Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  Sorry about your woman-drought. Now that you’re a sophomore, you’ll find there’re lots more fish in the sea, some even a bit nicer than the girls at home. Happy Hannukah, if that’s how you spell it.

  I write him back when I can, trying to keep him current about some of the changes.

  It is partly because Bobby is Over There, though, and partly because it is hard not to have the suspicion by the fall of ’67 that the people who brought us The War are even more confused than we have feared, that I start studying about what is going on. I find the best single assessment was made by LBJ himself during his campaign for election in 1964. “Why send our boys eight or ten thousand miles away,” he said, “to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves?” I soon begin to waver between wanting to blow up the Pentagon and hoping to develop a sophisticated strategy for political change. I end up first going to and then organizing demonstrations against the war, the draft, Dow Chemical for its napalm production, and the university for its defense investments. I find that leaflets have to be printed, announcements posted, teach-ins organized. Buses have to be gotten for the March on Washington, empty cars filled, maps distributed, instructions given. Dope has to be smoked and spontaneous all-night rap sessions held.

  I keep hoping something in all we are doing might help save Bobby and some other grunts. I am wrong.

  ✳

  Nearly thirty years have passed. And I still cannot sleep.

  6

  Nearly a week passes before Bobby calls to tell me Erickson Bruce has deposed the members of the siting committee. Bruce and his staff took their testimony not only on the same day, but at exactly the same time in order to prevent anyone from knowing in advance what would be asked.

  “They still haven’t called Jeannie yet?”

  “No. You still haven’t talked to her yourself?”

  His voice lowers, cools. “Not yet.”

  “When will you?” He doesn’t answer. “Given the nature of the questions, I guess the press will be reporting that Jeannie is being investigated.”

  “Bank on it. Probably within the next day or so. I’ve already briefed Cindy.”

  “But have you briefed Laura?”

  There is another pause on his end. Then he says, “Very funny.”

  “She did not seem amused the last time I saw her.”

  I can hear him sigh. “We’re working on it. It’s hard.”

  I wait to see if he will elaborate. He does not.

  ✳

  Two days later, on Saturday morning, I read the small article on page three of the local paper. It begins, “Special Prosecutor Erickson R. Bruce confirmed yesterday he is investigating circumstances surrounding Jean A. Parrish’s testimony before the State Subcommittee on Siting for the Interstate Bypass. Jean A. Parrish is the younger sister of Lt. Gov. Robert Parrish, the candidate recently nominated to run against Rep. Richard Wheatley for the US Senate. Mrs. Parrish resigned as head of her brother’s campaign committee in April of this year. She could not be reached for comment.”

  I picture Jeannie reading this, shaking her head, and saying, “The only Mrs. Parrish I know is my mother.”

  Just as I finish reading the article, the phone rings. It is the former Laura Gordon, someone who might perhaps be called Mrs. Parrish, except that she is called Dr. Parrish.

  Laura has called to ask me the favor of playing some tennis with Bobby this afternoon. He has agreed to participate in a charity match next weekend to raise money for the multiple sclerosis chapter Jeannie heads. He is worried about embarrassing himself. He hasn’t played tennis in years and people will be paying money to watch him and other “celebrities” play.

  “I haven’t played in years, either,” I say.

  “You used to. You and Gail were good.”

  “Work has really piled up.”

  “I’d do it myself,” she says, “but today’s my day at the community clinic.” Laura treats sick children there for free every other weekend—mostly the sons and daughters of those same migrant farmworkers who Bobby revealed existed, startling our high school Spanish class. Now they have been joined at the clinic by some Cambodians and some farm machinery assemblers whose unemployment has run out. She is always out rescuing someone, except herself. Dr. Tyler’s advice to me to do something—a sport, volunteer work, anything—comes to mind.

  “I’m not much of a teacher…”

  “No, but as Bobby’s old friend, you won’t make him f-feel foolish, either.”

  I look out the window. It is sunny and the thermometer reads seventy-seven degrees. I can combine sport and volunteer work in one gesture. It also has the virtue of very low stakes. How bad can you fuck up a tennis lesson? “All right.”

