Inheriting the War Page 9
After I corrected my posture, my father took some change out of his pocket and put it on the table. “How about some chocolate cake?” he said. “Then we catch the bus home.”
“Okay!”
The cake, I learned, was not to be eaten with a knife and fork, but simply cut apart with the fork itself. The crumbs could be compressed down and squeezed between the tines if you wanted to get them without touching them with your fingers. My father pronounced that I had made good progress, and we went down to the bus station where he bought his usual copy of The Stars and Stripes. On the bus we sat near the back, with the window open so he could smoke one of his pungent cigars even though the Korean women sitting around us grimaced and complained. He ignored them, but he knew what they were saying, and he actually enjoyed annoying them. He told me more about Vietnam as the bus droned on and I settled against his side, half drowsing.
“We used to go on patrol,” he said. “We’d hump our gear up into the highlands and watch the big planes spraying the defoliants. Long clouds of it would come down. Agent Orange. It was beautiful. In a few days everything would be dead. Not a blade of grass for Charlie to hide under. And we used to take Bangalore torpedoes—they’re long tubes packed with plastic explosives—we used them to blow up bunkers and patches of barbed wire. We’d go out to the Montagnards and stick the Bangalores down into the roots of their big trees and blow a few of them. When the trees fell over the Montagnard kids and women would run into the crater or to the roots that stuck out at the bottom of the trunk and catch all the stunned rats. That was a delicacy for them—a special food. They really liked us taksan for getting them those rats.”
I fell asleep to the sound of my father’s voice telling me something about a monkey and a shotgun. The pictures he took that day never came out.
My father stayed in Korea for eleven months after his return. Forty-eight weekends, and he came home on half of them. With the few three-day passes and holidays, he was home for less than fifty days before he left again. My mother and I visited him only once up in Camp Casey where he was stationed near Wijong-bu, and he wasn’t at all happy to see us. He told my mother later that having his men see his Korean wife undermined his authority. We never visited again.
While my father was on leave for my birthday in January of 1968, the U.S.S. Pueblo, an electronic spy ship, was captured off the coast of North Korea, and all over the country, the military went on alert. My father went back up to his unit early after hearing the news on his transistor radio. Later that month, during the Vietnamese New Year’s celebration of Tet, the NVA and the Vietcong simultaneously attacked over a hundred towns, cities, and military installations all over Vietnam. It was the bloodiest offensive of the war. The outpost where my father had served near Nha Trang was overrun, and many of his friends were among the Killed-in-Action. The mood among the GIs in Korea became thick and black, full of hate for Asian people and tense with the fear that the North Koreans might invade. The GIs were afraid to stay in Korea, but even more afraid that they might be shipped to Cam Ranh Bay to join some counteroffensive against the North Vietnamese. Houseboys and prostitutes were beaten more frequently; there were more fights in the clubs. The Korean army stayed on alert and continued to mobilize more men to send to Vietnam. There was constant news about the White Horse Division, the Tiger Division, and the Blue Dragon Brigade.
I don’t think my father ever considered our house his home that year. We were just the family that kept him occupied when he wasn’t working. Korea and Vietnam were both countries divided along their middle by a Demilitarized Zone, with Communists in the north and pro-American governments in the south. Both countries had Buddhists and Catholics and Animists, they farmed wet rice, they plowed fields with oxen, they were populated by people with yellow skin. When he took me to the Snack Bar that day to teach me how to use a knife and fork, he had said something about “The Great Game” when he sent me to buy my own slice of cake. “Heinz,” he said to me, “What old man is going to teach you the important things while I’m off in The Great Game?” What was the “The Great Game,” I had thought back then. Was my father, like my mother playing two slot machines, but one was Korea and the other Vietnam?
I think now that what he wanted was retribution. And that is why he volunteered for Vietnam again and left before the summer of 1968. And because I had not read the blue book he had given me, I wouldn’t know what he meant by “The Great Game” or “Zam-Zammah” or bulls on green fields for another twenty years.
