by CW Ullman
Charlie teared up, grabbed Gaston and said, “Don’t say shit about the Old Man. Do you want a Captain’s Mast?”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Gaston said.
“Well, you better give a fuck. I need you to get it together. You and Ronnie take Rusty to sick bay,” Charlie said.
Ronnie, Gaston and, eventually, Curtis picked up a delirious, mumbling Rusty. They struggled to get him up the stairs. Charlie turned to Baja Charlie and pointed at the refugees.
“Keep an eye on them; I’m going to square this place away,” Charlie said.
He watched Baja Charlie who had a distant look. He said, “B.C., you gonna be all right? If you melt down, we’re both fucked. I am barely holding it together.”
Baja Charlie nodded and regained his focus.
Charlie looked at the refugees, then out to sea and back around the room. The refugees who had been warming to Charlie now looked at him with fear and distrust. Some wondered if they were the next to be thrown overboard, while others looked like they wanted to throw him overboard. He walked toward them, but stopped, when, as a group, they backed up.
No one had ever leveled a stare at him like the old women in the group. He wanted to explain to them, but knew it was futile. He wanted to tell them about orders, command, discipline, and protocol, but he did not because he could not explain it to himself. Mentally, he tried justifying it, but the intellectual side of the argument was voided by his emotional condemnation.
Even though it was Rusty who actually threw the girl from the ship, Charlie felt responsible for not intervening. He felt as though he had performed the act himself. He was ashamed and saw himself as small and weak. He was not a man, he was a boy and he acted like a boy. A defenseless girl who needed protection was offered up to save this ship? To pull her from the water and then subject her to the over boarding sickened him.
His lack of courage turned briefly to resentment. His father’s stories about the Navy, heroism, saving people, and protecting the country now felt hollow. This was not war, this was rape. Charlie had been lied to and he was now determined he would not be lied to again. In what Navy did his dad serve? Why was his mother proud? All he knew now was he had to keep order and square away his compartment and when it came time to re-enlist, he would not.
He needed to do something, but did not know where to start. Tasks seemed meaningless when he considered what had happened to the girl and the feelings of the refugees. They were inconsolable and no amount of explanation was going to convince them Americans were not monsters. He wanted to assure them, but they huddled in fear, watching him. He was in an unfamiliar emotional landscape. It held him and drew him away from his surroundings; no thought could be completed, no emotion could be expressed. Gaston’s words looped through his mind, “This is never going to be okay.” He had been reborn, damaged, into a new life that felt overwhelmingly dark and joyless. His senses were overloaded, his thinking confused, and his emotions drained. He stood, holding in his hand a rope that had been an instrument of heroism when it pulled a child from certain death, but was now just a single strand to meaningless duty, to wind and stow.
He looked at the refugees, feeling like he was one of them. As far removed as they were from their previous lives in Vietnam, was as far removed as he felt from the life he had previously known. They were on a foreign vessel not knowing what would happen to them and he was in a foreign reality. He saw the rope in his hands and pulled it towards him, but it stuck on something. He could not see the end, since it was hanging over the edge of the ship. He pulled it again and still it would not release. His legs became weak with the thought that he would have to go to the edge, afraid of what he might see.
Charlie tried to ignore the rope and begin some other task, but he knew he had to fetch the other end. He walked reluctantly to the edge, keeping his gaze on the floor to avoid any view of the ocean. When he got to the edge, he reached under the railing to loosen the rope from the place in which it was wedged. He finally freed it and pulled it up, keeping his eyes closed. He was afraid to look at the water, because he would either see the girl floating, or more likely, not see her at all and know that the draft of the ship had pulled her under and through the propeller blades. Everything welled up into his throat and he had to yell and yell and yell. He never opened his eyes.
