by Chris Lynch
“Not now!” the gunner shouts, in a less-sure voice than he usually shouts that at me.
“Exactly now!” I yell. “If not now, when?” I am shifting around, monitoring the work of the gunner firing from the weapon mounted at the wide-open cargo door. From here, you can see the whole picture as we circle around and around the same “target.”
“Beck!” Gilroy hollers. “Final warning. Knock it off now, or else!”
Or else. Or else what? What could get worse than this?
“There is not a single weapon down there, and you know it,” I buzz into the gunner’s ear. “Nobody is shooting at us. Look, there, on the trail back to base. There’s the unit that called us in. Nobody’s shooting at them, either. They’re out on a picnic. Nobody’s even playing the game. We’re murdering numbers, man. We’re killing people so that when it’s all over, Gilroy gets to be a colonel!”
I notice off to my left the second gunner stops suddenly.
“Yes!” I shout. “See? Hear? It’s only us shooting. Shooting for nothing.”
The third gun keeps firing. It’s remotely operated by the copilot up front, but I almost feel I could reason with the gun itself if I could get to it.
The firing from number one gunner stops and starts intermittently. He’s testing the air.
“See? See? Guys, we don’t have to do this. We have a choice.”
The great miracle is that the third, remotely operated gun has gone silent.
This, this is a beautiful thing.
“Watch out!” number two gunner screams at me just before impact.
It feels like former Pats linebacker Nick Buoniconti has drilled me right between the shoulder blades with a helmet-first tackle. My spine crunches and I am hammered to the metal floor before I can even manage to get a partial look. I writhe around and find the copilot on top of me, then choking me, until I black out.
I’m sitting on the porch.
For crying out loud. I have been sitting on my own front porch, unable to make the next move, after making all the thousands of previous moves that have brought me here.
Here. I am only here because of them. I had decided I was not going to come home, ever. That was it. I took the Greyhound bus route all the way across the country, which is not at all the swift form of travel the name would suggest. I didn’t think America had as many towns as I stopped in between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of this massive and awe-inspiring place.
And I wasn’t done yet. I was back in line, in the station here in Boston. Everybody was staring at me, just like everybody in Arizona did, and Kansas, and Ohio, and New York, and just like everywhere I’ll go in the future.
The future. It was going to be someplace north. I was still making up my mind on that, hoping, really, that when I got to the front of the line something there would make up my mind for me. And it did.
The lady in the ticket office who did not stare at me was what did it. Not that she was so great, because she wasn’t; in fact, she was an old crab, and the only reason she didn’t stare at me was because she didn’t look at me at all, just like she didn’t really look at any of the other people in the line.
And she didn’t look up at her manager, who came by just as the long-haired stinker in front of me finished up and walked away with a ticket for whatever greatness awaits his smelly self in Montreal.
“Can you give me an extra two hours today?” the manager asked in a voice too young and too intimidated to be managing anybody, and surely not this somebody.
“No. Leave me alone, twerp,” she snapped at him without a second’s consideration before moving on to me. “Where you wanna go?”
The wounded and overmatched manager looked in my direction when I couldn’t help a laugh. When he saw my face, or what there still is of my face, he looked quickly away from both me and the ticket lady, muttering as he left, “I told you to stop calling me that, Hannah.”
Hannah.
Why did she have to be Hannah?
“I said, where you wanna go?” Horrible Hannah said as I started walking away from the desk.
I just kept walking as I heard her turn the question on the next person in line.
Where do I wanna go? I don’t know.
Where do I have to go? That is at least answerable.
I need to go home to Hannah, who is in no way horrible, and to Roman and to Caesar. I couldn’t not see them even if I don’t want to be seen.
I hear my Hannah, my mom, let out a scream to make the ears of God bleed, from inside the window that looks out onto the porch. I brace for what’s next as the thunder of many footsteps comes toward the door and toward me.
I wonder how frequently she has been pulling back that curtain to look for me.
The door flings open and before I can even get to my feet, my brother, Caesar, tackles me sideways, rolls me over on my back and kisses my forehead about a million times. I am starting to laugh when Mom follows, weeping and wailing, “Where have you been?” and the depth of the sadness of the sound chases away any thoughts of laughter.
I throw Caesar over, which is a lot harder than it used to be, and jump up to wrap up my mother as tightly as I can. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, as I will undoubtedly say every hour for the rest of my life. She hugs hard for several seconds and then pushes me back to get a better look. She is crying rainbows of tears already, but then she sees my face, takes it all in, and goes from all melted melancholy to … crying harder still, only now with the most earth-shattering smile anyone has ever produced. And still more crying.
“Do you have any idea … ?” she says as she pulls me into a hug that has the cartilage between my ribs crackling loud enough to be heard by all the neighbors undoubtedly now at their windows.
“I’m so sorry, Mom, I really am,” I say as I look beyond her, to the remaining parent. The one who is not crying and will never be crying. Except that … aw, cripes.
