Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  He was very drunk now. It was dawn. He’d vomited on his shirt, his pants, his shoes. He sat in the gutter. Josh sat on the curb. “What the fuck av ah done?” He looked up at the grimy brick of warehouse walls. It was Sunday, Father’s Day. The machine shops and offices were closed. “What’d I do to that kid las night?”

  He thought about Joanne. He was hurt, deeply hurt, shocked by his sister, by the professor and the students. And he was disappointed, bitter with himself for having lost control. He’d beaten up the big jerk, he thought, and he’d thrown Akins and two others into the walls before he’d realized what he’d done. “I didn’t mean to hurt em,” he mumbled to the gutter. “I didn’t want ta hurt em. Why’d they attack me? I just wanted to be left alone, maybe talk to Akins. And our car, Josh.” Tears welled up in Wapinski’s eyes. He tried to sniff them back but his nose was clogged with blood. “Why? Fuckin why?”

  He pulled the cigarette lighter from his pocket. He was out of cigarettes. His stomach retched, bile burned his throat. “All this shit, Josh. It’s melting on me.” Again drunken tears rushed out. “This was a mistake. There’s somethin wrong. Somethin wrong. I gotta get back where I belong. We left three guys on a hill. Four guys. I gotta go back. They were blown up and charred and bloody fuckin messes. Blood, Josh. More blood than ever. Right on that kid’s face. I gotta go back where I was good. Where I did good. I gotta find Doc.”

  Wapinski fondled the lighter, belched. The belch caused him to lose his balance. He fell back on the storm drain, rolled, looked into the drain, retched a thick mixture of bile, saliva, postnasal blood and mucus. He coughed, spit between the bars of the sewer grate, watched for the splat in the black water below. Then he brought his hands before his face. He still held the lighter. He stared at it. On one side there was a list and an inscription:

  DAU TIENG

  CU CHI

  GO DAU HA

  TRUNG LAP

  VEGHEL

  A SHAU

  DONG AP BIA

  I SERVED MY TIME IN HELL.

  On the other side there was an outline map of Viet Nam and the inscription: THANK YOU, SIR. YOU SAVED LIVES. MEN OF 1/506.

  Wapinski stared at the lighter. He held it with both hands. The sewer grate cut into his elbows. He rolled onto his side, toward the street, held the lighter in his right hand, then between his right thumb and index finger. He couldn’t feel the engravings. He lowered his hand to the grate, held the lighter between two bars, then purposefully, slowly, opened his fingers. Then he passed out.

  Wapinski woke at midmorning. He was still in the gutter before an alley separating machine shops and warehouses. He was broke: without his wallet, cigarettes or lighter. An old man was cleaning the blood from his nose. Before them was a familiar 1953 Chevrolet sedan. Wapinski’s head hurt. His hands were bloody. He felt guilty but his head wasn’t clear enough to understand why.

  “This your dog?” the old man asked. “And what’s this paper ... Bea Hollands? This pup here, he’s been watchin over you since I came. Nice looking animal.” Concentration slowly seeped back to Wapinski. “How come you haven’t been up to see me?” the old man asked sternly. His hands were gentle on Wapinski’s face. “When I finally heard you’d made it back, I came down to your mother’s place. Imagine that. I haven’t been inside there since she chased your father away.”

  Wapinski focused in on the old man’s face. It was a beautiful face, he thought. Wrinkled like a happy bulldog’s. He could not hold the thought, nor keep his eyes focused.

  “Come on up,” the old man said. “I’m not strong enough anymore to lift you.” He remained kneeling by Wapinski. “Well, how do they say it,” he said slipping a hand under Wap’s head. “If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain’ll have to come to Mohammed.”

  “Gran—” Tears flooded Wapinski’s face.

  “Don’t do one any good to cry and say you’re sorry, now.” Tears were in the old man’s eyes too. “Come on home, Bob. There’s fresh garden greens and corn fritters with syrup waiting.”

  “Granpa.”

  July 1984

  WE NEVER RELATED STORIES to each other. You know, not like we’re doin now. We’re all doin it now. Tellin our war stories. But then, when we were still in the Corps, or whatever branch, we never did. The extent was, “Hey, what outfit you in.... Yeah, I think I worked with you guys out in the A Shau....” Or, “Yeah, I was too. Were you there when the typhoon hit?” That was it. But now ... now it’s time.

