by Dale A. Dye
Later, during another brief period of lucidity, the doctor told him a few other details of his wounds and his trek north along with what was expected to be a very long recovery period, perhaps as long as a year or two. While Emory was still trying to comprehend what had happened out there on the trail, he was visited by a senior PAVN officer who pinned a small enamel bust of Uncle Ho to the bloody bandages covering his chest. He was chatty and helped Emory fill in some of the memory blanks.
The bombing had been unusually ferocious, the officer reported. Only four of the northbound porter command had survived. All of them, including Emory, had been found at the bottom of an unused tunnel that had caved in when the bombs fell. The sapper unit sent into the area after the bombing had found the two Americans when they were digging to clear the tunnel. It was only a stroke of good fortune that they were found at all. No mention was made of Theron Clay and Cleveland Emory didn’t ask about the man. If he never saw Clay again, it would be too soon.
Before he left Emory’s bedside, the PAVN officer indicated he would be moved as soon as he was able to travel to a rest area near the Chinese border. Facilities existed there to see Emory through his rehabilitation. Emory was expected to return to near normal but would likely never recover full use of his right arm and leg.
PART TWO:
LINE
CHICAGO
Not much new on the crowded shelves at FW Woolworth’s. Willy Pud knew what he needed, and it was basically the same back-to-classes bullshit his mother bought when he was gearing up for another elementary school ordeal. He was distracted momentarily by a pile of cheap tin lunchboxes, like the ones he carried as kid to a catholic school very near this store. The endorsements were different, maybe. Willy Pud remembered his Red Ryder lunchbox and Lone Ranger pencil case with built-in sharpener in a twinge of unusual nostalgia for those placid days. His dime-store heroes had disappeared like so many other touchstones of his pre-Vietnam life. Chicago’s current crop of crumb-snatchers ate their school lunches with Fred Flintstone or George Jetson.
Willy strolled down the teeming aisles, focusing his attention on the more adult school supplies: Spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, sophisticated pen and pencil sets, the sort of stuff that should have been—but rarely was—stuffed in his gym bag as he caromed through high school with a basketball under one arm and a football under the other. Who gave a shit about formal education in his letterman-jock crowd back then? None of them believed the vaunted diplomas and degrees would mean squat in a world of fixed measures and preordained neighborhood destinies. You got money? OK, so go to college and make a living with your brains. You don’t? It’s a different deal. You get a job somewhere local, go to work, and make a living with your hands. End of message, beginning of destiny for inner-city Chicago kids like Willy Pud and his high school buddies.
He pawed at the cheap tin lunchboxes, grinning at the cartoon characters and forgetting the basic academic supplies he’d come to purchase. So many things seemed to have gotten screwed around and out of familiar shape while he did time in the Marine Corps monastery. Red Ryder and Little Beaver disappeared into the sunset to be replaced by Robby the Robot. On TV, Ralph and Alice Kramden in grainy black and became Fred and Wilma Flintstone in living color. Everything in this alien world seemed to glow and throb with pulsating pastels in distorted shapes. He’d spent an aimless morning at a Westside neighborhood newsstand idly searching through comic books only to discover that Sergeant Rock and the Combat Happy Joes of Easy Company had been wiped out by the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
When the Woolworth’s security guard—more evidence of changing times—began eyeing him suspiciously, Willy Pud selected a plain grey binder, some ruled paper, a bargain package of steno notebooks and moved toward the checkout counter. If there was something else he needed to commence matriculation at the University of Chicago—which was what the brochures said he’d be doing—he’d come back for it later.
