“Stac—She marryin that ...”
“Um-hmm. I’m going up on Wednesday. I thought you’d come....”
“Naw. I gotta go up and see Tony. I’m goina be his best man. Ha! But California, huh?”
“Um-hmm.”
“Where?”
“San Martin. My father has a friend out there. He offered me a job.”
“Hey, okay!” Jimmy said. He put his hands on her shoulders again, pulled her close. She dropped her head. He kissed her hair.
She held him, not with passion, with control. “Jimmy, we need to talk.” He rocked back a few inches. She took her hands from his side, with her right she removed the engagement ring he’d given her. “Jimmy, I can’t do this if you’re going back there again.”
“Why?” He was calm.
“I just can’t,” she said. Her eyes began to tear.
“What if I don’t go back?” Jimmy said.
That stunned her. For a moment she said nothing. Then she whispered, “Your letters said you were going back for a third tour.”
“Yeah, but what if I don’t?”
“I ...” Again she couldn’t answer.
“Come on. What is it?” Now Jimmy stood back. “What if I stay?” His voice was hard.
“I ... you ... you don’t fill my needs anymore.” Red said. “And ... I’ve met someone.” She did not look at Jimmy. “I’ve met someone else who fills my needs.”
“Needs? What needs?” His words were fast, his tone had gone from calm to hard to angry.
“Well, to start with, I need someone who’s here.”
“Damn it! I just asked you what if I didn’t go back?” Now he turned, stepped away. Then he stepped back. “What someone?!”
“I wrote you ...”
“You mean this guy that you’re just buddies with?!”
“Yes.”
“I knew it. I knew it the first time you wrote that!”
“That’s what you said in your letter, but it wasn’t like that.”
“Yeah.”
“Really.” She was crying now, looking at him, beseeching him with her tears, angry at him for not believing her. “Really,” She said again. “Maybe if you’d trusted me I would have felt....”
“Oh, my fault, right?!”
“If you’d trusted me I would have stayed true. But you immediately thought I was cheating ...”
“You’re being just like Stacy!”
“You know it hurts to be accused of—like Stacy?!”
“Yeah. Like when she was foolin around on that Airborne guy.”
“Oh damn! It is that Airborne guy.”
“What is?”
“Bobby is. That’s who I’m seeing. Stacy’s old boyfriend.”
Bobby climbed the loft ladder, crossed the darkened wood floor with its remnant scattering of straw left from a time when the farm was active. His eyes adjusted as he approached the door, and the heavy beams and braces of the simple structure emerged as if he’d walked into a hollow body supported by an old but still strong skeleton. Grandpa had told him to go there, to spend the day, because he didn’t want Bobby moping around underfoot like he’d moped all day Wednesday, and Thursday, and Friday. “Go on up,” he’d said. “I left some things out. Some things a yours. And I cleared out a drawer too. That’ll be yours. When you’re done, file your things in the drawer and turn the lights out. You need anything at Morris’?”
“No.”
“Good. I’ll take Josh with me. He can’t climb the ladder yet.”
Dutifully Bobby had crossed the yard, opened the big door, walked by the vacant stalls, the long feeding trough, the center gutter for washing the place down, to the far end where the ladder was. He’d brought his AWOL bag, his records, a dozen magazines he’d kept, a hundred articles he’d cut from the newspaper but hadn’t read beyond the first paragraphs.
He put his hand on the latch to Grandpa’s barn-loft office, hesitated. It had been years since he’d been inside, years since he’d helped his grandfather raise the seven-sectioned bay window to the framed opening, pulling so eagerly on the line that ran through the pulley blocks, one on the superstructure Grandpa had built on the roof, one through the bindings that Grandpa had insisted Bobby tie about the window without Pewel watching or checking but just saying, “You’re fifteen. You know how to do it.” And he had raised the window alone, afraid his knots would fail or that the rope would slip through his hands, raised it easily until Grandpa had reached out and as simply as pulling in a child’s balloon, pulled the window into the opening, put precut dowels through each side into the predrilled holes in the side posts, opened the center window, and untied the line.
