Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  Cheaters, liars, betrayers, rejectors! Everyone. Everyone around him. Or suckers! Pawns, like he himself, lied to by presidents, by congresses, by governors and aldermen; cheated by politicians, by attorneys, by bureaucrats; betrayed by manufacturers, by shippers, by big business, by small striving to get their piece of the pie. SCREWED! Conspiracy, treason, deceit aimed directly at Robert Janos Wapinski, at his wife, his children, his dog.

  “How dare they!” Bobby kicked a kitchen chair, sent it crashing. “Son of a bitch. How can they ...” His voice tapered. He did not want the children to hear. Thoughts: Can’t they see? I’ve given everything, to improve everything, every aspect of every life.... They’ve set me up. Screwed! Taking it all away! Taking it all. Everything. Even the dignity of acknowledgment. Screwed! Screwed! Then loud, angry, “SCREWED!!!”

  On 8 September Sara returned to work, full-time. The situation fueled Bobby’s rage. It was part of their machinations designed to divide and conquer, designed to debase his pride, his ability to provide for his family—not like his father but like his grandfather who had been a rock, a foundation upon which an entire nation could build, but no more, no longer would that be allowed.

  Bobby did not object to Sara working. He took pride in her abilities, her quality as a teacher, her strong and principled positions. And he took pride in the accomplishments of his children, and in the independent attainments of the vets. Almost daily he received reminders.

  Dear Bobby,

  You made quite an impression on my husband. You have given him back his life and you’ve restored mine. People need heroes and leaders. There aren’t many anymore. It pleases me that Joe’s role model seems to have been such a kind, gentle and strong man.

  But neither his acceptance and pride, nor the acknowledgments, insulated him from envy, anger, bitterness.

  A different flood of letters also poured in, fanned the flames of his fury. “I’m dying from Hodgkin’s disease ...” “I’m in my third remission ...” “... liver ...” “... a soft tissue sarcoma ...” “The cancer registry here shows a rate among Viet Nam vets 1,100 percent over expectations ...” “... eleven birth defects and counting. My wife cries every night ...” “... the rash is so bad—it now weeps constantly—I can no longer use my arms. My mother dresses me before she leaves for work in the morning. She’s writing this for me now. (Hi! I’m glad to meet you, too.) ...” “... his headaches are so bad now he never leaves the bedroom. The psychiatrist at the VA said it’s from the emotional stress of combat but Danny thinks it was from that spray ...” “... the doctor told me to take aspirin. He insisted Agent Orange never has and never will hurt anyone, and he showed me both a VA memo to its physicians and a VA pamphlet which specifically stated these facts. I think they’re afraid if they admit it, it’ll be the Pandora’s box that’ll bankrupt the entire system ...” “... the VA pamphlet AGENT ORANGE: Information for Veterans Who Served in Vietnam says, ‘there is no medical evidence that exposure to Agent Orange has caused birth defects in the children of Vietnam Veterans.’ The lawyers for the class-action suit have at least 2,000 documented cases of polygenetic birth defects due to chemical mutation of chromosomal ...” “... they denied my claim.” “... they denied my claim.” “... they denied my claim.”

  “God damned fuckers! Screwed royal!”

  Tony sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Screwed to the fuckin wall.” Bobby’s arms flailed.

  “Yeah. They’re treating it exactly as they treated PTSD when that first hit em. Deny, deny, delay, deny. Not our fault. Nothing we did. You brought it on yourself. You’re a malingerer. They weren’t particularly tight with a buck when Daddy Dow presented them with a bill for eleven million gallons of that shit but they’re pretty tight now.”

  “I can’t work ... I ...” They were alone in the barn, in Grandpa’s office. Bobby couldn’t finish the sentence. His face tightened, wrinkled, his eyes squeezed closed, his lips separated. At first without sound, then without control, he cried. He babbled. “I can’t even ... If I could just ... I’m not finished ... I’m sorry, Tone. I’m ...” Tears seeped from his eyes, dripped from his jaw.

  “Naw. Naw. It’s okay.” Tears came too to Tony’s eyes but he forced them back. “I’d be doin the same. Shee-it. I have.”