A long file of customers waited at the checkout counter, shuffling forward carrying shopping baskets and coughing up phlegm induced by the cold, crisp air on the streets outside the neighborhood store. Willy slotted into the line and watched a teenage technologist trying to get the hang of her new electronic cash register. Willy stood patiently, shuffling with the rest of the civilians and thought about how certain parts of this new world had so much in common with the military world he’d just left. There was a lot of time spent waiting in lines, but it wasn’t the same here in Chicago as it had been at Camp Pendleton, queuing up to get his discharge papers. There were no frazzled NCOs at Woolworths or the Kroger Supermarket telling people to put out their smokes, knock off the grab-ass, and get a haircut. This world here in Chicago, Willy Pud thought with a grin, was an undisciplined, route-step world of people who wore strange uniforms and frequently got their stool samples mixed up with their shoe polish.
He paid for his purchases with cash from his first GI Bill check and left the store wondering if he’d ever fit comfortably in this new environment. On a meandering path to the L stop, he decided it was just a matter of patience mixed with tolerance. He just needed to make an effort, stop being so narrow-minded and critical. Most of the world’s population was composed of civilians, and they seemed to do OK. Waiting to cross State Street, he saw his reflection in a store window. From inside, a smiling clerk waved at him and Willy waved back. It was the same guy who sold him the first real civilian clothes he’d bought on the second day after he arrived in Chicago. What an ordeal that was.
He’d wound up spending half his discharge mileage allowance on what the clerks insisted was basic issue for a civilian’s seabag. He’d gamely tried on a bunch of things the clerk recommended but he just felt uncomfortable, somehow false and tawdry in the bright paisley pattern shirts and crotch-constricting bell-bottom trousers.
Among his fellow riders on the train, Willy looked around at the beards, sideburns, and shaggy haircuts. He wore an old knit cap over a scalp that had been peeled in the PX barbershop just before discharge, but no one in his car seemed to pay it any mind. Maybe he’d just let it grow, get used to the feel of something besides skin over his ears. Maybe even a mustache or something if he could remember not to continue shaving in the Marine Corps manner from the top of one ear to the top of the other. He needed to do something to ease his infusion into the student body at the prestigious university where he’d stuck out at registration like a flashing neon sign that said Beware! Vietnam Vet! Approach with caution!
Low SAT scores left Willy Pud little room for maneuvering through the schedule of classes for his first year as an over-age freshman college student. There was bonehead math and bonehead English, taught at a pace below the normal freshman speed for high-school grads that vaulted into college over the low hurdles of diminished academic standards. He’d thought there might be a few other vets in the line to sign up for Remedial English. He noted some wary eyes and familiar postures, but he didn’t try to make contact.
The only real elective course he was allowed to take was an introduction to Business Administration. Looking through the syllabus, Willy promptly decided that there wasn’t a problem facing American industry that the average Marine NCO with six months time in grade couldn’t solve in five minutes or less. He walked out of the University of Chicago admin building on Ellis Avenue under a blue September sky spotted with threatening rain clouds and decided it was going to be a long, uncomfortable year in his life just ahead. The thing to do, he decided, was to look at it like reporting into a new duty station. Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open until you could illuminate the terrain you found yourself traversing.
j
Even after his hair had grown enough to hide his former occupation from the campus activists who condemned it, Willy Pud found it hard to relax in his second year at the University of Chicago. He was much older than most students and older by a couple of years than some of the teachers. And the thread of grey beginning to show at his temples didn’
t help, nor did the deeply etched lines on his forehead and around his mouth. Willy Pud was clearly a student who had done something in his life beside sit in a classroom.
When sleet appeared in the chilly winds that blew off Lake Michigan and swept through the city streets, be broke out his faded and worn Marine field jacket. Everyone else on campus that year seemed to be wearing one, either dug out of a family footlocker or purchased for a few bucks at surplus stores overstocked with military gear discarded by waves of returning vets. Only the clique of campus veterans who staked claim to a comer table in the crowded Student Union recognized his jacket as the genuine article. Only they recognized the odd stencil across the shoulders as the designation of his unit in the Nam.
