At the bowling alley I suddenly felt embarrassed about my robe and the company I was keeping. There weren’t many people inside, but the heavyset man at the soda fountain and the three or four other young men wandering around looked at me. I felt like I was, well, in my pajamas in a public place, and so I pretended I didn’t see them, and tried to hold my head high, allied to my kindred.
The bowling was a joke. I could barely lift the balls, I felt so tired and weak. And I was hampered by my prejudice against bowling. Elmer had to be prodded to take the ball each time. His eyes were constantly full of tears. He could barely look down the alley, and he just squatted down and sort of gently let the ball roll out of his hands like you would a little child setting out to walk on its own.
George had to be reined in constantly. He didn’t know what he was doing or where he was. He trotted across the alleys talking to himself, he bumped into the little desks at the head of the alleys, and finally Bruce, the orderly, had to stay by him every minute, walking with him up to the place you got the ball, and directing him to toss it down the right alley. He did so, jerkily, like it was not a ball but a nasty piece of sticky garbage he was trying to get off his hand.
Steve’s eyes darted all around, looking for escape routes, but then when it was his turn, it was like another person suddenly slipped into him. He strolled up to the alley like he was the alpha in a pride of lions and gracefully swooped the ball down to the pins, deftly making strikes almost every time.
Blair picked up the balls like they were rightfully his, and hurled them down the alley, as if they were bazooka rounds and he was making a clean massacre of the enemy.
Jim sort of danced around with the ball and when he let it go, it zigzagged down the chute.
Brad was impatient, and so sometimes his balls were well aimed while other times his thoughts were back in Montana and he didn’t care and it just wandered, unowned, along the gleaming wood slats.
Mad that I had had to come here, and feeling very weak in my stomach and arms, I made halfhearted attempts to hit the pins. I really didn’t care where the ball went, though sometimes I did have a spurt of mild pleasure when more than two or three pins fell. At regular intervals, I thought of Will, Annie, and Matthew, and everyone back at CA, and everything seemed strange beyond strange. What am I doing here? Let me out of here.
We were all in our own worlds. Even so, our orbits seemed to overlap, and we were a team. We all clapped when anyone knocked down any pins, and when Steve came up to the plate, we all held our breaths and watched, stunned, talent in vivo. Blair exuded anger but even he got a little quirk of a smile on the corners of his lips when we clapped for him. Brad and he shook hands. Brad whistled when I managed to get a strike.
I’d lived in a lot of cultures, and this one, in a way, was at once the most rigid and the most caring. Somehow the doctors and the other staff, none of them older than thirty-five—had put hard thought to it and cobbled together a community that worked. The rules were clear, we each had a role and a job; there was no choice but to attend group and go to meals and go to OT. And the doctors asserted both a sense of challenge that we perform at our best, and a deep kind of caring that rippled around the meeting room and scooped us into its embrace. Even blazing Blair, who stood during most meetings, moving constantly like a leopard at the zoo, snapped out “Way to go, man!” to George when he managed to pull himself together and pass out the popcorn before the lights went out on movie night. Probably even for the doctors what they’d accomplished was startling. Fate, or the draft, had conspired to bring together some guys who could work together, and out of the mess of ingredients, even though some of the inmates would no doubt have disagreed, concocted a nourishing stew.
All the men seemed to me infinitely old, even though the majority of them were no more than ten years my senior. Brad treated me like an equal, a best friend. I didn’t realize that to him I looked grown. After the bowling, he sought me out. One day, looking out the window, he told me, “I faked depression so I could get back to my wife. She’s trying to divorce me,” he said, his eyes tearing up.
I asked about where he lived and what he wanted to do before the army. “Maybe things will change when you’re there in person,” I said. “I bet they will.” The murky look in his eyes lifted and he gave me a hug. His cheek was both hard and soft against mine.
Suddenly I knew I was attractive, at least to this man.
One day, in group, the men focused in on me. “How’s it going for you, Sara,” Dirk asked.