He regained a modicum of composure and worked the rope. While Charlie wound it, he momentarily saw an elderly woman hugging a child, staring at him while shaking her head slowly. The disdain was piercing. He wanted to avoid her gaze, so he worked at putting the deck back together, but was drawn back to her face. He could not focus completely on what he was doing, so he dropped things or stumbled. He kept seeing her out of the corner of his eye as she followed his every move. Charlie sensed a future of reprobation and condemnation, which he felt he deserved. He shirked his obligation to stand up for his men and his duty to protect the girl. He allowed Rusty to kill her and in doing so, bring Rusty to ruin. It could have been different had he not been internally boasting of the rescue. If he was a real leader, he would have come up with an alternative option or at least stop the insanity. He looked across the deck and noticed the calendar: April 30, 1975.
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As the days passed, the five sailors never spoke of the incident. Rusty was permanently in sick bay on a psychiatric hold. He slept or stared at the ceiling and did not speak to anyone. His five shipmates came to visit and try to converse with him, but he never spoke. The doctors called him catatonic.
Rusty’s catatonia was the worst the doctors onboard the Enterprise had ever seen. He was being fed through a tube to his stomach and he had no control over his bowel functions. Charlie would sit next to him for hours and Rusty would not move until one of the nurses turned him over in bed. Ten days after the incident, Rusty was airlifted to a naval hospital in Thailand and then flown to the VA Hospital in Long Beach, California. Over the next few weeks, the refugees were taken off the ship to Thailand and then sent to America.
In Charlie’s dreams, the old woman was still watching him, hugging the child and shaking her head. She had been off the ship for two weeks, but her disdain for Charlie haunted him. The rumor mill onboard the Enterprise was busy with the telling of the incident on Level D, causing the five remaining sailors to stay in their quarters unless they were on duty. They had become the objects of whispers and glances. Rusty was gone, the refugees were gone, and Charlie was finished with the Navy, even though he had a year left.
One day his section of a hundred sailors was called to one of the main hangars. The five of them stood at attention with the others while Captain Derrick gave a five-minute speech about how well the ship’s crew had performed under the duress and difficulty during the fall of Saigon. He showered praise on them and ended with, “I am very proud to serve with you.”
While ninety-five sailors returned a cheer, Charlie, Gaston, Ronnie, Curtis, and Baja Charlie had frozen stares of hatred for Captain Derrick. His smile vanished when, in the sea of sailors, he caught the icy glares of the five men. He ducked their looks and left the hangar.
When the rally was over, Baja Charlie approached the other four. “I don’t want to be called ‘Baja Charlie’ anymore. My name is Carlos.”
CHAPTER II
Charlie was broken and Colleen Palmer saw it as soon as her son stepped off the plane. There was a fatigue about Charlie that she could tell was not from lack of rest. It was a deeper weariness that came with enduring a terrible burden for a long time. While his mouth smiled, his eyes remained flat. She felt he was not so much glad to be home as to be done with the service. The man who returned home from war in April 1976 was not the same boy who had joined the Navy four years earlier.
Chris Palmer had dearly missed Charlie while he served his tour in the Navy. Chris was without his best friend for the four years Charlie was gone. Before Charlie left, they had always done things together. When Charlie was old enough at age three to catch a baseball, they would play catch for hours in t
he back yard of their house in Tulsa. Chris signed them up at the YMCA for the father/son activity, Indian Guides, when Charlie was six. The two went with their tribe to camp out at Roman Nose State Park in Watonga, Oklahoma. When it came time to learn how to drive, Charlie asked his dad to teach him. If Charlie’s friends were in trouble or needed advice, Charlie would bring them to his father. Charlie’s mom would tell the two they were more like brothers than father and son.
At first, Chris thought Charlie would acclimate quickly to civilian life once he was back home, but there was hollowness in him. He had lost something and it seemed like it had been roughly carved out of him. Chris had been in combat during his twenty years in the Navy, but because he was able to compartmentalize the trauma, he was not haunted by it.
As the days turned into weeks, Chris saw there was something more profoundly wrong. It was no longer easy for Charlie to laugh. He had lost his curiosity for life and ambition for school or a career. Charlie and Chris used to have long talks about football. When Chris brought up the latest on the Dallas Cowboys, Charlie’s favorite team, there was no interest. All he wanted to do was sleep past noon, come downstairs, eat something, and then go back upstairs to bed.
