Then again, “Hey, who have you given control over your life? Promoter Don King, maybe? The baseball owners? Budweiser beer? Some fucking demagogue here or there? A rented gold Cadillac? Who’s controlling you? You or them or it? Did they get to your mind? Madison Avenue ad men? You’ve got the choice. Political demagogues? Right now you’ve got the opportunity. You can use it or blow it. Your choice.”
It was a tit-for-tat game. And Bobby was losing. Throughout this period, as the barn meetings continued, Vu Van Hieu handled the IRS and the retroactive accounting beautifully but he was not able to account for many of the vets who had graduated or who had quit. Perhaps Hieu would have handled it even more elegantly, more efficiently, had it not been for Bobby. Bobby refused to allow Hieu to force the vets to comply with the IRS demands for independent contractor status. At that time he did not realize or understand that to the IRS this demonstrated High Meadow’s willful noncompliance with the law, and therefore justified the IRS’s refiguring of the ’77 through ’79 returns as if all vets had been employees; and as if Bobby, as employer, had willfully not withheld from the employees, nor paid to the government, FICA, Federal Unemployment, and Social Security taxes.
Bobby brought Hieu with him to the first meetings with the case officers. They were open with the government men, explaining that they believed the problem was not theirs but the IRS’s; they explained in detail what High Meadow was, how it worked, how and why he paid the vets, and how they in turn were liable for their taxes which, because High Meadow’s pay scale was minimal, were not much. The case officers seemed amenable, happy to accept Bobby’s explanation. Then the IRS re-sent notice of payment due for 1978, with additional interest charges.
In ensuing discussions, the auditors disallowed Bobby’s claim that the vets were independent contractors responsible for paying their own taxes. In addition, they showed that at least fifteen vets had been receiving veterans disability payments. The IRS then stated that if Bobby attempted to claim High Meadow was a drug, alcohol and behavioral treatment facility, High Meadow would, because its “patients” were receiving federal funds, be subject to all federal laws and regulations—including building access and safety codes, procurement contract procedures and reporting, and reportage of racial composition of staff and patient populations.
In October the auditors went further, stating that because of the unpaid taxes of 1978, all years would be re-examined and present income and contracts might be attached. The fact that Bobby didn’t “own” High Meadow but only held “tenancy for life” rights, set back the IRS attorney’s plans to lien the farm. But Vu Van Hieu (and quickly Mark Tashkor and Jesse Rasmuellen, High Meadow’s attorneys) didn’t believe this obstacle would hold the IRS at bay for long. Vu, Tashkor and Rasmuellen, along with Lucas Hoeller, a Nam vet and corporate tax specialist, set to work, retroactively, reforming all High Meadow activities under a single conglomerate that would allow Bobby to write off “wages” and “care” (bed and board) of the “participants” as expenses.
The IRS agents in turn asked for details of local bed and board establishments, (the value of bed and board they later called barter and treated it as wages, subject to taxation, and soon part of the overall assessment). Hieu was horrified. “These men,” he moaned to Bobby, “they act like your friend but they are not your friend. Many officials just like them now in Viet Nam. These men are your enemy. You must be more cautious. Must have Mr. Lucas Hoeller come every time. And Mr. Mark Tashkor.”
“Naw,” Bobby objected. “This is not Viet Nam. He’s just doing his job.”
“He do his job with vengeance,” Hieu retorted.
“No,” Bobby said reassuringly. “Really, Hieu. He’s looking for a win-win situation, just like us.”
In late October the IRS sent yet another demand. This time they claimed Bobby was liable not just for the previously mentioned amounts, not just for the 7½ percent employer’s contribution on all wages, but 15 percent, plus interest, plus various other penalties, plus—and this was the kicker, “A 100 PERCENT PENALTY FIGURED ON ALL UNPAID TAXES, CONTRIBUTIONS, INTEREST AND PREVIOUS PENALTIES.”