“I’m a little pissed off to still be here,” I said, showing off my new Ward 3 lingo.
“So you got your eye on anyone back at the school in Kobe?” Steve, the escape artist, asked. He was actually focused on me rather than unguarded doors.
I blushed. “I’m worried about what everyone will think when I get back.” This whole experience was so weird and such a strange mixture: I hated it and yet it was also a kind of miracle.
Brad said, “They won’t even think about it. You’re great.”
“We’re gonna miss you, kid,” Blair said.
Elmer gave a huge, heaving sigh and I started to cry. And they all just let me, sitting there with kindness in their wounded eyes.
Each day at group I got the hang of it more. I had never heard men talk like this: of feeling pissed off, of feeling murderous, of feeling like “offing” themselves. One man started crying uncontrollably as he told of a little child he thought he might have killed by accident. Another tore up a Kleenex as he described putting his dead friend in a helicopter. Another one refused to talk about Nam at all, though his body shook when others talked about it. Ken, though forced to come to group, usually collapsed in a heap and had to be forced to sit, with Dirk holding his arm.
As I listened, I was taking in a new view of both stoicism and emotion. I saw now that stoicism—being a blind and blinkered, unseeing marine—could be, for the GIs in Vietnam facing horror, or for a girl plopping down year after year in a new place, a necessity. Also, I saw that, with stoicism, anger, sadness, and disappointment would poke out sideways if they weren’t at least acknowledged. It was better to respect them as guideposts, rather than as black cats to be avoided at all costs. These bruised-eyed airmen had taught me it was safe to be tender.
I had always thought the world must be set up so that we all had an equal proportion of joy and sorrow or it would be too hard to bear. Now I saw, looking at Blair and Ken, that the world was not fair and was never going to be. The airmen taught me both not to be a soldier and what true bravery was. Bravery was taking in and feeling and acknowledging it all—and marching on. As the Buddhists I’d read counseled, “The only way is through.” And group made me see that openness, rather than restriction and secretiveness, brought joy. Our shared vulnerability made us human. Our armor didn’t.
It was a new and better world I was walking into. It was huger than ever: blue-skyed and towering and broad and lightly canopied, an infinite curve of bright-shining possibility.
American GIs weren’t what I’d thought they were. Up until Tachi, they’d been stereotypes to me: a mass of unfeeling, brute, crew cut rednecks who lacked the courage to oppose the government. Blindered automatons who didn’t think, but merely shot at what they were told to shoot—the worst interpretation of the marine at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The men on Ward 3 weren’t a mass at all. Each was as different from the other as scrambled eggs and blackberry pie and beef stew. Or twigs and rocks and ocean. And they were not unfeeling, brute cowboys. They seemed a world older than I felt, but they were simply young men, fragile as any: with hearts that could be seared and punched, and violently and desperately wounded. At last, I’d lost my ability, facile during the antiwar demos, to lump all soldiers together with a sneering dismissal.
With Dr. Cohen, I’d learned a new, more honest way to interact and I had added a new mode to my repertoire. I could be the chirpy embassy girl, making a brave, good show of things, and I could a
lso be emotionally honest and open. And either was true-blue American.
I met with Dr. Cohen and we troubleshot about my return to school. “What if it happens again?” I said.
Dr. Cohen said, “You know, Sara, we don’t exactly know what happened to you. It doesn’t fit any common pattern. I don’t think it will happen again, but we should be careful.” I loved that “we.” “What we do know is that when you became disoriented, you had an excruciating headache and a very high fever. If you get either of those again I want you to immediately take a high dose of aspirin. Start with two and then if it continues, take two more.”
Next worry: What would I do if the kids asked me where I’d been? It was so embarrassing.
“It’ll be five minutes of embarrassment and then everyone will forget about it. Why not try honesty? Tell them you were burned out and spent some time in a military hospital.” I thought of my father’s words from long ago: “Sara, you must face into your fears.”
