by Barry Fixler
He said someone who goes off to war and kills, and then returns and lives as if nothing ever happened, had to be a psycho or sociopath. I just laughed.
I had a chance to talk with Tick about Khe Sanh. He didn’t have any animosity toward me. He understood. War affects people differently. Some are like me. They go on. It tears others apart.
I always thought my reaction was normal. I can only speak for Marines in my generation. I’d say 99 percent of Marines that would come back from war would get busy and move on with their lives. And those that didn’t, the ones with mental problems, some of them may have had problems before they went to war.
Dr. Tick signed his book War and the Soul for me:
“For Barry, Your soul has seen and survived hell in the raw. Thank you and bless you for your service and sacrifice. I honor and salute you. Welcome home. Ed Tick.”
33
Real Homecoming
I was pretty sure in 1968 that God gave me a personal welcome home from the war.
I wasn’t the school kid that left a year and a half ago. I’d been to Parris Island, Lejeune, Pendleton, Okinawa and war. War. I’d just done thirteen-and-one-half months in Vietnam. I’d seen horrors, but I felt great about myself.
Now I was home on a twenty-day leave, my first leave after returning from Vietnam. I was alive, I had all of my body parts, and as boys will do, I went looking for girls.
There were a lot of Irish pubs in Syosset where we used to hang out when I was a senior in high school. So I went to one of those Irish pubs on my first Friday night home and I hooked up with a girl that was perfect for me.
She was a pretty, blonde, Irish girl with big tits who had just graduated from high school. What luck! I couldn’t believe it! She was the perfect one, and she wanted me to come to her house!
The only problem, she lived with her parents. But her parents weren’t home, she said. They wouldn’t be home until 2:00 in the morning and it was only about ten o’clock.
I almost had to pinch myself. In high school, it would take months and months to get laid. My tongue would hang out. Now, man, I was in her house and she was leading me to her room…and I knew what was next!
“This is the greatest,” I thought.
We were having sex, and all I could think was that I was getting a personal gift from God because I had endured the hardships of war, protected America and killed bad guys. I really thought that. God was rewarding me!
Her house was a split-level, like the one I grew up in, with all the bedrooms upstairs, and one staircase right next to the front door. Her front door was already open before I even knew what was happening.
Her parents were home!
“Oh my God! My mother and father are home! My mother and father are home! Get under the bed!”
I scurried under the bed while pulling on my pants. I’m still not sure why I didn’t bolt. I squeezed under the bed with half of my clothes off, thinking, “Run? Stay? Run? Stay?”
I probably would have given her father a heart attack. She’d turned her light on—to make things look normal—and her dad walked in her room.
I was squeezed under the bed with my head half-stuck watching his shoes go back and forth. I still debated running, but it wasn’t that simple. I didn’t know what clothes I had on, and I couldn’t remember where the door was. I couldn’t tell from her dad’s shoes how big the guy was. Would I have to fight him?
I just knew she’d be punished for about forty years, so I held tight. Dad sat down on the bed, and I had to listen to what seemed like an hour of father-daughter small talk. He had no idea that I was there. Maybe it was only five minutes, maybe fifteen, whatever. Here I was a Vietnam veteran, pinned down by father-daughter talk.
He finally walked out of the room and we just waited about an hour for her parents to fall asleep, and then I got the hell out of there.
Marines who come home on leave only have so much time, ten, twenty days, so they can be pretty much one-track. I was: girls, girls, girls; get laid; get laid; get laid. That’s all my brain would register.
I had my father’s car, a big Pontiac Catalina, ’67 or ’68. He always bought big American cars. His Catalina was a four-door sedan, the biggest one they made, a boat. It was a family car, a father’s car, definitely not cool. In those days, they had big, heavy, metal bumpers.
And God was still giving me treats because I hooked up with a totally different girl, a dark-haired beauty. It was too easy, nothing like before I left for the Marines.
“How can we treat Barry? Let’s give him two different girls!”
The girl and I went bar hopping until around midnight.
We were just driving around the developments on Long Island in my father’s Catalina. The radio was playing, I was kissing her, and next thing I knew, her hand was on my lap.
ZIPPP!
And then she leaned over.
“Thank you God! Thank you God! Thank you God!”
I couldn’t believe it. No effort. I didn’t do anything. It was as if God just said, “Okay, whatever two girls Barry wants, he’s getting.”
It was so perfect.
You know how sometimes you can remember where you were, what you were doing, the first time you heard a song? Right then was the first time I heard The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”
The song had been out for a while, but I had been in Vietnam, so first time that I heard it was home on leave from war.
“Hey Jude” and fooling around with a pretty girl while I drove my father’s Catalina around these rows of Long Island houses at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. Everyone asleep. Lights out. Real quiet.
Some things you never forget.
“La la la, la-la la la, la-la la la, Hey Jude…”
BOOM!
Fucking BOOM! I smashed the car!
La-la la la!
I probably was only moving about ten or fifteen miles an hour, but I ran right into a parked car and smashed in its side.
