Years later, a sad and fitting epitaph for the Agent Orange saga would come from James Clary, an Air Force scientist and author of the official history of Operation Ranch Hand, in a statement to Senator Tom Daschle: “When we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s we were well aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the civilian version, due to the lower cost and the speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned.”
By the time I reached adolescence, there was no longer any doubt as to whether I was like other young men. I was different, less than, not quite whole. Instead of attempting to come to terms with what I have now come to realize is a minor glitch in DNA, instead of facing up to my own uniqueness, the shape of my particular handprint, I tried hard to deny it, to prove to myself that I was in no way distinct from the two hundred boys and girls I entered Dixon High School with in 1988. On the surface, I succeeded. I joined sports teams and—I’m sure this was a conscious act of rebellion—put myself in positions that required the use of both hands in order to succeed. I wrestled and won matches as a freshman, earned four varsity letters as a soccer goalkeeper, brought home trophies and plaques. What’s more, I had awkward sex with teenage girls, drank beer and smoked pot, grew my hair long, hung out with the right crowd, took a cheerleader to the prom.
Inside, I was a wreck. I recall the summer between my junior and senior year and a girl named Krista, younger than I, brown hair, green eyes, slender, carrying always the smell of Elizabeth Taylor Passion. Krista was the first girl I spent more than one or two nights with, and I fell for her hard. Along with my friend Josh and his girlfriend Billy, we spent the better part of the summer together. It was a hot summer, hot in the manner that all midwestern summers are, so thick with vapor that even the loosest clothing sticks to skin, and sunglasses slide down noses. That whole summer, when I was in the company of Krista—which was most of the time—I wore long sleeves. I would rush into my bedroom to change clothes each time she came to my house. There was a particular red cotton shirt a friend had loaned to me that I must have worn three times a week. I wore it in the water when we swam in the moonlight at the abandoned rock quarry; I wore it during sex on the gravelly shore; I wore it when to do so must have been agonizing. I thought the sleeves would hide my hand.
And the long-sleeved t-shirt was not the only mechanism employed for hiding the truth of who I was. I took to wearing thick goalkeeper’s gloves that kept the shape of their fingers against gravity when I shook hands with players from opposing teams after soccer games (in retrospect, I wonder if the gloves weren’t part of the appeal of the position). I would bury both hands deep in the pockets of my letterman’s jacket as I flirted with girls from other schools at track meets or wrestling matches. I became skilled at striking a variety of postures to keep my dreaded deformity out of sight, turning this way or that, sitting down just so. I learned to live in a state of contortion.
It would be comforting to look back and to sense some kind of turning point, some theatrical beginning of a healing process, a link between the discord of those years and the relative stillness of the present. The truth is this: like most authentic change, most real letting go, mine has happened gradually, and beneath the surface of things. A decade and a half of life—of marriage and divorce, of fatherhood and graduate school, of love affairs and rafting swift rivers, of university teaching and Buddhist meditation—have swept away much of the hidden shyness and dread. But still, at the age of thirty-three, I’m finding that old habits die hard. If I’ve lost myself momentarily while driving, reading a book, or engaging in some other task that requires a chunk of my brain, I sometimes find that, without intending to, I have tucked my left hand gently behind my right elbow. Lying in bed at night before sleep takes hold, I’ll notice my left hand resting underneath the ruffles of the blanket while my right hand sits bare and comfortable on top. Or I’ll think about a class I’ve taught on a particular morning, coming to a sudden realization that all the gesturing and hand-waving was done with one arm. I will pause for a moment and make a mental note. Sometimes, I will curse.
Terry pumps the brakes to keep from skidding, drags the gearshift into park, and points out the driver’s-side window. From behind a chain-link fence, I stare at a fleet of seventeen C-123s beached on the desert playa. A two-foot square of aluminum, white with red block letters, clasped to the fence at shoulder height, reads AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, meaning Air Force specialists wearing hazmat suits. I must make do with the view from the fence line, which is fine with me, since the nearest contaminated aircraft are less than fifty feet away.
I climb out of the van and gawk. Forty years before, these olive planes, arranged before me now like neglected toys on the top shelf in a child’s bedroom, unloaded over 10 million gallons of dioxin-laden herbicide on a countryside halfway across the world, the same countryside my father tromped through with a gun at his side for one full year at the peak of the spraying. And now, on the edge of the desert metropolis, beneath wisps of cloud shifting and breaking in the morning sky, in the checkered shadow of the chain-link fence, as much as I would like to deny it, I find myself looking for catharsis—a burst of emotion that will finally and emphatically wash it all away.