Then we talked a little bit about the kids at school I liked and what I wanted to be involved in when I got back. Dr. Cohen said, “Remember, if you like someone, take a chance. You have nothing to lose.”
Then Dr. Cohen gave me a big hug. He was sending me back to CA refreshed. Like a spy, I’d been handed a new identity: a portfolio to a new land, a new language, a fresh passport with a new photograph in which my hair framed, rather than covered, my face. But this identity was real.
A balloon, if squeezed enough, will burst its skin. This February in 1971 was one of those points in life when an external event squeezes you, and you break open. Before Tachikawa, I had had a false identity, an identity too tight to encompass all of me or allow me to thrive. Now I had space to breathe and feel and move. The ordeal I had just come through—my loss of identity, hospitalization, and reassembly—presaged a parallel slippage of identity, upending, and transformation that my father would soon undergo. Both my father and I, sooner or later, had to face the miasma of our secrets, stoicism, and false identities. And beyond the obvious secrets and fake identities, we’d long harbored deeper ones with which we had to come to grips: the secret of our human needs and vulnerability, and the mask of invincibility we wore. This was the year of reckoning.
As I left the ward, Ken was lying crumpled by the nurses’ station. Walking out the double doors at the end of the hall—Dirk was holding the door for me, saying “Good-bye, Princess. We’ll miss you”—I suddenly understood why Dirk and the other techs had talked to people leaving about the likelihood that they’d miss the hospital.
In two weeks, I’d gained a decade’s worth of experience.
In Japan, I was born in one U.S. Air Force hospital; in a U.S. Air Force hospital, I’d made my second beginning.
During my hospitalization in Tachikawa, Lieutenant Calley was being tried for premeditated murder of the South Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. At the base snack bar, my father showed me a copy of the Post he’d gotten at the Tokyo embassy, where he had been going for talks. While I’d been living with shell-shocked men, South Vietnamese troops had made incursions into Laos, trying to disrupt the supply lines of the Ho Chi Minh trail. This first action that the South Vietnamese had taken on their own had failed miserably. Furthermore, the regime was now acknowledged to be a Swiss cheese of corruption. As the American forces withdrew, the South Vietnamese were beginning to feel like the sacrificial lambs of American power. Anti-American protests were springing up in Saigon. One of President Thieu’s inner circle had made a bitter pronouncement: “The Americans are businessmen. They’ll sell you out if you can no longer assure them of a profit.”
22
tea and bean cakes
I was in a medicated blur again, back at CA, but it was a different kind of fog when I’d left. This time, even though I was so groggy I slept through American history class, I was tracking the world. And there was no second Sara in operation.
The first day back, Andy was solicitous and protective, his eyes concerned, his floppy hat askew. He checked on me between classes. And my friends were quietly helpful. They didn’t quite know how to behave with me and tried to act like nothing had happened. I told Annie and a few others that I’d been in an Air Force hospital but was better now. Gretel didn’t even need to know; she was her same old, reliable sweet self.
At the end of the first day back, I lay down on my bed and placed my hands on my belly. I could feel my hip bones just under the rim of my hip-hugger jeans. Touching my own hard bones, I felt calm. I had within me, under my skin, what it took: the strength to name and hold pain until it subsided, to protect and express myself as I moved through a day.
My mother rented a tiny apartment halfway down the CA hill to be near me. Every couple of days, I went there and she cooked me some Kobe beef, fortifying me with protein. In her wanders around the city she had also discovered a German bakery, and she fed me excellent thick black bread slathered with butter, to fatten me up.
My father had had to return to Kuching. He called my mother and me at her flat every few days to check on me, even though it was prohibitively expensive.
“Just go slow and take it a day at a time. I know you can do it,” he said, his voice gentle and worried, and saturated with love.
