After the Flag Has Been Folded (36 page)

One day the provincial police came into Peter's home. When they saw the altar, they became enraged and screamed at his mother. “‘Who is this enemy soldier?'” Peter recalled them demanding. “Why you hang this enemy above Ho Chi Minh?'”

Peter's brothers told the soldiers, “This is our father.”

The soldiers yelled back, “‘I don't care he's your father! He's an enemy! Throw him away!'”

So Peter's mother took their father's picture down. Along with that of Ho Chi Minh, he noted with a chuckle. She threw the picture of Ho Chi Minh away. But she hid his father's picture.

I asked Peter if he blames Americans for his father's death, the way I had blamed the Vietnamese for the loss of my father.

No, he said. He blames the Communists. They mistreated so many after the Americans left Saigon in 1975. Those who served with the
Army of the Republic of South Vietnam were considered traitors. Their families were despised by the North Vietnamese.

“In spite of what people think of me and of my family—that we are losers, traitors—I'm proud of my father,” he said.

Peter appreciated the Americans and the Vietnamese who fought to free his country from oppressive rule. His father's death strengthened his desire to be a free man himself.

Three times Peter tried to find passage to America. The first time was in 1990, when he bribed his way aboard a boat, but after a week drifting about the South China Sea, a fierce storm arose and tossed the boat back to Vietnamese shores. Peter was devastated. “When we came to the shore there was a flag,” he recalled. “A North Vietnamese flag. A red flag with a yellow star. The police were waiting for us.”

In 1992 Peter tried again to escape his motherland.

“I was working as a carpenter,” he said. “I paid for a place on the boat to escape. But I missed the boat.”

Perhaps it was God's way of watching over him. “Everybody on the boat was killed.”

No matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine wanting to live in another country so badly that I would be willing to risk life, limb, and livelihood for that chance the way Peter and thousands of other Vietnamese had done.

As a small child, with a basket full of family treasures clutched to his chest, Peter had fled his hometown of Hue while North Vietnamese dropped fiery bombs in the streets. As a teen, he had worked in malaria-infested jungles to help support his war-ragged family. As a young adult, he had risked his life in an ill-equipped boat for passage to America. Peter had suffered so much for freedom's sake. Not only had he lost his father, this courageous young man was willing to lose his own life for a chance to live as a free man. Peter said we should both be proud of our fathers—they died fighting so all Vietnamese people could live in a nation free from oppression.

Sitting there in that hotel room, listening to Peter's stories, I was overcome with grief. Not just grief over the loss of our childhoods and the continual absence of our fathers, but for all the suffering his family and thousands of other Vietnamese families had endured. I knew losing Daddy would've been easier emotionally for me if such a sacrifice had ensured a life of freedom for men like Peter.

Thanks to a lot of political mangling and military mismanagement, American troops and the soldiers for the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam failed in their mission, but did that diminish the sacrifices these men made? Or our families' sacrifices?

Of course not. If anything, the suffering of Peter's family and, yes, the suffering my family endured are greater because our fathers did not succeed in their mission. Peter grew up fearing a retaliatory Communist regime. I grew up fearing men and ghosts I could not name. In those terrifying moments, we both wanted the same thing—our fathers to rescue us from war's poverty and pain.

We'd grown up halfway across the world from each other, but under the same cloud of confusion. The North Vietnamese had labeled all the ARVN soldiers traitors. American antiwar protestors berated Vietnam veterans as murderers. In both instances, fathers like ours were spit upon and cursed. And as kids, we'd grown up in societies that didn't allow us to talk about our fears or our fathers. That silence had stewed for a long time. I asked Peter to explain how he'd reached a peace about his father's death:

Peter gave me the precious gift of grace that night when he taught me why our fathers had risked and, indeed, given their lives. It was so
that men like Peter might one day live in a free country, one that promises its people economic opportunity and the freedom to hang their dead father's picture wherever they like, a nation that grants people the freedom to invite whomever they wish into their homes or hotel rooms, and to use their given names without fear of retribution. The freedom to read a book of their own choosing, or to worship in a church of their choice. The sort of freedoms I've enjoyed every single day of my life and taken for granted for far too many of them.

I wished somebody had explained all this to me when I was a young girl.