  Bobby snorted. “It’s okay to die,” he said.

  “Yeah. We all gotta go sometime.”

  “No. I mean ... It’s okay for me to die. I die, I die.”

  “Yeah, what happens, happens.”

  “What I mean is, I know it’s okay ... I don’t want to extend it unnaturally ... But god damn it, they owe me! They owe my family! I’m disabled and they deny it. They deny they’re part of it. It takes away more than money, more than my being able to help support my family. It takes away more than life. It takes away hope. It allows chaos to reign. It allows those fuckers to get away with it. I’ve been physically assaulted, and they’re getting away with it! And flaunting it! Their fucking diamond logo is on every fucking grocery store shelf in America. Screwed, Man! And the VA says in five years or so their study will be completed! In five years we’ll all be dead! Epidemiological studies! Feasibility prestudies! Protocols for the prestudy! Study-design review! Prestudy study design reviews. And challenges to each step! And reviews of the challenges! Purposeful delays. They’ve developed the perfect legal tactic—bureaucratic stonewalling. When we’re all dead, the suit is moot!

  “Listen to this,” Bobby continued. “This is from Fred Wilcox’s Waiting for an Army to Die. ‘... if Dow Chemical knew in 1965 that 2,4,5-T was contaminated with dioxin, and the U.S. knew in 1962 that dioxin is toxic, then why were extensive scientific studies not conducted on the possible mutagenic, carcinogenic, and teratogenic effects of Agent Orange before it was used in Vietnam?’ In ’62 the chemical companies even sent letters to the government warning of health problems. This is a cover-up, Man. This makes Watergate look like a leaky faucet. We’re talking conspiracy to commit murder! If they don’t deny it, they’ve got to throw all these fuckers in jail!”

  Bobby’s treatment at the VA in West Haven continued, and it continued to be quality treatment. What a paradox, what a contradiction, to be treated by a monstrous, multitentacled organization that went beyond denying responsibility, which essentially denied that treatment was needed! Bobby was not angry with his doctors, or with the VA hospital staff. Many of these individuals shared his anger at the political process, the governmental hierarchy that controlled that process, the Washington leadership that controlled the hierarchy. “Whatever happened to taking care of our own?” they’d ask rhetorically. “Whatever happened ‘to bind[ing] up the nation’s wounds, to car[ing] for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan’?” That the average age of World War II vets was sixty-four years, that these older vets were entering VA facilities in record numbers for long-term care, that the cost to the government was astronomical and rising, that the nation was still in recession and tax cuts were politically popular, and that younger vets were still viewed as having lost their war (denying funding for Agent Orange claims was an additional boon to the myth that the military lost in Viet Nam), all impacted the decision to delay or deny Viet Nam veterans compensation for bioaccumulated poisoning.

  Bobby hung his head. “How, Man, how did we miss this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Geez, Tony. I think back on my own health, I should have realized ...”

  “Yeah, but ... you know, you weren’t in a void. There was all the other shit comin down.”

  “But even here. We’ve been in touch with so many people. When I’d come across these health problem articles ... isolated pockets all over the place, people organizing in small groups, being put down as crazies ... I’d file em without reading em. It was like I wanted to deny it, too.”

  “You were handling other problems.”

  “WBBM-TV out of Chicago, in March of ’78, aired ‘Agent Orange: The Deadly Fog.’ How’d we
miss it?”

  “Could you have done anything about it?”

  “If I had had the tools ...”

  “But you didn’t. If we couldn’t handle it, maybe it’s better we didn’t try. We can’t chelate dioxin from our systems, can we?”

  “Maybe we can. Maybe we could learn how. Develop a program to wash it out before it manifests its damages. Instead we let the VA see that documentary, and react by secretly establishing their no-health-effects-from-Agent-Orange policy. We could have objected.”

  “That’s what we’re doing now, eh?”

  Screwed!

  A week passed. Maybe a month. Bitterness built on bitterness, anger on anger.

