And, when you got right down to it, if I lost all those things, I had practically lost my own self.
Which is a sad and depressing thought to have.
And I would have kept having it, except Cindy handed me Brutus, the first real present TJ had ever given me.
Making me learn my way around the darkroom had been the second.
So maybe I wasn’t so lost after all.
twelve
When TJ had come home for a few days after basic training, he’d looked like a completely different person.
He looked like a soldier.
I was almost scared to talk to him. Because I could tell he was a changed person, and I knew that whatever he’d gone through in basic training had made him stronger and harder, more ready for war. It made me feel like a little kid just to stand beside him. I figured that’s what I was compared to him, a kid, and I figured that when he got back from Vietnam it would be like there were twenty years between us instead of just five, and we might not have anything to say, we’d be so different from each other.
When he got back, he would have been in a real war.
Probably the closest TJ and I had ever been was when he was twelve and I was seven. I was old enough and smart enough by then to do stuff with him, and he was still enough of a kid that he could include a seven-year-old in his plans. Those were our best war days, when we kept notebooks of make-believe battles and ran home from General MacArthur Elementary School, where TJ was in sixth grade and I was in second, so we could set up our Army guys and test out our strategies against the enemy, which was commanded by Bobby Kerner and his little brother Charles.
In a way, it’s like we’d been soldiers together. I wondered if he still remembered how that felt. One thing I knew for sure when I saw him after basic training was that he’d forget the old days soon enough, if he hadn’t already. He was headed for a real combat zone.
“I’ve been assigned to the 51st Medical Company, based in Phu Bai,” he reported at the dinner table. “We ship out next Tuesday.”
My mother paled. “That soon?”
“From what they’re telling us, they need all the help they can get over there, as fast as they can get it.”
Then TJ leaned back in his chair and looked at the Colonel. “Sir,” he said, “I need you to do something for me.”
All this time the Colonel had been listening, but not saying anything. Now he folded his arms across his chest and said, “What do you need me to do, son?”
“I need you to act like you’re proud of me.”
The Colonel looked like TJ had punched him in the gut. It was the most outright look of surprise I’d ever seen on his face. It took him a minute to gather himself enough to say, “Of course I’m proud of you, TJ.”
“You just think I’m making a mistake.”
“We’re past all that, son,” the Colonel said, sounding surer of himself now. “I’m with you a hundred percent. I’m just trying to get used to the idea of you being a soldier. I’ll tell you what, you sure look like one. You remind me of myself in my prime. Son, you’re going to have to beat the women off you with a stick.”
The Colonel shook his head. “Asking me if I’m proud of you. How could I not be proud of you?”
TJ looked down at the table, but I could tell he was smiling, like that’s all he needed the Colonel to say.
After that, everything broke loose, especially the Colonel’s tongue. The man could talk some talk, and that night we got an earful. Someone had turned the opera back on.
“Now, you want to talk about a man who looked good in his first uniform,” the Colonel said, leaning back until his chair tipped. He turned to my mother. “Tell these children, Jeannie-poo, what a handsome rascal I was when you first met me.” When my mother just shook her head and laughed, he turned back to me and TJ. “Oh, she’s too embarrassed. You never saw a woman throw herself at a man the way your mother threw herself at me.”
“Oh, Tom,” my mother said, blushing, even though this was approximately the eight thousandth time the Colonel had told us the story about the dance where he and my mother met. “I don’t think that’s exactly what happened.”
The Colonel winked. “Don’t buy this little modest act of hers. She was brazen that night. Shameless might be the better word for it.”
I slipped into the Colonel’s story like it was a comfortable pair of old sneakers. I could have told the whole thing word for word, acted it out with all the Colonel’s winks and asides, I knew it so well. I glanced at TJ, who was grinning like a kid, suddenly not looking so combat ready. I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: It was good to have the old Colonel back.