Each week, and then every two weeks, I went by bullet train back to Tokyo, to Tachi, to see Dr. Cohen. Little by little, he tapered off my medications so I could walk around without squinting, the air was clear, and I could hear clearly and focus again. Gradually, I re-entered the stream. And one day, I was jabbering with Agnes and Annie like nothing had ever happened. With one big difference: I was strong, but no longer a stiff marine. Instead of saying “I had a great day,” I would say, “I’m a little pissed off about the math homework. . . .”
Upon my return, I befriended some new people. A girl named Ruth, who wore a bun and was one of those girls who looks twenty-five and possesses a forty-year-old’s wisdom at seventeen, invited me to meet her in Rokko, the village at the foot of the CA hill, one afternoon. She led me into a small doorway in a row of shops in the tiny village center. The realm into which we entered was carpeted with tatami mats and a handful of low tables. We sat down on zabutons at one of the intimate tables and Ruth ordered tea.
A lady in a kimono brought us our cha.
“It’s your karma,” Ruth said about my time in the hospital. “We all have our own fates, our own natures. . . . You just have to respect who you are. Each person is meant to be here. We’re all waves in the ocean.”
Ruth recommended I read a beautiful book by the literary giant Yukio Mishima, The Sound of Waves. When, a few days later, I opened Mishima’s paean to young love—gorgeous in its simplicity—it seemed as though the words and feelings, rather than my taking them in, were issuing from me. This tale of a young fisherman and his sweetheart was suffused with an honoring of the nonverbal.
“There you see Mishima’s capacity for subtlety and tenderness,” Ruth said. She then explained to me the Japanese preference for the indirect, the nuanced, the unsaid. “The Japanese ideal,” she said, “is to understand through the pores instead of the ears. Words not spoken are considered deepest. The smartest and most developed people can read each other between the lines. In Japan, we believe the innermost self is kept hidden—except with a true love, when it is understood intuitively.” I set Ruth’s observation beside the American’s propensity for saying out loud, and loudly, exactly what he thought, forever drawing attention to himself.
“We could spend hours together without talking. We understood without words.” To my friends and me, this would be the ideal in romance. In college, two of my friends would be driven crazy by their Japanese boyfriends’ propensity for silence and by their assumption that their girlfriends should understand them without words. But for now, I harbored a new dream of a boy who would understand me even from far away through the skin.
At the boys’ dorm one evening, we watched the U.S.-Chinese table tennis match. Everyone was talking about ping-pong diplomacy. My
father wrote that this thaw in U.S.-Chinese relations was a huge event. The Chinese had stopped calling us “running dog imperialists” and had invited the American ping-pong team to China.
Sara’s recent letter said that American support for the war in Vietnam was down to 34 percent. Half believed it had been morally wrong to get involved in the conflict. The protests, she said, were now led by Vietnam vets. I imagined Brad back there, marching, and a warming syrup flowed through me.
Suddenly at school I was no longer confined to looking. It was like I’d broken out of the cage. I was a talker and a runner, active now. I’d taken onboard a little of the nutty Sara, and laughed and opined out loud.
Annie and I were watching Will Suzuki dribbling a basketball with Jim.
Will was Japanese American, but as all-American as all get out. He’d spent most of his life in the American west. He was so good-looking—shaggy black hair, perfect build—and so affable and easygoing that almost every girl at CA had had a crush on him this year and he had playfully met the flirtations with an easy grace. Maybe because he was so naturally sweet, he could be generous with himself. A Mormon boy who incongruously rode a red Kawasaki (another missionary stereotype bites the dust), it seemed preordained that he would be a beloved doctor and boys’ coach, with at least five children later in life, but for now he was an overgrown boy besieged by girls.
“Just watch him,” Annie said, an ace flirt herself.
“Yeah,” I said. “God.”
But everything he did was appealing—Will making a basket in the gym, Will carrying a pile of books under one arm, Will talking over there, gesturing to Jim with his right, basketball-tossing arm. How is it that a starry mishmash of genes can roil around and then suddenly produce—maybe this is the true mystery of God—a constellation of features so pleasing to a beholder that it is like ultimate beauty?
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 40