We stand, we walk a little. My stories have begun to twine into his if only because I had my war to fight, too. From a grassy flat in the chapel park I can see the church above us, and the dormer window over the sacristy glints and stirs the memory of a night I hadn’t thought about for a good long time. Not the night when Kip and I crawled through that window on our way into the church and what we presumed would be a new life. I remember the darkness of the nave, leaping down into the candlelit sanctuary—but, as I say, that isn’t the memory it has shaken loose now.
I see the window and am transported back to a young man among hundreds of other young people and we have just marched from a construction site in Morningside Park, where we’d gone to protest the university’s plan to build a gymnasium on public property there, a gym that was to have lavish facilities for Columbia students and a separate, much smaller gym for Harlem community residents. Racism and the war were the two prominent issues of the day in the country, and we abhorred the implications of this project. We’d torn down a fence around the excavation site, one of us was arrested, and we marched back to the sundial on campus to figure out what next to do. The anger and spirit and fever had never been higher. I knew that this day something significant was going to happen. Whatever rules there were surely would be broken.
The university had a policy that prohibited indoor demonstrations. In the spirit of defiance we decided to take Hamilton Hall.
We were together an organic gesture, a tumult and turmoil inspired by what we believed was right. Idealism, rough élan, a spirit of tough good spread through us. It was our moment to seize. The SDS leadership walked side by side with the leaders of the Students’ Afro-American Society, the SAS, and several hundred of us marched with them.
Events unfolded with a manic slowness at first. The dean of the college challenged us to leave, but was instead held hostage in his office well into the next day. In the middle of the night we splintered into two groups, the blacks asked us to leave Hamilton Hall, said Hamilton was theirs and would remain theirs until the university agreed to discontinue work on its racist gymnasium. They told us to do our own thing, take a building for Vietnam. The blacks had a problem with Vietnam, too, but they had this other problem to work with first, and we heard them, they were brothers, we were behind them.
We caucused. Eighteen hours we’d been at it and here we were with nothing to show for our trouble. What we decided to do was take Low Library. Not just Low, but the office of the president of the university. That was going to be ours before dawn broke.
When we advanced together in the darkness—it must have been five in the morning—up the steps in the quad, we hadn’t an idea what would come of our action. We pried loose a red brick from the walkway, which were laid out like latillas, broke the window of the heavy door down at the southeast corner on the first floor of the building, and we were inside, our cries echoing through the vaulted marble corridors. Dim oil paintings of presidents and college dignitaries long since deposited into their tombs lined the hallways above our heads, the grave faces in the portraits staring down at us with inanimate horror as we streamed along. A frightened security guard was allowed to leave, but not before we informed him that this was the beginning of an all-out strike, that President Kirk could telephone and make himself aware of what were our objectives and demands if he so chose.
—He’ll know the number, someone said.
The president’s suite was located, as it is now, on the second-floor corner of the massive, ornate, colonnaded library. It faces out toward Dodge Hall, across gracious grounds of hedged walks and great plane trees. The suite was possessed of baronial detail, it emanated wealth—there was a Rembrandt on the wall—though I remember thinking how seedy some of the appointments in the office itself really were.
How we hated him. Hated what he stood for. We urinated in his wastebasket. We opened the humidor that was on his long desk, and with delight passed out his cigars, lit them up and smoked them.
—Not bad, someone said.
—Cuba libre, someone said.
We barricaded the door to the suite. We began rifling through his personal correspondence, and looked around in his file cabinets for documents that might incriminate him. What we didn’t crumple we tore in half.
It was the beginning of a siege that would last a week. By the end of the day administrators were forced to order all the buildings on campus closed, but this didn’t prevent seizures by some graduate students of Fayerweather Hall and later of Mathematics Hall. A group of counter-demonstrators took the old gymnasium and demanded that the administration do something to stop all this or they would take matters into their own hands.
Below our window, members of the faculty formed a human barricade to prevent the antiprotest forces from climbing the heavy black iron grates and entering our headquarters from the outside. Just beyond the faculty queue were the jocks, themselves shoulder to shoulder, their backs to us except to turn every so often and shout some imprecation up at where we sat on the window ledge, defiant and decided. The jocks lined up to keep any sympathizers from joining us. Beyond the jocks many people just milled, some heckling the jocks, some trying to toss food up to us—sandwiches, bananas—most doing nothing, only watching and waiting for something to happen. I knew that Jessica was out there somewhere in that farther crowd, and I can remember spending time looking out across what used to be the epitome of an Ivy League campus, with its stone plazas and polished white stone benches, marveling at what we had prompted.
During the night, strikers managed to sneak in and out of the building. The administration had shut off electricity and water in the hope of forcing us out, but they underestimated our tenacity. We slept on couches or on the floor. We weren’t budging until our demands were met, among them that the university end its association with the Institute for Defense Analyses and that all work being conducted in Pupin Hall on the electronic battlefield cease. Our position was simple. It was black as night at new moon and white as frost at first light. If they wanted to have their university back, they would have to make just a few changes, reorganize it in such a way that its students could attend it without shame. Civilize it, acculturate it.