During their brief conversations, Charlie talked about life onboard the Enterprise and the five sailors he had befriended. In one of the letters his parents received from Charlie while he was onboard the Enterprise, Charlie wrote about wanting to live in Manhattan Beach, California, when he returned. The parents, wanting to live near their son, decided to pack up everything, sell their house in Tulsa, and move. Once they were settled at the beach, they were glad to have moved to California. They knew Charlie would love the beach, but upon his arrival, he was uninspired.
When not sleeping, Charlie would sometimes meet up with his Navy buddies at Dockweiler Beach around a fire ring. They would sit in beach chairs, drink beer, and smoke weed around a bonfire in a concrete ring. They would not talk, just stare into the burning embers and watch the airplanes from LAX take off overhead. Chris did not know what to make of it. He was unsure if their morose outlooks were due to their war experiences or the amount of dope they were smoking.
Eventually he invited himself to hang out at Dockweiler with Charlie and his buddies. Because of his stint in the Navy, he felt a kinship with them. He knew about life aboard ship and how the confinement could drive one a little crazy. Since Charlie’s return, Chris asked him about going to school, but his inquiry was met with an apathy that frustrated him. He thought the best way to find out what was eating at Charlie would be to sit with him and his friends and hear what they talked about, but they did not speak. Chris wondered if it was his own presence that inhibited the conversation. When he asked, Ronnie told him this is just what they did.
One night there was a conversation about a sailor they all knew who was in the Long Beach VA psychiatric ward. It was a conversation Chris wished he had not heard.
“I went down and saw Rusty today. He isn’t looking that great. Has anybody else seen him?” Ronnie asked.
Carlos spoke first, “Yeah I’ve been down there a few times. They got him strung out on some shit. Sorry, Dr. Palmer.”
Chris, a chiropractor, said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve heard ‘strung out’ before.” They chuckled at his joke. He wanted to ask what had happened to this boy named Rusty, but bit his tongue, thinking his questions would shut down the conversation.
“I sat by his bed and talked to him and he still said nothing. He just looked out the window,” said Gaston.
Carlos asked, “How often do you go down there?”
“I check in on him once a week. They’re taking pretty good care of him.”
“Really?” Carlos replied. “Because to me he looks like shit.”
To Chris, Carlos’s statement felt like a hot iron that the others did not want to touch. His loaded reply fell somewhere between a statement and a reprimand. Chris was not sure whether it was leveled at the VA or the guys around the fire ring.
“I don’t like him being down there,” Carlos said.
Curtis said, “It’s the best place for him.”
“Have you been down there?” Ronnie asked in the same tone Carlos had used.
“Well, no, I-,” Curtis was interrupted by Ronnie.
“Then what the fuck do you know?” Ronnie asked. “Go down and check him out and then tell me it’s the best place for him.”
“I mean he’s damaged -,” Curtis was interrupted again by Ronnie.
“Damaged? Is that what you call it? Like a car bumper?” Ronnie challenged.
Ronnie was getting angrier. From the corner of his eye, Chris watched Charlie and saw no reaction. Charlie stayed focused on the flames in front of him, keeping his beer balanced on his knee, not moving or speaking.
“No, not like a fender on a car,” Curtis tried to explain.
“What did you say?” challenged Ronnie.
“I said not damaged like your fucking face, asshole.”.
Ronnie dove over the fire into Curtis, flattening him and the beach chair in which he was sitting. Before Ronnie could swing, Curtis had already hit him twice in the side of the head. Gaston and Carlos tried separating them, only to have the pugilists wiggle loose and slam into each other, falling on the sand, throwing punches that went awry, mostly landing in the sand. Carlos and Gaston were ineffective until Charlie’s dad stepped in to leverage the two combatants apart. The two fighters sat on either side of the ring and traded “fuck yous” for a while, until Gaston looked over at Charlie and said sarcastically, “Thanks for your help.”
“Why would I want to break up those two from clubbing each other?” Charlie said. “What is the fucking point of all this? We go off to fight Communism, we lose fifty thousand guys in defense of a foreign government that couldn’t string together a two-car parade, we come home, and people our age think we’re a bunch of fucking freaks, murderers….