  I know homecomings were really different. I mean, nearly 2.6 million Americans—men and women, 99.54 percent men but women too—served in Nam between 5 August ’64 and 7 May ’75. Official dates. Eight hundred thousand more served in the Southeast Asia theater. Three point four million Americans ... or as Bobby’d say it, “representing fifteen percent of all American families.” And each family dealt with it differently. Returning varied more than being there. No two guys came home at the same time, to the same house, same family, friends, neighbors, with the same baggage of experience.

  This has taken me years to figure out, to fill in details or be willing to jump over stuff or guess about the gaps. It was difficult getting to this point. For years it was like I had this voice inside me that couldn’t get to my vocal cords—like it wanted to speak but couldn’t get out and then somehow it came out of him and I felt as if it had come out of me. But now, partly because of him, I’m no more that person than I am the little boy in the store watching Bobby get smacked.

  What we, each and every one of us, brought to the war was a basic core identity established in early childhood. Other layers encased the core—schooling, adolescence, and military training. Then Southeast Asia. When we returned we reentered families barely changed from when we’d left. But like a ball of wax dipped and redipped, we returned with new layers, and not uniform ones either, but varying layers as if we had entered a hundred or a thousand different dipping pots. So varied was the Nam experience—from year to year, north to central to south, mountains to paddies to rivers to villages—it might just as well have been a hundred or a thousand different wars.

  My homecoming couldn’t have been more different than Bobby Wapinski’s, yet despite the differences, the same feelings developed—alienation, estrangement from my core identity, from my layered American identity ... as if my new wax coatings were impossible to hide or shed or deny.

  3

  Pisano

  OKINAWA, FRIDAY, 19 JUNE 1968—The day was clear, hot. He had been standing in line for nearly an hour. “NEXT,” the clerk called.

  “Pisano. Anthony F. P-I-S-A-N-O.” He waited. The clerk checked the register, gave his crew the last few numbers, again rang out with a loud “NEXT.” Tony stepped to the side. The crew disappeared into the shadows of the giant Quonset hut, then reappeared with four footlockers on a roller cart.

  “Okay Pisano, here it is.”

  Tony looked at the footlocker. His name was stenciled in black on the top, front and sides. There was a combination lock at the hasp. He attempted several sets of numbers unsuccessfully. “Hey, ah, ya know,” he stammered at the clerk. “How am I supposed to get this open?”

  “Ferget the combination?” The clerk’s tone was sarcastic.

  “Listen.” Pisano almost said, Listen asshole, but he just wanted to be gone. “Yeah, I forgot it.” He smiled cheerfully. “I been in the bush for thirteen months”—he chuckled a self-degrading chuckle—“who’s goina remember a combination after thirteen months?”

  “Hey, Tony,” Al Cornwall said from behind him. “I remembered mine.”

  “Ha!” Jim Bellows chided. “He’s a dago. You know, you got to retrain em every few weeks or they forget everything.”

  “Bite this, Bellows.” Tony grabbed his crotch, laughed good-naturedly.

  “Re-mem—mem, re-mem-mem-member, re-mem-mem, re-mem-mem ...” Bellows began singing, jumping side to side.

  Al cut in. “You guys hear what those guys said is happenin in Frisco?” />
  “Wait a minute, Man.” Tony threw his arms straight up. “I got to get this thing open.”

  “They say there’s a war goin on back there,” Al said.

  The clerk brought a well-used pry bar. “Ah, hot-damn. Thanks.” Tony jammed the bar behind the hasp. “I knew ya had ta have somethin like this.”

  “What guys?” Bellows asked.

  “These guys here are all talkin about it,” Al said. “They’re sayin there’s a thing called a hippie that’s slaughterin Marines if they catch em alone.”

  “Ooof!” Tony crashed forward as the hasp snapped from the plywood. “What a hassle, Man.”

  “There was a guy over at chow ... just back from the World. He’s sayin he couldn’t stand it. Sayin things like, what happens when you get to Frisco is ... you know, he had a little time so he goes to a bar nearby the airport and like ten long-haired, bearded guys surround him. He said they were goina kick his ass but the bartender pulled a pistol and escorted him out. He says it was like he was slime.”

  “What’s a hippie?” A Marine farther back in line asked.

  “I heard about them,” another answered. “They’re supposed to be real strange. Wear necklaces. The guys! Smoke pot. Stuff like that.”

