Inheriting the War

by Laren McClung

  LEVI RUBECK ’s poems have appeared in No, Dear, Wreck Park, Analog Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He is a former editor at NYU’s Washington Square Review, co-edits the online journal Paperbag, and writes on games for Kill Screen. (More info at dangerhazzard.com.) Later in his life, Levi’s father finally began to reckon with and share his experience as a Navy sailor during the Vietnam War. Levi explores his father’s denial of the legitimacy of his role in that war, and how it affected his marriages, children, and sense of place in the world.

  YELLOW FLARE

  I feel like Creedence should

  be playing. It might be

  why you don’t watch the news.

  You told me you wonder

  where’s your tumor, Scott

  got one the size of a handball

  but he died sober. Did I ever

  see you otherwise? I remember

  a trip to the small hospital

  and a bowl of candy, a room

  of tore-up board games and

  old men playing cards. I’m not

  so sure. The officers tested

  aggression-enhancing drugs

  on monkeys sleeping in your boat,

  which was still hot from the nukes

  it carried in 1944. You should

  be dead or shrieking but in

  this photo you’re at Sturgis

  wrapped in a leather vest,

  shaking hands, in this one

  showing off your soft-tail.

  We answer the phone

  with the same color

  but who knows where

  we got it from.

  MALL FLARE

  I can count the hair on your face.

  Two types of boys come here: those

  with fathers and those without.

  Our office is in the only mall for

  one hundred miles, across

  the theater, down the hallway from

  the arcade with guns in candy

  colors, light swaying in the breeze.

  Gateway guns. I can put a helmet

  on your head but you best not lose

  either. An example of losing your head:

  sleepwalking through Turkey,

  picking a fight with a cab driver,

  barely avoiding manslaughter charges.

  You will lose it anyways, it’s true.

  Why you should join the Navy

  rather than the Army: we teach our

  boys not to pee on their hands.

  A buddy sent me this video he took

  on his boat of missiles launching.

  He wasn’t supposed to take it

  but the boys are filming everything,

  it’s so easy now. Even though

  you can’t really see anything,

  there’s the sound of the air boiling

  and then some cheers.

  KAREN RUSSELL ’s debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and winner of the New York Public Library’s 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award. She was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” young writer honoree at a November 2009 ceremony for her first book of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which won the Bard Fiction Prize in 2011. She is the recipient of the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, Russell is currently a visiting writer at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her latest collection is Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

  UNDERGROUND IN VIETNAM

  As tourists in Vietnam, my friend Vince and I ate coconut candy and rode bicycles around the Mekong Delta. We lunched on a fish that looked like Harry Dean Stanton and joked uneasily about Agent Orange. Now, as part of the same package tour, our no-name bus took us to the Cu Chi Tunnels, the infamous Viet Cong network that snakes below the jungle northwest of Ho Chi Minh City. We were going to slot our bodies into a hole in the ground and try not to entomb ourselves.

  Before coming to Ho Chi Minh City, I had the sort of familiarity with Vietnam that comes from hearing one abbreviation throughout my childhood: “Nam.” To my siblings and me, it meant the place where an unrecognizably youthful naval officer disappeared and came out on the other side as our father. A slice of the country had lodged in my dad’s brain, a bloody shard of time, but I knew only the sliver he talked about with us, and I confess that I was shocked when the place had an airport. Shocked that it was possible to land here, walk around, pay a purplish currency for goods I recognized—T-shirts, ice cream. The reality of modern Vietnam seemed too vast and overflowing with life. At the Sheraton hotel, my father’s stories felt suddenly fictional, unreal.

  I suppose I hoped that the tunnels might be a literal portal, a way to enter the deep grammar of my dad’s past; now I felt desperate to get back on the big anonymous bus before I’d know for certain that I was wrong to come to this country and to this “attraction.”

  During the war, the tunnels stretched 125 miles from the outskirts of Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border, permitting the V.C. forces to coordinate intelligence over great distances. Many thousands of men, women, and children lived underground. Schools and hospitals operated sunlessly. Babies were born in the tunnels, our tour guide, Hai, told our group, but sick civilians and wounded soldiers died buried. In inverted funerals, their bodies had to be put aboveground.