That led to coffee and probing conversations that gave way in a day or two to beer and bullshit with guys who thought their service in the war was a common denominator beyond fellow student status. At those sessions in local dives, Willy drank, smiled, and listened while individuals in the crowd found out that there was no common thread, no single experience that was the same with everybody. Some were drafted; others joined the service. There were guys who served in support outfits and spent off-duty hours chasing whores in Saigon. There were sailors from the Brown Water Navy in the Mekong Delta who said their little part of Vietnam reminded them of Holland or Venice. There were guys from three different artillery outfits who couldn’t believe the other storytellers were even in Vietnam because of the differences in terrain and enemy activity between II Corps and III Corps.
There were two men who had fought with the same brigade of the same infantry division who couldn’t relate because the war had changed radically between 1966 and 1970. There were Air Force guys who whined about “working overtime” to keep jets flying from Tan Son Nhut and constant commodity shortages at the PX. There was a confused Marine who had exactly 46 days in-country when an NVA sniper sent him home with two new navels. From his limited perspective up in I Corps on the NVA-infested DMZ, the Marine figured anyone who faced only ragtag Viet Cong guerrillas never really fought a war at all. Everybody had the hardest time in Vietnam, and nobody who wasn’t there in exactly the same place, at exactly the same time, in exactly the same company, platoon, and squad facing the same unit of hardcore gooks, could really understand how bad it had been.
The only commonality seemed to be an emotional reaction to serving in the war in any capacity when the conversation inevitably arrived at the how and why of it all. There was a certain hostility that burned just beneath the surface among the vets on campus. Sometimes too much beer made them mouthy and careless. One or more of them would stumble on a mine that detonated among the others. They were saturated by the nightly jolts on TV news featuring scenes of disgruntled troops heading home en masse as America pulled out of Vietnam. It was like watching cockroaches scrambling out of a structure they had invested in building. Eventually, inevitable last questions were asked: How could such a seminal experience in their lives turn to instant shit? What was it all about and was it worth it? Peace with honor simply pissed them off.
I
I
Willy Pud drifted out of the circle when one of the guys who had done his 12 months as an MP in Saigon demanded he join something called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He was headed to another building on campus and had to pass by a membership rally. “I ain’t against the war,” Willy Pud told the organizer. “Can’t say I’m too pleased about the way we been fighting it, and I sure as fuck don’t think we ought to be pulling out after all the effort we put into it, but I ain’t gonna stand up and call myself a jack-off because I went to Vietnam instead of Canada.”
“Look, man,” the organizer pressed. “A guy like you with the Medal of Honor and all...”
“Who told you about that?” Willy Pud spun and brought the man up short with an icy glare.
“Word gets around, man. You could really do some good for the cause.”
“Like them other jerks? Throwing their medals over the wall at the White House?”
“Whatever it takes, man. Us vets get together and protest, maybe this shit is gonna stop, right? We’ve been there. People will listen if we tell them how it’s all bullshit.”
“It ain’t all bullshit!” Willy was breathing hard in the icy air, trying to keep from flattening the man whose only experience in Vietnam was in a cushy rear-echelon billet hassling troops on liberty. “It was the highest time in my life. I go around saying any different and I’m a hypocrite.”
“You go around saying you dug the fuckin’ war and people will think you’re a lunatic.”
“Not the people who know the score won’t...and it don’t sound to me like many of them are gonna throw in with your outfit.”
“Pudarski, man...you seen some shit. You can’t believe what we did over there is right. You can’t believe all the dudes who got wasted died for a righteous cause.”
“What I can’t believe is I’m qualified to say what’s right and wrong. I wasn’t in charge of that shit in Vietnam and I’m not in charge of it now. I went where they sent me and I did what needed to be done. I’ll never believe it was wrong to do it. I ain’t ashamed of that.”
Stosh Pudarski heard about the exchange on BBQ Rib night down at Hogan’s where a buddy of his who worked on the university campus told him about it. He was tickled and laughing over the story when Willy Pud joined him at the bar. The old man rapped his son on the shoulder. “Good thing you told them jerks to fuck off. It’s like I always say, Willy. You hang around with assholes; you’re bound to wind up covered in shit.”
