were palpable. I said that I felt like I was there, that I was him for a moment. I said, too, that his war stories told me something similar. What I left unsaid was not that I felt like I was there, but I still felt like I was him for a moment: running away from something so deeply a part of myself that it becomes running toward another thing entirely.

  One can’t know how he will react when he faces imminent death, like my dad did—shot, sunk, and trapped at the bottom of the sea—but I feel, with pale shame, a shame I would like to stash away, hidden from myself and others, that I might not have fought like he did to stay alive. I see myself wanting to violate, filled with a desire to dig until even the valor of fighting, for whatever reason or cause, is a darkened and shriveled fruit made into bait and poison. I see myself breathing the water, hoping death would come quickly.

  HEINZ INSU FENKL is an author, editor, translator, folklorist, and professor of creative writing at the State University of New York, New Paltz. His fiction includes Memories of My Ghost Brother, which was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection in 1996 and a PEN/Hemingway finalist in 1997. His most recent short story, “Five Arrows,” was published in The New Yorker. Skull Water, a sequel to Memories of My Ghost Brother, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. He is currently working on an experimental memoir, The Monkeypuzzle Tree, about his father’s experiences as a military advisor with the Montagnards in Vietnam in the late 1960s.

  FROM MEMORIES OF MY GHOST BROTHER

  The day of my father’s return from his first tour of duty in Vietnam, Mahmi and I waited at the U.S. military airport in Kimpo for seven hours. We had arrived early in the morning. We had taken an Arirang taxi from Pupyong to Kimpo airbase, expecting to wait only an hour or two for his out-processing after he came off the flight, but the plane was late and our wait became a daylong vigil. I did not know what my mother was thinking, whether she was imagining the flight shot out of the sky, or whether she doubted the Korea House translator’s reading of my father’s letter and imagined we had come on the wrong day. If we were not there to meet him, there was no way my father would be able to find us unless he wrote to h
er again from his new post in Korea. As the day drew on and the pleasant warmth of the morning became the blinding heat of noon, and then as the shadows lengthened where we waited outside, in the shade of a deuce-and-a-half truck, I tried to remember my father’s face. He had only been gone for a year, but without a picture I could only imagine him in the vaguest way. The short yellow hair, the square face, the plumped skin, the slightly downturned eyes, the sharp beaked nose.

  I remembered my father as an MP in the First Cavalry Division. On his shoulder he wore the shield-shaped golden patch with the diagonal black stripe and horse-head silhouette. He would dab my cheeks with shaving cream while I crept around him and splashed the dirty water in the wash basin. When I learned to talk, I said “Aboji myondo” each time he shaved, and he tried to teach me the English: “Daddy, shave.” I could never make the strange words, but I learned games quickly. I would imitate his shaving by using a dull knife, or play cowboy, making him snort and rear up to make the horse noise while I clung to his back. I would stop him, patting his short, yellow bristles, and motion for him to graze on the dry leaves I had strewn on the floor. I learned how to unlace his low-quarter shoes so I could use one lace as reins and the other as a whip. We would play until the sweat poured from his body, filling the room with his strange animal smell. I remembered the smell of yellow Dial soap, the gritty texture of Colgate tooth powder, the cold sting of Mennen Skin Bracer, the warm and wet lather of Old Spice shaving soap he brushed on my face with the two-tone bristles of a shaving brush. I remembered the odd musk of the foot powder he rubbed between his toes and dumped into his green wool socks and into his black combat boots, the sweet mildewy smell of damp leather, the pleasant bit of Black Kiwi shoe polish. I could remember all these things, but I could not picture his face. I could see his gap-toothed smile when he removed his false teeth. I could see the blue and green flash of his eyes, the plumpness of the back of his hand when he grasped a pen to write, but I could not remember his face. I had only pieces of my father.

  “Mahmi,” I said. “Do you think Daeri’s face has changed?”

  “His skin might be a bit burnt,” she said. “Maybe he’s lost a little flesh because of his hard life in Vietnam, but why would he look any different?”

  “I don’t know. What if I don’t recognize him?”

  “You’ll recognize him.”

  “Do you think he’ll remember me?”

  “Of course! He’s been thinking only of you for that whole year. You’re his son.” Though she tried to keep pale, Mahmi’s skin was burnt quite dark by the summer sun. In her beehive hair and her white polyester wanpisu, she was darker than me. Her skin was dark even for a Korean, and sometimes people said she had the skin of a sangnom, a commoner. “Do you remember the last time you saw him?” she asked.

  “It was with the beggars,” I said. “He gave them money and he said I shouldn’t make fun.”

  “That’s right.” Mahmi looked suddenly worried, and I knew she was thinking of the wounded veterans with pieces of their bodies missing.

  “Why didn’t he tell me he was going?” I said. Then I saw my father in the distance through the waves of heat rippling over the tarmac, and he looked smaller than I remembered. Other yellow-haired soldiers had come out before him, and I had been afraid to confuse one of them for him, but there was no mistaking when my father emerged from the terminal building—the fresh-cropped crew cut that made his hair bristle straight up like a brush, the fleshy square shape of his face. He was leaner and darker, burnt by the tropical sun and wasted by bouts of malaria. He was wearing his short-sleeved summer khakis, with his bars of decorations and the coiled blue Infantry braid around one shoulder, but he walked differently—methodically, with a step more cautious than I remembered, a step more suited for someone in camouflage fatigues. His ice-blue eyes had a distant look to them—or had they sunk subtly back in their sockets?