  “Shud up, Bellows!” Tony threw him the pry bar. He didn’t care about “hippies.” As he opened the locker to inspect the contents, he said, “Don’t listen to those idiots, Man. You know, they all the time.... Hey, what the fuck—this ain’t my shit.”

  The clerk came over. “Says ‘Pisano, Anthony.’ That’s you.”

  “Yeah, that’s me but this ain’t my stuff.”

  “Those your records in there?”

  “Ahhh ... no. Look! This guy was court-martialed. I’ve never been court-martialed. Honest. Ya know, maybe I deserved to be court-martialed. But I never was. Look at this guy’s shit. He wasn’t squared away, Man. Naw, that aint my service number.”

  The clerk grabbed a crewman, and both disappeared with the foot-locker into the bowels of the dark hut while Jim and Al and others continued repeating rumors they’d heard about the hippies of San Francisco and Tony kicked the dry dirt showing a disgust and boredom he didn’t really feel. “This is weird, Man,” he said to his two friends.

  “Yeah,” Al said. “Imagine finally gettin out a Nam only to have to fight yer way through Frisco.”

  “No,” Tony said. “I mean that footlocker. It’s like there’s somebody else, you know, somebody livin my life.”

  “Hey, Pisano,” the clerk called. “This one yours?”

  Tony inspected the footlocker. It appeared identical to the other. He tried the combination and the lock opened. “Yeah,” he beamed. “See, dagos don’t forget.”

  Anthony Pisano danced and limped through the next three days of processing on Okinawa. His leg was still hurting where he had been wounded six weeks earlier, a wound he had re-injured on his second-to-last helicopter flight in Viet Nam when the bird crash-landed at Phu Bai. He had been en route to Da Nang when the bird was hit by ground fire and the padding inside had begun to burn. The pilot had set it down fast and hard. Pisano’s right thigh muscle ripped from the jounce and the leap from the aircraft.

  “Hey,” he had yelled at the pilots as ground crew immediately surrounded the bird and extinguished the flame. “You guys goina take me to Da Nang, or what?”

  “Not in that,” the copilot yelled back. They both laughed. Pisano had crashed twice before, the copilot seven times. Controlled crashes. Nam craziness—hard-nosed, twenty-year-old macho. One more adventure. One more jarring to add to the body, one more nonfatal injury to laugh at.

  At Treasure Island Pisano said to Jim Bellows, “Ya know, I was standing right here day I left to go overseas. We were just gettin ready to go. And I looked up there.” Bellows turned, looked. “There was some fine California woman kissin her man good-bye right up there. She had a skirt on and she had her foot up behind her like this, kind a wrapped over the lower railin, and Man, you could see all the way to Camp Pendelton.”

  “Ooooo.” Bellows squeezed his arms in tight to his torso. “Oooo. OooooOoooo! Let’s go find one.”

  “Yeah,” Pisano said. “If they ever let us outa here.” Tony smacked the back of his right hand into his left palm. He had received travel and leave orders that morning, but along with a hundred other Marines, they’d hit a bureaucratic snafu. Again he slammed his fist. “Man, I’m not staying here. They’re just fuckin with us.”

  Bellows eyed him. “I don’t know, Man. Paperwork aint right.”

  Tony opened his hands like a preacher. His eyes twinkled in the sun. “What can they do?” he asked innocently. “We got orders. They can’t keep us. That’s cuttin into our leave time. I’m beatin feet.”

  “Oh Man ...”

  “Hey! What can they do, huh?” Tony shrugged. “I’m just a dumb dago. Come on.”

  “Okay. Let’s get Cornwall. We don’t wanta be in the airport with just two guys against all them hippies.”

  “Aw, fuck em.”

  “Okay,” Al Cornwall said, “this is the way it is.” The Marines had broken down into destination groups—those going to New York, to Chicago, Dallas, Philly, St. Louis, moved to their respective gates en masse. “Don’t anybody break up,” Cornwall said. “As long as we’re in a group, there’s no way anybody’s goina fuck with us.”

  “Nobody’s goina fuck with us.” Pisano was eyeing an older woman sitting at a dimly lit bar off the bright corridor.

  “Hey! Look! We all heard them stories on Okie, right? Maybe nobody’s goina fuck with us, but if the shit starts to fly ...”

  Tony turned, leered at Cornwall, pulled his head back, smirked. “Man, there ain’t nobody here in the fuckin airport.”