Peter had his own wish: “Why could I not have met you ten years ago?”

The last time Peter tried to flee Vietnam was in 1995.

“I bought two sets of bones of American soldiers,” he said. “One set had 30 percent of the body. The other had 90 percent. They had the dog tags with them. We made a photograph of the dog tags, and we sent them to Thailand to be examined. We thought with these bones we could get permission to go to America.”

He said the bones were certified to be those of American soldiers, enabling him to broker a deal. “American officials said they would get me out if I would show them where the bones were found,” he said.

But the deal was spoiled by a raid from the provincial police, who confiscated the bones.

“The Vietnamese government wanted to return the soldiers bones themselves, not through the Vietnamese people,” Peter said. “A fleet of police cars surrounded our home and took the American bones away. The Vietnamese government took credit for returning them.”

He was not penalized by the police for hoarding the bones. “No. No punishment. That's a good thing,” he said, chuckling.

And now, Peter said, it was too late to leave. “I don't want to leave my mother. You know we have a saying in Vietnam, ‘A mother can raise ten children but ten children cannot care for one mother.'
Sometimes my older brothers are a little bit careless. Our mother is ill and they don't check on her. I feel I must stay. I have obligations to my mother.”

Then, Peter told me about the towering statue in the center of Da Nang. As tall as a three-story building, the carved statue is a woman donned in traditional Vietnamese peasant garb. She stands with her right arm outstretched and her left hand over her breast, near her heart. She carries several bags, perhaps the sum total of her family's possessions. Her face is stoic, resigned to fate. She looks strong, powerful, but there's a tenderness around her eyes. As if they have seen the future and fear its sorrows. “This is Hero Mother,” Peter said.

She represents the women who grieved the loss of their sons, their brothers, their husbands in the American War in Vietnam. “One by one, these mothers saw their husbands and kids off to battles and never met them again,” Peter said. Just as his mother had done.

“Some mothers lost seven sons or more. Men died for the country. They are actual heroes. But it's the mothers, the wives, who suffered at home, who are the real heroes. That is what I think.”

The North Vietnamese built this memorial to honor women who lost so much during the war. Peter said the Vietnamese people try to find other ways to honor these women as well. “We build them houses, give them money and gifts very often.”

Peter recalled that when he was attending university he worked part-time in a hotel that was caring for a hero mother. He and his coworkers would often ask her to tell the story of her loss.

“She told us, ‘I lost seven men of mine, my husband and six sons. My husband and the first son left for the battle almost at the same time in the early 1960s. I sometimes received their letters that first year, rather late, three or four months after the sending day. Then the letters were less and less.

“‘ I also sent them some, but they could not receive any, I guess, because they moved very often. I received the bad news from my husband's unit first and then the son's. In the same month. Bitterly,
their letters still came when they had been dead. My other sons gradually went and never came back. I was waiting for them, at least one of them, coming back to me the next few years after the war, but then no one.'”

Peter and his coworkers were always surprised whenever they heard this hero mother's tale. “She told her story in a very calm tone of voice,” Peter said. “No tears. No emotion. Not at all. Why?”

But having witnessed his own mother's grief, Peter knew the answer. “She had cried so much tears when receiving the bad news, when unhopefully waiting for someone to come back. There is no more tears to cry now,” he said. “That is what I think.”

 

T
HE PAIN OF WAR
does not end when the bombing stops. Despite the decades that have passed, many of my fellow SDIT friends are still waiting for their fathers' remains to be returned home for burial. There are over 1,800 American soldiers still missing in action in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. There is no getting over the Vietnam War for those families. Not for any of us, really. The Vietnam War, as all wars do, forever altered the landscape of our nation and our families, causing us to fight our way through some tough terrain.

I have come to terms with a harsh history, as a daughter and as a citizen of a free nation. I don't miss my father any less with each passing year. I am simply more aware of all the life he's missed. I did not go to Vietnam seeking closure. Grief is a journey with a beginning, but it does not have an end, not in this life anyway. But my trip helped me realize that Vietnam isn't the scary jungle I'd always imagined it to be.

“For the first time in my thirty-seven years of life, I believe I will think of the country first, not the war, when I hear the word
Vietnam,
” Cammie said during our long flight home.

