Letter to My Daughter

by George Bishop

  His letters began to take on a darkly philosophical tone. He wrote about things he’d never mentioned before, friends of his who had gone out on routine patrols, or even just down the street to buy farm eggs in the next village, and had never come back. He wrote about the superstitions that soldiers came up with to explain away the randomness of life and death. How you should never say aloud the number of days you had left, for instance—that was sure to kill you. Or how some claimed that they could tell how long a newbie would last the minute he stepped off the chopper; it was a gutted look behind the eyes, or a hesitant gait that gave it away. “That one’s a goner,” they’d say. “Two months, tops.” But as far as Tim could see, death didn’t play by any rules. A clumsy blueleg from Minnesota who could barely load a rifle would go home without a scratch, while the smartest, sleekest tracker you ever met would get blown to a gory paste his third day out. Didn’t have anything to do with how good or bad a person was, neither. Line them all up—the nun, the priest, the shopkeeper, the rapist, the murdering NVA, the screaming teenage girl in a straw hat holding a live baby boy, the smoke still rising from its black charred body: you think there was any difference between them? There wasn’t no difference. Didn’t matter who you were or what you did, we all came to the same dead end. “And if you can figure that one out, I’ll be happy to hear it,” Tim wrote.

  But even as his letters dipped into this darkest of places, he still clung to one desperate hope, and that was me.

  “I picture you running up to meet me when I step off the bus in Zachary at Christmastime,” he wrote. “You look just like I left you, only better. You’re wearing shorts. (I always picture you wearing shorts even if it’s the middle of winter, hope you don’t mind.) I pick you up and hug you and kiss you and nobody can say nothing because I just came back from Vietnam and I got a whole mess of medals on my chest.” We’d have a little house there near the woods, nothing but peace and quiet, and for about a year he wouldn’t do anything but sit and look at me and we’d make love all day.

  “My good luck charm,” he wrote. “Laura. All I got to do is turn my arm up to see you. That’s permanent, won’t ever go away.”

  • • •

  Elizabeth, see if you can understand this. I stopped reading his letters. I couldn’t bear to hear any more about his ugly war. Why did he have to tell me all that? What could I do to help him? I had my own problems to worry about. I couldn’t take on the burden of being his lifesaver, too, his one and only hope.

  The first one I removed from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and didn’t open right away because I knew how depressing it would be; then I didn’t open it for the rest of the day, and then a week had passed and it was still in the drawer of my desk, unopened, beside the scrapbook I’d abandoned long ago. And then the next letter came, and I put it in the drawer with the first. Then another one. Later, I told myself. I would read them later, when I was stronger. But by semester’s end I had a small stack, light as the airmail paper they were written on but weighted with the accumulated guilt of my avoidance.

  He was killed, they said, in his sleep. Two weeks before his discharge, three clumsy mortar shells were lobbed from a hill where they hadn’t seen any North Vietnamese for a year and a half. One landed just short of the base fence, one landed on the wash shed of the kitchen, and one landed on a hut that wasn’t even Tim’s but had an air conditioner and the fellow was away and so Tim was using it. Even the army morticians, with all their glue and stuffing and wax, couldn’t make him resemble a human being. His remains were delivered to Zachary in a closed coffin draped with an American flag, which was how he was displayed on the altar of St. Aloysius Catholic Church that chilly winter day between Christmas and New Year 1973.

  Holiday decorations were still up, evergreen wreaths on the walls, a nativity scene at the front of the church. I recognized some of Tim’s old high school buddies and a few of his relatives who’d driven in from Lafayette. I wondered how Jack would get through it, remembering his wife lying in the same spot on the same altar four years ago. “First Suzy and now this,” people whispered. “Good Lord.”

