by Jim Lehrer
I stood absolutely still. “He sure did, sir. Yes, sir, he sure did.”
“Hold on a minute while I get something for you out of my office.”
I held on for a minute right there where I was standing until the major returned. He had a piece of paper in his hand.
“If you’re so inclined, Lieutenant, all you have to do is sign this, turn it in at Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington, and you could be on your way to being a marine again,” the major said.
I took the paper in my hand, thanked him, and snapped my fingers as Sergeant Lambert had the other day.
Then I went outside to the airport taxi that would take me to the plane for Washington.
MARTI WROTE ME a note that was dated exactly a year to the day after we parted at the Kinderhook bus stop. But her letter took more than ninety days to make its way from the Washington bureau of The Dallas Tribune, where she assumed I still worked, to Vietnam, where, as a captain, I was commander of Bravo Company, Third Battalion, Third Marines.
She said her father continued to make progress but still had a way to go before he was completely out of danger. Dr. Reynolds remained on the case in his own fashion—staying involved but as out of the way as possible.
And she wrote beautifully and warmly about what I had done in helping her but mostly for not printing a word in the Tribune, or anywhere else, about her dad. She thanked me for honoring both the spirit and the letter of our off-the-record agreement. “You are a most honorable and good man, Jack, and I regret very much having thought otherwise,” she wrote.
I answered with a brief note of thanks with an apology for not having told her directly that I was definitely not going to go with her dad’s story. I told her I had gone back into the marines but offered no explanation. There was no mention of Vietnam but I assumed she probably figured that out.
There was no further response required or expected from her, and we each continued on with our very separate lives.
I thought often about Marti over the years but it was not until late 2008, forty years later, that she came back into my life.
It’s a difficult story to tell—but, as they say in federal budget deficit politics, if not now, when?
I served two tours in Vietnam, my second as a battalion commander, the high point of what turned out to be a twenty-two-year career as an active-duty marine infantry officer. I retired in 1990 as a brigadier general assigned mostly to writing special speeches and other high-level PR kinds of things for the commandant of the Marine Corps in Washington.
Jan, my wife, and I chose Charlottesville as our retirement home, a most glorious place to live. The magnificent green landscapes and cool breezes of southwest Virginia combined with the intellectual stimulation provided by the University of Virginia’s faculty, libraries, and events—debates, lectures, performances—was perfect for us.
From Charlottesville, only a two-hour drive from Washington, I developed a substantial second working life as a free-lance writer and former-general television commentator. My TV appearances on military issues, mostly on cable, Sunday-morning network shows, and PBS, have especially helped augment my marine retirement pay. I was used by the media extensively during the Iraq war as a critic of George W. Bush’s sending Americans into harm’s way based on unproven intelligence. Later, my public support of allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military drew many invitations. Those kinds of positions were not expected from a retired marine one-star with much combat experience.
The Jerry Compton dream to write a novel pretty much disappeared when I left the news business. The closest I came was outlining a fictional story of a Kansas bank president who posed as a former marine combat officer in order to increase his business and local civic prestige. He not only learned the marine lingo and culture but also bought a small metal Silver Star lapel pin on eBay that he wore on his suit coats. It all ended badly for him, as it should have, but he was a good phony marine and it took a while for him to get found out. I thought of it as a novel of expectations but I never got around to sending the outline to an agent or a publisher.
While going through some of my old papers for a possible nonfiction Vietnam memoir, I came across my unused reporting notes from the bubble top adventure. I duly remembered what Bernie Shapiro, the Tribune bureau chief, had said about my holding the story for a book. I laughed at how long that meant I had been holding it now. Too long, too late? Maybe not.
And I wondered, for possibly the millionth time, about what had happened to Marti Van Walters.
A skilled user of the Internet (one of my grandsons calls me General Google), I easily located Marti Van (Walters) Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Her official bio on the Penn website said she had earned her master’s at Penn, gotten a PhD at the University of Chicago, and then returned to Penn as a member of the faculty. She had remained there ever since with her husband, a physics professor named Lou Jackson. The Penn bio said Marti had written extensively about modern American women writers, most particularly Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. The Jacksons had two daughters as did, interestingly enough, Jan and I.
My phone call to Marti—done cold with no email warning—got a surprised but most bubbly, joyous, great-to-hear-from-you response. She said something about having seen me on television and that she “more often than not, agreed with you.” We decided to meet for lunch in Philadelphia sometime “just to catch up,” but I pushed it further. I said—lied—that I had to come to Philadelphia in a few weeks to do some research about a piece I was writing on Tun Tavern, the place where, legend has it, the first U.S. Marines—mostly while drunk—were recruited in 1775. She agreed.
“I’d have known you anywhere,” she said to me three weeks later when we greeted each other at the upscale French brasserie on Rittenhouse Square she had suggested.
“Same with you,” I said, returning the favor. “I’d have recognized you from ten miles away.”
