by Pat Conroy
At night when I lay in Sallie’s arms she would whisper to me, “After med school, we’ll make pretty babies, Tom. Our job now is to learn to enjoy it.”
Together, in that long summer, we repeated the gentlest chapter in the history of the world locked in the sweet embrace of each other’s arms. Tenderly, we coaxed out every secret and mystery our bodies had shyly withheld. We made love as though we were putting a long poem together from tongues of rich fire.
When the honeymoon was over, I worked as Luke’s striker on the shrimp boat. Sallie and I would rise before dawn and meet Luke down at the shrimp docks. Luke would follow my father’s boat and I would make sure the wooden doors went over the sides cleanly without tangling the cables. When we had filled the hold with shrimp and iced them down, I would clean the deck as Luke headed the Miss Savannah back toward town. Luke paid me ten cents for every pound of shrimp we brought into the scales and I had money in the bank when I began my life as a teacher and a coach at Colleton High School.
In late August Saturday Review published Savannah’s first poem in a special issue featuring young poets. It came out on the same day that Luke received notification in the mail that his draft status had been changed to 1-A. Savannah had written an antiwar poem at the very moment that same war had impinged upon the family consciousness.
At our house next evening, Luke asked, “What do you think about this Vietnam stuff, Tom and Sallie?”
“Sallie made me quit ROTC as soon as the war began heating up,” I answered, handing Luke a cup of black coffee.
“Dead husbands make lousy fathers,” Sallie said. “There’s nothing in it for Tom.”
“They’re not going to let me out of it,” said Luke. “I called old Knox Dobbins yesterday down at the draft board and he said they aren’t going to defer shrimpers anymore. He said there were too many shrimpers on the river anyhow.”
“I guess he found a sure-fire way to thin them out,” I said angrily.
“Will they draft you too, Tom?” he asked.
“They don’t draft male teachers in rural South Carolina, Luke,” I answered. “They just pay us slave wages and hope we never look for real jobs.”
“You ever meet up with anybody from Vietnam?” he asked.
“I met a guy running a Chinese restaurant in Columbia once,” I said.
“He was from China, Tom,” Sallie said. “It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s the same thing to me,” I said.
“Mom says I have to go because we were taught to love America,” said Luke.
“We do love America,” I said. “What has that got to do with anything?”
“I told her I didn’t love America,” he said. “I told her I loved Colleton County. The Vietnamese can have the rest of it for all I care. It’s the damnedest thing. I’ll have to sell the shrimp boat.”
“Don’t—Tom can run the shrimp boat for you, Luke,” Sallie said. “As soon as school is out next summer, he can take the boat out for you and at least keep up the payments.”
“Tom went to college so he wouldn’t have to run a shrimp boat, Sallie,” Luke answered.
“No,” I said, “Tom went to college so he could decide to run a shrimp boat or not. I wanted to have a choice, Luke, and I’d consider it an honor to keep your shrimp boat running until you get back.”
“I’d appreciate that, Tom,” he said simply. “I’d like to know it was back here waiting for me.”
“Don’t go, Luke,” Sallie said. “Tell them you’re a conscientious objector. Tell them anything.”
“They’ll put me in jail, Sallie,” he said. “I’d rather die than go to jail.”
As our life in Colleton began to unfold in the drowsy fragments of a southern teacher’s life, Luke was drawn out of that life to play his small part in the only war America was able to rustle up in our generation. While I was teaching in the classroom and coaching football on the same field where Luke and I had once been co-captains, and Savannah was participating in every antiwar demonstration on the East Coast, Luke was patrolling the rivers of Vietnam, having enlisted as a member of the Navy’s most mysterious and elite branch, the SEALs. The Navy was not stupid and they were not about to waste the talents of the strongest and savviest boy who had volunteered in that queasy season of American self-examination. While I was sending boys on downfield blocking drills and Savannah was writing the poems she would include in her first volume, Luke was learning underwater demolition, how to parachute from low-flying aircraft, anti-guerrilla warfare, and how to kill silently when operating behind enemy lines. There was a disturbing apposition to the American lives we were leading, a complex harmony that would be called into play when the world would spin out of control and the stars would align themselves in fabulous and bestial shapes and conspire to take my family into the calms of our weatherless river and cut us up for bait.