I know how lucky I am—that things could be much worse. I’ve seen the pictures of the Vietnamese tending the earth after the fire. The parents who cut and burned the trunks of leafless trees to keep their children warm in winter. The beautiful young girls with jet black hair and loose blouses trimming grass for baskets. The peasants planting saplings in barren ground.
And I’ve seen the photos of jars filled with the stillborn at the Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Babies born with two faces and three ears. Dead babies with limbs like ropes, long, slender, twisted like pale pretzels in formaldehyde. Siamese twins with melting heads, gathered in a lovers’ tangle, the lips of one pressed to the neck of the other in the softest kiss. Shelves full of pickle jars holding the rawest fruit.
And the living, the children of the damned. Children with eyes like marbles, huge and rolling and blank. Children with skin like birch bark, skin that peels and flakes in small squares, covering their bodies in checkerboards of dying flesh, pushing up from scalps like duff on a forest floor. Children with alien heads, their skulls ten times the size of their jaws. I’ve seen the feet turned in on themselves, the blackened arms, the hands like clamps.
I look down at my hand in its present state, nearly three decades after the last surgery, after I finally said no more—no more casts, no more stitches, no more IV needles, no more Darth Vader masks spewing anesthesia into my lungs. I look down at the rumpled flesh, the grafts sewn between the spaces opened up to give me fingers, grafts of crotch skin, grafts that grow hair, and the lines of scars from the stitching, and the two tiny inner digits, and the middle knuckle that bears no crop, and the pinky that juts straight out, and the short, thick thumb, and I am glad that at six years of age I finally said no. They wanted to do more surgeries, wanted to cut a little more here, tweak the bone structure a little more there. And I said no.
A gust of wind rakes an old Pepsi can along the base of the fence. It rattles to a stop on the crown of an anthill, teeters for a moment, and rolls to my feet like an empty shell. Out here on the scabland of memory where scorpions scurry under B-52s, jackrabbits bound over chopper blades in tufts of never-green grass, and the sun burns through everything, there are no epiphanies. There are only dirt and space, dreams and loneliness, and—I realize with a start—confrontations with the past that will never quite fill the gaps. Taken with an incredible urge to urinate, I snap one last photo and hop in the van, trying hard not to look back.
ASHLEY ROMANO holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from New York University and works at Adobe. Her dad served in the Vietnam War as a US Marine, and his account of the time spent
in Vietnam has been a major influence on the narrative of Ashley’s writing. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine. She currently lives in Astoria, Queens, under the Hell Gate Bridge.
JERSEY CITY
for Robert
I.
To the place you grew up
in a railroad
apartment with your brother,
mother and father.
Where you worked on a chicken farm
and stayed in a bungalow
on the shore every summer.
To the place you played
high school football and broke
your nose. Where you decided
to walk into a Marine’s recruiting office
during Vietnam and then into a tattoo
parlor where you got a sailor skunk
on your bicep with the 18
dollars you had. Where you would send
letters and maps to your parents,
people I would never meet,
telling them where you were sleeping,
wrapped in a trench
and Qui Nhơn. A snippet of stories.
I am this.
II.
Barry Mann and Frankie Lymon couldn’t even answer
the questions they asked. Who put the bomp in the bomp
bah bomp bah bomp and why do fools fall in love?
Your advice: try to find better music to fall in love to.
You found Mom, your Linda Sue, in between those doo-wop
beats. She found you after dating the Four Seasons drummer.
Teenagers in love even when singing Duke of Earl
in between watch shifts during the Helicopter War.
It wasn’t about the answers but the way to shake hips,
to pin a carnation boutonniere at homecoming,
to find someone to share a malted and ssh boom with.
I haven’t found something better.
III.
My dad only gave me one photo of him in the war: his rifle aimed
at the cameraman, standing on top of a truck, cigarette between his lips.
Only after he died did I get the photos of him in his Marine uniform
with his parents. In them I saw I inherited a dimple on the left cheek.
The stories my father told me of him being in the war were dropping
acid and smoking dope. There were no stories of how his best friend
got blown up by a land mine, because every Vietnam vet has one,
only tales of seeing little red monkeys from his watch station
and jumping out of helicopters to What a Wonderful World.
The scars my father had were little white nicks on both of his calves,
multiple souvenirs he carried with his to tell only he knew. I’ll never know
if he took his malaria pill each week, or if he incorrectly discarded a wooden
ammo box which could be turned into an electrical mine, or practiced his religion
just as A Marine’s Guide told him. I only have his words and dimples like the
Vietcong instructions Is the enemy strong? Avoid him. Is the enemy weak? Attack.
IV.