“Dad, please,” I say when I see the unseeable. “Please, I’m begging you. I’m here now, and everything is fine.”
He stands his ground and sniffs and refuses to acknowledge the two, maybe three tears that have slipped down his face, and I can see the intensity there, the concentration that makes me believe if there is anyone who can will three tears to get right back into those ducts where they belong, then Roman Bucyk is that man.
“Where have you been, Ivan?” he says when Mom finally releases me. I walk up to him in that doorway, meet him face-to-face, man-to-man, and allow myself to fall into his arms, and he allows me to allow myself.
“I took the long way home, Dad. I needed the time. That’s all.”
I can feel him nodding even without seeing it. Even though that is not all. Not all at all. And we both know he knows it.
“We have company,” he says as he puts me at arm’s length, nodding at me like a coach putting a little kid into a big game.
“Aaarrrggghh” is by far the best I can do.
I feel Mom’s arm around my waist and Caesar’s hand squeezing the back of my neck, guiding me into the house behind Dad’s lead. I guess they think I need complete manual control now.
But that’s okay. What I am more keenly aware of than anything is that none of them made any kind of deal, big or small, about my face. And I don’t mean out of politeness, either, because I know them and it is not that.
It’s as if they don’t even see anything but me.
“You went and put your eye out,” I hear as soon as we hit the dining room. Then I nearly back out again as Rudi’s mom comes to me, open arms. “I always told my boy it was gonna be him, and who ever thought it would be you?”
I can’t even feel it as she hugs me. I look straight up at the ceiling, my mind trying to float up somewhere above this, my body going numb.
Hey, lieutenant,” I say cautiously. I have been wary since he couldn’t talk details over the phone. Like when you have some fatal condition and they make you come into the doctor’s office so trained professionals can treat you when you
faint onto your face.
“Good to see you, Morris. Jeez, lighten up, will you? Your lip seems to be healing nicely. It’s a lovely day outside, not a cloud or a protester to be seen. Haven’t seen those guys since that day, in fact, so I believe you scared the pants off them.”
“Did you call me in so you could ridicule me in person, sir?”
That doesn’t quite scare away his smile. “Wow. You are quite the serious fellow today.”
“Sorry. I just have a lot of … stuff, that’s all.”
“Fair enough, but I have some stuff that might improve your outlook. I’ve been in contact with all the relevant people and the story is this. There is, in fact, a mortuary affairs specialty track.”
“Great,” I say, feeling indeed better already.
Lt. Francis shakes his head in wonder. “I still can’t get over this enthusiasm for the subject. But, there’s always got to be a first time for everything, right? And any man’s enthusiasm for a job has to be a good thing in the end.”
“So, when do I start? Where do I report? This is great. I’ll go home and get my stuff right now and be ready to ship out —”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, we have to slow this down, here. It is not — as you should know well by now — as simple as that with anything in the Navy.”
Of course it isn’t.
“Right,” I say, straightening up in my chair and folding my hands on his desk like a good, attentive cadet.
“First thing, great thing, the men in charge have agreed to go along with your wish to proceed into mortuary service.”
“Excellent. When do I start? Where do I report?”
“Morris … ?” he says, folding his own hands on his side of the desk and waiting for me.
“Okay,” I say. “Sorry. Proceed.”
“Thank you. The big thing is, this will require retraining.”
“Sure,” I say.
“All of the military mortuary training, including the Navy’s, comes under the jurisdiction of the Army. Quartermaster Corps.”
“Army. Sure, fine.”
“That’s JMAC, the Joint Mortuary Affairs Center at Fort Lee, Virginia.”
It is killing me. I have become so certain that that is my place, in the war, in the military, in the universe, so certain that that is the closest I will ever come to making everything up to Rudi and all the Rudis everywhere and coming to some kind of peace with myself, that this has to happen, no matter what. Even if it means training with the Army.
“Yes, lieutenant,” I say. “I am happy to do the retraining. Sign me up.”
“It’s three months of training, Morris.”
“Okay, fine.”
“It’s ‘okay, fine’ with you, but what about the Navy?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“That is a big chunk of your remaining enlistment. What’s in it for them to train you and then get only a few months back, when they could just stick you in some crap post doing some crap job since you are already committed and have nothing to say about it?”
This is sounding heavy all of a sudden. Stupid of me, thinking it was as easy as that.
“What do they want?”
“You have to extend.”
My heart enlarges, then contracts, then goes up into my throat and drops down into my stomach.
“How long?”
“One year.”
I go stiff and silent but not by design. The thought has me all tied up. Noticing this, the lieutenant fills in some of the space.
“Including at least six months back in Nam.”
I’m surrounded. Ambushed. This is the end, lonely friend.
“Go on, open it,” Dad says.
I don’t want to open it. They have to be able to see my hands shaking. My hands. Steadiest, deadliest dead-eye shot in the Army, and my hands are shaking just holding my mail. If it can possibly get any lower than this then I do not want to find out.