We went out in the backyard after dinner to toss around the football—even my mother, who not only had an amazing wealth of knowledge about the Washington Redskins, the Colonel’s A-one, number one football team, but was also a fairly accomplished wide receiver.
“All right, everybody go out for a long pass,” the Colonel commanded, and the rest of us ran toward an imaginary end zone, across the heat-blasted grass, past the tomatoes and the black-eyed Susans. The Colonel lobbed one at my mother, but it flew over her head and went bouncing off into the grass. TJ scooped up the ball and spiraled it back to the Colonel, who shot it to me.
I pulled that baby out of the air and made a beeline for the line of floribunda roses the Colonel had planted at the edge of our yard. They were big, showy flowers, the babies of the garden, threatening to fall down and die if you didn’t bow to their every whim. I squinted my eyes and pretended they were the opposing team’s defensive line, veered left, feinted right, and dove through a gap in the middle.
“That’s my girl!” the Colonel yelled from the other end of the yard. “You show me Jamie Dexter, and I’ll show you a girl who can play some football!”
I rolled onto my back and smiled up at the sky. At that very minute everything was right with my world.
But TJ was only home for the weekend. On Monday we drove him to the airport to put him on the plane for California. In California he’d board an Army transport for Vietnam. It was finally happening. I walked next to TJ through the airport, proud to be seen with him in his combat fatigues and polished-up boots, an olive-green duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
My mother, of course, started to cry when we reached TJ’s gate, but she tried to act like she wasn’t. She stood up straight and pretended to brush something off of TJ’s shoulder. “You be sure to eat, TJ,” she said before a half sob got caught in her throat. “I don’t want you getting too thin.”
TJ kissed her on the cheek. “I will, Mom. I’ll eat everything they put in front of me, I promise.”
The Colonel shook TJ’s hand. “No heroics, son. Just do your job. Make us proud.”
“Yes, sir.”
I didn’t know what to do. We weren’t a family of huggers, but I felt stupid just standing there. Finally I stuck out my hand, and TJ took it. We shook solemnly.
“Write me letters,” I told him. “I want to know everything that happens to you.”
TJ leaned over and ruffled my hair. “I’ll keep in touch,” he promised.
He started for the gate. I ran after him. “Hey, TJ,” I yelled. “Pathfinders!”
TJ turned around and saluted. “Combat ready!”
And then he walked through the gateway and disappeared.
Once TJ was out of sight, the Colonel sighed and shook his head. “The only way out is through,” he said to nobody in particular.
“The only way out of what, Tom?” my mother asked him.
“The whole damn thing.” The Colonel began walking toward the car. My mother and I trailed behind him. I for one didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t much care. I was wound up tighter than a German clock. TJ was going to Vietnam. My brother was going to war.
Just like we’d always dreamed of.
thirteen
The Colonel was in the backyard when I got home from Cindy’s. He liked to sit out ther
e before dinner, to admire all of his botanical accomplishments. Usually he didn’t do more than gaze reverently at his flowers, since my mother hated anyone to come to the dinner table dirty, but today he was underneath a forest of tea roses, pruning.
I sat down on the grass beside him and plucked a few blades. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. I needed a strategy, but I didn’t have one. I knew I was about to ask something impossible. How do you go about doing that?
“Hand me my pruning shears, would you?” the Colonel called from where he was kneeling deep beneath the leaves. “She’s getting out of control down here.”
I passed the Colonel his shears, handle first, the way he’d taught me years before, when I’d wanted to be his garden assistant, just like TJ. It had been a boring job that consisted mostly of fetching the Colonel glasses of ice water and every once in a while mixing up a brew of fish emulsion and manure tea. I’d quit after a few Saturdays. That tea stunk to high heaven.
Sitting back, I took a deep breath and plunged in. “You think the war’s going to be over soon, sir?”