  She thanks me.

  I say, “I guess you two have reached some understanding.”

  “Understanding is too spacious a word for what we’ve reached. He admits he is putting his political goals before our personal life, if that is what you can c-call what Bobby and I have together. But he claims it is all only temporary.”

  Wincing at the bitterness in her tone, I remember the old slogan “The personal is political,” something I believed before the years taught me how many of the heart’s joys and sorrows have nothing at all to do with who is president. Or senator.

  “But you don’t believe it is. Temporary.”

  She says, “I think it may be the beginning of something quite permanent. It’s like my father saying he was only going to have one drink. I’ve seen this movie before, I know the ending, and it makes me feel helpless. And angry.”

  “It doesn’t have to turn out badly.”

  “Only if he loses.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I’ll put it this way—that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  When I say nothing, she asks if I can pick Bobby up in about an hour.

  Laura Gordon, I think.

  ✳

  I am halfway through my sophomore year when I get a letter from Bobby, or at least from someone who signed his name that way. He is beginning to sound like someone else entirely.

  1/12/68

  Ben—

  We’ve been all up and down the Dau Tieng area for a month now. I find I say a month to myself over and over because it’s hard to believe. I don’t know what a month means. I don’t know what most things mean. All I know is you see stuff no one should see.

  Near Tay Ninh, a guy I went through basic with was following in one of our old tank tracks and stepped on a five-hundred-pound mine. He was in the trees, on the leaves, all over our ponchos and helmets. Some of us nearest the blast with blood all over us thought we were wounded. Turns out I was. Caught what they said looked like some slivers of shrapnel in the neck and cheek. Medic cleaned me up and probed the wounds. It wasn’t shrapnel. It was bone fragments from the guy who got it. Everyone’s a luck freak. Since there’re mines and booby traps and snipers and friendlies who turn out to be VC, mortar fire and ambushes and firefights, accidental strafings and bombings of our own positions, gun jam-ups, a flak jacket somebody forgets to keep all the way closed, a LURP squad who mistakes you for Them—you name it—your number can come up in a thousand different ways at any second of the live-long day. You can be like this little Southern guy, Billy Jones, who’ll do anything, climb down an NVA tunnel, be the guy shooting tracer bullets at night from an M-60, check first thing in the morning to make sure the claymore mines haven’t been turned the wrong way in the night, run point when we know for a fact Charlie’s out there, anything, and he’s been in country sixteen months without a scratch. Or you can be Jerry Gertz, the guy who stepped on the mine. He kept his head low and played it strictly by the book. No skill, wit, intelligence, or cunning counts. When it calls, you answer. No atheists when we make contact, either, and everybody’s got his lucky charm, magic totem and please-not-me ritual. I s
tay close to Billy Lee Jones, who is a bigoted ignorant mean motherfucker, and I never wash that sweat-rag bandanna I used to use working at the freight yard. My best friend here is a black guy from Detroit who basically hates Billy Lee, and he sticks with him more faithfully than I do, and I’m faithful as a newlywed. (My buddy’s name is Reggie Robinson. Everyone calls him Smokey because he believes in miracles.) I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I guess I want you to know there’s some bad shit that’s going on here. Plus stuff I haven’t mentioned—the phony body counts, and “pacification” of villages that basically involves greasing anything that moves, and you hear about rapes and executions and guys tossing grenades in their officers’ sleeping quarters. And you believe it. The guys who’ve been here the longest say it’s been quiet this month.

  It’s too bad. This is a beautiful country. We’re really fucking it over. Of course from everything I can see, the South Vietnamese are piss-poor soldiers. When it gets down to it, as it has done from time to time even in this allegedly quiet month, they don’t seem to give much of a shit, not unless their officers or ours are kicking their ass. Gotta go. Sergeant says we’ve just been invited to go hump up some hill, whose name is number eight hundred something or other, the one that we cleared twice last week. And from which, when we were done, we walked away and gave back without firing a round. Keep writing. Your letters are one of the things that help me keep it together. And take care, old friend.