  Mahmi did not immediately run to him as I had expected. She gave me a quick glance, and I charged forward, sprinting until I grew suddenly self-conscious just in front of my father and came to an awkward stop to look sheepishly up at him. He stepped up to me and lifted me into his hug. He patted and rubbed the top of my head as he let me down on my mother’s approach. When she reached him he kissed her. That was the first and only time I saw them kiss.

  We rode back to Pupyong in another Arirang taxi. I sat in the front seat with the window open so I didn’t hear what they talked about in the back. We drove off the good pavement of the airbase and out into the winding dirt road through the several villages that skirted the other army posts along the bus route to ASCOM. I sat sweating in the vinyl seat, watching the meter click up nickel by nickel as we rattled on in the heat.

  In the evening I bathed after my father, standing in a wash basin full of soapy water as he scrubbed me with a rough washcloth and poured cold water over me to rinse me clean. Emo cooked a steak, which Mahmi had gotten the day before and kept under a block of ice. My father was happy but uneasy. Even when he pierced the top of his Falstaff beer with the can opener, making that cold crack-hissss sound that used to make him smile, he seemed preoccupied by something.

  I do not remember what he talked about that first night. I do not remember if the dinner was pleasant or if he had brought lavish gifts for everyone. I remember being shocked at the contrast between his burnt forearms and the paper-white flesh of his armpits. I remember thinking the damp curls of hair in his underarms were the color of the hairs around an ox’s nostrils. I remember how his feet filled the entire wash basin and how the room became pungent with the familiar odor of his sweat. In his duffel bag he had brought back all the cigarettes he had not smoked or traded from his C-rations, the packets of acrid coffee, the packets of toilet paper, salt, sugar, pepper, and cream, the metal can openers, the white plastic spoons—things that we would use every day in the house. He had brought my mother a red Vietnamese costume called an ao dai; he had brought fresh green wool socks for Hyongbu, grease pencils and yellow wooden pencils for Yongsu and Haesuni, and a leather wallet from my grandmother for me to hang around my neck. He asked me about school and I told him that I enjoyed it. I left out all the important things.

  “What did you do in Vietnam, Daddy?”

  We were at the edge of the parade field at Yong-san 8th Army Headquarters, just under the flagpole, and my father had put me astride the howitzer to take a quick picture. They fired deafening blanks out of the howitzer each day when the flag came down, and everything stopped to listen to the bugler play the sad taps music. The dark green barrel was hot under my thigh.

  “You’re sitting on top of the Zam-Zammah!” said my father.

  “Zam-Zammah!” I shouted.

  “Thy father was a pastry cook!”

  The shutter of my father’s borrowed camera clicked and I quickly swung my leg over and leaped down. “What’s a pastry cook?”

  “Oh, that’s someone who makes doughnuts and cakes. Like ttok.”

  “You’re not a ttok man, Daddy. What you do in Vietnam? You kill lotsa’ number ten VC?”

  “I was a red bull on a green field,” he said quietly, still talking some sort of riddle I didn’t understand.

  “How come you not say?”

  “I was on an Advisory Team near a place called Nha Trang,” he said. “I helped people called Montagnards fight the Vietcong. You’d like the Montagnards, Booby. They’re like Indians.”

  “They got Indians in Vietnam? Make fire with sticks? Wow!” I took my father’s sunburnt hand, and he led me across the street, past the Main Library, to the Snack Bar. I heard a raspy metallic sound and looked back over my shoulder at the parade field, suddenly expecting to see people ice skating the way they did when the field was flooded in winter. It was nothing, just a sound like the sound of a blade on ice, but it made me shiver.

  My father was quiet. He had seemed happier since he returned from Vietnam, but he was also distant, as if a part of him had not made it back. I had seen my share of limp,
black body bags and rigid aluminum coffins on AFKN television, and I imagined he had left something like that—some feeling that hurt like the sight of those containers—back in the highlands outside Nha Trang.

  My father treated me to an early turkey dinner at the special buffet that afternoon. He wanted me to have the dark and white meat, but I found the sliced turkey loaf neater and less like a dead animal—more palatable under the lumpy gravy and the dark red cranberry sauce. I had never learned how to handle a full set of western silverware, and today was my lesson on how to eat European-style, keeping the fork in my left hand, the knife always in the right. My father corrected me and told me anecdotes while I sawed at the turkey with the dull knife and struggled to use the fork in its upside-down position without letting the food slip off.

  “I used to go swimming out on Nha Trang beach,” he said. “The water was so blue it was like looking up at the sky, and for lunch I used to eat a green dragon fruit.”

  “Green dragon? Like dinosaur?”

  “Like a cactus—you know, like you see in the cowboy movies. Green dragon fruit tastes really good.”

  “Can I have one, Daddy?”

  “You come to ’Nam with me sometime, Booby.” He tapped on his false front teeth. “One time I lost my partial plate when I went to the benjo. I dropped it in there and it was night, so I couldn’t find it later even with a flashlight. In the morning I went out without my partial, and the Montagnards thought it was funny. I said, ‘See, me Montagnard, too.’ The chiefs got a real kick out of it. They file down their front teeth and they all smoke cigars, even the little kids your age.”

  I made a face to show him I didn’t like cigars.

  “Don’t spill that. Pull your elbows in. That’s right, and sit straight.”