Deros Vietnam (14 page)

The whole exercise reminded me of my Intro to Philosophy class in college. We had this ancient professor with a droopy mustache who looked like he would have been at home in a toga. He loved talking about Plato and Plato's idea of a horse.

“Everything you see in a stable is really an imperfect representation of a form that exists in the ideal realm,” he'd lecture us. Back then, all I could think about was the perfect coed body, but somehow the old professor's words stayed with me.

The professor-philosopher reminded us that one of Plato's critics told him that he “could see particular horses, but not horseness,” to which Plato replied, “That's because you have eyes but no intelligence.”

I had eyes, and ears, but when it came to combat, I lacked anything resembling intelligence. I had pen and paper, but I didn't have the story. I could write and write and write, but I'd never get it straight.

For me, Edwards's combat experience, hell, every grunt's combat experience was the ideal. I was stuck in the fucking cave with Plato.

In reality, the best I could do was pretend. So I kept on writing and distancing and putting myself to sleep.

* * *

I didn't have much luck getting the guys to lighten up on Edwards in the office or at the hooch. He didn't know when he was trying too hard or being an asshole. That was probably the lifer in him, the supply clerk. We draftees were better, purer. Plus we were educated and knew more than our bosses. As my uncle used to say, “we thought our shit didn't stink.”

The best thing that happened to Edwards was Nixon and Vietnamization. Guys kept DEROS-ing and weren't being replaced, so our IO office numbers kept getting smaller and smaller, meaning there were fewer and fewer guys to pick on him. Eventually, it was just a handful of us, plus Miss Tran and Edwards, knocking out the publications and press releases that used to take dozens of us to produce. If nothing else, it made the time go fast.

The declining GI numbers gave me a chance to go out into the field in search of my combat story. Hard as I looked, I never found it. By this time, nobody wanted to be the last GI killed in Vietnam and no one was taking risks. The only real skirmish I saw was between South Vietnamese soldiers, ARVNs, and some grunts who thought the ARVN were a bunch of pussies. Their M-16s did make that “crack, crack, crack” sound that Edwards had described. And you really could smell danger in the air. Edwards hadn't lied.

One day I got back from one of those assignments and, lo and behold, Edwards was gone. Gone from Vietnam and out of the Army, too. None of the GIs left knew what happened or gave a flying fuck. Even Edwards himself didn't mention what happened in the letter he sent me.

“You were the only guy I could talk to at USARV,
” he wrote just before the end of my tour. “I
want to thank you for that. We needed all the friends we could get in ‘Nam, and we were lucky to have each other. Maybe we'll meet up again someday. Liked your stories, Edwards.”

Inside the large manila envelope were photocopies of every one of my stories. My jaw dropped as I scanned his edits. They were meticulous. They were good. They were right. In a way, the stories were now more his than mine.

“
You still writing that shit?”
was the question Edwards posed to me that one morning in Vietnam. And as I sit here, light years away from that place, that time, and those people, the answer is “Yes, I'm still writing that shit.”

DEROS

As she slowly moved from the living room to the kitchen and back to the living room, stopping along the way to listen to the quiet which seemed to be getting louder, she realized that what was wrong was not something inside the apartment. It was inside her.

She gently massaged her stomach, then let her hand slide lower, to her uterus, to that area where she had housed him for nine months more than 22 years ago. That's where the pain was. It hurt like labor, but it was a different pain, a form of anti-labor, as if the doctor and nurses were opening her up and forcing her to take the afterbirth and the placenta and the cord back inside.

He was her baby. And he belonged there, if not inside her, then beside her, not in the car with his father, on the way to the airport and California and, all too soon, Vietnam.

What would they talk about in the car?
she wondered.
Or would they talk at all?
She shook her head. How was it that these two, so much alike that it was sometimes painful to watch, had become prisoners of this Oedipal dance? And why did she, who knew each of their hurts and their fears, why did she have to mother both of them? Why did she have to mediate their anger and navigate their distance?

Would she ever see him again
?