Rumors ran like light, faster than the sounds that carried them, it seemed. What we demanded was rejected. We demanded that every student who took part in the protest be granted amnesty. No, word came back. No amnesty. We demanded that the police not be allowed onto the campus, and that the leaders of the strike not be made into scapegoats. The answer was no.
On the sixth night I decided I had to slip out. Failure of nerve, concern that another arrest was going to ruin my chances of being admitted to the bar, exhaustion, worry about Jessica, there were a host of reasons behind the decision. Several of us ducked out under cover of darkness, even as others arrived. I walked past the chapel and over toward the law school, curious about the rumors that upward of a thousand police were gathering there.
The rumors were true. Wielding blackjacks and nightsticks, the cops thrashed their way through a phalanx of students sympathetic to the protest, bloodying noses in their progress toward justice. Once inside Low, they broke down the door to the occupied office and arrested all the strikers within. Elsewhere on campus, matters got even worse. Fire broke out on the sixth floor of Hamilton, then too in Fayerweather. Police swarmed through tunnels under the campus, emerging to arrest protesters in one building, and taking axes to break down the doors in Mathematics, where they discovered students chanting “Up against the wall, motherfuckers.” Students who had soaped the steps to prevent the cops from climbing them were now dragged, face down, out of classrooms and down those same marble stairs. Thousands had built barricades, thousands had torn them down.
I wandered, for days, from College Walk to South Lawn. I tried to get back into Low, but couldn’t. I felt that I had let myself down, my principles. I thought of Kip—he was over there fighting as he believed, and here was the closest to warfare I would ever experience and some
how I had failed. Some three weeks after the strike had begun, I got what I’d been looking for. Standing on South Lawn with a number of others, heckling a group of officers, we were suddenly rushed by plainclothesmen who’d been hiding behind bushes at the perimeter of the lawn, such as little children playing games do, and though everyone around me scattered, I stood dead still and looked into the blue eyes of the one cop who had set his sights on me. He came, slowly it seemed, running. I kept thinking, Brice? Why aren’t your feet moving? It was a dream, I was sure. And I remember that the look on his face, as he bore down, fifteen, ten, five feet in front of me, expressed the same thought. Why aren’t you running?
Together we buckled backwards onto the ground, there was an audible snap. Others were on me before I knew it and the handcuffs were in place. I made no resistance whatever to my arrest. Only later, at my arraignment downtown, when the charges were read to me, did I find out that he had broken his collarbone.
What marginal satisfaction I had felt upon hearing that the plainclothesman had hurt himself when he slammed into me was erased when I was made to understand that the charges included resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.
—Your Honor, I said. —I did not resist arrest and I did not assault the officer in question.
—That’s fine, said the judge.
—But sir?
He raised his eyebrows, waited.
—Sir, he assaulted me. I was standing, as any student ought to be able to stand, on the South Lawn of the campus at Columbia University.
—Minding your own business.
—I was minding my business.
—And would you care to tell the court just what was your business there?
Go forward, I thought, unleash it. I spoke up clearly, —I was there to protest the war in Vietnam, the illegal war in Vietnam, the unjust and idiotic war in Vietnam, sir. But, for what it may be worth, I did not assault the policeman in question. He assaulted me, in fact. I did not commit any crime.
—You’re a law student, I see here.
—That’s correct, Your Honor.
—I assume you understood that a crime of the nature you are accused of would make it difficult for you to be admitted to the bar.
—I was minding my own business, sir.
—Answer my question, young man.
—I am aware of what you’re saying, and that’s why, although as I say I strongly oppose our involvement in the war in Vietnam, I removed myself from the protest.
Painful admission. The judge eyed me, then studied the brief before him, commenting on the fact that it seemed to him I hadn’t always been quite so becomingly circumspect, given my record of arrests over the past several years. No sir, I told him, but it was hard for me to harbor such strong convictions about the mistake I felt our nation was making while at the same time studying the law and developing my knowledge of its importance and intricacies.
—Catch it and see what it eats, said the judge.
This is what I thought I heard, at any rate.
—I’m sorry? I said.
The charges were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence. Catch it and see what it eats. Ketchup and see what meats. Catch up and seize the meet. To this day I’ve not been able to figure out what he really said. If he were still alive, I suppose that after all these years I could look him up and ask him. He seemed a decent-enough sort of man, had seen a lot, had cultivated some sense of balance and distance. He retired a few years after my small episode before his bench, and I read in the paper that he died soon thereafter. No voice, no remembrance. Which brought me back to Kip.
We knew where he was, Jess and I. We tried to know. We knew where Ca Mau and Can Thó were, down toward the very bottom of the country, and we knew the famous sites like Bien Hoa and Khe Sanh. She had hung a map of Vietnam on a wall in the apartment, a vast operational navigation chart with many markings that meant little to us but to a pilot would show where were aerodromes and vertical obstructions, floating villages and pagodas, rice fields. I complained that a map of Vietnam on the living room wall was morbid, and while we could refer to it I didn’t see the need for its display.