Actually, it wasn’t just a favor. She really did look remarkably the same as she had forty years before. Her hair was graying but still short, and her face, while showing a few wrinkles, still blossomed like a happy flower. Her sixty-year-old body, which I silently admired through a light green pantsuit, could have passed for a twenty-year-old’s.
The marine “exercise thing,” as my family called it, had kept me in pretty good shape, too, if I do say so myself. My hair, also short, was mostly white but it was still there, as were the flat stomach and good build. And I hadn’t lost even a fraction of an inch off my six-foot height.
I had, without much thought, put on a tweed sport coat with charcoal slacks and an open-collar sport shirt. I didn’t realize until I was on the train that my outfit was only a slight change from my old reporter’s Glory Suit.
“If I am sixty, and I am, then that makes you seventy,” Marti said with a laugh.
“And I am,” I said, picking up the joke.
“Remember how we talked about the ten-year age difference?” Marti asked.
I assured her that I definitely remembered.
“Was that the real reason you kept deflecting me when I threw myself at you and your bed?” she asked. “I’m sorry, but I just have to know.”
“Trust me, Marti, there is nothing I would have loved more than taking you up on … well, you. But I kept thinking you were just a college kid and it would have been taking unfair advantage or something like that.” I left out the part about the ethical qualms of a journalist sleeping with a source—which, to me, she still was at the time.
“Have you done many what-ifs about me?” she asked.
I wasn’t ready for that one. While much had gone under many bridges in the last forty years, the question brought me up short. Perhaps not all of the water was gone?
“No, not really,” I dodged. “My mind was kept too busy with being a marine.”
Then, to swat her question away even further, I asked, “Notice anything new about me?”
> She gave me a hard look and said, “Frankly, no. You look great—the same …”
I looked down at my wristwatch and said, “It’s over twenty minutes and I have yet to excuse myself for a smoking break.”
“You quit?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“When?”
“Seventeen years, seven months, and four days ago.”
She extended her right hand, which I took in mine. “Congratulations, Jack,” she said with that great smile. But I knew she was probably thinking that I’d quit way too late to completely rule out lung cancer turning up down the road. At least she didn’t say it.
Marti went on to give me a full bubble top family update, which made me very happy. She said it had taken more than five years, but Martin Van Walters had come back almost completely to life. For several years before retiring, he worked successfully as a consultant to corporations on personal security for CEOs and other executives. He died peacefully in his sleep of a heart attack three years before at age seventy-nine. He was buried in that same Kinderhook cemetery with Martin “O.K.” Van Buren. Rosemary Walters, she said, had been completely alcohol-free since Reynolds got her involved in Alcoholics Anonymous. As a widow, she still attended AA meetings regularly at her retirement village condo in Delaware, a short train ride from Marti in Philadelphia.
“I always felt your mother got lost in the shuffle of everything that was happening to your dad,” I said. “I wasn’t sure anybody was paying much attention to her and her problems.”
“You were absolutely right,” Marti said. “Reynolds said victims usually come in pairs. Nobody gets sick like Dad did all by himself.”
Marti and I talked about some other things, including the dwindling state of play on Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.
“There’s been no deathbed confession from an Oswald helper yet, as far as I know,” I said.
“There’s still time before we hit the full fifty-year mark,” Marti said. “There could still be one out there.”
I told her I didn’t think so. Whatever the various conspiracy theorists continued to put out, there was no credible evidence to refute the theory that Oswald acted alone. Yes, one man really did fire three rifle shots out a Dallas window in a few seconds and change the course of history—forever. For me, the fragility of what we all come to think of as order and normality has been the permanent lesson of the Kennedy assassination. Since that awful day we’ve known we are always only three shots away from chaos.
Marti also brought up the Iraq war, which was in full military and political momentum. I told her what I had been saying about it on television and in op-ed newspaper pieces, but she seemed already aware of my “reasoned antiwar” position, as she called it. Her get-the-troops-out-of-there views were much stronger than mine.
“Can I assume you were for McCain—with the military connection?” she asked, smiling her Marti smile. “I was out canvassing for Obama most weekends all over Pennsylvania.”
I grinned but said not a word, having decided as a matter of my own personal policy to let all of that lie. I, too, was for Obama, but not publicly. From having been a reporter and then a career military officer, I had a natural resistance to declaring political preferences. My punditing also led me to keep the lid on my politics. Being labeled a Republican or Democratic general was not good for my business. I wanted to be seen as a nonpartisan evenhanded basher/defender of war decisions and the people who make and execute them.
“When you were a marine in Vietnam, did you think about dying?” Boom. All of a sudden, there she was again, the straightforward, in-your-face girl from forty years ago. Yes, Marti was still very much Marti.
“No, not at all,” I said, ready to quickly end this line of conversation. Marines are taught from their first recruit depot formation that there’s nothing more useless than a dead marine or one who constantly thinks and talks about being one.