Black hourglass against a field of red. Seventh Division—Bayonet. An Indian head in a feathered headdress superimposed on a white star. A field of black. Second Infantry Division. A black horsehead silhouette, like a chess knight, above a diagonal black slash across a shield of gold. The First Calvary Division. In his German accent, he called it “The First Calf.” These were the totemic symbols of my father, his military insignia. The four cardinal points in green, which the Germans in World War II had called “The Devil’s Cross.” Fourth Mechanized Infantry Division. A white sword pointing upright between two yellow batwing doors against a field of blood. The Vietnam campaign. Golden chevrons, a white long rifle against a blue star, oak-leaf clusters, a cross of iron for excellent marksmanship. Symbols of power. Totems of the clan that kills people whose skin is the color of mine. Indelible.
NICK FLYNN is the author of four books of poetry: Some Ether (2000), Blind Huber (2002), The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), and My Feelings (2015), as well as a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins. He has received fellowships from, among other organizations, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. His creative and critical works have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of three memoirs: The Reenactments; The Ticking Is the Bomb (2010), which the Los Angeles Times called a “disquieting masterpiece”; and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2005), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into fifteen languages. He teaches at the University of Houston and spends the rest of the year in (or near) Brooklyn.
PRACTICAL JOKE
(1971) Travis, just back from Vietnam, is renovating the house next door. The war’s an unending muddle. My mother bakes a blueberry pie, puts it in the window to cool, invites him over for a piece. Thirty-one, divorced ten years now, she makes a good pie. Travis is twenty-one and still looks like a Marine—his USMC tattoo, his fatigues—albeit freaky, bright-eyed, his hair going wild. Not a hippie, but drifting toward hippiedom. Trigger-hippie, you might call him, as he’s armed to the teeth, having smuggled out his M-16 and various sidearms. They begin seeing each other and, as per usual, he begins renovating our house. My mother likes a man who’s good with his hands. Skipping school one day, I’m lingering around the house alone when he pulls into the driveway, lets himself in to work on a dead outlet. I hide in my closet, hear him talk to my dog as he works, and what he says sounds insane. He tells my dog that in ’Nam he ate better-looking dogs, that over there a dog would never get so fat, that all dogs knew enough to run the other way from him instead of rolling on their backs, waiting for the knife to slip in. He tells my dog about the villages he burned and the people he killed and that not all of them were soldiers. About bulldozing a tunnel and later finding out it was filled with kids. Through the cracked door I can see him holding my dog’s ears and crying and I don’t dare breathe. A few months later my mother stands me in the kitchen to tell me she’s going to marry him. That’s a mistake, I say. She nods that she knows but says she’ll marry him just the same, and she does, and they’re happy, for a while. He’s fun to have around in a frenzied sort of way. If we want to go fishing he takes us down to the Harbor, tells us to wait on the loading dock and goes off to hot-wire someone else’s boat. We go out for the afternoon, catch a few fish, and he drops us off again. We knew the boat was stolen, even though he said it was his friend’s. We knew there’d be trouble
if we were caught but we went anyway. His impunity thrills me, I mistake it for fearlessness, though years later he will admit to being afraid all the time. When he decides to put an addition on the house he takes me down to the lumberyard and I see how he pays for a couple sheets of plywood and a few two-by-fours, how he takes the slip out to the yard and backs up to a stack of plywood and has me get on the other side of it so we can load the whole pile onto his truck, until the springs sag. We jump into the cab and he slams it into drive and with the first jerk forward all the plywood slides out onto the ground. We get out and reload it, his entire body now coiled energy, waving off an offer of help from the guy who works there. That weekend we double the size of my mother’s cottage, the second and last house she’d buy, all of us and a few of his friends furiously hammering, desperate to finish quickly because Travis never bothered to get a permit. The last thing we do that Sunday night is paint the whole thing yellow, so it will blend in with the rest of the house. It will take two years to get around to shingling it, and only then when the yellow is peeling off in sheets.