God was still smiling on me, though because neither of us got hurt. The parked car was a different deal.
“Shit!”
I cut the lights, backed up, drove out of there and took her straight home.
My father’s car had to be messed up, too. Not that he would’ve freaked. He wasn’t that type. As long as no one got hurt, he couldn’t have cared less. But I felt bad. I thought that I’d smashed up my father’s Catalina.
But that was the thing about those old Pontiacs. They were built like tanks. I got the car home in the garage and there wasn’t a scratch on it. Nothing, just another gift from God.
34
‘Stay Cool! Mitch’
“Stay cool! Mitch”
That’s how Mitch Sandman used to sign off the letters he sent to me in Vietnam, and I felt the void of his absence as soon as I returned to the States.
Mitch and I became buddies in second grade, and that was that; we were tight from then on. I went off to the Marines and he started working and going to school at night, but then he was drafted, and the war decided our fates.
If you lived in Long Island, in Nassau County, in the 1960s, you couldn’t drive until you were seventeen years old if you took driver’s education, or eighteen if you didn’t. But Suffolk County was just a few miles east of us, and you could get a junior license in Suffolk and drive at sixteen. So when we turned sixteen, our parents would drive us over to Suffolk County to get our junior licenses.
We were sixteen when Mitch convinced his father to get an old jalopy, a 1951 Ford, for $50. It was a hunk of crap.
My family had new gardeners and after school I started working for the gardener. Not that I needed it, but it was a challenge for me, so I started working for him after school and on Saturdays. Somehow I brought Mitch into this, and he came and took things to another level.
He had this piece of crap old Ford, and Mitch said, “You know, Barry, over in Hicksville there’s a house that’s selling a bunch of shrubs, and we could just hop the fence and pick some shrubs and we’ll
give them to our gardener.”
What Mitch was talking about was probably a nursery or something. It was a school night, about eight or nine o’clock, and we weren’t supposed to be driving in the first place. His car had no license plates, no insurance, nothing.
Mitch and I jumped the fence at the Hicksville place, took about six little shrubs and put them in the back seat of his car. We shot down to where our gardener guy was and we put the shrubs on the back of his truck and drove back home.
The next day, the gardener said, “How the fuck did these shrubs get on my truck?”
But, hey, it was free merchandise, so he sold it.
A few days later, we did the same thing: hopped the fence, lined the shrubs in Mitch’s back seat and then drove them over and put them on the gardener’s truck. The gardener loved it. He sold them to all of my neighbors.
Mitch and I laughed. The guy probably thought, “I dunno where they’re coming from, but I’m not asking because I’m making a lot of money.”
He wasn’t paying us a thing. I never needed the money. We just did it for the thrill.
“Wow, look how nice those look all lined up.”
We were having a great time.
Then one night we jumped the fence and all of a sudden, a big guy came out screaming like a son of a bitch.
“I’m gonna get you guys!”
We jumped in the car, but the guy jumped in front of it, so Mitch made a U-turn onto the lawn and we drove away, but the guy ran to his pickup and chased us.
He followed us through this subdivision, and we were thinking we were about to get beaten when I got the idea to start tossing the plants. I started tossing the plants out and they hit the street, wobbled and then popped straight up because of the big root balls. In no time there was a line of trees down the middle of the street, and sure enough the guy stopped to get them and we escaped.
Mitch had a knack for scams and getting me involved in them. We were in tenth grade, and we were at a pizza place in Jericho, Long Island.
Mitch convinced the waiter that he’d graduated high school and had already done this and that. The waiter was complaining about wrecking his car.
“My front fender’s smashed in and I can’t afford to take it to the body shop,” he said, so Mitch convinced him that he worked in a body shop. He said he could work on the guy’s car from three o’clock to five o’clock on weekdays.
School let us out at 2:45 and Mitch’s parents got home at five o’clock, so Mitch picked the guy’s car up and had a two-hour window for joyriding.
This went on for a few days. Mitch made it look like he was working on it. He’d spread some kind of putty on it, sand it down or whatever. Mitch didn’t know how to fix the car. He just wanted to drive it around for two hours every day.
Mitch picked me up each day and we went joyriding. We kept it in the subdivision because we never saw cops there.
Our friend Larry always stole his parents’ car and took us driving, too. So one day we took the waiter’s car over to Larry’s, and we were revving it and saying, “Come on out! Come on out!”
Larry popped his head out the window over his garage and screamed, “Leave rubber! Leave rubber!”
Then his head jerked back and his mother appeared in the window. “Get that car out of here!”
She had Larry by the neck, but we could still hear him screaming.
“Leave rubber! Leave rubber!”
So Mitch wound up the motor in neutral, revving it higher and higher and even higher to impress Larry.
BOOM!
Mitch dropped it into drive, and BOOM!
Something snapped under the car and the two of us as well as the car went flying. It was like a catapult, and we landed on somebody’s front yard.
We had been joyriding and abusing the poor car for about a week and the car finally said, “Fuck you!” and catapulted us onto a front yard. The car just flattened out and impaled itself on the lawn. Parts of it were scattered all over.
