Deros Vietnam (22 page)

I am awake the next morning when grandmother rises, waiting for her by the fire pit. I know that she will sharpen my sickle before she goes back to the base.

I watch her in silence. Her hands hold the sickle as if she is nursing a newborn. Carefully, she sharpens the blade on the stone until it shines brightly in the reflection of the firelight.

Grandmother comes over to where I am standing in the darkness. She hands me the sickle, whispering softly.

“Save our people from slavery.”

As I turn toward the rice fields, I am surprised to feel my grandmother's arms tightly around my neck. She kisses my cheeks, my eyes, my ears, and neck. Then she places her finger to my lips and speaks quietly.

“Try and save the professor, too. He has forgotten the language that his heart is speaking. You must help him.”

I hug my grandmother and walk into the darkness.

Later, when the noise first fills my ears, I think it is coming from the ground under the water in the rice fields. It sounds wet and hollow, then becomes louder and louder. I put my hands to my ears to try to mask the noise. Then I realize I am hearing the pounding of my blood. It is the sound of a broken heart, of a missing link. It is the sound of my grandmother's death.

* * *

We buried my grandmother this morning. My mother is still out at the gravesite, wailing to the night. I came back and put my brothers and sisters to bed and sat by the fire to look for answers. The oranges and luminous yellows tell of fires that destroyed my ancestors' homes. The smoke that drifts skyward from the fire is shaped like the elephant Trieu Au rode into battle against the Chinese. I fall sleep with that vision in my head as I hold my weeping mother in my arms.

* * *

I awake early, prepare my family's food, and walk toward the fields. But instead of going to work, I make my way to my grandmother's grave. I know that the professor will be there.

His back is toward me. I almost say something, then I stop and listen to the Vietnamese prayer he recites above her grave. His words are soft and soothing. His tears drip down his angular cheeks and make little pools of mud next to his combat boots.

I want the professor to turn around and look at me. I want him to see the elephant that I am riding.

I step toward the professor, the sickle above my head, and he begins to turn. I bring it across the back of his neck, my cut smooth and clean. There is a smile on his face as his head tumbles onto my grandmother's grave.

As I wipe the dark red blood off the sickle with my hand, I hear the waves crashing and the wind rising across the fields.

“I will rail against the wind and tide
,” I recite,
“kill the whales in the sea, sweep the whole country to save the people from slavery.”

Acknowledgments

With all due respect to Charles Dickens, Vietnam was the worst of the best of times and the best of the worst of times. The best of Vietnam resided in the men and women I served alongside (and those who preceded and followed me). Their friendship, resilience, courage, and good humor helped make the best of a horrendous situation. In the process, they helped me to cope with my 365 days “in country.” I wish I could thank them all individually now, and wish like hell I'd thanked them back then.

The worst was what it was—an unpopular, unwinnable (from my vantage point), unforgiving war that sucked the life out of us, our families, and our country. America hasn't been the same since Vietnam, and probably never will recover, unless we confront everything that it did to us, especially the us who surrendered the best of our youth to the war's perpetration.

Yet the best and the worst and everything in between can never be erased from our memories. My year in Vietnam irrevocably changed me and my life. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't reflect on that place, those people—us and them—that time and those experiences. And the only way I've ever been able to make any “sense” of it, if there is any sense to be made, is to write about it.

I kept a journal the entire 365 days I served in Vietnam, wrote some bad GI poetry when I got back, focused my post-Vietnam graduate studies in English on the war, and have kept on writing ever since. At first, the writing primarily served as therapy, but after a while, when I couldn't quite get my Vietnam novel going but the urge to write kept gnawing at me, I wrote a very short story about my Vietnam experience. It was tight and tiny, only about 500-600 words, and later became the basis for the story “Malaria” in this collection. I got up the courage to share it with a published author, a wonderful Wisconsin fellow named Norbert Blei, and he didn't hate it.

So I wrote another story. And another. And I started inventing characters and then the characters started taking the stories where they wanted them to go.

I was learning how to be a writer.

I rewrote those first three stories for close to 20 years until I realized there was more to say about the experience of support troops in Vietnam. I drew on the men I knew, the assignments I completed in the field, and the stories I heard both there and back here. I read and reread Hemingway's brilliant World War I collection
In Our Time
and used that as my North Star. I'm still trying—with the longer pieces as well as the interlinear mini-chapters—to reach Hemingway's height but know now that I'll always be reaching.

Finally, I benefitted from an extraordinary team of coaches, most of them Vietnam vets, through the Deadly Writers Patrol writing group. I don't know where DEROS would be without the guidance and support of Tom Deits, Tom Helgeson, Steve Piotrowski, Bruce Meredith, Wyl Schuth, Howard Sherpe, and Craig Werner. Thanks to the group's rigor – you had to prepare something to read every week—and constructive feedback, I was able to assemble the collection. With the help of Bill Christofferson, I found the talented folks at Warriors Publishing Group.

Yes, I'm one of the lucky ones—I went over and came back intact; I've had a good marriage, a great family, a fulfilling career, and supportive friends and communities. I thank them all.

But I'm especially mindful of those who never came back, not just the 58,195 on the Wall, but the hundreds of thousands who never got a hug or a hello or a thank you or an offer of help after they returned. Those are lives we should have saved, could have saved.

And to them I want to lead the nation in reciting the words: “We're sorry.”

Doug Bradley

Madison, WI

Summer 2012

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Copyright © 2012 by Doug Bradley (
doug-bradley.com
)

Cover art copyright © 2012 by Gerry Kissell (
gerrykissell.com
)

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