  “What the fu—” He was on Route 154 coming back from the pharmacy at RRVMC. It was a pleasant day. He felt decent. In the rearview mirror flashing red interrupted his thoughts. “What now?” He slowed, pulled to the side, let the car idle as he watched the officer approach, watched red and blue blips sparkle from the officer’s polished brass belt bullets, from his mirrored sunglasses, his badges and buttons. Bobby rolled down the window. He felt like a child about to be berated by his mother for something of which he was unaware.

  The officer looked in. “We’re making random stops to check to see if drivers are complying with the new seatbelt law.”

  “Oh.” Bobby felt relieved. “Sure. I’ve got mine on.”

  “You really didn’t have to in a car this age. What is it, a ’54?”

  “ ’53. My granpa added em a number of years back.”

  “Okay,” the officer said. “Have a nice day. You can go.”

  The officer turned, headed into the flashes. Now Bobby watched him in the sideview mirror, watched him retreat, watched the smug strut. Bobby leaned out the window. “Hey! Wait a minute.” The officer turned. “Wait one damn minute,” Bobby shouted. He opened the door, got out.

  “Yes.”

  “You stopped me just to check my seatbelt?!”

  “That’s right.”

  “How dare you! How DARE YOU pull me over for this!” Bobby was livid. “What kind of police state tactic are you running? You stop people at random? Pull them over? Don’t you EVER do that again!”

  “Take it easy, Buddy ...”

  “Fuck you, you son of a bitch! What’s your name?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Fuck you!’ I’m reporting you.” Bobby was like a madman. He walked right up to the officer. His skinny arms flew. “Get in my car. I’m taking you in. This is an outrage. This is criminal.”

  “Get back in your car and move along.” There was no warmth in the officer’s voice.

  “I will not! You have criminally violated—”

  “I said get in your car.”

  Again Bobby’s arms flew. “You motherfu”—the heels of his palms hit the officer’s chest—“cker.”

  “Bobby, settle down.” It was Mark Tashkor.

  “I’m sick of it. They treat men like criminals. We’re citizens! We’re being denied our rights.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I’m sick of it, Mark.” Bobby’s manner was harsh, threatening. “That arrogant, incompetent fuck. Bureaucratic authorization to criminally destroy a man’s credibility. We just keep being abused.”

  “Oh Boy. Look, I can get them to drop—”

  “I’m not going to let em drop anything. Make em put me on trial. Make it a test case.”

  “Bobby, we’re not going to do that.” Tashkor was firm.

  “Why the hell not?! We just let the state creep in here, chip away there, taking freedom after freedom. I wasn’t doing a god damned thing. I’m just driving along—”

  “Bobby! Bobby. Bobby. The guy’s just doing his job.”

  “Mark! For God’s sake. You’re an attorney. Don’t you see? It’s not that lackey puke. It’s the law. It’s the law that allows them to enforce this seatbelt law by stopping—”

  “Yes.” Mark cut him off. “You’re right. But ...”

  “Just like the goddamned VA.” Bobby switched to a falsetto. “‘Oh! That oozing rash! That leukemia! That’s just your irrational response to delayed combat trauma. Let me set you up with a shrink.’” Then in a deep, accented bass, “‘Why thank you, Commissar. Do you also condemn objectors to the gulag?’”

  7 November 1984

  I COULD NOT BEAR it any longer, the anger, the bitterness, the wasting away. I spent more time in the fields, or at the small mill, or in the market arranging for the sale of our crops. And I spent time at home, studying, or with my family. My eight-and-one-half-month-old son was crawling everywhere, gnawing or gumming everything in the house. Gina and Michelle were blossoming into young ladies. Linda had earned her own office in Denton’s Ob-Gyn group. (To the chagrin and resentment of some of the physicians, Linda was more popular with the pregnant ladies than any of the docs.) And I spent time with my mother and father, too—feeling, being, becoming traditional American middle class. Even enjoying it.

  At High Meadow the number of resident-vets dropped to nine with Denny Thorpe returning to Hagerstown armed with volumes of information on birth defects and VA compensation procedures; and Van Deusen, Mariano, Wagner, and Gallagher buying an old two-family house on the hill above the small mill. November came. Bobby’s health seemed to stabilize. My thirty-fifth birthday came and passed. In Washington, D.C.—after years of exile and expatriations—the nation finally welcomed its Viet Nam vets home. Or perhaps I should say we gave ourselves a welcome-home parade and a memorial, for it was Scruggs and Wheeler, two of our own, who were the prime movers behind the memorial. The dedication touched off a national reacceptance.

