“And why does our CIA and military think they have the right to change other countries’ governments for them? What would we do if the Vietnamese decided to bring their soldiers here and control our government?” I was almost apoplectic now.
“These things are very complex,” my father said. “Things aren’t black and white. In war, morality gets murky. We aren’t all good or bad and neither are the North Vietnamese. . . .
“Sara, the truth is we say we live in accord with principle or the rule of law, but it’s really a case-by-case basis in foreign affairs. If we can win by force, we do it.” My father sat back and looked at me squarely. “Sara, history shows we’re one of the most violent and war-like peoples in the world.”
“No we’re not! We can’t be.” For a moment my mind flashed on a trip to Florida we’d once taken to visit Mom’s sister. All along the way there were shacks selling bargain towels, firecrackers, and most of all: guns.
But my father kept looking at me with his steady eyes.
“Well then,” I said. “We’re the worst country in the world!”
The Sara in The Hague wouldn’t have recognized this Sara, not even a year older, who was feeling a sensation close to revulsion about her own country. If to be American meant to be the warmonger of the world, I didn’t want any part of being an American. Until now, I’d thought America was exceptional, that we did provide a model of freedom and opportunity, that we were able to correct our mistakes. What would my country be in this world? What would I be?
My father said, “It will be okay,” as a father does to a child, but we both knew for a lot of people, Vietnamese and American, it wouldn’t.
One day I looked up from the war statistics in the paper and heard my parents talking about the pressures at my father’s office. My father had just had to take the polygraph, to test his loyalty to the administration. As part of their work, CIA officers are required to do so periodically, as a kind of monitoring of their commitment and fealty. My mother told me years later that everyone lied about a thing or two. But this was more than a test.
“It’s demeaning. I have a right to my views,” my father said.
“We’ve got to get you away from that place,” my mother said. “Why don’t you put in for a post in Asia. India, anywhere, or Taipei again. I’d love Taipei.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for openings in Asia,” he said.
“Is all this worth it?” my mother said into the air of the kitchen.
My father was stoic and my mother was upright and strong, working hard at her physical therapy practice, but she was more prone to upset than she ever had been before. One day I spied her sneaking a cigarette in the yard; she had promised to quit smoking when we left Holland. And my father was quietly, invisibly frustrated. His secret was hovering at the uttering point.
Now every night I listened to Walter Cronkite and kept a count of the dead boys and followed the battles against the Vietnamese. Furious at the CIA and the army, I thought of the Vietnamese people dying in their villages. I saw young Americans dying, I heard bombs dropping, I saw children running, I saw helicopters dropping into crashing blazes. I saw the poor people on the street in Taipei. I saw almond eyes. I saw the raggedy girl. I choked up all the time for the young draftees and for the Vietnamese. I was like a crystal about to break.
Sara and I climbed the 893 steps to the top of the Washington Monument. From here I could see all of Washington: the Capitol, the green swath of the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial. I could almost see the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It all seemed ostentatious and bloodthirsty. I knew now that soldiers really could die unknown. What did the monuments really represent? America, freedom, all the glorious words: a sham.
Sara and I sat in her tower room and wrote protest letters. The letters were white flowers scattered around us and we were flower children amid them. If only people would plant flowers and be kind to one another instead of making war. It seemed so easy, so obvious at fifteen—an age when a daisy is a discovery, newly born. Sometimes Sara and I went to Montrose Park and made buttercup and daisy chains for the whole world. And it seemed like we were doing the president’s work—it was that important. There was a famous photo of a hippie putting a daisy in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. This was what should be happening all over the world. We could do it: if everyone would just join together.
While the war had crushed my apple-pie version of America, the counterculture was giving me a new vision of my country and its possibilities. If youth needs an ideology, this period was bulging with clear commandments to follow: Make love, not war. Spurn material possessions. Be a nonconformist. Be true to your nature. Save the earth. Question authority. Be here now. Each of these tenets felt like a blazing, pure, fresh discovery.
