Machine Dreams (37 page)

love,
Billy

June 24

Dear Dad. Things here status quo. Thank Bess & Katie for writing, okay? Have had a lot of 18 hr days this last week, no chance to write, but today we came back to Lai Khe late afternoon after resupply runs near here, so decided to drop a line. When I get time I try to figure how to describe this place. Monsoons begin in
August but now it never rains, days are just blue and hot. The sunlight is so hot it’s heavy. I don’t know why I never asked you about the war you went to, I guess I thought I saw it in the movies. They’ll never show this one there, pictures don’t say how it is. If a whole operation moves across a field out in the bush, the sky can be full of twenty or thirty choppers in formation, and below them just the humped cattle and the villagers looking small in the grass. Even the old women carry long poles over their shoulders, baskets on rope at each end. The people all have the same coloring, and out in the country they dress the same—to me they all look similar, especially the girls and the children. Their faces look perfect in a way. We sweep across windrushing the grass, and they stay where they are. Our guys, the ones I’m up there with, are the best I’ve met, the best I’ve been with anytime. Maybe you know what I mean. I think about bringing a couple to lunch at Bess’s, then sitting on the porch swing (summer, of course) and watching a few cars go by on East Main. Big ambitions, right? Tell Bess to expect us and don’t worry too much.

love to everybody,
Billy

WESTERN UNION
TELEGRAM

MR. AND MRS. MITCHELL HAMPSON
68 PINE STREET
BELLINGTON, WEST VIRGINIA

INFORMATION RECEIVED STATES THAT YOUR SON, PRIVATE FIRST CLASS WILLIAM MITCHELL HAMPSON, HAS BEEN LISTED AS MISSING IN ACTION EFFECTIVE JUNE 1970 WHILE PARTICIPATING IN AN OPERATION AGAINST A HOSTILE FORCE. YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY ADVISED AS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IS RECEIVED.

Dear Miss Hampson. You may not know of me but I shared a hooch with your brother, Billy, and Luke at Lai Khe. Their chopper went down in a night operation west of Tay Ninh and I was in that operation. I was interviewed for the After Action Report, but those aren’t released most times and I’m writing because we had agreements, and Billy told me to write to you. He was real fond of you and used to read us some of your letters (the funny parts) out loud. All this is real bad for us here. Your family will want to know as much as possible about what happened. Night of June 30 we were resupplying an 18-man unit, just two choppers. We had no word of a hot zone but we came in very hot. Their chopper took a lot of hits, lifted off, started flaming from the engine at about a hundred feet. Both of us on the right of our machine, the copilot and me, saw the gunners jump more or less simultaneous. The chopper moved forward maybe fifteen feet as the pilot tried to touch down, then fell nose first and exploded. We had to pull off and call in artillery, and the area was not searched until dawn. There was nothing left of the unit, but they were all accounted for, and the pilots were with the chopper wreckage. If Luke and Billy had not got clear of the wreck, we would have found them. If they’d been killed in the ambush, we would have found them. Since they had no weapons or radios, it’s likely they hid and were captured as the VC pulled out. If they were not hurt and were trying to evade capture, they might have circled around as the fighting continued, and been captured somewhere between there and the nearest friendlies—which would have been Firebase X-Ray, about 20 clicks east. But there were a lot of VC in the area, doesn’t seem likely they would have gotten far. There is no way of knowing. I hope something more definite is learned, but I doubt it. I send you and your family my condolence. We have lost our own in
Billy and Luke, but I hold out some hope for them, at least for a while. Luke was The Vet and Billy was our new guy, they were tight. They would have hung together if possible, I tell you that.