Which one,
her mind quickly countered. As emotional as her husband was, he could easily succumb to a crying jag on the way home and drive right off the Schuylkill Expressway. And her son …

She paused as the aching in her womb struck back, pulling her stomach and her head and her heart with it.

DEROS? Was that the term he used? She envisioned the word in her head, storing it in her mind for a future crossword puzzle as she did with most new words she heard. But this one was made up, just another of those silly Army acronyms.

“What's a five letter word for the Greek God of …?”
Of what
? she thought. Deliverance? Salvation? Reunion?

DEROS had something to do with return from overseas, but she couldn't remember the rest of it. The return from overseas was the important part. When would that be? When could they start counting down from 365? When would the pain go away?

As she reflected on “going away” she realized she was standing in front of the door to his bedroom. “Walk On By,” she said aloud, pulling her hand back from the doorknob. She couldn't go in because she didn't want to face the disappointment of his not being there.

For a moment, she could still hear the music that he played so loud, especially the album that had the song “Walk On By” which so unnerved her. The voice of the black man in that song, his pleading, his hurt, all the longing in his voice, the female singers in the background, the electric guitar demanding to be heard.

Now she was inside his bedroom, fingering through the wooden crate next to his desk where he kept his record albums. She gasped, staring at what looked like a black baby's head emerging from the womb before she saw the sunglasses and the beads around the neck and realized it was the head of the black man who sang the song that took her son away and broke her heart.

She grabbed the copy of
Hot Buttered Soul
and tried first to break it, then bend it, with no success. There was only one thing left to do.

She opened the turntable, placed the album on the spindle, raised the needle and turned up the volume. Loud. Louder. An orchestra, violins—had they always been there? The guitar and then that deep, painful resonant voice, reminding her that she'd lost someone she loved.

Standing there, listening and crying, she knew what DEROS meant.

Malaria

The last order Master Sergeant Billy Taylor snapped as I left Fort Benning was: “Make sure y'all take these malaria pills 48 hours BEFORE you leave for ‘Nam. Do you read me? If you don't do as I say, you'll get malaria and die ‘fore you get sick of the fucking place.”

Sgt. Taylor's words hovered above the dashboard as my dad maneuvered his VW bug through the rain and the Philadelphia rush-hour traffic. If it hadn't been for Sgt. Taylor's warning, my dad and I would be headed south toward the airport and my flights heading to the West coast and Southeast Asia. Instead, we were driving north—back home to fetch my forgotten malaria pills.

We approached my parents' apartment in silence. My dad pulled into the small circle in front of their building and turned off the ignition. I got out.

“I forgot my malaria pills,” I told my mother as I returned to re-swell her puffy eyes and nose. Neither of us was up to a repeat of our previous, painful goodbyes. I grabbed the pills, pocketed them in the raincoat my dad gave me for protection, and kissed her between petrified tears.

Back on the road, my dad and I again sat in silence. Under normal circumstances, a hostile, damp night with tons of traffic and skittish drivers would throw him into a rage. Not tonight. He simply steered, coping with the demands of the highway, and my departure. As I watched him, I thought about how much we were alike, and how far we'd come in just 48 hours.

* * *

My parents were hosting a festive, pre, pre-Thanksgiving going-away dinner for me, accompanied by my girlfriend Emily.

“The Last Supper,” I whispered to Emily, trying to explain all the familial hoopla.

My mother invited her sisters, Mae and Stella, and Stella's husband Joe, to join in the celebration. The seven of us dined on turkey and all the trimmings in front of the TV in the living room of my parents' tiny, two-bedroom apartment, watching the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs play football.

Between first and second helpings, as I passed the gravy boat to Aunt Mae and joked about Thanksgiving in Vietnam, Aunt Stella and my dad leaped from their chairs and ran toward the TV. A skirmish had broken out between opposing linemen. Aunt Stella screamed: “Get the nigger! Get that nigger!” My father hollered, “Kill that black bastard!”