These tax-related events, the entire process, was more than Bobby (or Hieu) wished to grasp—more bewildering, more frightening. Bobby suspected his mother, possibly in conjunction with Ernest Hartley, of being the stimulus behind the IRS probe. For all his reaching out and expanding into the community, his relations with his mother and his family had gone from bad to worse. Only Brian remained cordial, but their talks were never intimate. Still Bobby never missed, never considered missing, paying them their yearly percentage as per Pewel’s will.
What truly frightened Bobby, and Hieu, was one auditor’s comment to Lucas Hoeller. “We never would have caught him had it not been for that informer.”
Sometime between the meetings of October and December, maybe before Sherrick’s cancellation proposal, maybe shortly thereafter, Bobby went to a doctor, again for his ass. And for his knee. “Forget the knee. I want you over at St. Luke’s immediately. You’re all infected.”
“Can they do the arthroscopy at the same time?” Bobby wanted the medical business finished once and for all.
“Just get your buns over there. Take care of them first.”
Time was a cloud. Bobby did not want Sara to know. He instead called Tony who took him to the ER. Bobby was examined, waited, was reexamined, again asked to wait. Finally, “The procedure is called an anal fistula repair,” the doctor explained. “Here, let me show you.” The doctor drew a diagram of the anal sphincter and surrounding tissue. “A fistula,” he said, “is a channel caused by injury or infection. It connects an abscess to an open cavity. You’ve an infection up here. Pressure causes the seepage. You shouldn’t have let it go so long. It’s the infection that’s probably been making you feel so weak. What we’ll do is open up the channel, then suture it back up. But from the inside. See, we cut the sphincter here—”
“Oh,” Bobby moaned. “Oh. I gotta get out of here. I gotta get some air.”
Bobby emerged from the examining room. “Hè.” Tony chuckled. “How’s the ass?” Bobby was ashen. He glanced at Tony. Then his eyes rolled back and he toppled silent as a tree in the woods.
Two days later, after the surgery, the doctor told Sara that Bobby would be fine but that his hematocrit level “was a bit low.”
Still the meetings continued—beyond the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, past the election of Ronald Reagan, through falling inflation rates and Thanksgiving and Christmas and to the new year. As the pressure of the local recession and the pressure from the IRS increased, as the daily news brought new setbacks in the hostage negotiations, as the Soviet expansion into Afghanistan solidified, Bobby intensified his harshness, his demands, on the assembled vets.
“If there’s anyone here who wants to remain stuck, get out. This isn’t a fucking rest home. If you want to be warehoused, go to the VA. If the vow means nothing to you, leave.”
To a man the vets sat quietly, heads hung. “You’re expected to know the truth, the overall picture of what happened there. Why it happened. What America’s role was. The positives. The negatives. What we were up against. What the enemy did. Goddamn it! Today’s social problems are caused or exacerbated by misperceptions dating to Viet Nam. This new racism, this new polarization—skinheads, the Klan, Latin Kings, the Black Mafia, street gangs—their growth is a direct result of the media’s narrow focus on racial tension and violence and its neglect of racial harmony. We’re teetering on the brink of disaster. Individually and as a nation. Do you know that NVA terrorists assassinated a hundred South Viet Namese village leaders each month in 1960? A thousand a month in ’62? People wonder why America has lost its will! Every terrorist incident, every hostage-taking to which America does nothing, destroys our will. Tony, you said this. We were America’s will: the will to survive, to fight, to pull the trigger. And we were wasted by self-serving politicians, by the media, by big business, by the left and the right. And in usi
ng us they have killed America. Sherrick, is America over? Are the founding principles dead?
“You guys want to believe the worst about yourselves? Go ahead. Focus on every error, on every failure you’ve ever committed. But be aware, individually or as a nation, it makes us suckers for other people’s propaganda. If it’s you as an individual, go ahead, believe you’re nothing, believe you’re worthless, inept, because you don’t have a tenth of the shit Madison Avenue tells you you gotta have to be anybody. If it’s you, us, as a nation, go ahead, believe the worst because of the skewed perceptions propagated by ourselves, by Americans, about who we were in Southeast Asia.