Bobby opened the door, felt for the switch, turned on the overheads. The room glowed warm without shadow, the soft luster of oiled pine absorbing any hint of glare. He stood. A thermal drape had been pulled across the bay window beneath which a large pine desk had been built. Bobby closed the door, stepped to the desk, dropped his AWOL bag on the floor, his armload of papers on the desk. He lifted the hem of the curtain. The morning sun was rising behind the barn. Before him was the pond. He raised the hem further. Across the pond he could see the crags and the woods. To the left were the knoll, the cliff, and the orchard. To the right was the high meadow, fallow now. Above, surrounding the woods, the meadow, and the barn were the ridges, which seemed to hold and to protect everything within their expanding, descending V. Bobby dropped the drape. He sat. He squeezed his eyes shut, shuddered, opened them.
Before him was an old manila envelope that he had stolen when he was thirteen, taken from his mother’s attic unknown to her then and probably to this day, had taken and run to his grandfather leaving Miriam to think he had run away. Grandpa had kept his secret, had kept the letters safe for ten years. The letters were the old man’s tie to his son as much as the boy’s tie to his father. Yet they’d sat, deteriorating, unread for ten years by either grandfather or grandson. They were love letters written by a man they both loved, to a woman neither loved but both accepted exactly as they accepted the physical presence of the letters, as a tie, a bind to a man who had deserted them, a man to whom neither held an iota of hate nor an ounce of grudge.
Grandpa had taken the envelope from the file drawer, had laid it on the big, oiled pine desk. With it he’d laid two file folders, one from Paul Wapinski’s soldiering time in the Pacific, one from Bobby Wapinski’s time in Viet Nam. Pewel had laid them side by side, his obsession with his family, driven, even back in the early ’40s before Paul returned to abandon them, by Pewel’s fear that he would never see his son again, driven, heightened for his grandson, because after Paul returned he disappeared and the same might be happening with Bob—disappearing, abandoning the man who had toiled for half a century to establish a home to which his son and grandson might return, might have a base upon which to build their lives.
Bobby did not immediately turn his attention to the manila envelope or to the files. He’d brought his own material and he’d brought Tyrone Blackwell’s letter, which he’d begun reading in the house but which had overwhelmed him in the first few sentences. He had stopped abruptly, refolded the pages, returned them to the envelope addressed by hand, marked in the corner FREE meaning it had been mailed from Viet Nam.
He pushed the folders and the manila envelope to one corner, Blackwell’s letter and his recent news clippings to the other, plopped the material from the AWOL bag in the center. That, he decided, would be the easiest way to begin.
He looked down at the desk, thought down through the floor to two stories below where his wrecked Mustang sat on blocks. He sorted pages and magazines, placing them in stacks, chronologically, the oldest on top. “What the hell am I goina do with that car?” he muttered. He turned to look for Josh but Josh had gone with Grandpa. He opened the top magazine, the Newsweek he’d begun reading on his journey home. “The Battle of Ap Bia Mountain,” the headline said. And the photo and cutline, “Hamburger Hill: Was the Slaughter Really Necessary?”
Immediately his eyes found the line about the Nixon administration, which “sought ... to disclaim responsibility” and immediately Bobby Wapinski tensed. “Fuck em,” he muttered. “They just don’t fuckin—” He sat back. Never let em get to your mind, Wap. Never let em get to your mind, cause they just don’t fuckin understand.
He leafed through the articles he’d read months earlier, turned to an article on South Viet Nam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu. On a trip to South Korea, the magazine reported, Thieu “was hailed as a great anti-Communist Asian leader.” The article went on about the flap between Nixon and Thieu over diplomatic policies and negotiation strategies.
... Mr. Nixon might just agree to Communist demands for a provisional coalition government.... But in his statement in Seoul, Thieu made it plain that he would have nothing to do with such a proposal”
Agree! Wapinski shook his head. Agree to a coalition government with the communists! It’d be suicide. At the back of the magazine there was a column by Stewart Alsop titled “No ‘Disguised Defeat’?”
... Nixon ..., “A great nation that fails to meet a great challenge ceases to be a great nation.” ... the United States could not and would not accept a “disguised defeat” in Vietnam....
