by Chris Lynch
“All right. Yeah. No, sure, I am, I’m fine. At least he gets to go home, anyway. Getting away from here is an unequivocally great thing.”
“Indeed. Though I wouldn’t imagine your friend Ivan feels quite that way about it.”
My friend Ivan. The phrase slaps around my head like somebody’s playing racquetball in there, and I can’t even begin to catch up to it right now.
“Yeah, well, that’s just tough for him. He’s got no business here anymore and he needs to be home. He’s a tough guy, he can adjust to anything.”
Again, he lets the pause bleed out some.
“Tough, yes, I suppose so,” he says. “You’re sounding more than a little bit that way yourself, my son.”
“Am I? I guess that’s to be expected, to a degree, under the circumstances. I don’t mean to be sounding coarse at all to you, though, Dad.”
I hear it as soon as it floats out. I don’t think I’ve called him that since fourth grade.
“Not at all,” he says, upping the kindness level in his voice. “You don’t need to be worrying about me. I just want to know that I don’t need to worry about you.”
I am getting the signal that my phone time is about up, but I still have the freedom to appreciate the blatant absurdity of those words. I cannot resist.
Laughing, I say, “Worry about me, Hans. Worry ’til your eyelashes melt off. Because if you aren’t worrying about me in the middle of this traveling circus of morbidity that means you either don’t love me or you’re delirious. And you should leave the delirium to me for the duration.”
After a deep sigh, he laughs — less than me, but enough.
“I suppose any other response from you would have been unsettlingly artificial, Beck. So, as you wish, I will redouble my anxiety regarding your well-being.”
“That’s the spirit,” I say, and I really am out of time now. “Dad” — there it is again, weak, needy, probably worrying him even worse — “I have to go. Love to Muti and the girls. Not too long in-country now, then I’ll be back, too.”
“That will be welcome, son. You are the last one left over there, and now it is your turn.”
You would think, with my grades, I could count to four. But it’s only catching up to me at this instant.
I am the only one left.
I want to be here.
I signed up willingly and have had every intention of serving out my tour of duty to the last day.
This is stupid. A waste of talent and training. It’s obscene.
I would be on the very short list of guys who have not been trying to get themselves sent home, and now they are forcing me out so they have to drag some scaredy-skinny chicken of a draftee over here to fight in my place.
Nobody has ever had to do my fighting for me. This is a disgrace. I’ve been queasy in my stomach ever since I heard.
“That’s just the medication,” the deadpan doc says after I make my last-ditch pitch to keep my job. “Your stomach will settle down on its own. When you’re all settled in comfortably — at home.”
I am getting dressed in my uniform for probably one of the last times ever. It is my discharge day from the hospital in Saigon. They flew me down for surgery after they did what they could on the base at Pleiku.
“It’s not even my shooting eye,” I say. “I always just closed that eye when I sighted through the scope anyway. So, if you think about it, I might even be more efficient now, since I won’t have to be bothering with that.”
“You are a very funny patient,” the doctor says without any indication that he recognizes any humor in me or anything else. I suppose he’s in a particularly unfunny job, to be fair. I figure it must be frustrating to be working as a doctor in a place where pretty much everybody else’s job is the exact opposite of yours.
Like my job was. And like the guys who shot me up and blew me completely out of the game.
A corpsman has arrived to drive me to the airport and my flight. I hate to say it, but a wave of fear sweeps right over me at the sight of him and all he represents at this moment. It doesn’t matter, though. I have to go with him regardless.
“Lieutenant,” the doctor says after I have thanked him and started walking away.
I turn back, and he hands me the small presentation box.
“You almost forgot this,” he says. “That would be a pity, after all you had to endure to earn it. You’ll want to show that off to everybody once you get home.”
“Thanks,” I say, and go back to following my escort out.
It’s the Purple Heart. I open the box and stare at it during the ride to the airport. No offense to the fine and noble profile of George Washington there, but this is the loser’s medal. The Not-Exactly-Red Badge of Stupidity would be a more fitting name for it since they’re giving them out by the crateload here to every numbskull too stupid to crouch down under fire.
Doc said it would be a pity to leave it behind, which is kind of funny since it isn’t anything more than the pity medal for getting yourself scraped up. As for wanting to show it off to everybody? Who is everybody now, anyway? If they want proof of how badly I lost, I’ll just show them my face.
The jeep shudders to a stop outside the airport terminal.
“That was some quality driving there, my man,” I say to the confused-looking corpsman. Then I reach over and slap the medal in its case onto his lap. “Keep the change, have a good war,” I say as I roll in the direction of someplace else.
I don’t want to be here.
I wake up so certain in that belief it almost scares me. The whole time in Vietnam I was like everybody else, yearning to be back home, in my good life, with my good friends.
And yet, I wake up to a crisp and sunny autumn morning — the kind I used to look forward to all the rest of the year — feeling like I don’t belong here. I have walked around and around the town, rode trolleys and buses to the places I knew would put the old life back into me only to find that, one by one, those places absolutely failed to do anything like that.