All of the neighbors and Larry’s mom yelled, “Your friends are crazy!” Someone called the police.
We didn’t get in trouble because we were so young. I can only imagine the police asking the waiter, “Why did you let the kid take your car?”
* * *
Mitch was good for mischief, but he was never meant for combat.
We were the same age, but he got left back one grade. I graduated high school and after four months went into the military. I was away for the next two, two-and-a-half years.
During that time, he graduated a year after me and back then, the service waited until you were eighteen-and-a-half years old before they drafted you. So by the time he got drafted, I was already in Vietnam, and we only kept in touch with each other through writing.
He was drafted into the Army, but he wasn’t much of a warrior, just not a military type of guy. He got drafted and he was reluctant to go.
His father was not the kind of father who said, “Hey, come on boys! Let’s play catch.… What are you doing Saturday? Oh, I’ll take you to Yankee Stadium!”
His father wasn’t like that. So Mitch never had any guidance on how to deal with the military.
I was away when he got drafted, so I could never give him the dos and the don’ts.
I would have told him to be squared away. He had an opportunity because in the beginning, the Army and the Marines gave intelligence tests. Mitch scored very high. He scored superior. He was too smart to be an enlisted person.
They saw how intelligent he was and wanted to put him through officer’s training school. Not only would he have been an officer, but he also would have gone through another year learning to be a helicopter pilot. That’s how intelligent he was.
But instead of two years, Mitch would have had to agree to serve for three or four. That was all he could see, and he wanted out as soon as possible. I would have told him to go to school for another year or two, absolutely. It was 1969. The war was going to end sooner or later.
I would’ve said, “You’ll be going to school for maybe a year or two easily, go through officer’s candidate school training to be a pilot. That’s two years down the road and you’ll be in the States, not in Vietnam.”
By the time I returned from the war, Mitch had been sent to Vietnam. We only missed each other by a few months. So the last time I ever saw him was June of 1967, right after boot camp. We never saw each other again, just exchanged letters. It was kind of hard to really say your personal feelings in writing.
He didn’t last more than four months in Vietnam before he was killed. Mitch was an assistant machine gunner, which is one of the worst jobs to have. You’re just a mule responsible for carrying ammo. On June 3, 1969, his squad was sent on a helicopter to rescue the crew of another helicopter that had been shot down.
Mitch was cut down in a sheet of NVA gunfire as soon as he stepped off, according to D.W. Taylor, who was also on the chopper and received a Silver Star.
Mitch was killed out there in that horrible way. He had barely turned twenty, and he was just too stupid about the military. That killed him. He could have gone to school and been an officer. It would have changed his life positively, and he wouldn’t be dead.
His name is etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. My daughter traced a copy of it when she went on a field trip to Washington, D.C. in seventh grade. She had no idea what my friend’s last name was; she only knew him as Mitch.
She told whoever was in control of looking up names on the wall, “Listen, my father’s best friend, I only know his first name. I think he died in 1969.”
She found it with just that information. She recognized that last name Sandman, so she brought the tracing home for me.
He always signed his letters with something like, “Yo! Barry! Hang in there, man! Stay cool! Mitch”
I have done my best, Mitch. I have done my best. I hope that I have honored you, and that you would be proud.
35
Home at Last
&nbs
p; From 150 Marines in Okinawa, we dwindled to twenty-five in El Toro, California, and five of us were still together on the way to Kennedy airport in New York. One was headed to Brooklyn, one to the Bronx and so on, so we said we’d share a cab ride.
My parents were expecting me, but they didn’t know what day or what time. They knew that I was scheduled to be home within two weeks, but I hadn’t talked with them in awhile.
The cab took me to within a block of my house in Long Island. It was maybe 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, a nice, peaceful summer New York night. I shook hands and said goodbye to the other Marines and walked to my house. The lights were off. My parents were asleep.
When you’re at war, home is what you live for every hour and every second of every day. To finally stand there in front of my house brought out everything that had built up inside me.
I just stared. It was one of the greatest moments in my life.
The only moment more emotional probably was seeing my daughter born. Other than that, standing there in front of my house in the middle of a New York summer night was the heaviest. I was home from Vietnam in one piece.
I had been more afraid of losing a limb than losing my life. There are times when a mortar is overhead and you jump in a foxhole and you have no control that you just know someone’s going to get it. I kept telling myself that I couldn’t skate it, couldn’t escape it. I knew that I was going to lose a limb.
I just stood there outside the house and took a few minutes to suck it all in.
Of course I was anxious to get in the house and relieve my parents. I knew they were worried sick; every minute that I was away was a burden on them. But at the same time, I wanted to bask in my emotions. They were good, so I stayed there for a few minutes, just soaking it all in.
“Barry, you made it,” I told myself. Probably eight or nine months into my tour of Vietnam, I developed a morning ritual. I would take thirty seconds and tell myself, “I have both my hands. I have both my feet. I have both my legs.”