Moments before we'd boarded a plane in Singapore, bound for Los Angeles, our group gathered around big-screen televisions and listened as President Bush announced that American troops would
soon invade Iraq. My heart sank into my gut. I said a prayer for the families that would soon be thrust into an inevitable lifelong journey of grief and reconciliation.

The search for honor, peace, and understanding is, ultimately, up to each one of us.

“The art is to ransom sacred moments—the message of the past—and to deposit them in the bank of eternity,” Rabbi Marshall Meyer once said while commenting on the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our journey in country allowed us sons and daughters the chance to ransom the sacred moments of our fathers' lives so we can carry them to eternity's shores. We're sure our soldier fathers will have camp set up by the time we arrive.

T
HE CORRECTIONAL OFFICER STUDIED ME WITH A WARY EYE AS
I
EMPTIED MY POCKETS OF CAR KEYS AND COINS
and placed them in a bowl she handed me. I paused when she said, “Remove your shoes, ma'am.”

“My shoes?” I replied, looking at the stain-ridden carpet beneath my feet. “Not unless you give me a pair of slippers to put on.”

Standing behind me, Linda cried out, “I'm not taking off my shoes!”

“You're going to have leave that camera here,” the officer said, ignoring Linda's protests.

Frustrated, I glanced out the glass doors Linda and I had, of our own free will, walked through into the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Washington.

Rain pounded the glass, sounding like a barrage of BB shot. It was the kind of ruckus that Frank and his childhood buddy Joe Kirkland used to fire off, sending squirrels and birds helter-skelter, seeking refuge in the tallest Georgia pines.

I put up a fuss when the officer tried to take away my camera. Finally, she gave in about the camera, not the shoes. “Okay, as long as you don't take any pictures of the facility,” she ordered.

“Sure, no problem,” I replied.

I handed my driver's license to another officer and signed in as a guest. Linda did the same.

It was Monday, March 31, 2003. I'd been back from Vietnam for nearly two weeks, barely long enough to recoup from the extreme jet lag that had me waking at two every morning and sleeping at three every afternoon.

Gates clinked and rattled as Linda and I were led from one section of the facility to another. Frank and I had been in prison before—him for drug use, me for my job as a reporter—but this was Linda's first look at the bowels of a maximum-security prison, and she didn't like it one bit. Her dark eyes were cast downward, and a frown creased her forehead. Her thick, dark hair cascaded past her shoulders and partially hid her face, like an exquisite shawl.

Mama's coworkers had planned a surprise retirement party for her last day. Sneaking Linda, Frank, and me into the prison was the biggest surprise of all. Frank hadn't arrived yet. Fearing that Mama would show up for work early, as was her custom, her coworkers intended to lock Linda and me away in an office at the infirmary until they got Mama situated.

We were walking between the administrative building and the infirmary when a man stepping onto a prison bus stopped to greet us. “I knew your Mama and Daddy at Fort Benning,” he said.

Linda and I looked at each other.

“You knew our daddy?” I asked.

“Yes, ma'am. And your mama, too,” he replied. “I used to see her hanging out at the NCO Club on base.”

“And now you work with her?” Linda asked. We were both stunned. Mama had never said a word about working with someone who'd known her in Georgia.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“Nice to meet you, sir,” I said as the man took another step onto the bus. Prison officials were scurrying around us, rushing us off before
Mama arrived. They locked us in the office of the supervisory nurse. The small window in the door had been covered with a sign that said
DO NOT DISTURB
. A desk cluttered with files and loose paper stood in one corner. A clock ticked away.

Mama worked the swing shift. It was nearly 2:30
P.M.
Frank still hadn't arrived, but Linda and I could hear Mama talking outside in the hall.

“What do we do if she comes in here?” I asked.

“She won't,” said Beth, the supervisory nurse. “She never comes in here if I have that sign up.”

Mama had been a prison nurse at Shelton for eighteen years. She had first worked in a prison while living in Alaska. She claimed it wasn't as hard on her physically as working in a hospital's intensive care units.