I was born a child of rock ‘n’ roll and war and this crazy thing
we call love. Out through Mother and passed to the calloused
hands of Father. So when Dad died, out went the Doobie Brothers,
Boz Scaggs, and ZZ Top. Out went the stories of getting fined
for shooting a water buffalo in a rice paddy and taking opium
during a watch shift. Out went the Christmases where the ham
would be carved to a soundtrack of Johnny Mathis. Out went
the birthday cards signed love, Mom & Dad, the television
playing Gladiator with commercials even when owned on DVD,
the singing of Runaround Sue while vacuuming. In came dinners
quiet as bread rising on the counter, the head of the table never full.
JOSEPHINE ROWE is an Australian writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. She is the author of two story collections and a novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal (Catapult, 2017), which follows an Australian family attempting to move beyond the long shadow of the Vietnam War. Rowe’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Best Australian Stories, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds fellowships from Yaddo, Writers Omi, and the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and was a 2014–2016 Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She currently lives in Tasmania.
VANELLINAE
And I know now, about the birds—their Latin name, their
population and international distribution. I know their
migratory patterns, have watched footage of them in
flight; could write about the slow, irregular beat of wing or
shrillness of call, but still do not know how to write about
youstanding at the window that morning at the
repatriation clinic, grey in the early light alongside the other
old soldiers and all of you just watching the birds in the grass
outside. Seven of you there at the window, not speaking only
smoking as you’d smoked through decades of daily crossword
instant coffee, broken families, anger management, repeat
prescriptions, therapy through wood and leather work and
all those things nobody talks about. You stood smoking and
watched the birds build a nest, and though I know the word
VanellinaeI still do not know how to write about what
you and those grey men were waiting for.
WHAT I KNOW OF DOORWAYS
1.
Here, I am five years old or eight years old
or ten
between my father
(wild; throwing punches and hard words and spit)
and my mother
(saying nothing, now
the door-handle pressed into the small of her back).
My mother’s body is soft and warm as sleep
as my father beats a hole
beside her head.
(Years later my mother slips through this hole.
The door is replaced so that I cannot follow).
2.
Watching sheet-lightning
through a screen door
in Bairnsdale. I sit in the hallway and
lean forward when the sky turns
silver.
In the next room are relatives
I do not know.
Their children
stand back from the windows
eat slowly
are adequate.
They don’t pretend
to like me.
3.
My sister and I get up at dawn.
The back door creaks
so we open it slowly, by inches.
Everything is grey—
our faces and breath,
the house and hills.
We climb onto the roof,
staining the palms of our hands
and the soles of our feet
red with dust from the tiles.
We are waiting. I can’t remember what for.
LOVE
He is teaching her how to break bottles against the side of the house. A whiskey bottle works best, he tells her. She thinks this is very lucky, because that is what they have the most of—he has spent the last few weeks emptying them. So whiskey bottles are what they are using. Now, he says. Like this. Crack. So that you get something like a shiv, not just a fistful of glass and stitches. Like this, he says. Crack. And she feels a great swell of pride in her sparrowy chest—he gets it perfect, every time. Now you, he says, and he hands her the next bottle. Because a father can’t always be there, he says, and she nods and tries to look solemn, to make him believe she understands. The bottle does not break on the first try. She swings harder on the second try and gets it, but it is a bad break. Her fathe
r does not say this, but she knows. Too close to the neck. Shards of glass from other afternoons shine dully in the dry earth at their feet. He hands her another bottle and the second break is better, the glass jutting out like the snaggled teeth of some prehistoric fish.
She tries to imagine when she will need this—how things will ever get so bad. Her idea of evil is a slinking, unknowable thing, formless and weightless and impossible to hurt. She takes another bottle and tries to give the evil a shape, eyes and lips and things, all squinty and sneering—a composite of all the villains and monsters she has seen in films and picture books. And although she finds the result is less terrifying than something incorporeal, she does not know how she will ever be brave enough—will she ever be able to do that to somebody, evil or otherwise?
They both know she will not. Later there will be men and dark rooms and lost hours, a thousand little cruelties and she will never, not once in her life, save herself in the way he shows her now.
But there are so few things he feels he can teach her, so little he can offer before the night calls him back, swallows him whole without leaving any trace but the small change on the bedside table, half a pack of cigarettes and a new bruise on her mother’s arm.
That is not important now. That is for later, and for now there is the smooth neck of the Jameson’s bottle in her small hand, the cool glass warming with the heat of her palm, another crack against the wall of their coffee-brick house.
On the other side of the wall her mother stands in the center of the lounge room and listens, not understanding, her pale hands making light fists and her head lowered in preemptive defeat.
Outside, the setting sun has turned her father to a featureless silhouette somewhere just to the right of her, watching. When she tries to retrieve this moment from the clutter of early childhood—and she will, over and over again, looking for reasons, warning signs, answers—she will not remember how his face was set. But she will remember the sound of breaking glass, and she will understand this as love.
Inheriting the War Page 34