Carry Me Home
John M. Del Vecchio
In Memory of
Frank Delaney
David Coughlin
Sheldon Silverman
Felix Antignani
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
—Abraham Lincoln
Contents
Author’s Note
Part I: Homecoming
July 1984
1: Wapinski
July 1984
2
July 1984
3: Pisano
July 1984
4
5
6
7
8
August 1984
9
10
Part II: Expatriation
August 1984
11
12
August 1984
13
August 1984
14
August 1984
15
16
17
18
September 1984
19
September 1984
20
September 1984
21
22
23
Part III: High Meadow
October 1984
24
25
October 1984
26
27
October 1984
28
1 November 1984
29
2 November 1984
30
3 November 1984
31
Sunday, 4 November 1984
32
5 November 1984
33
7 November 1984
34
11 November 1984
14 December 1984
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Author’s Note
THERE IS NO HECKLEY County in Pennsylvania. The name was taken from a gravestone: Heckley—50th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers, Infantry, 1848–1910. There is no township of Mill Creek Falls, nor, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone in north central Pennsylvania called their farm High Meadow. The communities of Ridgewater, Rock Ridge, and Coal Hill are imaginary, as are the Mill Creek Falls subdivisions—Old Town, Old New Town, New New Town, Creek’s Bend, etc. There is no Veterans Administration and no State of Pennsylvania Veterans Medical Center in Rock Ridge. In California, no land exists between Sonoma and Marin counties. The city of San Martin, like Heckley County, is a figment of my imagination.
Carry Me Home is the last installment of a trilogy about America’s Southeast Asia era. The 13th Valley (Bantam, 1982) is the story of American infantry combat in Viet Nam and an inquiry into the causes of war. For the Sake of All Living Things (Bantam, 1990) is the story of a Cambodian family from 1968 to 1979. The story explores the making of a genocide with emphasis on Communist factions, their actions, interactions, and ideologies, and their effects upon a people. Carry Me Home is the story of a medium-size aging mill town and the generation that grew up there during the Viet Nam War era. The title has been borrowed, with permission, from Marcus Leddy’s Carry Me Home album, a collection of songs for and about Viet Nam veterans (Blue Roan Records).
I have attempted to keep major historical events and general background history accurate. Times and dates of some specific events, particularly non-news television programming, which occurred in the United States may have been altered. Certain films, TV shows, reviews, and critiques that are cited in the late 1970s and early 1980s did not appear until later.
Personal and minor events are composites, built or extrapolated from interviews, conversations, and/or official records. The characters who peopled these areas in the sixties, seventies, and eighties are fictitious. Characters depicted from specific military units (i.e., Tony Pisano of the 2d Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 3d Marine Division) have not been based upon anyone who served in these units, though where unit actions are described I have attempted to be true to the history of that combat. Any resemblance to any person, living or deceased, is purely a matter of many people having shared similar experiences, held similar beliefs, exhibited similar behavior.
However, some people do live by The Code.
Part I
Homecoming
July 1984
I’M GOING TO MAKE it. I’m going to make it, Man. I’m going to make it.
Wapinski used to say it. Say it like this. He’d be standing there, like this, leaning back on the sheet-metal break.... Or maybe we’d be fishing the far end of the pond where the cliff comes right to the water and he’d be sitting on the edge or he’d have climbed halfway down and gotten onto that crag and he’d fish with one hand, hang on with the other.... Or he’d say it up here by the graves....
Damn. This is hard to talk about.
He’d say, “I don’t think I’d like the person I’d be if I hadn’t gone.” Then he’d say, “And if living with this pain, and damn it that’s what it is, is the price, then I’ll take it. I’ve seen the best. And the worst. But seeing the best, seeing it just once, that makes it worth it. That inspiration. That awareness. You become so damn aware it hurts, but you know what’s possible ... and you know the price. You know it applies here, in the World, not just in Viet Nam. You know honesty and honor and vigilance ... the costs, and what it costs when they’re forgotten ... and that, that equates with hope.
“The best. The best here. The best in Nam. Decent. Honorable. Guts and balls and courage. Audacity. See it! That’s what High Meadow’s about.”
Wap would go on like that, casual sometimes, ranting ferocious sometimes, go on for hours while we worked in the barn or while I’d be trying to tell him the advantages of Spredor 2° alfalfa over the old standards that don’t creep out. There’s a sugarbush over the west ridge there. His grandpa planted it back in the twenties. Can you imagine that spirit? It takes fifty years before a stand of sugar maples can rightly be called a sugarbush but his grandpa had that kind of optimism. Wap had it too. He had this idea that he could take the dregs, if they’d come to him, and turn em into philosophers or philanthropists, financiers or physicians. His words. That’s how strongly he believed in the basic strength and value of Everyman.
Where’s that spirit now? People think it’s crazy. Imagine planting something today that won’t pay off for fifty years? Build today for a world fifty years from now? For the year 2034? Crazy? Optimistic? I don’t know. It must have been in their blood because that’s what they founded here. That’s what they set in motion.