Sincerely yours,         
Spec. 4 Robert Taylor

M
y father owned a concrete plant. He wore khaki shirts and work pants, the same kind of clothes he wore in wartime photographs when he was building airstrips in New Guinea and teaching the Papuan natives how to operate steam rollers. They could learn a good bit, he told me once. In grade school my brother Billy and I rode the Brush Fork school bus from our house in the country past bus shelters emblazoned with our father’s name, and the name of the plant:
MITCH CONCRETE.
The words were painted on the three-sided shelters in large red letters. The bus driver shopped at each shed to pick up children who had walked as far as a mile or two down dirt roads to the highway. The shelters were well built and didn’t leak. They had corrugated fiberglass roofs, concrete floors, and built-in wooden benches painted white. The bus shelters were not actually heated, but when they were under construction my father brought up the possibility of building sliding aluminum doors across the fronts to cut down the wind and rain, the blowing snow
in winter. The school board said no, that some of the kids waiting in the shelters would be junior high or even high school students, and it wasn’t wise to equip the shelters with privacy. Besides, if the sheds were built deeply enough, a portion of wind and rain would be eliminated. My father followed this advice, and there was no recorded case of sexual activity in the bus shelters.

The shelters are still standing, well kept and newly lettered with the same two words, because the subsequent owners of the concrete plant decided to keep the original name. My father sold the plant after my Great Uncle Clayton, his partner, died of a stroke in the plant office as one of the mixers was being repaired outside. The plant was gone, and years before Billy and I entered high school my father was working first as a salesman for a heavy-equipment company, then at a desk job for the State Road Commission. The desk job was short-lived. He became self-employed, an independent salesman of heavy equipment, aluminum buildings, office supplies, or cars. In the worst of it, shortly before he retired early and drew a disability pension from the Veterans’ Administration, he was selling a doubtful brand of life insurance from a makeshift office in the basement of the house we’d moved to in Bellington. He had a file cabinet and big desk down there, both pieces of the same metal office equipment he’d once sold. On the desk sat a lamp, a large manual typewriter, a row of spiral-bound construction catalogs between metal bookends, a porcelain coffee mug full of pens and sharpened pencils, and a nameplate with his name on it.

These objects from the room in the basement were the only ones my father took with him when my parents were divorced.

Also in the room was a single bed in which my mother slept the last few years of their marriage, boxes of old toys, a washer and drier, and a discarded couch and chair from an old living room set. On the wall was Billy’s black light poster of Jimi Hendrix; I don’t know why he put it up in the basement, but no one has ever moved it. The poster is lettered in pale green and rimmed in pink; both colors are meant to glow. Directly under the poster is the ironing board on which my mother once folded the family laundry. The laundry was piled first in a jumbled heap of clean white cotton on the same single bed where she slept then, hearing the water
pipes and tin furnace ducts make sounds over her at night. The pipes wind in and out of the basement walls, in and out of the ceiling, and at night they assume a dominance over the rest of the room.

The subterranean dominance of the pipes, their silent twists and turns in the dark, are reminiscent in spirit of the last few years my family lived in one house, and the year Billy went away. He was nineteen, the year was 1970, and he went away to Fort Knox for basic training. Fort Knox is where they keep the gold and train the kids. I hope they trained him damn well—it’s the least they could have done—but I don’t know. I’ve looked through Billy’s Fort Knox yearbook many times; Charles Hollis, Brigadier General, USA, Commanding, was right:
This yearbook will help you, your family, and friends to vividly recall the start of your military career.
The entrance to Fort Knox is pictured; there is a tank on a broad stone platform and a sign that says
WELCOME TO THE HOME OF ARMOR.
The famous gold is kept in the Gold Vault, a bunkertype building that looks like a two-layered concrete box cake with barred windows. I think about all those gold bars sitting inside a well-fortified silence, row after row of gold bars. Billy was golden, in the summer; he got that kind of tan. I wonder if someday I’ll be forty and think to myself,
Billy was a beautiful kid.
No, I refuse to ever think that.

Billy didn’t fail the first semester of his freshman year at the state University, but his grades weren’t good. He quit school on the day of his nineteenth birthday, before grades were ever sent home. Billy didn’t feel very involved in college, and he wouldn’t let them grade him. As he pointed out, grades would not have saved him from the lottery anyway. He didn’t resist the fall of the numbers the way I might have, but he evaluated things on a personal scale. I realize now that Billy was one of the more decisive souls in Bellington: he would not be moved. He made his own definitions. I finally begin to understand some of Billy’s definitions, but I’m a slow learner. It seems as though Billy, whom I always tried to instruct, is instructing me. And he isn’t even here, not right now.