In Vietnam he’d been a mine-sweeper, the guy who cleared the path, made it safe to put your foot down. Usually he was good at it, but sometimes he’d screw up, and when he did someone was blown to pieces. After being in-country for a year he signed on for another hitch, but caught some shrapnel a few months into it and was shipped home. In the States he became a color guard in Washington, standing at white-gloved attention at high-level events. But he landed back in the “world” with a short fuse, and when a car full of hippies honked at him at a traffic light that had turned from red to green Travis got out and pistol-whipped the driver, pulled him right through the car’s window. Half an hour later, when the police found him, he was in a fast-food joint eating a burger, having forgotten what he’d done. He got off, but then Kent State happened and they ordered him into the basement of the Pentagon, “full combat gear, the whole nine yards.” He refused. He knew he’d be sent to college campuses, and was terrified that he’d have to kill more kids. They locked him up in Bethesda for six months, shot him full of thorazine, gave him honorable discharge, cut him loose. A few months later he was at our dinner table.
I liked to play what were called “practical jokes.” I had a spoon with a hinge, a dribble glass, a severed rubber hand. I’d leave booby traps around our house, usually a piece of thread strung across a doorway as a tripwire, one end tied to a broom or the racks from the oven, anything that would fall and make a racket. I don’t think I knew that Travis had spent his time in Vietnam checking for tripwires—I don’t know if knowing would have stopped me. I would set the trap and maybe it would catch someone and maybe it wouldn’t. One night Travis took the racks and tucked them between my bottom sheet and the mattress. I came in later that night and crawled into bed. Why I didn’t notice the racks right off I can’t say, but hours later I awoke from dreams of torture.
Mid-afternoon, one Saturday Travis comes home after digging clams with a buddy. Leaning on pitchforks knee-deep at low tide, they’d each managed to kill a case of beer before noon. He dumps the clams in the sink and tells my brother and me to circle around, he wants to show us his photo album. For the first few pages he’s a teenager, cocky beside hot rods, girls sitting on the hoods, one with her arm draped over his shoulders. The next page shows him at boot camp, Parris Island—crewcut, sudden adult. The next show Vietnamese women dancing topless on tables, and on the next page a village is on fire. Corpses next, pages of corpses, bodies along a dirt road, a face with no eyes. As the stories of what he’d done unreel from inside him, my brother stands up and walks into his room, back to his wall of science fiction. I look at the photos, at Travis, look in his eyes as he speaks, somehow I’d learn to do that, like a tree learns how to swallow barbed wire.
Years later, when I track him down, he shows me another photo, one I hadn’t seen or don’t remember—him on a dusty road outside Da Nang, a peace sign dangling from his neck. The reason he signed up for a second hitch, he tells me, was so that he could go into villages ahead of his unit, ostensibly to check for landmines and booby traps, but once there he’d warn the villagers to run, because if they didn’t he knew there was a good chance they’d be killed by his advancing soldiers. Then he set off a couple rounds of C-4, radio in that it was still hot, smoke a joint, watch the villagers flee.
The night he showed us his photo album, after the house went quiet, I crept into the kitchen for a glass of water, the sink still full of sea clams, forgotten. Under the fluorescent hum they’d opened their shells and were waving their feet, each as thick as a long forearm. A box of snakes, some draped onto the countertop, some trying to pull themselves out.
FROM THE TICKING IS THE BOMB
THE FRUIT OF MY DEEDS
Thich Nhat Hanh gave a dharma talk about a Vietnam vet, an ex-soldier who came to him, unable to sleep. After seeing a buddy killed, this soldier had put rat poison in some sandwiches and left them outside and watched as some children ate them—and since that day what he did has been slowly tearing him apart. You have only two choices, Thich Nhat Hanh told the soldier—continue destroying yourself, or find a way to help five other children. These are your only choices.