The Colonel pulled his long frame out from underneath the roses. “It’s gone on as long as it needs to,” he said, sitting up and wiping some crumbs of dirt off his cheek. “But it’ll take some time to get out of there.”
Okay. Next question. “Do you think it’s right for the Army to send someone to war whose brother has already been killed in the war?”
“Was this person drafted, or did he enlist?”
“Enlisted.” I hoped this was the better answer.
“An enlisted man has chosen the military, and he’s responsible for fulfilling the duties of his enlistment agreement. It might be taken into consideration that his brother has been killed, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be sent if he’s needed.”
The Colonel stood. Pieces of mulch clung to his pants legs, old combat fatigues he wore around the house on weekends. He leaned down to brush them off. “You hear of men enlisting after their brothers have been killed in war, because they want to have a crack at the enemy. Revenge. I don’t know if that’s a good reason to enlist or not, but it makes for some pretty motivated soldiers.”
“I don’t think Private Hollister’s after revenge.”
The Colonel gave me a look. “Hollister? Your rec center buddy? Is that who we’re talking about?”
“Private Hollister heard that they were sending radio operators from 1st Signal Troop to Vietnam.” I stood up and immediately wished I were taller. The Colonel might take me more seriously if I weren’t such a runt compared to him. “But he thinks it’s going to be really hard on his mother if he goes, since his brother died there. And he says you’re the one who signs the orders. I figured if you didn’t sign his orders, he wouldn’t have to go.”
It wasn’t the A-number-one argument I’d been hoping to make, but it laid the cards on the table. “I’m asking you not to sign his orders, sir,” I finished up. “I know it goes against Army protocol, but it would mean a lot to me if you didn’t sign them.”
“You’re asking me not to sign his orders?” The Colonel’s voice was flat, disbelieving.
I nodded.
The Colonel scratched his head, then brushed back his hair with his hand. “Who do you think I am? Tell me that, Sport. Who do you think I am? Do you think I’m Santa Claus?”
“You used to be, remember?” I was scrambling, trying hard as I could to win the Colonel to my side. “Mom told us that you used to get up on the roof and jingle bells and stomp around like a reindeer.”
The Colonel didn’t say anything. He sat down in a lawn chair in the middle of the yard. He rubbed his eyes, put his hands down in his lap, then stretched his legs out and shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked vaguely confused, like he wasn’t sure what he was doing in this particular backyard on this particular Friday afternoon in this particular century.
“Back when TJ enlisted, when it was all a done deal, I made a call to an old buddy of mine,” the Colonel said, sounding like he was about a hundred years old and a hundred miles away. “Just got his first star. Used to be Col. Sudner, now he’s General Sudner. Next time I see him, I’ll have to salute the guy. He’s at Fort Jackson, Adjutant General’s Corps, Personnel Command. I asked him to make sure TJ didn’t get shipped over to Vietnam, to pull whatever strings he could. Man, he chewed me out, up one side and down the other. ‘Dexter, you damn so-and-so,’ he says. ‘You want your son kept out of Vietnam so somebody else’s son can go and get himself killed?’”
“The Sudners were at Fort Leavenworth,” I said. I couldn’t focus on what the Colonel was telling me. I couldn’t quite take in the fact that the Colonel had tried to pull strings to keep TJ out of Vietnam. That went against protocol. It went against everything he’d ever told me about the Army way of doing things. Honor, duty, sacrifice, wasn’t that what he’d been preaching to me all my life? But all I said was, “I remember Col. Sudner. He has a scar on his cheek, from where a dog bit him.”
The Colonel didn’t seem to hear me. “Maybe I ought to be ashamed. Sudner sure thinks so. But it’s a worthless war, and I don’t want any son of mine anywhere near it.” He looked up at me. “I’d let somebody else die for TJ, God forgive me, but I would.”
“It’s a worthless war?” My mouth hung open. The Colonel was calling Vietnam a worthless war?