“But every person here has taken a vow. Repeat it with me. I vow—” Bobby paused, waited for the chastized vets to lock in, “to seek to discover the truth, to become unstuck, to grow, to expand beyond myself, to encompass community, intellectual development and spiritual awareness.”
Again Bobby paused. The vets were silent. “The vow ...” Bobby said. “This is an irrefutable obligation. If you are not willing to take it, or if you are not willing to live by it, LEAVE!
“Gary, how did Sam Adams put it? If ye love the tranquility of servitude better than freedom—and whoever or whatever you give your mind to is your master—go from us in peace. What did he say, Gary?”
Sherrick spoke up. “‘Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.’”
“Um.” Wapinski was motionless yet he seemed to be burning. “Leave. Call us not your brothers. Do you know why you were where you were when you were? Was there valid tactical, strategic or political reasons, or was it totally meaningless? Is it because you were never shown the overall reasons and you, to this day, believe there were none? Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. That’s what the vow is about!”
Gary Sherrick rose. “I propose,” he began, stopped, straightened, cleared his throat. Formally he said, “I propose we place on trial, in this next year, the information, and the sources of that information, to which the American public had been exposed, regarding the entire American–Viet Nam era. In addition I propose that we incorporate the research for this year’s trials of Jane Fonda and Robert Komer into a massive effort to discover the truth or nontruth of that previously mentioned information, and those sources of information, which allegedly have so poisoned our culture that America, as a concept, is endangered and on the brink of extinction.”
“Seconds?” Bobby called.
“Aye.” Forty hands rose.
On December eighth the temperature dropped below freezing, and for twenty-seven days it remained below zero, did not break above freezing until the hostages were released and yellow ribbons bedecked the land. It was as if that record cold winter was naught but one long meeting interrupted by daily events. Guys were hot with the topic, with their research. Arguments disrupted work. Bobby saw this as good. Vets switched basketball teams to be with like-minded players. New vets quickly became engrossed. Vets taking courses at Nittany Mountain involved nonvet students, and some nights the barn and library were packed with more than one hundred “investigators,” “prosecutors,” and “defense-team researchers.” It was an exciting time, a striving time, generally a happy time.
Bobby was still sick, still irritable, still blaming it on allergies or the flu or burn-out or IRS-induced stress. Tony, Sherrick, Vu, Van Deusen, joked with him, chided him, told him just because he had a pain in the ass didn’t mean he had to be a pain in the ass. He took it good-naturedly, but soon the frustration would spike and the ire of slow progress or no progress would grab him and he’d snap at one of the vets and the core staff would find itself buffering the most vulnerable vets from Wapinski’s wrath.
In mid-January Mike Treetop and John Cannello left High Meadow to open their own restaurant in downtown Mill Creek Falls—the Shuke Apeilish Pàkawenikana (Lenape for sugar apple dumpling, or the Apple Fritter). That sparked an immediate celebration but in Bobby it was followed by deeper stress. To Tony he said, “When I was in school, even in the army, I never thought I’d live to thirty. Even when I was first married, I figured thirty. When I married Sara I knew I’d be like Granpa, live past eighty. I’m going to be thirty-five. This IRS bullshit is killing me. I don’t know if I’ll make it another year.”
“Cut the shit,” Tony responded.
“No, Man. They really got me. They don’t want to work it out. Hieu’s right. They don’t want me to be in business. The easiest thing for this agent to do is to shut me down. That makes his life easy. He’s got nothing vested in working it out. The government gets nothing if I close down. And it has to pay these guys’ unemployment. It gets whatever I can pay if I stay open. But these agents don’t care.”
“Yeah, but Man, your guys are going like gangbusters. They’ve been fixing frozen pipes around the clo—”
“Business is great. We’re making money. We’re paying taxes. But the more that comes in, the higher percentage they disallow. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
At this time it was not so much to Tony that Bobby spoke. Nor to Sara. Nor Josh. Not even to Grandpa up in the cemetery. Instead Bobby spent hours talking to Hieu as if Hieu’s trials and ordeals made him the most worthy confidant, as if Hieu was not Hieu at all but was Pewel Wapinski reincarnated.