  Within days after I get his letter, the Tet Offensive begins.

  All those generals’ reassurances and CIA spooks and defense department intelligence reports, and all those governmental statements about the war being over, have been wrong.

  In June I am in Rapid City, South Dakota, sprawled in a room at the Holiday Inn, my face itching from the beard I am growing after discovering my duties as a low-level campaign coordinator for Bobby Kennedy do not require me to look clean-cut. I am in a jubilant mood. The weather is good enough for me not to need to use air-conditioning, a bunch of others and I have been working long days and long nights, and our work has just been rewarded. The late returns are in. RFK has won the primary convincingly, beating not one but two opponents who are South Dakota’s neighbors, Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy. There are two other staffers sharing the motel room with me, but at the moment they are down in the restaurant trying to scare up some food. It has been a long day and we are tired, but we plan to be up for a while longer. It is two hours earlier in California, whose all-important primary is the same day as South Dakota’s, and we want to hear the results. (I had hoped to have been sent out to California to work, but as a mere college student and a Midwesterner, no such luck.) I snap on the television and sit on the bed.

  As we have already heard on a campaign secretary’s car radio, Bobby is running ahead, and in fact he has at this moment just finished his speech claiming a great victory and is making his way through the Los Angeles ballroom crowd. Annoyed that I have missed him, I am about to turn the TV off and go to bed when the two staffers come in with sandwiches and coffee. I tell them the California results, and, as we look at the screen, the gasps and the screaming begin.

  His death puts an end to the brief green season many of us have cherished. JFK, MLK, RFK. And if we find out later how flawed each of these men were, they still spoke to aspirations we honored.

  But among those young at the time, some people get numb or cynical or become hedonists or turn inward; others turn east, a few find Jesus or the Maharishi or Hare Krishna or wait for The Revolution or join a commune, and in between many try a pharmacopoeia of new drugs to show them The Way. What is startling, though, is how many who so recently burned with idealism now simply burn, and within a few months more are close to burning out altogether. I have lost my own sense about how to go forward, and though I think I’ve escaped the most far-out of The Ways to carry on, in the end no one I know escapes.

  Not even Bobby Parrish.

  2/27/68

  Ben—

  I’m coming home.

  Billy Lee Jones was not lucky. My friend Smokey, the guy from Detroit, was not lucky. Many others I knew were not lucky. I was lucky. If you can call a shattered femur, severed tendons in the hand, and a broken eye orbit lucky. Which you can. They tell me I probably will keep the leg, and I should see, and I should regain partial use of my hand.

  During a counterattack a few days after all the fighting at the Vietnamese new year, Tet, Billy Lee went down an NVA tunnel after some snipers. His feet were still sticking out when they blew him away. Two days later after a skirmish, under orders, Smokey was checking the pack and pockets of a dead soldier the NVA left behind. The body was booby-trapped. Smokey was still alive when the Medevacs choppered him out. They couldn’t get him back in time. He left a girlfriend he was going to marry and their one-year-old son. And a mother, his father having died, like mine, when he was younger. Afterwards I started doing some strange shit. We got a new gung-ho lieutenant who’d just graduated from VMI. He sent me on point, I said fine. Smokey’s being gone made me lonely, and Billy Lee’s buying it made me scared. And the whole stinking scene made me mad. I was like fuck it, so I shot anything that moved. If I didn’t like the way a breeze stirred the leaves, I shot up the leaves. On point I shot a monkey, a snake, and two lizards. Scared shit out of the rest of the company, who thought we were under fire, but I thought fuck them, too. Gonna do this my way. Being scared didn’t make me afraid. Made me reckless. I used to have nightmares about shooting a civilian. Now I’m thinking, hey, let ’em stay in their villages—somebody pad around near me while I’m on patrol, they’re fucked, I don’t care if it’s General Westmoreland.