“So you enjoyed it? Being a marine?” she asked.
What was I supposed to say? “Sure, except being transferred from one post or country to another all the time.” And then, without really thinking, “That kind of life would not have fit in with that of a college English professor.”
“Ah! So you did do some what-if thinking about me!” She said it with a pleasure that gave me pleasure.
“You got me,” I said with a grin. “Now, how about you?”
She looked right at me and said: “My only what-if regret is that I did not end up going to bed with you at Kinderhook.” I felt some warmth spread to my face—and elsewhere.
Marti went on.
“Despite all my talk about the openness of the sixties, I was still very slowly finding my way from virginity,” she continued with a huge smile. She was clearly loving this. “I figured I could justify doing it with you because I owed you so much. And because you were so much older—and a marine—you could teach me more about what I needed to know about sex.”
“Semper Fi,” I said with a laugh. A real one.
“What if we had slept together at Kinderhook?”
“What if we did?” I asked.
“Would it have led to anything more?”
“Who knows?”
“What if it did and, because of that, you didn’t go back in the marines?” Marti persisted, her face still in full impish mode.
That did it. She had hit the nerve that mattered the most to me. “I’d have figured out a way to be with you in Philadelphia, probably as the executive editor—or, better still, an outspoken left-wing columnist—with The Philadelphia Inquirer,” I said. It was a phony hold-the-line answer.
“You’d have done that just for me?”
“What if you had decided to give up the idea of advanced degrees and become a military wife? How would you have been as a white-gloves hostess at receptions on marine bases?”
“What if you had been killed in Vietnam?”
There we were again. I ducked. “What if you jumped in bed with an American literature professor while I was overseas fighting for my country?”
“I would never have done that to you!” she said with some force. And I believed her. It probably didn’t make sense, but I did.
Then she moved on to where my mind had spent countless hours over the last forty years.
“What if you’d ignored off-the-record and published my dad’s story in the paper then—in 1968?” Marti asked.
Finally, here we were.
“You would have hated me for the rest of our lives,” I declared.
“True. Oh, how true that is. You might have died from a Finnish sniper rifle shot by me on a street corner in Washington—instead of from the Vietcong or whoever in Vietnam.”
“I didn’t die in Vietnam, please remember.”
“But you might have …”
Marti abruptly looked away from me. She was thinking of something—something new and important. I had not seen her in forty years, but I knew that look. I had seen it at Union Station, in Philadelphia, and, of course, in Kinderhook.
She came right at me. “Why did you suddenly decide to go back into the marines? You never mentioned even thinking about the marines again to me.”
I shrugged.
“I thought for sure that you were going to break our off-the-record agreement and do our story,” she pressed.
Now it was my turn to look away.
I was having a great time with Marti. That was all I was trying to think about. She was as charming and quick-witted as I had remembered her.
“Did you win the Medal of Honor?” she asked me, finally, when she realized I wasn’t going to explain myself to her.
“No, no,” I said, and then my ego and pride could not resist adding, “But I did pick up a Silver Star, one or two Bronze Stars, and a couple of Purple Hearts.”
“So you were wounded?”
“A few times. But I didn’t die, as you’ve noticed. The hits were nothing serious. Everything healed.”
And, before I knew it, our l
unch together passed the two-hour mark.
I realized that, with all our happy and serious talk, neither of us asked for or volunteered any information about our respective immediate families.
She didn’t ask me about Jan, my wife of thirty-five years, and how we met on a blind date at a Marine Corps birthday ball in San Diego, or about our children or grandchildren. Her husband, the physics professor, and their two children never came up, either. I realized that I had absolutely no desire to know a single thing about that part of her life.
The fact is that for two hours neither of us strayed much from our original roles from forty years before. We remained at Kinderhook, mostly in that cold tiny room on the third floor.
And damned if I couldn’t feel that Marti, always and ever the smart kid, could sense something still to come. Of course, she would be wondering why else I would suddenly call her after all these years …
“I take it you’ve got something on your mind, Jack, besides renewing an old acquaintance and playing a game of what-if with me.” By God, she was reading my mind! “I’ll bet money it’s about writing a book—am I right?”
I shook my head in wonder—in admiration, in affection.
“You want to tell our story, don’t you? You want me to finally release you from the off-the-record deal?”
She had it—of course. With her, it had always been of course.
“You got it,” I said. “That would be great.”
She reached down for a black canvas briefcase she had brought with her, something I had barely noticed when she arrived. She set it on her lap, unzipped it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers that looked to be at least two inches thick. There were also at least half a dozen bound diaries.
“Be my guest, Jack. I took notes about everything that happened to me, particularly beginning November twenty-second, 1963, including after Dad came back to Kinderhook from Singapore. Use them in any way you wish. All I ask is that you return them when you’re finished. Keep them in the case—easier to carry.”