  Today Cu Chi is a theme park. The blood-soaked ground has sprouted a cafe and a gift shop. Shrapnel is sold as a souvenir; you can buy U.S. servicemen’s lighters and bullets, bagged like carnival goldfish. Hai showed us an exhibit of many whimsically named booby traps: Tiger Trap, Spinning Trap. Bamboo spikes that looked like old lion’s teeth grinned at us. “No Babies Trap,” he said, and demonstrated how they would snap shut on a soldier’s penis. “Trap makes a lady-man. Understand? Ha ha! No babies.” Some of our faces contorted with horror; others’ laughed maniacally. Hai’s turned red. Nobody seemed to know what to do with this history. Earlier, Hai cornered Vince and me, the only Americans on the trip, to ask if we had seen his father; the man left Saigon for Houston when Hai was 3.

  As a courtesy, the entrance to the tunnels had been dilated for our large, Western bodies. Still, it was a tight fit. One Dutch girl in a silver jacket slid into it, like a light ray entering a blind eye. Vince went down next, and I followed. There were dim red lamps in the tunnels, and there wasn’t a breath of sun. Everybody crawled forward on all fours in a human chain. This chain was incredibly slow-moving. At first there was banter, but then the heat smothered it. I wanted to yell to be let up, but I was at least eight bodies from the entrance, so I stayed silent, shamed into it by those amiable Dutch kids, whose big bodies were practically humming with good nature even as they blocked the exits. In the underground acoustics, my brain became a megaphone for such unhelpful information as: YOU HAVE TO PEE. YOU CAN’T STAND THIS FOR ONE MORE MINUTE. If I had hoped to get a deeper sense of the war, I was currently connected to only my own shallow panic.

  Then we stopped moving. Anyone who has been on a roller coaster when it grinds to a halt midflight knows this terror.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” “How long till we surface?” Somebody thought Hai had said seven minutes. “Seven, right?” a voice cracked. “And not, like, 70?” Sixty seconds, times seven. Somewhere back in the sun, I assented to enter this nightmare. Now I was the middle segment of a long worm. Move, I threatened the worm. If you don’t move, I’ll scream.

  The scariest stories, to me, are always about what we can bear, the hells we construct and endure. Soldiers and even children lived in these conditions for years. My father fought aboveground, but he tells a similar story: “I can go no further!” turned out to be a bluff the war would call him on again and again.

  Eventually we did start moving. We pushed on, helpless to do otherwise, on the assumption that we’d turn a corner, find an exit. One by one we did make it out of the tunnel, gulping at a blue sky. We’d been down there for less than 20 minutes. We had seen, Hai remind
ed us, only a tiny fraction of the entire thing.

  BRIAN SCHWARTZ ’s short stories and essays have appeared in Harvard Review, Ascent, Blackbird, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other journals. At University of California Irvine, he was awarded a Regents Fellowship and the Cheng Fellowship in Fiction, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Schwartz is a senior lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at NYU and he has also taught at UC Irvine, San Francisco State, and in Bard College’s Language & Thinking program. His father Mayer served in Vietnam as a doctor in the US Army Medical Corps with the rank of captain and received a Bronze Star for meritorious service.

  INVASION

  We kept the new house closed up but every day a couple lizards found their way inside; this happened early in the morning or at twilight, when it was cooler. From the start, my wife Donna was a lizard sympathizer. She liked to take the little things outside and set them free so they could sunbathe their cold blood and infiltrate our home again in the dark of night. During our first week in Florida, we found one lizard in the bedroom of our new home, one in the TV room, one in the kitchen. The kitchen one died of a coronary: Donna picked it up, and it fell onto its side in the palm of her hand. These lizards scare easily.

