Then she read the letter again. He might drive her crazy, he might have hurt her more than anyone ever had, but she loved him with the whole fire of her soul, and she was waiting.
~oOo~
When Mo started college in the fall of 1967, Vietnam hadn’t reached the OU campus in any significant way. For most students here, and possibly for most faculty, the war was a thing that happened somewhere far away. Even those students who had family in the fight, who’d been drafted or who had enlisted, didn’t seem to bring the war with them in their bookbags and rucksacks.
Students at coastal schools had already been in the thick of anti-war protests in the fall of 1967, but in the conservative Oklahoma heartland, Vietnam was still just a war, like any other the United States had fought. America was on the side of right, and its might would save the world.
It wasn’t what Mo thought, or her friends in the Student Alliance for Peace, but in 1967, and 1968, SAP had been a tiny group, its speeches and protests barely attended—and those who showed were at least as likely to heckle them as add their voices in support.
But the fall of 1970, when Mo began her senior year, Vietnam was a very different thing. Two more years of news reports showing carnage and devastation. Khe Sanh. The Tet Offensive. Hamburger Hill. Every night, sitting in their living rooms, their forks paused over their Swanson Salisbury Steak Dinners, people saw dead soldiers. Screaming soldiers. Exhausted, agonized, disillusioned soldiers. Weeping women. Terrified children. Burning farms. Destroyed forests. And piles and piles of the dead.
And then there was My Lai. The horrific thing their own ‘boys’ had done. The horrific thing that had sent Brian back to that hell, for reasons Mo would never comprehend.
And just a few months earlier, in May, right here in the US: Kent State, where the US National Guard had gunned down American students at an American university in the American heartland.
Not even the heartland could pretend any longer that Vietnam wasn’t poisoning the whole country.
A few days after Kent State, students at OU, as across the country, had called for a general strike and mounted a major protest that had resulted in a clash with police and highway patrol officers. Mo had been home, still reeling from her personal losses, but that clash had clearly emboldened the student body.
When the Fall 1970 term began, on the very first day of classes, Mo stepped onto a campus she hardly recognized. Mixed in with the usual chaos and confusion of a first day was the storm of the war. The open spaces of campus roiled with students, and what were usually calls to promote campus activities had a decidedly rebellious air. People stood on soapboxes, with bullhorns, and shouted about injustice and cruelty, and others, the more conservative among the students, shouted back. There were tussles and arguments. Mo even saw one student spit on another.
Steve Best, apparently still working on his Master’s and still heading SAP, was one of those with a bullhorn, and Mo paused at the edge of an impressive throng to listen to him speak.
Though he’d added extended riffs about Kent State and the structures of law and order turning against America’s own children, and the perversions of American soldiers, most of what he said was what he’d been saying as long as Mo had known him. Most of what he said, she agreed with. Her love for Brian had never diluted her hatred of his war.
But she felt disloyal now to actively protest. Not only because it hurt Brian when she did, but because she’d seen how the returning troops were treated—worse since My Lai than ever before—and she saw Brian in every single veteran.
The war was terrible, but the protests, which she’d grown uncomfortable with years before, were now a horror of their own.
Shaking off a thickening weight of melancholy, Mo turned and headed toward her first class.
“Mo! Mo, wait!”
She stopped at a familiar female voice and turned to see Barbie trotting after her.
“Hi, Mo! I haven’t seen you in forever! How are you?” Barbie came in as if for a hug, but Mo took a step back. She liked Barbie, but they’d never been close enough friends for Mo to want to hug her—and now, she was mature enough, or strong enough, or just tired enough, not to save Barbie’s feelings with a hug she didn’t want.
There was, of course, an awkward moment while Barbie adjusted, but the always peppy young woman didn’t lose her cheery grin.
“Hi, Barbie. How are you?”
“I’m wonderful. I mean—I haven’t graduated yet, obviously, and I was supposed to last semester, but there was a calculus disaster, and I wanted to change my major anyway, so now I’m doing fashion merchandising. Are you still in education?”
“I am, yes.”
“Well, how’ve you been? Are you coming back to SAP? You really should—we have four times the members we had before, and we’re doing all kinds of important things. We’re going to the City this weekend for a big protest at the Air Force base. You should come!”
She said it like they were planning a party. Had Mo actually liked these people? “I’ve plans this weekend. And I’m late to class. It was good to see you.”
Barbie looked at her watch. The next classes didn’t start for almost half an hour, so Barbie knew Mo was trying to ditch her. But she smiled nonetheless brightly. “Oh, okay. Well, keep in touch!”
Mo offered her a smile and turned away, marveling at how much her life had changed, how much she had changed, since Brian Delaney had walked into her uncle’s shop.
~oOo~
15 Aug 70
My Irish,
I probably won’t send this one. I don’t want to lay all this on you. I know this year has been hard on you, and I’m not where I should be, and that’s my fault. I guess I deserve all this. I know I do. But sweetheart, I’m having a hard time today. I’ve been having a hard time for a while, all summer, but I’ve been keeping it out of these letters. I just can’t do it tonight. I need to get out what I’m really feeling. Then I’ll burn this and pretend it never happened.