Through the lens of the sixties revolution, and my new-hatched abstract thinking, I could poke holes into anything now, and I suddenly saw flaws and hypocrisies everywhere. I thought about how everything in the world logically ought to be. Work should be done for its meaning and societal value, not its remunerative properties. Schools ought to be open and free like the British school Sum-merhill. We should live in communes where child care is shared by everyone. We should drive cars that don’t pollute, or else bike or walk. We should wear our clothes two or three days in a row, to avoid polluting our rivers and seas. We should grow our own food and bake our own bread. People should be appreciated for their uniqueness, not their conformity—what notion could be more heaven-sent for a weird Foreign Service girl? Each of these ideas shone. During a course in psychological anthropology I’d take in my thirties I would learn that American adolescents, more than those of most other cultures, think they reinvent the world. As they recapitulate the history of thought, they feel like the great explorers.
The dictates of the counterculture offered me a way to be an American and feel good about it: I could be critical of the government but love my country, my father said. Dissent was American. Our country was founded on it.
My family was riding through the West Virginia countryside—a realm of shaggy blond fields and broken farmhouses, once upright, effortful, hardy structures sagged down into themselves like fallen souffles, testaments to the back roads of the American dream. My parents loved this countryside. Each might have been happy living in an old farmhouse—he with a pile of books, she with a garden to cultivate—and perhaps be happier, life boiled down to its salts.
The tidy little car was rambling its way along an empty back road. The autumn sun was Achilles slashing swords of brilliant light into the crowns of the russet and lemon trees, and Demeter pouring a yellow of glory and goodness across the pastures. We curled around a copse of old deciduous trees and then the world suddenly seemed to flash open. On the left were the old, scruffy, bowing woods, and to the right was a meadow like a bolt of radiant cloth. It was an average West Virginia field—stretching to a creek bed where the trees lined up. But here, in the mid distance, it seemed like an early Christian tableau—with a beam of celestial yellow-blue casting a careless radiance over the world.
“Stop, Pop. I have to run in this meadow,” I said. My father, understanding my urge—the draw of American beauty—pulled over, and as everyone slowly piled out, I darted out the door, stepped into the meadow as if into some sort of golden liquid, stretched out my arms, and ran into the grasses. I ran full-tilt toward the trees, then I curved like a hawk, my arms winged. Then I began to bound, eating the meadow in huge gulps. Chevy Chase vanished, the war nonexistent, Sidwell left in some long-ago past, I spun, like a top, free of self-consciousness, social life, and time. It was as if the beauty had shocked my mind into abeyance, knocked my heart onto an alternative beat—one that swallowed beauty like the finest, honeyed water—that sucked beauty, and beauty alone, from the array of the world.
I ran until my arms were cooled, tingling with sweat, my legs ached, and my heart was banging. I collapsed, sinking into the gold like a deer into its bed, and, swishing my fingers through the dry stalks, I look
ed up at the clear, watercolor-washed, Madonna-blue sky. My heart was thrumming like a lute; I’d never felt this happy. My body was fresh. I was beautiful, the world was beautiful—I was the meadow and the meadow was me—and everything was ever so fine.
Through the natural world, I found my way to another America, an America I could love. Always the land had been at the heart of my father’s love of country. Perhaps it is the particular lay of a landscape that holds a person fast to her country through, and despite, changing political weather.
At Friends Meeting, Mr. Johnston described George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, standing on a storybook-green hill in rainy England—I imagined him shivering in worn moleskin trousers and a beat-up moss-green hat, gazing into the trees and hills—and feeling a deep shiver of peace that flowed through his gaunt body and out of him into the world, uniting everything: the fount of Quaker worship. Just hearing the story, I felt confirmed. I knew about dissolving into the landscape. Human beings were simply mammals, offspring of nature: beautiful, green-white, tender shoots springing up out of the loam of the woods.