  So a couple of weeks ago in the late afternoon we’re sitting in camp, I’m at the perimeter. I’m eating some K rations, ham and eggs, about the only good stuff to eat there is here, and I think I see something moving. Think, what the hell, maybe I can blow away one of those huge rats they have around here, so I unload a couple of clips. Then I go back to chowing down. The lieutenant’s had it and is all ready to bust my ass for being trigger-happy again. Then a couple of guys who’re checking the wires before dark find three dead North Vietnamese who, until I spoiled their whole day, had been setting up for a sapper attack at nightfall. I hear they’re going to give me a medal. So Sarge persuades the captain to send me to the base camp near Chu Lai, wants me to have a few days to cool out, catch a USO show or something. Maybe he’s right and it’s part of the whole world of shit I’ve been in the last weeks, but I see this nurse, Bonnie, and I fall in love. I mean I’m ready to die. Everybody who’s been here six, eight months says anybody with round eyes is Marilyn Monroe to you. I’m here three months and I can’t take my eyes off this woman. (Women here usually hook up with officers. Why not? They’ve got the good food, nice quarters, easy life. Grunts ain’t so lucky.) But I am obsessed. Third night after I meet her, I’ve got half my clothes off and half hers, too, and I am trying to explain just how short life can be, and just when I think maybe she might be beginning to see things from my perspective, the base starts to get incoming. Rockets, mortar, machine guns.

  Everybody’s out of their hooches and the bar and the dining hall and heading for the bunkers. She frantically gets her clothes on and goes straight for the hospital. I’m thinking, what else, Bonnie, so I head for the hospital, too. Mortar fire starts walking in, boom-boom-boom, and like a terrible dream you can’t stop or change you can see three or four shells in advance exactly what’s going to happen—the hospital’s going to get it. And does. Medics and nurses are running all over, guys already wounded once have gotten it again and are screaming, a fire’s going in two of the operating areas. I run in. I don’t see Bonnie anywhere. They’re out of fire extinguishers, so we’re using water and swinging blankets. A surgeon’s in there directing everybody to take care of some burning mattresses. I see no one’s paying any attention to the fucking oxygen tanks. I start rolling one away, it’s burni
ng my hands right through the blanket, and the surgeon goes bullshit. Thinks I’m stealing it. I point to where it says “Caution: Flammable!” on the top before he gets the picture, and then he runs to get the other one himself. We get the fires under control, I’m still looking around for Bonnie, and start helping move guys who’re movable to the bunker.

  Once a place gets hit you tend to think it isn’t going to get hit again, lightning striking twice and all that, but the mortar took out a lot of the protective sandbags at the walls, so we’re being cautious. I’m helping this tank gunner who has his head mummified completely in gauze when a rocket hits within about fifteen yards of the mortar round. Next thing I know it’s daylight and I’m on my back in the very same hospital. Bonnie it turns out was in a complete spasm of guilt looking for the doctor she’s engaged to, missed him in all the confusion, and made it back to the bunker untouched. The guy who did the surgery on me? The one who’d gotten pissed off about the oxygen tanks? Turns out that’s him, her fiancé. He recognizes me, says he’s put me in for a medal. Well, fuck the medals, I’m glad to be alive. Though I still miss Bonnie. But at least the tank gunner got no new injuries. I caught all the shit that was coming his way.

  From here I go to Saigon, Saigon to Tokyo, Tokyo to home. Don’t wait up. Write through San Francisco, they’ll find me. Here’s hoping there’s no shit coming your way, now or ever.

  B.

  By the time Bobby gets home—finishes his hospital rehabilitation and the physical therapy and is given the two Purple Hearts, the Bronze and the Silver Stars, and his honorable discharge—I have been back working in the foundry for two months saving money for a trip. To where I have no idea. I’ve thought about Europe or Mexico, but going either place feels wrong while everything at home is coming apart at the seams. I delay deciding until it is almost too late to go anywhere before school begins again. But not too late to go to the Chicago Democratic Convention. With a student-reduced fare to O’Hare, it is not even that expensive. Which is what I write to Bobby while he’s awaiting his final discharge papers, urging him to meet me in Evanston, where I’ll be staying.