I imagine High Meadow was quiet like this when Wap came back. He told me about comin to this spot with Noah on his shoulders, comin up here to talk to his grandfather and tell him his plans. To see if he’d approve. He’d come up here a lot. From up here you can see most of the place. In the morning, with the sun at your back, the pond looks so peaceful. What hell it unleashed.
The barn down there is still intact. To me the big barn was the heart of the place. Machinery’s idle now, but it’s usable. The farmhouse is fine. Wap never finished remodeling but the place is livable, and except maybe for the roof over Noah and Paul’s room, all is tight. The path from the house to the barn is thick with grass and weeds.
I didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Came up the back trail, around the pond. Wap and I built that gate on the crest halfway up the drive from the road where the stream goes under in those culverts and where the s
chool bus used to stop. We used hinges I forged in the shop that first winter when I didn’t feel like talkin to anybody and there wasn’t so much goin on. Used five-eighth-inch-thick carriage bolts for the pins and bolted the gate to the posts instead of using screws. That gate won’t need maintenance for another decade. That’s the way he wanted us to build.
There’s gullies in the wheel paths on that last uphill section before the house and yard. Must have been heavy thunderstorms this spring ... or last fall. You can’t build everything maintenance free.
The high meadows are fallow. The orchard, the vineyards, and the strawberry fields are untended. We were going to have our first real grape harvest this year. Wouldn’t have been much. The vines aren’t old enough yet. They’re nothing compared to a sugarbush for measuring optimism, but in a few years we’d have had the best vineyard in Pennsylvania. I say “we” but I should say “I.” Wap set the direction, but generally he stayed in the barn running the other businesses or studying in his grandpa’s office in the loft. He let me manage the farm.
It’s so clear this afternoon. I can see out over the house, out over the hills, way down the valley to the edge of town where the square steeple of St. Ignatius sticks up through the trees. Back this way, where the break in the treeline is, that’s the Old Mill, which closed about a hundred years ago. The next break down is the New Mill, which closed right after World War II. Then way down there, just before the creek, that’s the warehouse or Small Mill area. To the left is Old Town, and over a bit, that’s Lutzburgh where Bobby grew up.
Upriver, way to the left, across the new bridge, that’s New Town—all subdivisions. And down there, below South Hill, is the new mall. Way east, east of Creek’s Bend, is where Kinnard/Chassion opened the new toilet paper and disposable diaper plant and where now most everyone works, just like in the old days when everyone worked at the old mills.
He carried me home. He never said that but it’s true. You know, not carried, but attracted ... all of us. And we came and we took. Seems to have happened like that, like snapping your fingers. It’s nine years since we met. We were in separate isolations. I mean, that time in San Jose ... when Da Nang was goin down the tubes. I mean I knew him from way back, from Mill Creek High, but he was a year before me. And then in Sonoma, and at St. Luke’s. But we didn’t really connect.
Seems like a million years ago, his coming home. I’d been back a year. I was still active duty and they sent me to Philly on burial detail, which is where I met Linda, and when I was discharged ... I forget if Wap was back yet. I got out in April. Wapinski got out in June. Ty was still in. Yeah, I musta been in Boston.
Anyway, it’s been eight years since we began this venture. Seven years ago he sent out his letters. High Meadow became our base camp, our sanctuary. We left windows open and unshaded at night because High Meadow was secure. Secure? What thoughts! Why do the voices still cry?
1
Wapinski
ROBERT JANOS WAPINSKI WOULD never remember the details of his own homecoming. In a week they would be foggy, in a year they would be out of his mind, out of the recallable memory banks as completely as if the circuits to those banks had been cut and atrophy had caused the storage area to disintegrate.
What he would remember was a few sentences a man he’d come to believe never existed spoke to him on his second-to-last flight in the uniform of his country. And he would remember his mother, cold and hard, his mother who had given him away at age two when his father left, then taken him back, reluctantly, at eight when his paternal grandmother died and his grandfather had been in such grief that he’d let the boy go. He would remember Stacy—could never forget Stacy—and what she had done. And he would remember fleeing back to Grandpa Wapinski.
But the details. They were lost, forever, for when a man returns from war his mind and soul lag behind his physical being and do not catch up for weeks or months or years.
Mill Creek Falls, Pennsylvania, Saturday, 14 June 1969—In the soft gray predawn Robert Wapinski quietly walked into his hometown. He stopped. He looked back at the old steel truss bridge, looked down into Loyalsock Creek, looked across to Route 154. He had walked the thirteen miles from Eagles Mere. His feet were sore, his legs tired, yet he was restless, anxious. He had two miles to go, across town, before he was home.
Wapinski reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He’d shipped his heavy belongings and carried only a small AWOL bag that contained his orders and records, toiletries and clean socks. Before him the warehouses and machine shops were dark. In the graying sky, silhouettes of workers’ houses could be seen emerging on the hills above Small Mill. As he walked Wapinski caressed the lighter. With one hand he snapped the top back, flicked the wheel in the lee of the upheld AWOL bag, lit a smoke, closed the lid, ran his thumb nail over the engraving.