  Unlike the first, this service was a stark, brief affair with no flowers, no incense, no organist. The lights of the church hadn’t even been turned on, as I recall, and the only illumination was a watery glow of red, blue, and yellow seeping through the stained-glass windows and spilling across the wooden pews and floors that damp gray afternoon. I sat next to Jack in the front row because he asked me to. We barely spoke, and when we did it was mostly to exchange factual and necessary information: go here, do this, give that lady a hand, would you. Jack didn’t allow a sermon from the priest, just the minimum required words to send the soul to heaven. In a moment of terrible insight during the prayers and sniffling, I recognized this service to be the exact opposite of the service that Tim had always dreamed of for his homecoming: sorrow instead of joy, an end instead of a beginning, and one instead of two at the altar.

  Soon we were lining up to pay our respects. Nearing the coffin, I tried to picture Tim’s soul rising to heaven. His body would be smooth and pure as I remembered it, but transparent. The ghost-soul of Tim would be met in the sky by Saint Michael, who would escort him up past the clouds, through dark space and stars, bypassing purgatory to ascend swiftly into the radiant sphere of heaven, where, the nuns assured us, the blessed lived in supreme happiness in the presence of God forever and ever.

  But as I touched my lips to the dark wood of the casket, I couldn’t hold on to this vision. I was conscious only of the unnatural gloss of the wood, and of the creak of the floorboards behind me, and of the priest standing to one side coughing and rustling his vestments. He might have been a man waiting at a service station to have a tire changed. There was nothing sacred there that day. What I mean to say is, as far as I was concerned, God has vanished, flown far away, leaving us poor human beings with nothing more than pieces of charred bone and flesh in a wooden box. That’s all it was.

  At the cemetery, Jack stood back blinking as the coffin was settled in the dirt in front of his wife’s marble memorial. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands—to let them hang at his sides, or put them in his pockets, or fold them below his waist as the priest was doing. The clouds of his breath huffed in front of his gray face. He looked all of a sudden like a brittle, lost old man, and if I felt anything at all that day, it was a soft, vague pity for Jack. The undertaker was standing by with the shovel, and Jack obligingly took it in hand to toss the first clod of dirt into the hole. It landed with a flop on top of the coffin, and Jack passed back the shovel. A black crow cawed impatiently from the branch of a nearby pine, telling us to hurry up and get it over with.

  I hadn’t expected to accompany Jack back to his trailer that evening, but after all the friends had left and the relatives had gone back to Lafayette, there was no one left to care for him but me. The trailer was cluttered and cheerless, even smaller than I remembered it. I cooked dinner for him and tried to put things in order. The flowers he didn’t want. The trifolded American flag I set to one side on the kitchen table. I felt bad leaving him for the night. I didn’t see how he could stand to stay out there in the woods in that cold aluminum cave all by himself.

  “Sure you’ll be all right?”

  “I managed for two and a half years. I reckon I can manage the rest,” he said from the doorway.

  For the remainder of the holiday, I ended up going to sit with him for a few hours every evening. After I cooked dinner for him, we would do jigsaw puzzles at the fold-down table. We didn’t talk much, not at first, but it didn’t feel as if we had to. It was okay just to be there. At the time I thought I was doing this as a favor to Jack, but I came to understand that I needed these visits as much as he did. There was no crying, no dramatics, and when we spoke of Tim it was in the familiar, fond way that you might speak of an old classmate you hadn’t seen for a while. We just were getting through it the best we could, I suppose, providing each other with the simple, un
demanding presence of another person.

  My parents, for their part, didn’t dare to protest my nightly visits. They sensed they didn’t have any say in the matter, even as I took food from my mother’s kitchen and carried it to Jack’s in my father’s car. At certain times in a person’s life, I believe, their will takes over their actions, making them as driven and unalterable as the weather. My parents could no sooner have stopped me from going than they could have stopped the rain. And anyway, what were they going to protest? The boy they hated had been blown to bits. They should’ve been overjoyed.