The morning of December 3rd, 1969, the day after the lottery drawing for the draft, I went down to Aunt Bess’s to talk to my
father. Billy had already refused my suggestion that he resist the draft and go to Canada, but I was still plotting. Bess and Mitch had just finished breakfast. My cousin Katie, Bess’s daughter, had stayed the night but had already left for Winfield. Katie is in her mid-thirties, married and childless, delicate; I was sorry she’d gone. In her quiet way, Katie would have agreed with me. Bess stayed in the kitchen as I followed my father into his bedroom; she knew I wanted to talk to him alone.

“Dad,” I said, “aren’t you worried about Billy?” I stood on one side of the perfectly made double bed. My father stood on the other.

He looked down at the ribbed bedspread and touched the foot of the wooden frame with one hand. “Course I’m worried. We don’t have any damn business over there.”

“Dad, I borrowed some money from Student Loans. It’s money for Billy to go to Canada, and I have information about places for him to go, people to contact. There are organizations that will help. I want him to go soon, and I would drive up with him.”

My father looked across the room and made a sound with his mouth. A click of his teeth, a sighing of air through his pursed lips. Scowling, he shook his head. “That’s not right either. He’d never even be able to come back here.”

“He doesn’t have to live here. It’s possible to live somewhere else besides Bellington.”

“I’m not talking about Bellington, now you know that. He couldn’t live anywhere in this country.”

“Does that matter?”

“Well,
hell yes
it matters.”

I touched the surface of the bed. The spread was so smooth, the pillows so perfectly covered, I didn’t see how anyone could have slept there the night before. “Dad,” I said, “I think we should all talk to Billy about going to Canada. Someday he’d be able to come back, surely.” I waited, my father made no reply. “If we let them get hold of him, there won’t be anything we can do later to help him.”

Silently, my father nodded. Then he said, “I don’t know, Miss. We’ll have to hope they don’t send him there.”

“Don’t send him? Of course they’ll send him. Why do you think they want him?”

My voice had taken on a strident tone, and my father leaned a little toward me across the bed. “The government has troops all over the world, they don’t just send everyone to Vietnam. Besides, this is Billy’s decision. If he’s old enough to be drafted, he’s old enough to decide what he wants to do.”

“Daddy, he’s just a kid.”

Mitch put his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight to one foot. “So are you.” He looked at me straight on. “You know what you think. Don’t you think he knows what he thinks?”

I was frightened. Suddenly it all seemed real. “What do you think he should do?” I asked.

My father frowned and shook his head. When he frowned so gravely his blue eyes were nearly hidden in his creased eyelids. “I don’t know, Danner. Whatever he decides, I will stand with him.”

“Does Billy know that?”

“Yes, I think he knows.”

“What would you do if it were you?”

“Why, I guess I’d go in. I did before. Most of us did. Anyone who could.”

“But this isn’t even a declared war.”

“Neither was Korea. Lot of boys went to Korea. Lot of boys from around here.”

“But not Billy,” I said. “Billy is ours.” My voice was shaking, so I whispered, “They weren’t.”

We heard water running from the tap in the kitchen. Bess, the sleeves of her sweater pulled up, was washing the breakfast dishes. She washed dishes in a tin basin in the deep enamel sink, then put them in the drainer and poured scalding rinse water over them. The water would be heating now in the teapot.

“Godammit it to hell,” my father said quietly.

Before he went to Vietnam, Billy had a seventeen-day leave home. Once, late at night, we came back from the Tap Room and sat in his Camaro out in front of our mother’s house. We listened to the tape deck, shared a bottle of beer, and smoked a joint.

“This dope isn’t bad,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“Kato and I bought an ounce in Winfield.”

“Billy, you want to hear my latest idea on how you don’t go to Nam?” I took a drag on the joint.

He smiled amiably. “Sure.”

“You get busted, like I did, only worse. They hold you here for trial. You’re found guilty, of course, and they put you in some nice safe jail for first offenders for a couple of years. By the time you get out, Vietnam is over.”