Sara and I grabbed onto the Save the Earth Movement. Ecology had just been “discovered.” This gave me more cairns to follow:
Move back to the land
Recycle envelopes
Build a dome
Heat with a woodstove
Do laundry by hand
Make candles and soap
Form a co-op Chant
Grow a garden
In my backyard, Sara and I read out passages of Walden to each other. Henry David Thoreau’s masterpiece was our new bible.
December 24, 1841
I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what will I do when I get there? Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?
My new goal was to live in a cabin in the wilderness—to be a stalwart, self-sufficient inhabitant of the American woods. (I didn’t know that Thoreau sent his laundry to town.)
One early evening, Sara and I saw the film Easy Rider together. The film was a tour of American glory: a long, awe-inspiring motorcycle journey through a break-your-heart Western landscape. But it also was a bald and disturbing portrayal of intolerance: the two hippies—average practitioners of psychedelics and free love, a bit vapid but basically kind, harmless people—were sneered at along the road, and then blown away. This was an America that despised difference and wanted to kill freedom.
Just as school was letting out, knowing his approval ratings were about to plummet, Nixon, and the Vietnamese president Thieu, announced the withdrawal of 25,000 U.S. troops. Kissinger, meanwhile, was flummoxed. He kept saying, “I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point.”
This summer of 1969 would be the bloodiest of the Vietnam War—scores of American men would die each week—and the season I would learn how glorious a real American summertime could be.
In July, Mom, Andy, and I decamped and moved to a rambling wooden house overlooking the Patuxent River on the property of the Sotterley Plantation in Hollywood, Maryland. The rental house had been offered to us by other “State Department” friends, the Fitzgeralds, who, when they were in the States, spent their summers at the plantation in another shambling house on a bluff overlooking the water. The Fitzgeralds had three children still at home: Barb, two years older than I; Ted, a year younger; and Nan, a year younger than Andy. They were all lanky kids, with deep tans, lean salty legs, peeling noses, and hair the color of sun-bleached wheat. Mrs. Fitzgerald, with a puff of brown hair, pearl earrings, and a natural elegance, had a loud southern voice and a hearty laugh. She made wonderful pots of fish stew and delicious layered salads smothered in mayonnaise and dotted with bacon.
Weekends, when the fathers made the two-hour drive to join us, we ate Mrs. Fitzgerald’s chili or my mother’s soy sauce chicken out on the picnic table in the field overlooking the river, and the fathers drank beer and relaxed. My father was growing a mustache, and Mr. Fitzgerald, in a pair of baggy khaki shorts and a faded Ivy League T-shirt, fondled their big old Labrador while he and my father compared goings-on at FE and LA, the Far East and Latin American desks. Being around the Fitzgeralds and the other State Department people who dropped in on weekends, I felt like I was back with my own people.
We kids spent our days fishing for crabs with long nets jabbed off the long, rickety wood-slatted dock, jumping in and out of the square of the bay netted off from jellyfish, and scampering through the marshes and fields of the hot Maryland countryside, feeling like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. In the late afternoons and cool evenings, we took turns playing the guitar on the Fitzgeralds’ porch, watching the sun cast rainbows on the water. How many times did the Maryland air, or the air of every state in the union, receive the notes of “Blowin’ in the Wind” that summer?
It was American bliss, but the troubles of the world still managed to wend their way down to Sotterley and stir things up. One day, Barb and a visiting friend went off secretively to smoke behind the boathouse. None of us told the Moms. And when the Fitzgeralds’ older brother Dan, who was brilliant and went to an Ivy League college, came down, he and Barb confronted their father one night at dinner. Usually we younger kids just half-listened to the fathers’ shop talk, but this time we were alert as swamp foxes.
We were halfway through Mrs. Fitzgerald’s crab and potato stew when Dan said, “So Dad, when are you going to really get us out of this immoral quagmire?” His tone was quiet and curious, but there was a slight thread of defiance.
Barb, who was the bubbly, passionate one, said, “Yeah Dad, you older generation are just a bunch of warmongering, establishment fat cats. . . .”
The two younger Fitzgerald kids stayed quiet, like this was a familiar dynamic and they knew to keep mum.