“SEAL,” Savannah wrote to me when she learned of the naval branch that Luke had joined. “A bad omen, Tom, a very bad omen. A bad word, and a dangerous one in the Wingo family mythology. Do you remember when you wrote me about the Clemson game, the one where you scored the only two touchdowns in your college career? You had a magic word going for you that day. The word was tiger. You were playing the Clemson Tigers and the word tiger has always been a lucky one for us. But SEAL, Tom. Do you remember what happened to the seal at that circus? Do you remember what tigers do to seals? I think Luke is going into a country of tigers as a seal and it terrifies me, Tom. Poets look at words for signs and symbols. Forgive me, but I don’t believe Luke will survive the war.”
I followed Luke’s war in the letters he wrote me addressed to the coach’s office at Colleton High. He wrote other letters to my parents, grandparents, and Savannah—cheerful letters full of pretty lies. In his letters to them he described sunsets over the South China Sea, meals he ate in Saigon, animals he sighted at the edges of jungles, jokes he heard from his friends. In his letters to me he sounded like a drowning man. He described military operations to blow up bridges in North Vietnam, night raids on enemy positions, rescue missions to liberate captured Americans, and ambushes on small supply trails. Once he swam four miles up a river and slit the throat of a village chief who had been consorting with the Viet Cong. He had been the only survivor of a raiding party that had tried to surprise a retreating column of North Vietnamese regulars. His best friend had died in his arms after stepping on a land mine. It was Luke and not the mine that killed him. His friend had begged Luke for the injection of morphine, saying that he would rather die than live like a vegetable without legs or balls. He would have died anyway but he died more quickly because my brother loved him. “I don’t dream at night at all, Tom,” he wrote me. “It’s when I’m awake, when my eyes are wide open, that I live with nightmares. There is only one thing wrong with killing people. It gets so easy. Isn’t that terrible?”
Whenever he killed a man, Luke would tell me about it in flat, unemotional prose and ask me to light a candle for the repose of the man’s soul whenever I got near the Cathedral in Savannah. We had all been baptized in the Cathedral and it was Luke’s favorite place of worship. Before Luke came home, I was lighting thirty-five candles beneath the statue of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and would recite the prayer for the dead in an aura of trembling light for this platoon of unknown men. With the rest of the family he continued to uphold the fiction that he was seeing no action at all. His letters to my parents sounded like a travel agent trying to entice reluctant tourists to an exotic locale in the Orient. He picked orchids in the jungle for my mother, pressed them between the leaves of the Bible my grandfather had given him as a going-away present, and sent the book to her for a Christmas present. The Bible smelled like a buried garden when my mother opened it, and dried orchids, with heads like shy dragons, appeared in hundred-page intervals. My mother wept over the first Christmas Luke had ever missed on the island.
“Dead flowers,” my father said. “Luke’s become real el cheapo over in Nam.”
> “My sweet baby boy,” my mother said between sobs. “Thank God he’s in no danger.”
In Colleton I had entered into the teacher’s life of sustained regularity. I taught my English students literature and composition for five hours every day, drilling them in the treacherous architecture of English grammar and force-marching them through the thickets of Silas Marner and Julius Caesar. As a punishment for majoring in English during college, my principal assigned me to teach sophomores my first year in Colleton. Sophomores, sizzling with hormones and beleaguered by bodily changes they barely understood, would sit slack-jawed and comatose as I sang away about the pleasures of the active voice, the perils of “that versus which,” or the perfidy of Cassius. I used words like perfidy far too much that first unconfident year as a lecturer. I had more in common with a thesaurus than I did with a teacher and the sophomores of Colleton County suffered because of my ineptitude.
At lunch, I would sit in the teachers’ lounge. While I ate, I would correct the ghastly papers of my students, who seemed gifted in destroying all vestiges of beauty or grace from the language. After school, I would change into my coaching clothes, loop my whistle around my neck, and coach the junior varsity football team until six in the evening. I would be home by seven o’clock, when I’d begin fixing dinner. Sallie would arrive home later, exhausted from her long commute; she. was attending the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston. We lived in the small house we had rented a block from my grandparents’. Luke had wanted us to live in his house on the island but Sallie had easily assessed my mother’s character and decided that Melrose was a one-woman operation. Our house was small but it was located on a creek and we could swim off a dock at high tide. In the mornings I set a crab pot before I left for work and fished for channel bass when they made their run in late September. I chaperoned a sock hop in the lunchroom after a football game on the same night that my sister attended an antiwar rally in Central Park and my brother helped mine the approaches to a North Vietnamese river.