The smoke tasted good. “Captain, I think we’re making a mistake,” a voice ran in his mind. “Lighten up, Thompson,” he answered back. “We’ve done our job.” “I think we should go back, Sir. We belong to that world. It’s all going to be bullshit. Just like R and R.” “Things are going to be great!” Wapinski had said. “Captain,” he heard Thompson answer him, “it’s gotten into my blood. Into yours, too.”
Wapinski walked east, up River Front Road, past the aging brick warehouses and machine shops. Lights from a new rooftop billboard cast overlapping shadows on to the pavement and into the dingy alleys. He hesitated, looked up, moved toward the Loyalsock to view the sign. Four powerful mercury vapor bulbs blazed over it:
Invest in MILL CREEK INDUSTRIAL PARK
a Downtown Redevelopment Project
—Ernest Hartley, Mayor
Wapinski slowed, tensed, peered deeply into the last alley. Shadows were ebbing in the growing dawn but the alley was black, dense, impenetrable. His eyes snapped forward, he spun, looked back, searched the deserted building, the empty road, the gorge of the creek. No one. He walked on, crossed the lane-and-one-half wood bridge over Mill Creek that divided Small Mill from River Front Park and downtown. He walked quietly, caressing the lighter like an amulet, fingering the engraving. Things are going to be great, he thought. I’m not going to let it be otherwise.
The trees in the park were heavy with foliage, the gravel paths clean, raked smooth, the grass thick, lush, high. Wapinski crossed a path, headed north toward the Episcopal church. On an earthen mound in a circular clearing at the center of the park stood a granite obelisk. As a youth he had played on it, walked around it hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, but he had never read it. He walked to the monument’s base, read, in the gray light, the first plaque: “ERECTED BY THE PEOPLE OF MILL CREEK FALLS AND HECKLEY COUNTY—1883—IN HONOR OF ALL WHO FOUGHT IN SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY.” Eighteen eighty-three, he thought. Eighteen years after the end of the war. Took em long enough. “Eternal Vigilance Is The Price Of Liberty. BULL RUNN WILDERNESS.”
ROLL OF HONOR
Killed
Crowley, James 1 Cav June 14, ’64
Hartley, Elijah ..................
Wapinski stopped. He counted but did not read beyond the first few names—twenty-eight. The first date struck him. One hundred and five years ago to the day. He swallowed, ran his hand through his hair, looked about. Patches of mist lay between the gravestones in the cemetery beside the church. A slight breeze brought the smell of clover and onion grass to his nose. Below the Killed list was a second, DIED OF WOUNDS. There were fourteen names. Wapinski moved to the north plaque.
On fame’s eternal camping ground,
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards with sacred round,
The bivouac of the dead.*
IN MEMORY OF THE MEN WHO FELL
IN THE WAR OF THE
REBELLION 1861–1865 AS
DEFENDERS
OF LIBERTY AND
NATIONALITY
The fourth plaque was yet another ROLL OF HONOR—TO THOSE WHO DIED IN POW CAMPS. Wapinski
counted forty-one names. Forty-one?! he thought. Forty-one, twenty-nine, fourteen. Eighty-four. God! Eighty-four dead from just Heckley County! I wouldn’t have thought there were enough people in Heckley then ...
There was one additional plaque, a small one placed at the base of the obelisk. DURING WW II THE CANNONBALLS AND CANNON WERE REMOVED AND SCRAPPED FOR THE STEEL. A shiver ran up Wapinski’s arms, up his neck. He did not know why.
He left the park, crossed Mill Creek Road north of the church, walked east a block on Second Street, then north on Ann Drive to Third Street. This was downtown Mill Creek Falls. Wapinski looked into the store windows. It was lighter now. Nothing stirred. No one was about. As he walked he ran the fingers of one hand along a large store window. The glass felt smooth, clean, not washed clean but unmolested, unworried clean. He could not explain that either. Again he stopped. It was light enough to see his own reflection in the pane.
At five eleven he felt neither big nor small. He felt thin. He’d lost thirty pounds in Viet Nam. His blond hair was military short and sun bleached. He thought it made him look younger than he felt. He smiled. “Hey, fucker,” he whispered to his reflection, “you made it. You made it back.”
It had been a long night, a long day and night, long two weeks, long year. Now the confusion of emotions and images, the tiredness and adrenaline rush, overwhelmed him, made him retreat into himself, numbed him, yet simultaneously he was alert, anxious. Among all the confusing emotions there was a drive, a motivation that had superceded all conflicting thoughts, that overrode all turmoil. It was a simple drive, not intellectual, not physical. It was the drive to get home.
Home. Not to Stacy, not to family, though they were very much a part of it, but simply home. Simply to stand on the porch, in the kitchen, in the bedroom of the house that he called home. He arched his back, flexed his neck and shoulders. Offers of regular commissions, reenlistment bonuses, the wonderful look and lure of a stewardess who he fantasized might be interested if he pursued, nothing overrode the force that had propelled him toward Mill Creek Falls. There was joy in the drive, pride in what he was, what he was bringing home. And there was paranoia and sadness. Home. He would go home and figure it all out from there. Perhaps establish a new home, perhaps with Stacy, from the base, the foundation, of what had been his home ever since he was eight.
Carry Me Home Page 1