Willy tried for a while to make friends with younger students. He met them for coffee or beer at the Student Union or one of the college hangouts, but most forays into idle conversation ended in ambush. For a while, he skirted the issue of his background, even lied once or twice, making up a story about deciding to return to school after spending years in factory work, but he was ashamed of doing that and just told the truth—but only when pressed.
Struggling to fit in, Willy looked for circles he could join that didn’t include fellow vets. Most of the young students he talked to in their favorite joints had varying reactions when they discovered he’d spent six years in the military and three years fighting in Vietnam as they always did. Sometimes he encountered painful angst and heard about how everyone should just join hands across the continents and chant a secret mantra for peace. Other times he heard about the plight of downtrodden masses struggling to be free. And sometimes—too often—he had to face that question that seemed to consume young men and women he met on campus: What’s it like to kill someone?
One afternoon in a smoky joint near campus when he’d downed two pitchers of Rolling Rock and heard the question from a girl he’d been trying—ardently and unsuccessfully—to date for two weeks, Willy Pud decided he’d had enough. “Listen,” he said boring into her wide blue eyes, “the only thing I feel when I kill someone in combat is recoil and a slight pressure on my trigger finger.”
By the end of his second year at the University of Chicago, he was avoiding student hang-outs and spending his time with his Dad and the geezers at Hogan’s. There was a picture of him in dress blues wearing the Medal of Honor hanging on the wall. That elicited a lot of free drinks and obviated most political discussion within earshot of his bar stool.
Willy Pud couldn’t see where his post-military life had much meaning, but it did have a semi-comfortable pattern. Confronted on all flanks by unfamiliar situations and circumstances, robbed of the signals and standards that he used in the Marine Corps, he lived by instinct. He fell into a shuffling route-step, never thinking much about what he might do when he’d had enough of the student lifestyle. Money was no problem for the foreseeable future, so Willy Pud simply drifted, cashing his checks and helping the old man with odd chores when he wasn’t studying.
He spent the summer of 1973 helping his father and Frank Hovitz make custom cabinets for a renovated brownstone on the Wests
ide. He did rough assembly of the raw wood, leaving the detail work and installation to Frank and his Dad who worked like two pistons in a well-oiled engine. Running a plane over soft pine, feeling long slivers of wood curl over his fingers like warm water had a soothing effect on him. He could lose himself in the emerging wood grain, focus right down there where the fine brown lines flowed through the blond surface and barely hear the two old carpenters arguing baseball or planning a fishing trip.
Using a fine rat-tail file to smooth a comer joint, he often thought about the hardback hooch he’d built with his squad during a stand-down at Camp Evans shortly after Tet ’68. Navy Seabees and Marine Engineers were busy all over I Corps repairing battle damage and clearing ordnance, trying to get the military machine back in gear. There was no time to build shelters for grunts that probably wouldn’t get to use them much anyway.
Willy was on light duty, recovering from a wound, when his unit packed up and moved to Camp Evans. He found himself standing in the middle of a dusty compound full of rotting canvas tents and bursting sandbags. The previous residents had been unstuck and sent to Khe Sanh in a big hurry. Willy could have ordered his people to clean out a couple of bunkers, refill sandbags, and let it ride, but that didn’t seem right. He borrowed some basic tools and went to work using all the skills he’d learned from his father.
Pudarski’s Palace began to rise from the flat, sandy earth as Willy worked with his squad. It eventually dwarfed all the slap-dash structures inside the compound and drew sidewalk supervisors from everywhere who wanted to see something beautiful, something made with love, skill, and care amid the devastation of war. For two delicious, diverting weeks Willy Pud called to mind every carpentry trick or technique his father had ever taught him or even mentioned in passing. When it was finished, everyone agreed Pudarski’s Palace was a genuine wonder. It featured a fireplace, loft, railed balcony, and a walled-off cubicle for each resident. They’d even added a shower stall. It was unique, and it was comfortable.