During the Easter holidays, my father and I put the Miss Savannah on the rails of the dry dock and pulled her out of the water. We scraped the bottom of barnacles and paint, then put a fresh coat of paint on the blitzed-down wood. I ordered the nets I would need for the summer and we worked on the engine until it purred like a cat when we took the boat into the channel for a trial run.
That summer, I took to the river as a shrimp boat captain for the first time in my life, a rookie in that hard and sun-enameled fraternity.
I was tied up next to my father’s boat and had to cross his deck to get to the Miss Savannah.
“Good morning, Captain,” my father would say.
“Morning, Captain,” I would answer.
“Bet you a beer I put more shrimp in the scales than you do today,” he would tease.
“I hate stealing beer from an old man.”
“That’s too much boat for you, Captain,” Dad would say, looking over at the Miss Savannah.
Each summer morning I repeated those unconscious rituals of my childhood when I watched my voluble father, talking incessantly about his plans to make a million bucks, as he moved out to intercept the vast swarms of shrimp efflorescing in the creeks. Only now it was I behind the wheel—moving the heart-pine vessel through channels I knew like the ridges of my thumbnail, interpreting the tidings of markers that flashed for a thousand miles along the inland waterway, and keeping a nervous eye on the depth recorder whenever I shrimped waters unfamiliar to me. I would follow my father’s boat out each morning and we would shrimp in tandem.
At sunrise we would have our positions agreed upon and I would reduce power from 1500 rpm to 900 and listen for the music of the winch as Ike Brown, the striker I had hired, began the work of setting the nets and getting them into the water. When the nets opened underwater, I felt them drag the boat almost to a halt and I adjusted to the proper trawling speed of 1½ knots.
That first summer, I caught thirty thousand pounds of shrimp, paid Ike a good salary, myself a better one, and made all payments on my brother’s boat. When I had to begin summer football practice on August twentieth, I had trained Eke Brown to be a captain himself and he had brought his son, Irvin, aboard as striker. Later, when Luke returned from overseas, he co-signed the bank note when Eke bought his own shrimp boat and christened it Mister Luke. In the naming of boats, there is always a sense of honor and sentiment at play.
By the time I became a football coach again that August, Savannah had given her first poetry reading and Luke was about to bring his military career to an end—and get back to the river where he belonged. Invisibly, all the nets were moving in place through the silent channels encircling the shrimper’s family.
It was night on the South China Sea and the planes were returning to the carrier after their raids over North Vietnam when the radio control center received an urgent message from a pilot that he was crash landing in a rice paddy less than a mile from the sea. The pilot had given the exact coordinates of his position when he was lost from radio contact. A brief council formed on the bridge of the carrier and a command decision was made that a team be sent ashore to attempt a rescue of the downed pilot.
Lieutenant jg Christopher Blackstock was chosen to lead the mission and when asked by his commanding officer to choose the other members of his team said only a single word: “Wingo.”
They were lowered into the sea after dark on a black life raft and paddled beneath a full moon through the three miles of rough water to the beach. The moon was bad luck but they reached the shore without incident, hid the boat beneath a grove of coconut palms, checked their positions, then made their way inland.
It took them an hour to find the plane, which had gone down in the center of a rice field that mirrored the moon in a thousand pools of fresh water. Luke told me later that a rice field was the most beautiful marriage of water and crops he had ever seen.
This rice field inspired both awe and danger as Luke and Lieutenant Blackstock crawled on their bellies along one of the ridges that divided the field into shimmering symmetrical pools. The jet had lost a wing and lay glistening on its side, the high rice reaching up to the fuselage. The rice moved with the wind and reminded Luke of the salt marshes of Carolina, but the smell was more delicate and sensual.
“This was real rice, Tom. Not that Uncle Ben shit. There were some damn good farmers sleeping in that part of the world.”