... skeptic was President Thieu ... warning ... against a “false peace”—precisely because he was deathly afraid that President Nixon might elect to settle the war in Vietnam at the expense of the Saigon government....
... The military and political situation in South Vietnam really is much better—the Communist wolf is really further from the door.... The Saigon government now controls more people than since the Diem days; the Communist “infrastructure” shows real signs of unraveling in some areas; the Viet Cong is having severe recruiting and disciplinary problems. But because there had been so much false optimism in the past, officials and reporters are chary of emphasizing these facts, for fear of being laughed at....
They’ll make you doubt your own mind. Hmm, Wapinski thought. Not this guy. He was enjoying this guy Alsop, thought Alsop’s got his shit together, got it rolled in a tight little ball.
... North Vietnamese have hinted, and the Russians have more than hinted, that there should be no great problem about a mutual military withdrawal from South Vietnam, if only the political problem can be sensibly settled, on the basis of point five of the Viet Cong’s ten-point program.
What ten-point program? Was I that immersed in what I was doing there not even to know about the proposal?
Point Five proposes that “the political forces ... that stand for peace ... enter into talks to set up a provisional coalition government ... [then] hold free and democratic general elections....
What the Communist side is proposing, of course, is a Popular Front government, precisely patterned on the popular fronts established under Soviet sponsorship after World War II, as a prelude to total Communist control.
Wapinski skimmed down, thought back to “administration ... sought ... to disclaim responsibility.” “Shit,” he whispered under his breath. “Never let em ...”
... This three stage process, from seemingly genuine coalition to the final ... monolithic Communist control, is unquestionably what Moscow and Hanoi intend for South Vietnam.... But if the Communists are smart enough—which they shows signs of being—to offer a sufficiently thick disguise, President Nixon ... under enormously heavy pressure may accept the defeat, as President Thieu is very well aware....
Senate ... murmurs are being heard to the effect that only the “corrupt and unsavory” Saigon government stands in the way of a settlement and an end to the killing.
Wapinski’s mind buzzed. He was calm and tense simultaneously, pre-combat relaxed. This was a completely different dimension to Southeast Asia than he had dealt with during his year.
He opened the next magazine. There was a Canadian whiskey ad that had, in the backdrop, a beautiful woman with short brunette hair, standing, looking out over a mountain lake. She wore a two-piece bathing suit and a lustrous light blue, three-quarter-length jacket. Her legs were perfect. He tried to flip by but he couldn’t turn the page. Married, he thought. He checked his watch. In a few hours she’ll be married. And Red’ll be there too ... to help cement it.
His mouth was dry. His head felt as if it were filling with concrete. Again he looked at the picture. The girl was looking out, across the water, her body turned half to the camera, her profile showing just the tip of her nose and the contour of her cheek. He analyzed the photo attempting to determine if indeed the image was Stacy’s. One moment he was certain it was, the next he felt sure the ass was not round enough, then again with the pose, the taut muscles, the shoulders pulled back ... the entire image not two inches high behind an eight-inch bottle of Canadian whiskey ... “Geez, man!” He sat back. “What the hell are you doin?” Again he checked his watch. “What the hell are you doin with Red?”
He pushed on through the magazine, reading article after article—Nixon’s troop withdrawals, reduction in force, Viet Namization, ARVNs taking over in the Delta, defoliants reduce land to moonscape—yet not retaining even a semblance of their content. He rose, walked to Grandpa’s drawing table, looked at the old man’s sketch of a school bus fitted with Grandpa’s design for nylon-plastic “kid-catchers”—two-piece shields that mounted on the frame and body at the rear wheels, enclosing the wheels and curving in under the bus, designed like an old-time train’s cow-catcher, to deflect an animal or a child. Yeah, Bobby thought, why not.
Bobby returned to the magazines. The September 15th Newsweek had five pages called “The War in Vietnam,” including a column by Kenneth Crawford entitled “Kindly Uncle Ho.” Crawford concluded:
What effects Ho’s death will have on the tactics and strategy of his successors is unpredictable.... There will be a vacuum. For Uncle Ho, like Uncle Joe (Stalin), was a genius—an evil genius by democratic lights. Both Marxians in their ideology but throwbacks to Genghis Khan in their methodology.