It always struck me as odd that Mama had been drawn to the most difficult jobs. Much of her early career was spent tending to heart attack and stroke victims, most of whom died in those years. In her later career, Mama cared for some of the most god-awful folks in the entire nation. Murderers. Rapists. Just plain mean and evil people. I could never figure out if growing up the only sister of all those brothers had toughened Mama or if Daddy's death had scarred her so badly that the only pain she could feel was so sharp that others naturally recoiled from it. Whichever it was, Mama never shied away from tough jobs.

The door opened and finally Frank slipped in, laughing. “Can you believe they let me in this place?” he said.

“I can't believe they ever let you out of prison in the first place,” I teased.

Frank hadn't been behind bars since he was released from Fort Leavenworth. “The great thing about this visit is knowing I get to leave when I want,” Frank said, laughing again.

Linda rolled her eyes at the two of us. Our baby sister can be the most pious person in the world. Sometimes she acts as if God
dropped her off with the wrong family. Nothing about prison humors her in the least. “You look nice,” Linda said to him, changing the subject.

Frank was wearing dress slacks and a plaid-print shirt with a tie. He'd dropped about thirty pounds since I'd last seen him at Christmas. He'd been diagnosed with diabetes since then and was working to control it with diet and exercise. He'd also quit smoking a year earlier.

I was wearing a pink shirt I had made for me at the silk market in Hoi An and a pair of black silk pants. Linda was dressed in black slacks and top. We all looked festive.

None of us had ever expected Mama to retire. She'd worked since Daddy died. It was hard to imagine her rolling around the country in a recreational vehicle. She had friends, but most of them were people she worked with. She had given up any hopes of a sustainable love life once she moved west at age thirty-seven. She'd dated sporadically over the years, but nothing of any consequence. If she was lonely, she never let on, at least not to us.

Beth opened the door and motioned for us to follow her down the hallway. Mama was already there with most of the infirmary staff, from all shifts. The break room was narrow, so people were spilling out into the hall. Beth squeezed by them, followed by Linda, Frank, and me.

Mama was across the room, holding a Ritz cracker with a slice of deli meat in one hand and a napkin in the other, talking to a coworker. She wore a blue wool blazer, a pair of jeans, and high-heeled boots. In December she'd shocked us all by bleaching her dark brunette hair a golden hue, the color of harvest wheat. Mama didn't need a man in her life to make her feel desirable. The right clothes could always do that for her. These days she buys her padded bras at Victoria's Secret.

Linda walked up to Mama and gave her a hug.

“What are you doing here?” Mama asked. Then she saw Frank and me. “How'd you get in?”

I hadn't seen Mama since Christmas, since my trip to Vietnam, but she's simply not the kind of gal who whoops and hollers. Her smile and the moistness in her dark eyes told me more than any words ever could. We hugged. “I can't believe you drove all the way up here,” Mama said.

“I wouldn't miss this for anything,” I replied.

For the next hour or so we lingered in that room, picking at the melons and deli foods spread across a banquet table underneath the sign that read
HAPPY RETIREMENT, SHELBY.

Person after person welcomed me to the prison and told me what a wonderful mother I had.

“She's one of the best,” one lady said. “Tough, but smart. She taught me a lot.”

“Are you the writer?” another woman asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I feel like I've known you for years,” she said. “Your mother is so proud of you. She brings your articles to work for all of us to read.”

“She does?” I asked, blinking back hot tears. It had never occurred to me that Mama talked about me or my work to her coworkers.

“Didn't you just go to Vietnam?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That must've been some trip,” she replied.

“The trip of a lifetime,” I answered.

Later that night Mama and I sat in the den of her home watching the videos I'd taken during my trip. I thought about how our relationship had been changed by the events surrounding this book.

When I began this search in 1996, I just wanted to find the men who served with Daddy. Somebody who could tell me what happened the day he died. Somebody who could tell me what kind of soldier and man he'd been. The sorts of stories Mama couldn't or simply hadn't shared with me over the years.

Granny was the only person I'd ever felt I could freely discuss my father with, and she was dead. Sometimes Linda and I talked about
Daddy, but not as much as we talked about raising kids. Frank and I had never really discussed our growing-up years, Mama, or how Daddy's death had devastated us.