“Did you think the pilot might still be alive?” I asked.
“No, not after we saw the plane,” he said.
“Why didn’t you turn back and get your butts back to the boat?”
A year later when he was back in Colleton, Luke laughed and said, “We were SEALs, Tom.”
“Jerks,” I said.
“Blackstock was the best soldier I ever saw, Tom,” Luke explained. “I’d have crawled all the way to Hanoi if he’d asked me to.”
When they reached the downed jet, Blackstock made a motion for Luke to cover him. Blackstock climbed up the intact wing and peered into the empty cockpit. There was movement in a line of trees a quarter of a mile away and Blackstock dove for the soft watery earth as the first salvo from the AK-47s smashed into the fuselage of the plane. Luke saw five North Vietnamese regulars come running toward them, moving low and fast between the tall sheaves of rice. He waited for the wind to bend the rice again and when it did, he aimed his submachine gun, fired, and watched all five splash heavily into the paddies. Then it seemed as if all of North Vietnam rose up to challenge their return to the sea.
They plunged down an embankment as mortar fire took the damaged plane apart behind them and they sprinted south along a perimeter of solid land as they heard orders shouted in Vietnamese being issued in the darkness. The jet was still receiving most of the incoming fire, and they put as much distance between themselves and the plane as they could before they turned and crawled along one of those straight and vulnerable ridges that divided the rice field into congruent designs. They heard th
e soldiers moving toward the perimeter and the jet, concentrating their firepower. A hand grenade exploded a hundred yards away.
“There’s only about a hundred of them, Luke,” Black-stock whispered in Luke’s ear.
“For a minute, I thought we were outnumbered,” Luke whispered back.
“Poor bastards don’t know we’re SEALs,” he whispered.
“Doesn’t seem to bother them much, sir.”
“Let’s make it to the trees. Then they got to find us in the dark,” Blackstock whispered finally.
But while they were lowcrawling toward the looming shadows of the forest the North Vietnamese had overrun the area around the plane and discovered that the Americans had escaped the ambush. Luke heard the sound of men running and of feet splashing through the rice paddies searching for them. But the rice field was vast and its divisions of water and long intersecting footbridges of land made a disciplined search impossible. It was only when a squad of North Vietnamese soldiers came rushing out of the darkness on that same isthmus of land, running headlong and reckless, that Luke and Blackstock instinctively rolled off into opposite sides of the paddy and, lying in water, waited until the men in black were almost on top of them. They killed seven of them in a space of three seconds, then took off, running through the water and high rice with bullets threshing the rice around them. When they reached the tree line, Blackstock rushed for the covering of jungle. Luke heard the single retort of an AK-47 come from the trees, heard Blackstock fire his submachine gun at the point where the shot had been fired, then heard Blackstock fall. Luke came out of that paddy spraying machine-gun fire in all directions. He crouched and fired until his ammunition was spent. He grabbed Blackstock’s weapon and continued firing. When he had emptied the second submachine gun, he began lobbing grenades to his left and right. It was ineffective, he agreed later, but he wanted to give the enemy something to occupy their attention.
Weaponless, he lifted Blackstock off the North Vietnamese who had killed him, put Blackstock on his shoulders, and headed for the Pacific Ocean with a large contingent of the enemy forces in serious pursuit. Once he was in the forest, he began walking and listening. Whenever he heard his pursuers, he simply stopped until he no longer heard them. He treated his withdrawal as a long deer hunt and he used the knowledge he had learned from his lifelong association with the white-tailed deer. Movement could kill a deer or save it; it all depended on the wisdom of the choice the deer made when the smell of hunters entered the woods. For an hour Luke hid beneath the roots of a fallen tree that bore a strange fruit he had never seen. He listened to voices, footsteps, heard rifle fire near him and miles away. Again, he lifted Blackstock up on his shoulders and began carrying the leader of his mission toward the sound of waves crashing on the beach. It took him three hours to go half a mile. Luke did not panic. He listened and made sure that when he moved there was no one nearby to hear his advance. He was in the country of his enemy, he reasoned, and they held an enormous advantage because of their familiarity with the terrain. But the land was not that much different from coastal South Carolina and Luke figured that he had learned a thing or two as a kid. And it was dark and no one could follow a trail in the dark.