Home is recognizable, but life is not.
Not only are my friends not with me, they are in places — dead in the ground or living in hell on earth — that make me feel so guilty for being home that I worry I’ll go crazier here than back in the war.
One thing I have decided, one thing I can do for myself, is I can stop waiting passively for word of an assignment. I have to talk to somebody. A Navy somebody, even if just to talk to a Navy somebody and stop listening to myself.
So, I dress under the old familiar Richard Petty racing poster, next to my little-boy bed, and I set out to see the somebody.
I ride the Green Line trolley into town, and am suddenly aware of the deathly screeching sound the steel wheels make on the tracks with every shift and gentle curve of the route. Despite the fact that I have ridden these things ten thousand times over the years, I somehow have never been on one that made this ungodly, unbearable sound.
My stop is supposed to be Park Street, but by Arlington I can’t take it anymore and bail out two stops early.
The contrast is extreme between the subway I leave behind, with the trolley still screaming in my ears, and the relative peace of the Public Garden and the Common. In the perfect fall air, with the sun splashing all over leaves that are just beginning to turn, I briefly feel like here is the thing that’s been so lost since my return.
So I step lightly the first couple of blocks to the Navy recruiting station, where I have some questions to ask.
But before I get there, I reach Brigham’s and I stop right there on the sidewalk, unable to pass.
There have been quite a few times that I was unable to pass a Brigham’s before, and the situation was always resolved by getting a butterscotch sundae.
Just like the one I got the day Rudi accompanied me to this same station, when it all began. He got hot fudge, marshmallow, nuts, and multicolored jimmies. We sat right there.
It is so hard to be home. Boston’s breaking me down the way
that Vietnam should have, and it’s all about the one guy who came home with me and the two who didn’t. The thing is, this city is the place that I never felt alone, ever, and now it’s the loneliest place on earth.
I force myself away, no butterscotch sundae, no looking back. The effort of it and the concentration required have me marching very close to military style as I come in sight of the recruitment office.
And the commotion going on out in front of it.
There are a dozen or so people walking around in a circle right in front of the place. They are chanting things and carrying signs that I can’t read yet but I could pretty well guess.
Whatever it is, it’s their problem and I don’t need to pay it any mind. I keep up my marching until less than half a block from the office’s door I become suddenly very interesting to some of the demonstrators. They shift up a gear from tired-looking windup picketers who weren’t being noticed by anybody, to inspired and angry shouters who see in me their time to shine.
“Don’t do it, kid,” says a doughy blond guy who steps up and blocks my way.
“Kid?” I say, as there is no way this guy is any older than me.
“You don’t want to do this,” says a second one, stocky and pimpled and also crowding in too close. He is likewise not old enough to be lecturing anybody, and to be blunt about it, I’d be willing to stack my worldly experience against these two any old time.
The rest of the windups continue their circular picket pattern, and I see now that their signs are reasonable enough, with slogans like Peace Now! and Everybody Home for Christmas! I wouldn’t argue with any of that, and in a different world I might even join them.
These two guys breathing my air, on the other hand …
“And how would you know what I do and do not want to do, would you mind telling me?” I snap.
“Nobody in his right mind wants anything to do with this disgusting war,” the blond one says.
“Well you also know nothing about the state of my mind, either, now do you? How would you, right? How would you possibly know that? In fact, I don’t think you know anything about anything!”
I am pretty sure of two things at this point. The first is that I am right about everything. The second is that I might be tipping my hand regarding the state of my mind.
Oh, a third thing. I don’t care.
I give the first guy a shove sideways to get him out of my way, and then I’m faced with the second one.
“Come on, pal,” he says. “You have no idea what the Navy is up to over there.”
Of course. They think I’m here as a potential warrior, not a seasoned and still-active one.
“Oh, I don’t,” I say, sneering right in the oaf’s ignorant face. “But you do.” I give him the same sideways shove as the first guy, though it takes more effort this time.
I get a small nervous prickle up the vertebrae of my neck as I get him behind me.
I am certain this is a thing connected to my time over there, but I feel the chill of threat in time to whip around and find the guy coming up on me. He freezes. Then he looks past me and I check over my shoulder. The peaceable types have stopped marching and are now staring at the two guys.
I go back to my business and enter the recruiting office.
“Good day, young man,” says the bright and energetic junior lieutenant. At the sight of me in the small storefront office he is up and out from behind his desk like I am an old friend returning after a long absence. I suppose in a way I am, since this is the office where I originally signed on. But he wouldn’t know that.
“Hello,” I say, feeling likewise happy to make his acquaintance and shake his hand. He’s as friendly a presence as any I’ve found lately, and the scene outside his workplace makes me suspect he feels the same about me. “How’s business, lieutenant?”
“Ha,” he says, gesturing at the steady circulation of people who disapprove. “It’s been … a little slow, frankly. But you are here to change all that, am I right, sir?”