It’s been five months, Mo. Five months without even one letter. The last one you sent was when you told me about losing the baby. The last letter you sent me broke my heart and made me so worried for you. And nothing since.
If it weren’t for Bridie, I think I might be 100% crazy by now. But at least your aunt likes me enough to tell me how you’re doing. She says you’re doing pretty good, taking your studies serious and doing great with that. I’m proud of you.
She also tells me you still love me. She says you read my letters over and over. I’m glad I know that. I read your letters over and over, too. Every word is a lifeline. Even the ones where you’re mad at me, even the ones where you’re hurting, I read them and read them and try to hold onto you as hard as I can. But God, Mo, I need to feel you reaching back. Please, sweetheart. Please.
I signed on for a year tour, and that’s coming up. It doesn’t look like there’s anything that’s going to stop me from coming home on time, but Cornish asked if I’d stay.
Right now, I don’t know if there’s a reason to go home.
Is there a reason, Mo? Do you still want me? Do you still love me?
If not, please just say it.
I love you.
Brian
He’d signed it Brian.
For the first time in weeks, maybe months, He’d signed his name Brian. Not as an afterthought, but as himself. In that moment, in this letter he hadn’t meant to send her, he was exposed, and Mo saw the man she loved. He’d poured his heart out, and she saw him. Brian. She saw his pain, and her own stretched out around the whole world and met it.
As before, the reasons she hadn’t been writing had nothing to do with her love and need for Brian, and everything to do with her own loneliness and loss, and the bitter inadequacy of ink and paper to convey anything she was feeling. Need had rendered her speechless. All her losses were centered on Brian, and even as she’d reclaimed her life and her future, every thought of him was a howling abyss of pain that not even her love could fill.
But he was still there. Her husband was waiting inside the soldier to come back to her.
After all this time, these terrible months, he was due home in mere weeks. If he re-upped again, she’d swim to Vietnam and strangle him with those damn dog tags.
Mo closed her Mathematics Strategies for Elementary Learners textbook and pulled out a sheet of pink paper.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Brian, love,
If you don’t come home as soon as you can, I will swim to Vietnam and strangle you with your bloody dog tags.
If you want to talk to me, come home, you idiot.
Mo
24th August 1970
Ps. I love you as ever, and I miss you every day.
Brian read those few lines, Mo’s first in agonizing, empty months, and laughed. He read them again and laughed more, then read them again. This was all he needed. Those three sentences, packed solid with her keen sass and fiery strength, said everything about Mo’s well being and her sustaining love for him. The frail, lost girl who’d written him in grief had recovered. She was herself again. And she still loved him. His wife.
If she never sent him another line, this would get him through his final weeks—and he had his answer for Cornish. No, he would not stay. He could not. He was needed—he was wanted—at home.
~oOo~
Cornish came into the command hut, and D stood at attention at once. “Sir.”
“At ease, D, at ease.” The major nodded at the maps on D’s desk. “Those today’s?”
“Yes, sir. Never seen it so quiet. All patrols reported clear again. No sign of activity anywhere in a ten mile sweep.” D studied his work. He tracked reports of enemy sightings, ranging from combat engagement, to suspicious civilian activity in nearby hamlets, all the way down to tracks, debris, or other signs that the enemy had come and gone. For the past two days, for the first time since D had been doing this work, all patrols had reported no signs of enemy presence at all.
That didn’t mean combat had ended—there were reports of engagements and active battles elsewhere, but here at Bong Son, starting late in the summer, things had steadily slowed to something like peace.
In busier times, the command hut bustled with commissioned and enlisted personnel, but over the past few months, though the draft was still in effect, new recruits hadn’t been coming in at a pace to replace those rotating out. And right now, toward sunset, most administrative staff were on personal time. D was still in here because he hadn’t had anything better to do than finish his maps.
“How was your trip, sir?”
Cornish crossed his arms and studied the maps with him. He’d just returned from a trip to Saigon to report to the brass. “This is for no ears but ours for now, but I think we’re finally really in drawdown. We’re not gonna win this war, and the pendulum finally swung in Washington. HQ is talking about redeploying the 173rd home. And I mean home—to Fort Campbell, in Kentucky.”
D’s heart kicked oddly. In theory, that was fantastic news. The 173rd Airborne Battalion had been one of the first units in, in 1965, and D and Cornish had both been among the first boots down. Cornish, a career man, had, with the singular exception of a week home for his father’s funeral in 1966, never left the jungle in all that time.
If the 173rd got sent home—really home, not to a Japanese readiness base like Okinawa but back to the good ol’ U. S. of A., it meant they really were drawing this nightmare to a close, and that was a fucking miracle.
But D had six weeks left in his third tour, and he was beyond ready to go home. Redeployment of the entire battalion would take months to plan, prepare and effect. Not the length of a whole fresh tour, but certainly an extension of one.
With one stroke of his pen, Cornish, who’d already leaned hard on D to re-up again, could fuck up the end of his tour and make him stay to redeploy with the full battalion.