I exchanged a painful expression with Emily whose body visibly tightened. She was embarrassed for me, and I was angry with my family. In fact, on the 28
^th
day of a 30-day, pre-Vietnam leave, I was pissed off about everything—my parents, Aunt Stella, racism, genocide, Nixon, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kent State, the draft—everything.

“What's your problem?” My father baited us, looking past me at Emily whom I suspected he already disliked. She hadn't responded to his good old boy flirting and hadn't laughed at one of his stupid jokes since she'd arrived.

“Back off, will you please, Dad?”

“It's my house; I can do as I please.”

“Then try showing some consideration for people who don't share your prejudices.”

Battle lines drawn, Emily quietly excused herself from the table while the rest of my relatives pretended to watch the football game.

“Don't hand me that high and mighty horseshit,” my dad snarled. “I've had it up to here with your college-boy crap. You're no better than any of the rest of us. I was hoping the Army might change your attitude, but it hasn't. I'll guarantee you Vietnam will.”

I glanced at my mom at the mention of “Vietnam.” Her eyes moistened. I hated my father for upsetting her. I hated him for embarrassing me in front of Emily. I hated him for the war.

“Vietnam will straighten you out,” he continued. “You mark my words. Do you good to defend this great country.”

“TOUCHDOWN!” Aunt Stella shrieked. I shook my head, swallowed my words and left to look for Emily. She wasn't in the guest bedroom. She wasn't on the balcony either.

I walked down the narrow hallway to my parents' bedroom. Even though they always turned the heat in their apartment up way too high, my folks usually kept the large windows in their back bedroom wide open. The pitch-black room was cool, almost cold, like a cave hidden away among the nearby Pocono Mountains.

I thought I heard something when I entered the room, but I was so exhausted that I collapsed on my parents' firm, queen-sized bed. It was then that I detected the sound of another person's breathing. The rhythm of the barely audible sighs told me that it was Emily. We didn't talk about what had just happened, or what was going to happen in less than 48 hours.

“Do you remember that turkey dinner I cooked for you and your Army buddies last summer in your apartment?” mused Emily. “Not nearly as good as your mom's food. I worked all day on that meal and then that asshole roommate of yours—Frank—joked about how he couldn't eat a turkey dinner if it wasn't Thanksgiving and hadn't been made by a family member of his—he kept rubbing it in all night—you didn't stop him. What a jerk he was. I never liked that guy.”

Emily kept going on like that, never pausing to ask me for an answer. She needed to let down, and the cool, dark quiet was helping her to do that.

After a while I started to talk to the darkness myself.

“I've been looking for an answer to why I'm bound for Vietnam,” I began. “First, I thought I was some sort of innocent victim, a casualty of life's unfairness. Then I decided it was fate. But that didn't make any sense either, especially for a good Catholic boy like me.

“Next, I thought it was punishment for something bad I'd done—a sin I'd forgotten to confess, some wrong that I didn't bother to right. Later, I turned to astrology, then Tarot cards, marijuana, meditation, more dope, the Grateful Dead—none of it worked.

“Then it hit me—it was my parents' fault!”

Was Emily listening? She seemed to still be breathing in the cool night air and breathing out her anxiety.

“It is their fault, goddamn it. I mean, shit, I made it to the draft lottery, which was going to save my ass. But the day before my birthday was picked out of the fucking fishbowl as number two-fifty something. And the day after was three sixty-six! Are you shitting me? But my birthday! Number nine! Fuck, I might as well have packed my bags for Vietnam the day I was born.”

We both lay there, Emily replaying the weeks we'd spent together before tonight, our final night, while I continued to make a case against my parents for their lousy family planning. I needed so bad for someone, for Emily, to hold me right then. But I didn't reach across the bed. I wanted her to find me, to caress me, to comfort me.

Lost in our respective monologues, Emily and I were unaware that the bedroom door had opened and a crack of light from the hallway reaffirmed how dark it was.

Someone had entered the room. Neither of us moved. I wasn't frightened because I knew it was my dad. And when he lay down on the bed between us, it seemed inexplicably natural.