  We were living in Pelican Row, a gated community in Cole County, Florida, in a Pelican Row townhouse, with a small kidney-shaped swimming pool. The maintenance fees were very reasonable. As soon as we got to Pelican Row, we installed an alarm system, but we kept having problems with it. Something to do with the electrical wiring. Several times we came home from the deli or the symphony or the beach and the minute we unlocked our front door horns blew and a theatrical Bible voice boomed into the thick air: GO BACK! YOU ARE TRESPASSING! THE AUTHORITIES ARE ON THEIR WAY! GO BACK!

  But it was our home now—we owned it.

  Shortly after our move to Florida I discovered a bundle of old letters I’d written to my wife from Vietnam. Donna had kept all the letters together faithfully, a thick stack, more than 350 pages, but then over the years we’d forgotten about them. I found the letters as we unpacked, sifting through our boxes of shared belongings, a mound of old creased paper browned at the folds like the tanning, wrinkled hide of a beach-bound retiree. “Look at this, Donna!” I called out through the cool air of our new concrete garage. We read through several of the letters together, standing side by side, scanning through those pages from the distant past.

  Dear Donna, I’d written on page after page.

  Dear Donna,

  Dear Donna,

  Dear Donna,

  Dear Donna, over and over, day after day, a 26-year-old Army doctor, reaching back home for loving language, some sign of the beautiful familiar. My youthful penmanship was surprisingly legible. My letters were inquisitive and polite. They were full of little incidents I no longer have any memory of, very different from the stories that have stuck with me all these years, the things I can’t forget. I’ve always done my best to contain my memories of Vietnam, put them together in a tight file in my brain, secure and closeable. I saw what doctors saw over there in that faraway place: I saw bullet holes, wet stumps where limbs should be. I saw corpses. But on a lot of days nothing happened, no one was hurt, I was bored out of my mind. I had plenty of time to write home.

  Here’s one story I never put in a letter: I’m in the Quonset hut playing cards with some docs one night, and we all hear a wailing outside. It’s a sad howl, almost like a child’s. First I’m careful to put my cards face down on the table and pocket my piastres; then I lead a pair of medics outside to see who’s making that sound, and why.

  There’s a grunt there in the dark with a shovel in his hand. He smells like liquor. I’m looking all over to see—is he bleeding, is he hurt. Is there a hole in his shoulder or his groin. But he’s in a t-shirt, his limbs seem fine, body fine, he is a drunk G.I. holding a shovel crying about something.

  It was a cobra, he wails.

  Now I’m looking at his ankles, his feet, which are in black boots, but there, at his feet, there’s a dark snake on the ground. It’s cut in half, two thick lines in the dust. It was a cobra.

  Were you bitten? I ask him.

  No, he says. He holds his shovel at me, shaking it. I sliced it right in half, he cries.

  The guy was fine. If he’d missed with his first swing he might have died. That’s how death was there; it was like a weather condition. It was in the forecast or it wasn’t, depending on the day.

  Donna was a speech therapist when we lived in upstate New York; she began studying for her Florida state license in speech pathology after we moved. I asked Donna one day—we were out on the golf course—“Haven’t you considered just not working?”

  “Not really,” she said. She was wearing a pink sun-visor. She used to work with elementary school children who couldn’t say their “R”s; now she wanted to work in hospitals, like I used to do. She wanted to get up in the morning and visit patients. She thought she’d like to work with stroke survivors—her father died after a stroke.

  “But look, honey, we’ve only been in Florida for a month,” I said. “Why don’t you take the whole year off? I mean, we’re retired. We can do anything we want. We live in a virtual paradise down here.” I gestured to the golf course. We could see retirees everywhere we looked, on other distant patches of manicured grass, in light-colored clothes, hauling clubs or scooting along in white carts. There were palm trees and sand traps. Everything was blurred by the sun.

  “I have never heard you use words like that before,” Donna said. “Paradise? Can’t you wait until you’re dead for that?”

  “I don’t believe in life after death,” I told my wife.

  “Me neither,” she said. “I believe in life before death. Oh, there’s my ball.”