“We got into it for the right reasons,” the Colonel said, leaning forward and looking straight at me, like he needed me to believe him. “That’s what all those antiwar types don’t understand. They don’t understand that the Soviets and the communist Chinese are a real threat to our security. We can’t let ‘em have Southeast Asia.”
The Colonel sat back in his chair and frowned. “Problem is, we don’t know what we’re doing over there. We’re in over our heads. It’s a jungle war against an enemy that’s just plain smarter than we are when it comes to that kind of fighting. If we had any sense, we’d admit defeat and get out. Save a lot of lives that way.”
I sat down on the grass. The tips of my fingers and toes felt numb. “Did you tell TJ that?”
“I told him over and over. He wouldn’t listen. He’s eighteen and thinks he knows everything there is to know.”
“Does he know you tried to keep him out of Vietnam?”
“You’re the only one in this family who knows that. Your mother doesn’t even know.” The Colonel pushed himself out of the chair. “I thought college would keep TJ out of the war, but I was wrong. I thought I could keep him safe, but I was wrong about that, too.”
He began walking toward the house. He looked old to me then, his shoulders sagging, his head low. Before he got to the back door, I called out to him.
“Colonel?”
He didn’t turn around. But he stopped.
“Will you help Private Hollister?”
The question hung in the air, suspended between the whir of cicadas and the lonely coo of a mourning dove. I hugged my arms to my chest, as if I needed to hold myself up. Despite the heat, I felt a chill run through me.
“I’ll think about it,” the Colonel said.
And he disappeared into the kitchen.
That night I spread out TJ’s Vietnam photographs on my bed. The soldier in the wheelchair, the bandaged stump of what had been his right leg pointing straight at the camera. A terrified child, naked to the waist, hands to his ears, running down the road, a helicopter hovering in the distance. The soldier on the stretcher, the wound soaking his bandaged chest. A hollow-eyed GI staring at the camera, the skin burned and scarred across his cheeks and forehead.
I left them all on the Colonel’s desk, fanned out like a hand of cards, where he would find them in the morning when he sat down to drink his coffee.
fourteen
School started the Tuesday after Labor Day. If I’d had any big dreams about the eighth grade being some kind of promised land, they fell flat pretty quick. Eighth grade was just like seventh grade, but even more so. Math was good, English was
boring, and in history we were studying the Greeks and Romans, just like we had in seventh grade and sixth grade, too.
The one bright spot of my day was newspaper. Sixth period, Mrs. Ronco’s room, second floor. Originally my elective had been Music Appreciation, but I’d met a new girl in first period pre-algebra class, Alice Freeman, who complained that she couldn’t be a staff photographer for the paper because she didn’t know how to develop film.
“Why don’t you learn?” I’d asked her. “I could teach you.”
“I’m allergic to the chemicals,” Alice told me. “At least I assume I am. I’m allergic to almost everything else. Anyway, my mom won’t let me get near a darkroom, just in case.”
So we hatched a plan. She could take pictures, I would develop them. And wonder of wonders, Mrs. Ronco liked our plan just fine. The only catch was, I’d have to write articles for the paper too.
“I can’t write,” I told Mrs. Ronco. “Just ask every English teacher I’ve ever had.”
“It takes practice, like anything else,” Mrs. Ronco insisted. “Besides, the beauty of newspaper writing is that there’s a formula to it. Just follow the rules and you’ll be fine.”
Well, rules I could do. So I wrote my first article, which was about a new teacher who had been teaching in India for the last three years, and it turned out okay. Alice took the pictures, and they turned out even better.
“Look at this, it’s got my byline,” I told Private Hollister, slapping down the paper on his desk. He was still at the rec center, still waiting to hear if he’d be shipped out to Vietnam, but so far, nobody in his unit had gone as far as the Dairy Queen in Harker Heights. The new guy from Fort Sill had yet to arrive to take over the rec center. So Private Hollister stayed put, mopping up and reading comic books.
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