  I visited Jack once more on the day I was due to go back to Sacred Heart. I made biscuits for breakfast, we had coffee, and before I left he handed me a lumpy manila envelope and a letter. “Tim wanted you to have these.” We hugged standing outside beside a picnic table on a pine-needled patch of ground in front of the trailer. The light fell just so, and his shadow lay across the ground just so, that it made me think of the color photograph of his wife and son on the wall above the kitchen table.

  “I’ll visit again soon,” I promised. “Stay warm.”

  “Go on, now,” Jack said. “Don’t keep the nuns waiting.”

  • • •

  I rested the side of my head against the cool window of the Greyhound as it hummed down Highway 19 past the familiar landmarks—the last Esso before the end of town, the McHugh fire-watch tower, the low white tanks of the Shell Oil depot receding in row upon row to the east. I remembered that first drive with my parents to Baton Rouge three years ago. It had been this same weather, the same season, the same gray frosted landscape. I remembered, too, before all this happened, how my school bus used to pass the Prejeans’s home every day in Zachary, and how I stared out the window hoping for a glimpse of the ailing and mysterious Suzy Prejean. And I remembered sitting in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Riverside Hotel with Chip Benton as we watched the lights of the city drift past outside the dark glass. All these things were in my mind as I opened the envelope on my lap.

  Inside were Tim’s medals, the ones he’d won in Vietnam. I turned them over in my fingers. Already they had the look of antiques, like trinkets you might pick up at a yard sale. There was a small brass star attached to a red ribbon, and a round bronze token attached to a yellow ribbon, and another disk attached to a slightly different red ribbon. There were matching rectangular pins for each of these, and a few colorful cloth patches as well. I didn’t know what any of it meant. I opened the letter with some trepidation. It was six pages long, written on plain white paper, not the usual airmail kind. “Dear Laura,” it began.

  Tim said how he sat down to write this letter because he had a bad feeling he might not see me again and he didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye and telling me how much I’d meant to him. He’d told his daddy to give me all his medals, because he was afraid if Jack kept them he’d make them out to be something they weren’t, like his son was a war hero or something. “I tell you this much, if I die over here you can be sure it was an accident. I’m not taking any chances, not anymore,” Tim wrote. He wasn’t so foolish that he was going to get himself killed for this army. Because what he’d realized over these past few months was that I was right all along. He’d been sold a line.

  “You know I didn’t always feel this way, Laura. I started out all gung ho, thinking my country right or wrong, but things kept building until the lies couldn’t hold and I’d have to be blind not to see what a genuine fucking disaster this invasion has been.” It didn’t make any sense, he said. There was nothing there. It was just jungles and hills and villages, and dogs and chickens and people going about their lives. Straw houses and green trees, mothers with babies. “You can’t help but think everything would’ve been fine if we’d just let it be.” And yet here they came with their millions of tons of machinery and ordnance, blowing things up indiscriminately and digging themselves in deeper and deeper until they were up to their necks in shit, and as far as Tim could see, it was mostly their own shit. Charlie’ll have the last laugh yet, he said: “Lookee crazy American up to neck in own shitee!” But what Tim wanted to know now was, whose idea was this in the first place? Because it was the idea of a madman, that much was clear. He couldn’t see any other way to explain it. “This war is the dream of a madman.”

  I stopped reading and looked out the window. Fields of broken sugarcane blurred past. The bus swayed and hummed. Could there really be a war on, I wondered, right now, with boys like Tim fighting and dying? He was right, it seemed mad. Impossible. I turned to the next page. It was only words on paper, but I could hear his voice as clear as if he were sitting beside me.

  “It’s raining now,” he told me. “The water falls in strings from the edge of the roof outside my door, like one of those bead curtains you see. I’m hoping it keeps raining until the roads are impassable and our next mission gets delayed a day or two. The rain’s brought some cool air with it. A rooster’s crowing like it’s morning and there’s a radio playing Bob Dylan in the next hooch….