Wapinski placed the magazines in the empty file drawer Grandpa had left him. Faith and patience, he told himself. Faith, patient inquiry and hard work. Keep on, keepin on. For an hour he read, sorted, and filed news clippings, forcing a patience that he did not feel, forcing a focus that would not come. He thought of Red, of her eyes and smile and laugh and of how, at times, she could say exactly the right thing. Still he did not focus on her. He turned to Blackwell’s letter.
Dear Captain Wapinski,
You remember me. I was wounded on Dong Ap Bia when you were in command and now they’re court-martialing me. Sir, you’ve got to remember me and help me. You visited me at the evac hospital at Evans before you left for the World. I was wounded in the buttocks and back by friendly fire on one of the last assaults up that bad motherfuckin hill. I did whatever you ordered. I was a good troop. I was up there when the monsoon hit and we got washed off that bad fucker, and I was the first guy back up there looking for those guys we lost. I know you remember that cause you were right there, too, like you was a regular grunt and not a replacement commander from the rear. I know you remember me because we were from the same area back in the World. I come from just outside Wilkes-Barre, from Coal Hill. The rear is where I got in all my trouble and it’s like nothing I did out in the A Shau means anything cause in the rear they don’t put any merit on what we done in the boonies. I got two Purple Hearts. I got an ARCOM, the Air Medal and my CIB which no one can take from me. And I should have a Bronze or maybe even a Silver Star but these motherfuckers in the rear are holding up the paperwork cause I got charged with possession of dope and insubordination to an officer—Major Krausewitz, the assistant adjutant. That son of a bitch locked’n’loaded on me in the messhall in front of about a hundred guys. I was unarmed. I pulled guard three nights straight and that fucker wanted me back in the boonies that minute. I didn’t even have my ruck packed or any ammo and he wasn’t going to give me time. I said, No Way, Sir! I’m not going. I wasn’t even armed and he stood there with that 16
on his shoulder aiming in on my face and telling me to get up and move or he’d grease me on the spot. My wounds from Hamburger weren’t even fully healed. Sir, he done this because I’m Black and because I was doing some weed when I was con-vo-less-ing but you know I never did any in the boonies or even on guard like some of these white REMFs.
Sir, I need your help. I need you to write them a letter attesting to what kind of soldier I was. Captain Billings was killed on Dong Ap Bia otherwise I know he’d do it because he and I were really close. Sir, if you don’t write, they’re going to send me to LBJ (Long Binh Jail), and make me do hard time. I need your letter right away, Captain Wapinski. Other brothers that served under you said you’d do it because you were “an up front boonie rat” when you were in the bush. Thank you, Sir, for helping me. Anything you send to them, send me a copy too or they’ll say they never got it.
Your Brother-in-Arms,
Tyrone Blackwell, Pvt 1
Wapinski reread the letter. He remembered Blackwell, remembered his anger after he was wounded, but he wasn’t certain if he could recall Blackwell in the field. He pinched his lower lip, attempted to force upon an image of Dong Ap Bia the image of a black soldier he’d commanded for so short a period. Blackwell, he thought. “Because I’m black,” he thought. It struck Wapinski as strange, eerie, that of all the men he’d known in Viet Nam, a significant percentage, perhaps one in six, were black. Yet here in Mill Creek Falls, with its equally mixed population, he did not truly know a black man or woman except for Johnnie Johnson, who owned the auto salvage yard behind Lloyd’s Autoland, had not associated with any Mill Creek blacks since high school. He seldom even saw any black men or women or children, as if they were physically or legally segregated to the one section of town in which he himself had no business.
Blackwell ... Bro Black from the Sugar-shack. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe that was Tyrone. He looked at the desk. There was an entire file of clippings on the 101st Airborne from ’68 to ’69; there was the old file with clippings from ’42 to ’45, and there was the envelope.
Carry Me Home Page 18