  “Tony.” Cornwall pulled him aside. “Look, Man, there’s an honest-to-God fear factor workin here. If somebody spits at one of these guys, they might tear em to pieces.”

  “Geez! Look around. There isn’t hardly anybody in here but us. Only long-haired thing I seen so far is that old dollie with the big ba-zooms.”

  “What about that creep over there?”

  Pisano turned. A young man was walking down the wide corridor in their direction. He had neatly combed shoulder-length blond hair. He was wearing a three-piece business suit without a shirt. A turquoise-and-silver necklace hung against his skin. His sneakers were untied. “Hey! You!” Pisano yelled in his best DI voice, his right hand jabbing outward.

  “Oh Christ.” Cornwall dropped his eyes toward the floor. Several of the Marines fell in behind Pisano. The young man paid no attention.

  “Hey!” Pisano yelled again.

  The man furtively glanced over.

  “Yeah,” Pisano shouted. He gave the man his most-infectious smile, walked out to intercept him in the center of the corridor. “Yeah, you,” he said more quietly. “Ken I ask you a question?”

  “Me?!” the young man said.

  “I was wonderin,” Pisano said, “ah, see, all of us just got back from Nam and we were wonderin what a hippie is and if you’re one.”

  “You’re stoned!” The young man stepped back, then sideways, turning, continuing to face Pisano as he moved down the corridor, finally backing away still in the direction he wanted to go.

  “AAaaARRR!” Pisano roared.

  The young man spun, ran away.

  “I can’t believe you guys,” Pisano blurted between laughs. “Here you been through a year a shit and you’re worried about somethin like that.”

  “Passengers holding boarding passes for rows twelve through twenty-seven may now board,” the ground attendant announced.

  Pisano got up, shuffled to where other Marines and other passengers were forming a line. He shuffled slowly toward the door, feeling a bit disappointed because the attendant taking the tickets was a guy and not one of the pretty girls he’d seen at the other gates. He handed the worker his ticket and pass and then it struck him that he had forgotten something. “Ah ... wait a minute,” he said to th
e worker. “I’ll be right back. Don’t leave without me.”

  “I can’t hold—”

  Tony shouted, “I forgot to call”—he sprinted up the corridor to the phones—“my Mom.”

  As Tony deplaned in Philadelphia he smiled and winked at the stewardess, leaned forward and placed an innocent peck on her cheek, then tried to ever so lightly brush the back of his hand across her thigh, barely succeeding to brush her skirt as she stepped back. He did a little jig in the lighted bulbous pod where the ramp sealed against the plane’s body. He checked his reflection in the small window, now black with night outside, then started walking up the enclosed ramp. He felt he looked sharp in his Marine Corps uniform with its three rows of ribbons, carrying his short-timer cane and attaché case, standing tall at five feet eight inches, feeling like a mountain at one hundred and forty-six pounds.

  I’m a proud motherfucker, he thought. A Magnificent Bastard. I got my shit to-geth-er, rolled in a tight little ball, and the folks are goina be proud. Two-thirds of the way up the ramp he paused, switched the cane to his left hand, bent and rubbed his right thigh with the heel of his right palm, then straightened back up, threw out his chest, and marched into the terminal.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered. He stopped. They grabbed him. “Uncle Joe! Mom! Pop! Who’s this? Maxene?” Thirteen friends and family surrounded him, twenty-six arms tried to hug him at once. He beamed, he hugged back, kissed. He broke loose, did a little jig, then let them hug him again.

  Family was important to Tony. Indeed, it was the stories of his Uncle Joe—Tony’s childhood hero who had been a Marine in the Pacific during World War II—that had led Tony to enlist in the United States Marine Corps in August of 1965, two months after his high school graduation, three months before his eighteenth birthday. Tony’s enlistment convinced his cousin Jimmy, son of his father’s sister, Isabella, and her husband, James Pellegrino, to follow suit one month later.

  His family and friends had driven down in three cars, one car with four friends from high school, guys who hadn’t gone into the military—Roy, Jack, Donny and Ken—all slapping him on the back, congratulating him, shuffling him toward the baggage claim area, two of them dropping off to try to pick up his cousin Annalisa, Jimmy’s sister, who had just graduated from high school and who was pretty without being intimidatingly beautiful. Tony stopped to let his mother and father catch up, and his eldest brother John and Uncles Joe and James and Aunt Helen, and his cousins Vinny and Maxene. Maxene, at sixteen, was a knockout.