“Rusty is a basket case in the VA. I used to go to see him. I’d read to him – the paper, sports, magazines. I took a Playboy into his room and showed him the pictures – nothing. So I thought what the fuck am I doing here, I don’t care; I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the whole thing.”
For the first time Charlie’s dad became aware of what was bothering him. He could now fathom the wrath, but was completely blindsided by what happened next.
Charlie turned to his father, “And you can go to hell.”
Chris was stunned; all he could say was, “Me?”
“Yeah, you and your whole fucked-up generation. None of the shit from your generation applies to us. You guys fought Nazis and Japs, you were actually defending a way of life, fighting real evil. So, when President-fuck-you-Kennedy calls us to serve, we think we’re going off to save the planet from Communism.”
Everyone around the fire ring was looking at Charlie. Gaston wanted to intercede on behalf of Charlie’s father, but he did not know what to say. On the other hand, Charlie was verbalizing what Gaston and the others thought about Vietnam.
“I am in such a fucked-up mood all the time; I don’t want to do anything but sleep. I am enraged at everyone. I was in the mall last week wearing my Navy work shirt. Some longhaired punk walked past me close enough to see my name, whispered it to his buddies and then said, “Baby killer.” I turned around and caught the three of them and beat the fuck out of them until security got there. When I told security what happened they clubbed the shit out of them for me; the only bright day I’ve had since I’ve been home.
“I don’t get the fucking point, Dad. I mean, I just don’t get it. Do you want to know why we’re all fucked up? You want to know what is wrong with us? We killed a girl who was eleven. ELEVEN! We didn’t shoot her or run her over by accident. No, we threw her off a ship into the fucking ocean because we were ordered to.”
Chris was astonished by Charlie’s lacerating fury. His smoldering resentment even caught the other four by surprise. Chris thought his connection with his son was an uns
hakeable bond. That Charlie was so angry shook him and gave Chris a feeling he had never experienced before. He believed that all the things they had done together from Indian Guides through Charlie’s sports and, finally, the Navy had built a strong relationship, but Charlie’s pitched anger proved that the relationship had been replaced with open hostility. The animus from Charlie was so strong that Chris did not know how to respond. It was like an indictment.
“Rusty got off easy,” Charlie continued. “He’s unconscious. We deal with it every day, and if I am not with you guys and being reminded of it, I have to listen to these stateside Jody-fucks comment on going to war. I wanna kill every draft dodger I see. All those sanctimonious conscientious objectors look down their noses at us, like, ‘How could you be so stupid to fight in war?’ Fuck them.”
Charlie stood up and threw his beer into the fire and said, “Fuck them and fuck you.”
He turned and walked away, leaving an awkward silence with the rest just looking at each other. They then looked at Chris and felt bad for him.
“He’s just frustrated, Dr. Palmer. He didn’t mean all that, except the draft dodger stuff,” Ronnie said, “He’ll get over it.”
Chris asked, “How was Rusty involved?”
The other four exchanged glances, wondering if they should answer. Finally, Gaston spoke.
“Rusty was the one who did the most to rescue the girl, and he…was the one who put her back in the water,” Gaston said. “The VA said he went into shock or something. He’s never recovered.”
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Charlie had reached the end of his coping skills and wanted to leave. When he saw his father later the next day, he told his dad he wanted to use the family’s second car to travel and Chris agreed. Chris just wanted him to be safe.
Chris tried to give him some traveling money, but Charlie said he had saved up money from the service. Chris wanted to make things right with Charlie and apologize, but Charlie did not want to create room for discussion. He could feel his father’s disappointment, but he was uncomfortable entering into some heart-felt dialogue with his dad. Charlie’s tormented heart was not in a forgiving, excusing, or apologizing state. In Charlie’s view, people were fucked and his parents were no different. He felt they had a plan for Charlie that he was supposed to follow, and if he did so, they would be proud of him. Screw that, he thought. What had been gained so far from following their master plan? Charlie’s view of life had been soured by the incident on the Enterprise, and it caused him to question everything, including his parents.