  I missed the dedication ceremony. It is as important for a parent to spend his birthday with his children as it is for him to be there on their birthdays—it shows them they have something valuable to give, not just that they are valued and thus will receive. Bobby’s thought. He missed the ceremony too. A group of fifty High Meadow and ex-High Meadow vets went. They returned on Sunday, the fourteenth, with story after story. I went down, rode the Harley, had to, didn’t I? for Jimmy? went down alone in December, perhaps looking for greater distance, for escape from that rage, arrived late at night, in fog, mist, drizzle. A slight wind shifted the haze. The roar of jets from Dulles was the only distraction. I came around the corner. I will tell you it is not the same memorial today as it was in December 1982. At that time there were no lights, no stone walkways. There was mud. For the November dedication they had lain sod but hundreds of thousands of feet and poor drainage had destroyed it and the pit before the apex was—to me appropriately—thick, oozing muck. I had come in from Constitution Avenue, from the back where the top of the memorial is level with the ground, so from the back you see nothing at all—and in the low flowing mist and drizzle I was not even certain I was coming upon it. Then I made the corner, the west corner, the one closest to the Lincoln Memorial which in all its splendor and light was visible only as a glow, occasionally in thinner troughs of the moving mist, as an outline. Then the memorial, the first inch. A one-inch-high black polished stone. A pitiful, insignificant one inch. Inconsequential, much like the beginning of the involvement, a tiny wedge but one by forty inches. Then the first names, deaths. Step by step it grew. In the mist, in the dark, with the backglow from Lincoln not entering the pit, with the roar of unseen Dulles-bound jets unsettling. I could not see, focus upon, more than two or three panels, the one beside me, the one in front, the hazy one beyond, me not wishing to read the names, not yet, thinking this is all? This knee-high, waist-high wall, a memorial? More names. More names. Five per line, chest high, panel after panel, muck squishing from beneath my advancing feet, no longer able to see back, to see the beginning, to see the inconsequential thin wedge, unable to halt the descent, panel by forty-inch panel, the names, numbers, growing, slow steps, panels above my ears, over my head, blocking the sounds of the street, the city, capturing like a giant ear the overflight thunder, engulfing, enveloping, un
til the panels are more than ten feet, until I am submerged in the dark mist and the memorial itself, until I have descended through 29,000 names, 29,000 fallen with 29,000 fallen before me, reaching out, narrowing to the east, to the far inconsequential, insignificant wedge.

  There is a man with a beard, ponytail, and headband, kneeling silently in the apex. I do not speak, do not acknowledge him, allow him the privacy of his prayer, his mourning. I am glad I am here, alone, here when there is no one except a kneeling figure. I advance. The east wall tapers. I slow. I do not yet know the order of names but have been told by others to look at 53 and 54 East, the panels that hold the dead from Dai Do. In the darkness, the mist, I cannot read, then can just barely read, but do not recognize any names, think to myself that I would not recognize them anyway because I do not remember the names anymore, maybe never knew some by other than a first name, or last, or moniker. Then I see, sense, Malnar, John Malnar, Big John, our sergeant major, then—it is strange, eerie, names emerge as if they want to be sensed, remembered, as if they come to me, as if they are branding irons, yet cold, dark, yet burning, searing my face, my mind, wanting me. I drop. My legs are liquid. My body has evaporated into the mist. I drop to knees I cannot feel, into mud I do not know is there. I am there with Manny, Emanuel, there with Harold, Richard, Robert, John, Carlos, William, Emmett, James ...

  James ... I cannot move, do not move, cannot leave my brothers because they have reached out to me, hold me, touch me, and I them, them, eighty-one names from Dai Do, with me until I must find James, until I am sucked back down into the swirling vortex, amid tears, I am no longer, I am mist in the dark mist of flowing spirits clinging to the earth, come with me to find James, Jimmy, panel 14 West, I’d walked by him, by him without noticing, by him on the original descent without knowing.