Thich Nhat Hanh always has a contingent of Vietnam vets at his retreats, at least at the ones he holds in America. As the years pass, more and more are from our subsequent wars. I first met some of these vets nearly twenty years ago, and the time I spent with them convinced me to track down Travis, my stepfather, whom I hadn’t heard from in years. Travis had served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970 as a combat Marine—my mother got together with him soon after he got back stateside. They stayed together for four or five tumultuous years, and then they split up.
The years Travis lived with us I never called him my stepfather. He was more of a wild older brother, just a guy who was around for a few years, who taught me how to bang a nail, how to build an addition without pulling a permit, how to “borrow” a stranger’s boat to go fishing—then he was gone. When I found him, all those years later, in upstate Vermont, I wanted to ask him two questions: how did he meet my mother, and how did he find out she had died? I’d brought a video camera to film his answers, telling him, telling myself, that I was making a documentary film—the home movie we never had. Later, I would seek out my mother’s other boyfriends, ask them the same two questions. What surprised me about Travis was that he felt responsible for her death in some way. He thought she’d used his gun, which I don’t even think is true—my mother had her own gun.
(1999) Four years after Travis and I reconnected, a filmmaker tracked me down (she’d seen my home movie), and asked if Travis and I would be interested in flying to Vietnam to be part of her documentary film—three combat veterans and three of their children, the vets returning to the scene, their children along to bear witness. The conceit of her film was to examine if war trauma was passed on through generations.
Travis turned fifty on a train from Ho Chi Minh City to Na Trang.
Three weeks into it we spent a day filming a single stretch of road outside Da Nang, where Travis had been stationed. Each night, Travis told us, this dirt road was destroyed by “the gooks,” and during the day the Americans would hire the locals to rebuild it. Travis knew, everyone knew, that it was likely that the same ones who destroyed it then rebuilt it the next day. This went on for months. It was, for Travis, as if Sisyphus had to hire someone else to push his rock, thereby denying himself even that pleasure. The day we were filming, Travis spent a long time trying to find the spot he’d spent so many days on thirty years earlier, the exact stretch of road that had been blown up so many times. He spoke with the other vets, pointed to the line of mountains in the distance, tried to line up a photograph of his younger self, standing on that road, with the line of mountains today. While Travis was being interviewed I stood under an umbrella, trying to protect myself from the merciless sun, watching farmers work the rice paddies on either side of the road. Each shoot of rice, once
it reached a certain height, had to be transplanted by hand—the bent-over farmers were doing that this day. Travis needed to stand upon the same piece of road he’d stood upon so many years earlier. Maybe we’d bombed the line of mountain beyond recognition, José offered—it happens. Travis finally had to accept that it wasn’t exactly as he remembered. As we drove back to Da Nang we passed small mounds of rice piled along the edge of the road, drying in the sun. Some of the rice got caught up in our tailwind as we passed, rose up in the air, then settled back down to earth.
That night, over dinner, the director announced that the next morning we were to visit the site of the My Lai massacre. It was the first we’d heard of it. The other two vets were not happy about this, and threatened to leave the film if they were forced to go. No one will be forced to do anything, the director insisted. The other vets said they’d spent their lives living down My Lai, being called baby-killers by strangers, and this was not why they’d agreed to be part of the film. Travis looked at them. This is what we all did, he said. This is what they meant when they ordered us to clear a village—these guys just got caught. Travis asked me what I thought. I told him I thought we should go, but that it was up to him.
The next morning the bus pulled up in front of the site of the massacre, which is now a museum, a sacred site. Travis and I walked in together, the camerawoman walking backward in front of us. The other vets and their children remained on the bus. The museum is a small building with framed photographs on the walls, most of the photographs from the New York Times or other American newspapers. I remembered seeing a lot of the same photographs when they were first in the Boston Globe. At some point Travis told the camerawoman to shut off the camera, that he didn’t want to be filmed. Then he walked slowly away from us, talking softly to the translator.