Mr. Fitzgerald, who had a dignity and an intelligent authority that made me both admire him and turn bashful when I was around him, just laughed and said, “That’s one way to look at it. But we fat cats’ll get it right one of these days. ”
Dan and Barb exchanged meaningful looks. Mrs. Fitzgerald laughed and got up to fetch the salad, and the topic changed to the fine crop of tomatoes this summer.
After dinner, wandering around licking my ice cream cone, I heard Mr. Fitzgerald talking to my father on the porch.
My father had said, “What do you think about Saigon, Ed?”
Mr. Fitzgerald, who seemed to love Pop, said, “Bad stuff, Charlie.”
Later I’d read about the atmosphere at the CIA and the State Department during this period of the war. Both arms of government were rent by division. “The best and the brightest,” all those Ivy Leaguers and other smart young boys recruited into the government after World War II, had screwed up and everyone was blaming everyone else and no one knew what to do. Arguments reigned inside the walls of the giant buildings and protestors assailed them from without. Families of State Department and Agency employees, like mine and the Fitzgeralds, were being torn apart by the war.
I heard my father saying to my mother one evening on the porch, “What are we doing dropping eighteen-year-old boys into that God-forsaken mess?” My father’s tone brought to me, out of the blue, a picture of Mr. Chu quaking with fear back in Taiwan.
But the warm tides of our red-white-and-blue summer resumed their soothing lapping when the fathers returned to Washington. One afternoon, we all scrunched into Barb’s beat-up VW bug and she drove us, barefoot, to the carnival in Hollywood up the road, on Route 4. There, a nowhere spot along the highway, a traveling caravan had erected a small Ferris wheel, a rickety roller coaster, and a merry-go-round. We gorged on cotton candy, peanut brittle, and Cokes in between stomach-sickening twirls on the rides, again feeling like characters in a Mark Twain novel. On July 21, drinking lemonade in the sweltering heat, we watched, on a tiny black-and-white TV, a man walk on the moon.
The summer rolled on. As we hiked with our sticks in marshes and swam in a warm Maryland river, America’s troubles faded into the background. Elsewhere, a coalition of antiwar groups planned a series of “moratoriums” on the war; the Woodstock rock festival, a miracle of peaceful cooperation, sex, and music, took place in that soon-to-be-legendary field up in New York; and Henry Kissinger, true to his clandestine activities-loving self, met secretly with a North Vietnamese negotiator.
But the most miraculous day of that sun-kissed summer was that on which my mother led Andy and me along a little dirt road that traversed the plantation and showed us the raspberry bushes lining the path. We picked berries all afternoon, plunking them into beat-up saucepans from the rental house pantry. Back at the house, while the sea breeze sipped at our sunburned skins, she showed us how to make pie crust from scratch the way our Indiana grandma had, and to concoct the syrupy, delicious berry-glop for a raspberry pie. I didn’t know my mother possessed such knowledge. This was the summer’s miracle: my mother’s raspberry pie, that homemade American dessert to eat for all our soldiers fighting in Vietnam. This was what they were fighting to get back to.
18
the secret
The month that school began, Ho Chi Minh died and the North Vietnamese vowed never to give up. They believed it was their “sacred duty” to defeat the United States and the South Vietnamese. Nixon, meanwhile, told the congressional leadership, “I will not be the first president of the United States to lose a war.” From the outset of school that year, I felt part of the swirl. I knew how to do Sidwell now. The white halls were supercharged with antiwar fever.
“I’m fed up, Lois,” my father said.
He again hadn’t gotten the promotion he’d expected.
“Don’t worry about it, Charlie. Next round for sure,” my mother said.
In a government job, a man and his career are subject to swinging political tides in the country at large and to the small, mean political tides within his particular agency, and his particular division of that agency. Promotions are a matter of political calculation, yes, but also random dumb luck. Who was at what helm at what hour. At a certain age, by wayward winds, men’s careers rise or stagnate.
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