—Morbid? display?
—Look, can’t we just keep it in a drawer? I asked, to which she rejoined, —Listen, Brice, my map is nowhere near as morbid as your burning Buddhist monk, the one I’ve had to walk past each and every day for how long now?
—That monk is, was, principled and noble.
—And Kip’s not.
—Not in the same way.
—I tell you what. You put the monk away, I’ll put the map away.
They both would stay up for a while yet.
We were, Jess and I, still hanging in with each other despite the clear difficulties. She shared with me the several letters from Kip that followed that curious first he’d mailed, and what he wrote me I shared with her. Although it is possible he hadn’t intended I see hers or she mine, Kip divulged nothing in either correspondence that was so private as to be exclusionary, nor so uninnocent as not to be potentially manipulative. A statement like “I assume Brice is still throwing time and energy into protesting the war, what he needs is love from what I can tell, that would be time and energy better spent, when will he find his own woman?” was sufferable because—to my credit or shame?—I had kept my hands to myself, but it would also serve as advice, if not caution, to me, were the letter to be seen by me, which, as I say, it was. I read it as advice to stay away from Jess. Similarly, when I sensed Kip was making inquiry about Jessica’s fidelity, he tried to manage it in such a way as to make it more endearing than provocative. Jessie deserves better than an absent fiancé, he might write. Or else, I don’t know why any of you has anything to do with me. Rather than interpret these observations as something that might indicate Kip was beginning to lose what center he had, I saw them as quaint rhetoric meant to prod from me some report about her doings, her state of mind. I took it all for false naivete. And again, astute enough to know Jessica might wind up reading my letters, I sensed that he guessed right in thinking her response would be sympathetic.
—Forgotten him? Sometimes I don’t understand him. Brice, do me a favor and make sure you let him know—
—I know what to let him know, I said.
When she received his final letter, the letter that came before the telegram that announced he was going to be incommunicado for the length of a tour, she came to her senses about Kip’s precariousness. It would come to be called the Last Letter, as if a miserable holy document.
“Dear Jessie,” he wrote, “I’m going insane in this place. What I described in my last letter is basically what is going on now. Boredom incarnate, that’s me. Nothing doesn’t bore me about where I’m at. Same beat-up old hotel, same bored comrades, not that they’re comrades since how can they be when we don’t do anything together. It’s like a morgue but no dead bodies. Maybe I should be grateful but I’m not. Most of these guys are happy not to be up north where by all accounts the world is coming to an end (for the thousandth time, right). There have been moments I even thought about getting up in the air and going straight toward Da Nang and just forcing myself into action. From what I hear, things are out of control there enough I almost think I could get away with it. But not quite. My other infatuation is the Gulf of Siam. Swear to god if the plane had the range I’d be tempted by Malaysia. It won’t, so point moot. This is just ravings. I have to do something soon, though. I’m here and don’t let Brice see this or know, but I’m for the first time not so sure why I’m here. You can get out of doing this if you want out badly enough and are willing to sell part of your soul to do so. Look at Brice with his artificial pardon from service. I don’t know. And another thing is these South Vietnamese don’t seem worth all this effort, they don’t seem really to give a fuck one way or the other out in the villages. Just those in power want to keep their hands on the reins and in the tills. The whole exercise seems futile from down in the toilet where I’m positioned. I’m not sur
e what I’m going to do about it, but something—and soon. Sorry to be pissing and moaning. Most letters written from the battlefield are brave boys addressing beautiful worried girls back home, right? Harrowing dignified documents of courage. Like, My darling, we beat back the enemy today and took many casualties but the cause has advanced and Victory shall soon be Ours! I shouldn’t even send this bit of drivel, but the frustrations are closing down on me. Or that is, closing me down. And your work? It’s all right? And Brice—he’s okay? If he’s in jail tell him I’m proud of him, and if he thinks I’m being facetious tell him I am being serious. I’m sorry for everything. Love you, Kip.”
Jessica and I happened to be at the apartment when she received the letter and she read it aloud—there was no hiding it from me. It wasn’t all that strange to hear. High, low: Kip. He was low—way low. No mention of her pregnancy was my first response, but kept to myself. “My other infatuation is the Gulf of Siam” prompted my second: onward Kip, and away? If his airplane could fly over the moon like the cow in the nursery rhyme, would the moon be regarded as beckoning him? Kip, I thought. God, man. What are you doing and who are you?
Jessica was saying that it was clear he hadn’t received her letter. Couldn’t be that selfish. That wouldn’t be Kip, would it? She took a pushpin and stuck it in Da Nang. Red marked places he mentioned, blue places he’d been. And what color would mark where he died? There were plenty of black pins in her little canister. I asked her if she wanted to talk but she said what about? There wasn’t anything to talk about.
Then, the telegram.
Jessica had been aware the chances were about one in ten he’d not come home alive, those were the official probabilities. That Kip might be killed or injured she and I had understood. But neither of us was prepared for this. I read the few sentences printed in purple on the leaf of pale yellow paper. The message was remarkable for its marriage of curt precision and inexplicitness.
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