3 November 1984
HOW CAN I TELL you the story here of Vu Van Hieu? It is long, complex, a story of woe, a story of courage. Late at night Bobby used to visit him in his cubicle in the old bunkhouse. Hieu would be sitting on the edge of his cot, chain smoking, staring fixedly at the cover of a closed dictionary, concentrating, seemingly absorbing the content by the power of his focus. Bobby would sit, maybe smoke a cigarette with Hieu, maybe say nothing for a while. Then they would talk about Viet Nam. Hieu told Bobby about his war, thirteen years in the ARVN, ’62 to ’75, about his imprisonment. “They say, ‘You come for three days. Three-day reeducation seminar camp.’ They keep me for three years. They keep me much longer but my wife’s father have some money to bribe the guards to let me escape. If I stay, if I not escape, I would not be alive. Sometime for two month they put me in a steel CONEX. You remember the steel CONEX box. My ankles in iron shackles. Eat only one bowl of rice each day. Two cups of water. You read report from the Aurora Foundation. That report has pictures of the CONEX they put me in. You know, they tie our elbows together. Lock us in under the sun for two month straight. Most men die. I can see all my bones because I have no muscle left. When the guard say, ‘Okay, your wife pay. You can escape tonight,’ I cannot go. I cannot stand up. I cannot crawl. I have no skin on the back of my leg, only scab. When I move they break. I cannot escape for three weeks until my wife’s brother come and carry me.
“Then I hide. All Viet Namese people suffer food shortages. Some say America has blocked everybody from giving food to Viet Nam. But why does Viet Nam need anyone to give it food? My country grow food for many millions more people than it has but the communists won’t let us grow food. No one want to work for the communists.”
Hieu seldom talked about himself to other vets. But he talked to Bobby, shared with Bobby his deep sense of shame for having left Viet Nam, his profound desire to return. “It take me nine time to escape Viet Nam. Nine time I bribe this official, that official, this boat captain, that river watcher. Eight time they catch us. Once they send me back to the seminar camp where they work people who have no more money for bribes. They starve them and work them until they die, then they throw them like cherry pits into the jungle.
“The communist always know when someone trying to escape. They always know how many to let be successful, how many to intercept. Half of my people die at sea. These boats very small. Just coastal fishing trawlers. Maybe one hundred people on one boat. No one can move. Some baby born on boat next to some old woman crapping or some old man seasick. Many boats sink. Many attacked by pirates who kill the men and children and take the young women.
“We shou
ld have fought the war different. We try to fight on fronts while the communists terrorize our rear areas. We should have fought that way too but LBJ say, ‘No Sir.’ If he said, ‘Okay,’ in 1965, there would be no CONEX boxes, no seminar camps, no pirates, no refugees.
“In Thailand I take classes in English and in American accounting practices. My wife die. My children in Viet Nam with their grandfather. You help me write to Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick at UN. You help me write to President Reagan. Because you are a citizen they must listen to you.
“Bobby, you help me go home. Someday—you hear my words—some motherfuck day, we go back and kick ass. Then I come back here with my children and my wife’s family and my children get American education. They think I’m Eastern! Bullshit! I am fundamental American values.”
31
THE WIND BLEW COLD. The street was empty. RTL6764 waited. Gilmore had not been in but had been expected within a few minutes, yet the informer refused to wait on hold. Instead he’d walked upriver from the booth by the old two-lane steel truss bridge over Loyalsock Creek; had passed through the small mill area where many of the old brick buildings were now boarded up: had shied from the White Pines, worked his way through the tight, cramped streets of the millworker houses, uphill, past St. Ignatius, into the even more tightly packed homes of the minorities, to the phone booth at the edge of that neighborhood, beside the converted house that was The Church of the Golden Shep herd.
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