Mama had mailed me all of Daddy's letters in December 2001. I had not asked for them. I knew about them, of course. As a teenager I had snuck into her bedroom and pulled down the box where she stored them. I would hold my breath as I opened the red-white-and-blue-striped envelopes. And I would invariably weep as I read the words my father wrote to the woman he loved. I would cry not only because I missed my father but because I missed the woman my mother was before his death. The mother I lost to America's most unpopular war.

When Mama mailed me those letters, she and I were not on the best of terms. She'd left my house in a huff in June following my twin daughters' graduation. The long days of summer had passed without either of us uttering a word to each other. There wasn't any one thing that had caused the rift between us. It was a pile of discarded rubbish, the sort that sits in a heap for years in the backyard while everyone ignores it.

Finally, I relented and called her shortly before the girls and I went to Hawaii. I had not been back to the island since 1966. Our last years with Daddy were spent enjoying the paradise that is Oahu. I looked forward to sharing my memories of Daddy with my daughters. I wanted them to visualize their grandpa as a young father, playing horseshoes in the mud, riding a moped through the pineapple fields, fishing the surf of Oahu's North Shore, marching around cannons at Schofield, and hiding Easter eggs under banana trees. I urged Mama to make the trip with us. She flatly refused.

Mama simply didn't understand why I was going back to Hawaii. Or why as a writer I wanted to poke around such a sorrowful story. She was certain it was just my way of making her look bad. All that condemnation I'd directed toward her as a teen had taken root and embedded itself into her psyche.

I tried to explain that that wasn't it, that I felt that this story was something God was directing me to write, for whatever reason. I told her that my feelings toward her as a teenager had long since been resolved. I understood things as a woman that I could not understand as a child. Like why a woman might confuse sex for love, the way I had with Wesley Skibbey, the way she had with countless men. I told her that I looked at her and our past with different eyes now—eyes more level with her own.

But she didn't believe me. Mama had never gotten over the feeling that she didn't measure up. In her quiet moments she saw herself as the timid young girl who used to deliver laundry to the back door of the big houses of Rogersville's wealthy families. Or as the sassy young widow who wore red hot pants and embraced “Harper Valley PTA” as her theme song.

Things had softened greatly between us. That change was the result not of any one pivotal moment but rather of the little, day-by-day communiqués. I had to know things only she could answer. We talked by phone several times a week and e-mailed more often. Mama was still reluctant to talk about Daddy and his death, her hurt, and the longings she'd suffered, but she knew that I wasn't going to give up and go away. I could be just as mule-headed as Mama, and I was determined to get this story down.

Even so, she wasn't making it easy for me. When Mama mailed me Daddy's letters, she sent them along with a warning. In a handwritten letter, she told me she expected two things from me in return—that I make copies of Daddy's letters for Frank and Linda, and that I not use them to shame her because “your father loved me very much, Karen. And he would be very disappointed if you used his letters to hurt your family.”

While I was grateful for the letters, Mama's warning didn't faze me. Nobody could make me any more aware of the responsibility I had as a daughter and a writer to get our family's story straight. For
me, writing is like being a mother, hoping to bring life to a child. I hold in my hands this miracle of beauty, awe, and wonder. Along with it is a burdensome responsibility.

It's a terrifying role, one I approach completely aware that it's going to take a power beyond me—a power I don't control and can't manufacture by sheer will. All life is a precious gift, even the life of words.

In retrospect, my search to reclaim my father did parallel that of Meg in the fictional tale
A Wrinkle in Time
.

“If you want to help your father you must learn patience,” Mrs. Whoo had warned Meg. “To stake one's life for the truth. That is what we must do.”

This search demanded that I risk my career and my relationship with my siblings and my mother. During that summer of silence, when Mama and I weren't speaking to each other, I asked Linda why she thought Mama was so upset with me.

“She doesn't understand why you keep bringing up all this stuff, why you feel like you need to write about it,” Linda said. Linda isn't keen on revisiting the trailer park days herself.

“Sometimes I'm not sure why I need to do this myself,” I replied. “But I'm not trying to hurt you or Mama or anyone else. I just know in my bones this is something I'm supposed to do.”

This journey has taught me that my greatest flaws, and yes, Mama's too, could be a source of unfailing strength. “What were her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness. Yes, it was Meg's faults that she turned to to save herself.”