He looked up at his CO. Cornish looked down at him, and then chuckled. “Easy, Sergeant. I’m not going to ask you to stay. You’ll go home on schedule. But I’m gonna work your ass off on this while I’ve got you.”
“Thank you, sir.” D breathed out his mass of worry. “ Kentucky’s home for you, isn’t it?”
“It is. Callwood, Kentucky, born and bred. Campbell’s on the other side of the state, though. It doesn’t matter either way—I’m not leaving. I’m being reassigned. When the 173rd goes, I’ll report to Saigon.”
D couldn’t hold back a chuckle, but he didn’t say what he was thinking.
“What?” Cornish asked.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Tell me. That’s an order.” He said it with a grin.
“I was just thinking, you’re bound and determined to be FILO.” FILO: First In, Last Out.
The major shrugged. “There’s an oak leaf in it for me. Besides, soldiering is my life. Never had anything else I cared about.” With a keen glance at D, he added, “I thought you were the same, once upon a time. But you’ve got more than this now.”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
~oOo~
On a frosty grey day in mid-November, just shy of a year after he’d left for war for the second time, D’s feet touched American soil again. It was Alaska, and his travels were far from over, but this was home enough for now.
The full military flight, every seat occupied by a man returning home from combat, erupted into cheers and whoops of joy—and not a few sobs, too—as the plane’s wheels touched down, and many a man dropped to his knees at the base of the deplaning stairs and kissed the frozen tarmac.
Here in Alaska, none of these men were home yet, some, like D, were days away yet, but they all were close enough for joy.
~oOo~
A commercial flight from Alaska took him to Kentucky. Before he could get home, there were more papers to push at Fort Campbell, where the 173rd was, indeed, being redeployed in the spring, to get him fully separated—or as fully separated as he could be. There was the lingering possibility of recall, but he’d given the jungle three voluntary tours, during which he’d received two purple hearts and three commendation medals, so he wasn’t worried he’d be sent back involuntarily to a war winding down to its inevitable stalemate.
And it would absolutely be involuntary if he ever picked up a fucking M16 again in his life. He was done with blood and death and war. He had a beautiful wife, and a life to build with her. What he needed to do now was get his head into a civilian shape.
He didn’t regret this last tour, despite the pain he’d caused, and the pain he’d felt. He’d done something good, and he felt clearer about himself, too. He’d been there to start that war, and he’d needed to see its end.
As it turned out, his timing had been good. He’d be surprised if there were any American troops still on the ground at the end of 1971.
It wasn’t until the airport in Kentucky that he truly saw how much the public had turned against the war, and the soldiers. Coming in on a commercial flight, dressed in his dress greens as required, D and the few other returning soldiers with him encountered myriad angry stares and sneers, and several shouted insults like “BABYKILLERS!” and “FUCK OFF, ARMY PIGS!”
Protesters had been assholes before he’d left for this tour, but this was fucking Kentucky, not a California college campus. He hadn’t expected to find so much hate here.
One scraggly motherfucker spat a massive, phlegmy wad at him. It missed, landing with a splat a couple inches from the shiny toe of his shoe. If it had landed, D might have found himself in a cell before he had a chance to get his uniform off. As it was, he simply stopped and stared until the pussy shrank back.
Other soldiers met their families at the airport, but there was no emotional reunion for D yet. He’d told Mo to stay put at home, not to try to meet him until he got close. Once he was done at Campbell and free, he’d get his ass home.
He’d gotten lucky and caught a seat on a transport flying out a day earlier than scheduled, so he’d be home before Mo expected him, and he hadn’
t tried to get word to her about the change. Since he’d first buckled in, he’d been playing that surprise reunion in his head like a fantasy.
Not long now, and he’d be home. Really home. A little more dented, but whole. More whole, he thought, than he’d been before.
~oOo~
The protests were bad everywhere. At the airports, at the base gates, anywhere people—all of them young people who had no fucking idea what they were talking about—saw men in uniform, there were shouts and gestures, signs and insults. D turned his mind to Mo, kept his attention there, and ignored the black bile hurled his way.
The men in those unruly crowds were the ones D truly despised. Just like that Steve asshole who’d called himself Mo’s friend. Some smug college bastard without the sense of duty to enlist and with the privilege to avoid the draft. They had nothing on the line. It was easy to shout curses at men who’d dodged bullets, or failed to dodge them, who’d survived in misery and uncertainty and done what they’d been told was their job. He’d like to show these tie-dyed pieces of wet shit what the men they hurled abuse at had been through, and see if they’d still stand on civilized sidewalks and behave like animals.
They were right to hate this war. It was a bad, stupid, pointless war that had caused mountains of pointless death and suffering. But fuck, these sons of bitches were turned the wrong way. Those protests belonged with the politicians. Shout at the men who’d created this war so they’d stay in power.
D moved through every public space with his head high. Those few protesters who sought to block his way, he moved without ever touching him. He simply let them see the man who’d survived three tours in that place they feared so much.
Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning Page 18