“Dad, I am so tired, it could actually be brain damage. Can’t this just wait?”
He goes from excited to deflated in the time it takes me to form that sentence. I feel the stare of Rudi’s mom’s two eyes on the mangled side of my face even though I don’t exactly have the peripheral vision to see her. I turn to see her reading over and over again the letter she received on her son’s behalf from the USMC.
Purple Heart and Bronze Star. A glorious end, my friend.
“Ivan,” Mom says, reaching across the table and stilling my hands without calling attention to the nerves. “The Citizen reporter is going to call back. You don’t have to stay up for that. We just want to have at least something to tell him, that’s all. Your father was so proud, but embarrassed not to be able to tell him anything.”
The military information offices, in their desperation to put out any feel-good stories from the stink heap of feel-bad stories the war is generating, leaks partial information to local papers. They know about medals and citations as soon as they go out, but they don’t know specifics until the families themselves reveal them.
“Congressman O’Neill wants to come and have a big public presentation ceremony, for both of you together,” Rudi’s mother says, voice cracking over there in the blackness of my vision.
I am on the verge of being sick if I do not get away from these decent and deserving people gathered around this table.
“Come on, hero,” Caesar says, getting up and circling behind me from the blind side. He claps both hands on my shoulders, and I buck violently in my seat. I make a sound that I barely recognize but is something like sick, something like one of those Asian jungle tigers. My brother pulls right back away from me, and I tear into the envelope.
“There,” I say, laying it on the table in front of me. I read the first lines:
The president of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Distinguished Service Cross to Ivan Bucyk, Second Lieutenant, United States Army, for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations involving conflict with an armed hostile force in the Republic of Vietnam.
The DSC. Second only to the Medal of Honor.
I already hear sniffles and moans when I pat the citation gently where it lies and excuse myself to go to bed.
It is no lie and no exaggeration to say that I am exhausted to a degree I have never experienced before.
It is also no lie to say I do not get one minute of sleep as I roll over and over and over again in my old bed in my old home that provides me no comfort now.
I wait and listen endlessly, like a sniper in the woods, until I mentally register company gone from the house and then each member of my family getting into bed.
Dad takes hours.
When they are all asleep, I get up, put on a new eye patch, pack up my old pre-war duffel bag, grab a stack of my mail from the hall table, and head out.
“What are you doing?” my brother whispers, startling me as I turn the front doorknob.
“Gotta get away,” I whisper back. “Going hunting.”
“Let me drive you,” he says.
“Gotta be alone,” I say. “Not like I haven’t hitched it before.”
He is whispering the next round of this exchange I cannot bear, when I pull the door closed behind me.
Once I have done it, I feel better than I have felt since probably the day before Rudi got his induction notice.
When Lt. Francis presented the options to me, I was stunned into silence and indecision. Told him I had to think about it. So I started thinking about it, about the options, about the life ahead. About being in Boston, or Virginia, or Florida or California or Maryland.
Or Vietnam.
About what I was going to do with myself, in the world, for my life.
By the time the trolley reached the station at Copley Square, I had no decisions left to sort through.
I jumped off the car, ran up the stairs, ran down Boylston Street to Tremont Street right back to a smiling Lt. Francis, who read my face with little apparent surprise.
�
�It occurred to me,” I said with conviction, “you don’t have to believe in the war, to believe in the guys.”
“I’m going to get my bonus after all, aren’t I?” he said.
This is how completely unglued the entire world has come lately: I am humming a little bit of “Anchors Aweigh” as I pack my bags to ship down to Fort Lee. I don’t even leave for another couple of days, but I am that anxious.
It hurts a little to think about how much I want to get away from here, but that means I’ll just have to stop thinking about it.
It hurts my mother more than a little. But when I explained how I feel about the good I can do in this job, she understood and even got rather proud of me. Then when I explained how the mortality rate in the mortuary services was almost zero, even in Vietnam, I could almost hear her humming “Anchors Aweigh” herself, though that could have still been me.
I know I’m doing a good thing.
And I know I’m running away.
Something spooky is transpiring, though, with Beck, in the way he seems to have uncanny timing with his correspondences to me. Not to mention the content.
When I hear the mail hit the floor I interrupt both packing and humming to go get it. There is a larger than usual packet from Beck, and I tear it right open.
It’s a magazine. The Grunt Free Press.
It’s, right off, a crazy-looking thing. The cover is all done in wavy-bubble psychedelic lettering with drawings of snakes and frogs in army helmets presenting the contents. I start flipping through and see serious articles like how not to catch a certain prevalent disease, and less serious ones like the methods career Army officers use to scratch their behinds with maximum efficiency. Each page looks like it is designed by a different person, some of whom could be university art majors, while others seem like kids going through fourth grade for the second time. There are poems and cartoons and photographs, and it is gripping stuff in some spots, boring in others, plain dumb in still others. But the overall tone is consistent: We are tired and frustrated and angry servicemen (mostly men), and this is our scream.