  We stopped so she could set up her shot. I was steamed at the things she was saying. Then she got out a five-iron; I told her she wanted a different angle, and she thought about it a moment. “The hell with it,” Donna said. She swung the five-iron violently at the nesting ball, and I don’t think we ever found it. We probably didn’t look too hard: there are copperheads in that part of Florida, blunt-headed, sticky-fanged, masters of the quick strike. They like to hide near trees.

  Some nights I would read a letter or two out loud to Donna; other nights she would read one to me, rendering my younger self in her fine woman’s voice. It became an after-dinner ritual. We were working our way through the whole stack, my 1967 epistles. I’d never written so much in my life—and I never will again, either. And some of my letters were boring. But some made us laugh out loud, Donna and me, reclining on our cushy new Florida furniture and trying to remember who exactly we were back then. Kids, when you get down to it. Anyway, one night I called our son Jason in Wisconsin because Donna and I found a letter that made us both laugh out loud. “Jason, you got a minute?” I said. “Have I told you that your mother and I found a stack of old letters I sent home from Vietnam? Have I mentioned that to you?”

  “What?” he said. Jason had two young kids; I often found myself repeating things to him because he couldn’t hear me over the sounds of his lovely screeching brood.

  “The letters I wrote to your mother from Vietnam,” I said again. “Can I read one to you?”

  “Sure,” he said, sounding a little doubtful. But I went ahead anyway. The letter was about what happened during a monsoon. Dear Donna, I wrote, The rains are upon us. It seems like they’ll never stop. Other than that everything is okay and I’m fine. A man here named Martin has taken to walking around outside wearing nothing but his boots, because he says everything gets soaked in one second flat and what’s the point? So off with his clothes and we have all been seeing much more of Martin than we care to. Predictably enough this has earned Martin a nickname: but nevermind about that, it’s a little off-color. Rest assured I am wearing clothes as usual.

  I started laughing but the best my son could manage was a forced chortle.

  “What was the guy’s nickname?�
� Jason wanted to know.

  “Who knows? Can you believe that happened to me?” I asked my son. “You realize how young I was when I was in Nam?” Then I saw one of those damn lizards scamper out from under our oven. Pinkish little vermin, almost like a wiggly crayon. “Whoop—Hold on, Jason. Donna, hey, we have a visitor in here. Donna?”

  “Leave it alone,” Donna called from the other room.

  “Jason, sorry, I have to go,” I said. Despite my wife’s protests I was not inclined to leave the lizard be.

  Winter of the previous year, our last Christmas in the old house, Jason brought his kids to upstate New York. When we were all there together in the old ancestral home for the holidays, I watched the movie Peter Pan with Jason’s kids—the oldest was seven—and I was rooting for Captain Hook. He’s the only character in that damn story who’s subject to age. Hook’s ridiculous mustache, his old man’s chin and obsolete outfits—he’s like a middle-aged guy trapped in a never-ending shopping mall filled with adolescent punks. And there’s his missing hand, torn off by a suddenly-lunging crocodile: a glorified lizard. The hook struck me as awful and almost real last time I watched; age does that, it curls and numbs your extremities, turns your body into something you can’t entirely trust, something that could betray you in the middle of an innocent nap as you go to scratch your cheek. The kids giggled whenever Hook was in trouble, but I didn’t think it was funny.

  Another story: I’m sitting at a folding table under a tent with one of the medics. We’re at the edge of a small city called Pleiku—it’s clinic day. We have a military directive to perform community service for the South Vietnamese, so on Friday mornings we sit out here, as the heat builds in wet layers, and we try to relieve the residents’ aches and pains. But they almost never come to us when they’re seriously ill. Instead they line up with stomach ailments, nagging sores, odd-shaped bruises. We give out decongestants and plastic bandages, which Uncle Sam packages in olive green tins. They call me dai-wee-boxee, which means Captain Doctor, and they use hand motions to indicate where they hurt. One man, a thin short guy, very short black hair, comes up to me at the table, and he points to his head. I point to my head. “Your head?” I say. “You have a headache?” He’s pointing to his forehead and grimacing. There are no cuts or discolorations. “Okay, you have a headache,” I say. I hand over two aspirin tablets.