  “I tell you, Laura, if any good comes out of our being here it’ll be a complete accident. What I mean is, any good that happens here, happens not because of the U.S. Army but in spite of it. The weird thing is that there is some good here. Only it’s not what you’d expect. It’s got nothing to do with the war. I swear, I believe I spent some of the happiest, most peaceful moments of my life right here in Vietnam. I wonder if you can believe that?

  “It’s like this,” he went on. “You hike out in a field some morning to take a piss. You’re half awake, and you can already sense the heat of the day at the back of your neck, but right now it’s still cool and a white mist is rising up from the grass all around you so that it’s like you’re walking in the clouds. And then from out of nowhere a flock of brown baby ducks comes waddling past, tripping over each other and quacking soft. A minute later a mamasan comes up the hill after them wearing a straw hat and a yellow sarong, waving a bamboo stick, quiet as a ghost, humming to herself. She stops on the hill when she sees you. You look at her, and you look at the ducks, and she looks at the ducks, and she looks at you, and she sees you holding your thing in your hand. And then she cracks up and puts her hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing. And you laugh with her because you’re peeing, and the morning is so damn beautiful, and people are so damn great.

  “Or it’s like Binh, that kid I got to know when we were out on a long mission last year. I told you about him. How he used to come every day and I taught him how to use the radio. Just some local kid from the village, barely spoke any English. I don’t think he’d hardly ever been to school, but sharpest mind you ever saw. It’s like he had a natural intelligence for working with things. I’d take the radio apart while he was watching and he’d put it back together fast as you please. Wouldn’t let me help him. We tried to get him to drink beer but he wouldn’t. Most decent kid you ever met. We got to be real good friends, and that didn’t have nothing to do with him being Vietnamese or me being American or this damn war that put me here.

  “And meeting someone like Binh, you have to assume that there’s more like him, and then from that you have to assume that even north of the DMZ they got their Binhs. And then pretty soon you’re wondering what makes the enemy so different from me? Probably just like with me, somebody got him all riled up with a bunch of noise, put a gun in his hand and said, Go kill. And you can bet they’ve got their heroes, their honor, and their medals just like we do. Only what they call bravery we call treachery, and what we call bravery no doubt they call treachery. Only difference is which side of the line you’re on. That’s something I guarantee Uncle Sam would rather not have you think about.

  “Then you get to wondering, Laura, if they can lie to me about that, and do it so damn well and convincing, then what else is a lie? What if everything we’ve ever been taught as true is a lie? A made-up story? Because we make them up all the time here, believe me.

  “The government surely never intended this,
but they’re schooling some mighty skeptical boys over here, guys who from now on will look sideways at everything you present them with because they’ve been handed nothing but shit for so long that they won’t take nothing for granted anymore. That could actually be the best thing the army has done, taken people like me and turned them into doubters. After two years here, I finally know there’s nothing in this world worth dying for except maybe love.”

  I was shivering as I read, hunched over the pages and sniffling against the cold. The bus rocked as it veered into downtown Baton Rouge. I turned to the last page.

  “Laura, you haven’t written me for a while. I hardly can blame you, my letters haven’t been very cheery lately. And then all I’ve talked about is how when I get home we’re gonna do this and that and I paint this dream of how it’s going to be when we’re together, but it occurs to me that maybe I should’ve asked you first before I put you in the middle of that dream. The truth is I don’t hardly know you except through your letters. But I guess that’s all right. They kept me going. I needed someone to write to, and I always looked forward to getting your reply.

  “Course if you’re reading this now, hell, none of that hardly makes any difference anymore. But if it helps you to know, I can tell you that if ever I was a little bit kinder or a little bit braver, it was because I had a picture of you in my mind and I wanted to please you. That’s what the medals mean. Don’t have shit to do with the war.

  “So if you ever need any strength in the future, if you ever get to feeling so low you think you aren’t worth anything, I hope you take out one of these medals and hold it in your hand and remember that once a boy loved you with all his heart.

  “Look in on my dad from time to time if you could. He always liked you.