I love it when people who outrank me call me sir.
“Um, maybe. In a way, sure. That is, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to mislead you, but I’m not here to join.”
The starch just about comes out of his perfect white uniform. His voice loses its bounce. “So, then, what are you here for? There is only so much this office is equipped to provide in the way of services to the general public. Are you sure you wouldn’t maybe like to consider the opportunities available in today’s Navy? We do offer a surprising —”
“Sorry to interrupt, lieutenant, but it’s probably important that I tell you, I’m not thinking of joining because I’m already in the Navy.”
He scowls at me. “Rank?”
“Just a lowly seaman, I’m afraid, sir.”
The chanting outside appears to get louder, but that’s probably just the comparative silence in the room. The lieutenant backs away from me and sits on the edge of his desk.
“As an enlisted man yourself, you must be aware how difficult things are these days, in a job like mine. Between these people” — he gestures out his window — “and the … unpromising nightly news reports, seeing a fresh face come through that door is a happy event, indeed.”
He looks deflated, and now I feel like I have another thing to feel guilty about.
“Sorry to let you down,” I say.
“It’s nothing. But can you tell me what you did come in here for?”
I had almost forgotten myself.
“Oh, right, it’s a bit of a story. See, I’m getting reassigned. I am just back, short notice. I was a body escort for … a good friend of mine.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. And so … hold on, you’ve done a tour already? You’ve been over? To Vietnam?”
“Yes, sir. And while my tour wasn’t completely up, it was close enough, they decided I should just stay, and I would be notified of my new posting once it was all worked out. Like I said, it was all kind of rushed there when I left.”
“Sure,” he says, “of course. And, you would like me to do … ?”
“Well, I had a lot of time to think about things on the trip back.”
“A time of quiet contemplation, I would imagine.”
“Uh, contemplation, for sure. I might have been talking some, too. Anyway, I got to thinking that, if the reassignment hadn’t gotten too far, that maybe I could come in and talk to you about, possibly, if there was any sort of process, if I wanted to go into a certain specialty or another. If there was, yeah, a process I could explore, through you.”
He’s looking at me very thoughtfully now, rocking a little back and forth on his desk. I doubt I’d get this much consideration if he were not short on applicants and with a surplus of time on his hands.
“You know, I have never faced this situation before, so I honestly don’t know. Might depend on what kind of needs there were in the track you were aiming for. Have you got —”
“Mortuary services, sir.”
That, as you would probably guess, is a bit of a showstopper.
“Mortuary … ?”
I nod, almost afraid of hearing it come out of me again.
He nods in return, pondering my words, and me.
“I should gather, then, from this, that your journey transporting our fallen comrade from the battlefield through our system and on to his place of peace, included some positive experience?”
I have just a little bit of trouble answering him right away, as I revisit the details in my mind.
“Yes, sir, you could say that. You could possibly say, even, that I felt like that was the area of the service I would be most likely to contribute something of value.”
The peculiar result of what, I have to confess, sounds even to me like a most peculiar conversation, is that the lieutenant smiles almost as winningly now as when I first walked in.
“Well, seaman, I do believe this is the first time anybody has come in here and done a selling job on me. It would be terrific if we could find the i
deal situation for every potential enlistment. Now, there is a designation of mortuary affairs specialist, but frankly, since nobody has ever inquired about it before, I am without any hard information about it. Then, there’s the particularities of your own enlistment situation, meaning you have come in here and presented me with two complete firsts in one day. So, why don’t I get all your relevant information, and you take my card, and let’s see if there’s anything I can do for you.”
“Great, lieutenant. That’s great. I appreciate you even looking into it.”
“Well, don’t get too excited until we figure out how I’m going to get my bonus paid out of this deal.”
He reads my stupid expression. “Oh, relax, will you. Jeez, you Nam vets really are tense, aren’t you?”
“Hey, I’m easy,” I say as he circles around to his desk chair and fishes through some papers to get my details down. “You should see the rest of them.”
“Yeah,” he sighs wearily. “Lucky for me I only normally see them on the way in, and not on the way out. And lucky for you, you came through it all just fine and dandy.”
I take the paper and start giving my name and phone number, home address, serial number, and service details.
“Lucky for me,” I say. “Fine and dandy.”
Not sure if I would ever want to say it out loud to anybody — except probably Rudi — but as I leave the office with Lieutenant Francis’s card in my pocket, I feel elated about my prospects in mortuary affairs.
“Now, where were we?” says the stocky guy right in my ear, bringing my spirits back to earth.
“You did not sign up, did you?” the smaller guy says.
The even, rhythmic chanting of the larger group behind us sounds almost soothing, despite the words being, “Say it ain’t so. Please don’t go. Say it ain’t so. Please don’t go.”
“It’s none of your business what I did, so get lost.”
“This is everybody’s business!” the stocky guy with the iffy skin, and now the angry, red complexion, yells.
Then some demonic middle-aged spirit possesses me and I come out with this: