The Vietnam Reader (73 page)

Or I can say, honestly, “Yes.”

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Homecoming

August 1966. Corporal Peron Shinneman, who lost a leg in Vietnam, is welcomed home by his wife, Shirley.

Prior to 1981, there were few serious and thoughtful attempts to dramatize the life of the returned veteran. More often, the vet was seen as psychologically and physically damaged, prone to violence and addiction, and all too eager to bring the ugliness of the war home to the United States. This early and unfair picture of the vet has remained with the American public to this day.

While the extent of the veteran’s injuries, both physical and mental, has been downplayed in later efforts, there is still a portrait of the vet as a brooding loner, rarely a family man, and never a success. Suicide, alcoholism, and homelessness dog the Vietnam vet, weighed down with the burden of guilt. Even in the following selections—some of the best writing about returned vets, all later than 1983—the reader will see the usual assortment of troubled-vet symptoms. Haunted by the past, the vet stays in his lonely room or drives around his hometown aimlessly, unable to find anyone who will listen to his troubles, sure anyway that no one will understand. A logical but possibly misguided explanation is that compelling fiction (and poetry) is rarely about happy, untroubled people.

In vet Larry Heinemann’s National Book Award-winning
Paco’s Story
(1986), Paco is tortured nightly by his unrequited desires toward his hallmate, the pretty and innocent Cathy, and by his related memories of his unit’s gang rape of a VC. The warrior’s return to the civilized world through the love of a woman is a standard trope in
homecoming narratives (say, Michael returning to the community of Clairton through Linda in
The Deer Hunter),
and here Heinemann nails down the reasons that this will never happen for Paco. It’s shocking, ugly, and sad, and Heinemann’s narrator—the dead platoon members—rubs the reader’s face in it.

Nonvet and literary writer Louise Erdrich gives us something of a similar story in “A Bridge,” from her first novel
Love Medicine
(1984). Henry Lamartine has returned from Nam and runs into Albertine Johnson on the seedy side of Fargo. Like Paco, the drunken Henry flashes back to an atrocity as he tries to bed Albertine in a flophouse. Though this piece flirts with melodrama, its vivid prose shines, and the novel as a whole received overwhelmingly strong reviews and made Erdrich a literary celebrity.

The poets in W. D. Ehrhart’s anthology
Carrying the Darkness
(1985) provide another view of the war living on inside its soldiers. John Balaban, a conscientious objector who spent several years in-country doing humanitarian work, uses bizarre horror-movie images in “After Our War” to bring the waste of the war home to the reader. Veteran Steve Hassett takes this a step further, comparing the Hessians hired to fight the Revolutionary War to the American soldier in Vietnam; “Now we bring our dead to supper,” he says in “Patriot’s Day,” and then, in an untitled piece, sends U.S. troops in to search and destroy a typical American home. In contrast, D. C. Berry paints the separation between soldier and citizen directly, noting that for the dying soldier even something as unchanging as the sun “goes down a different way.”

First Air Cavalry veteran Bruce Weigl’s selections here, taken from three separate collections, show an astonishing range of technique, from the surrealism of “Sailing to Bien Hoa” to the plainspoken “Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry” to the daring collage of “Monkey.” “Him, on the Bicycle” is reminiscent of Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” in its empathy but is far more celebratory, while “Anna Grasa” quietly brings the war home.

“Speaking of Courage” comes from Tim O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried
(1990) and shows veteran Norman Bowker trying to come to terms with his Vietnam experience while he drives around
his small town on the Fourth of July. The idea of the town in its complacency being culpable for what happened to Norman in Vietnam is reminiscent of the storybook country town of Boone’s relationship to the outcast Paco. As usual, O’Brien works with a seemingly simple realism while deftly fitting in metaphorical meanings. The accompanying “Notes” throws a different light on the story and its genesis, and gives us an intriguing view of how vets see other vets.

Paco’s Story
L
ARRY
H
EINEMANN
1986

6. Good Morning to You, Lieutenant.
We can stand at the crest of the town’s one good hill, James, and pause and get quiet and comfortable and still, and listen to the night sounds. At this late hour of the night the tranquil murmuring hum of the river, cascading over the rock-and-concrete spillway under the bridge, yonder, is almost the only sound to be heard. That constant rush of water is the hush that has lulled many a strapping newborn infant to sleep in its time; the last sobering sound heard suddenly, abruptly, in many a deathbed room, as clean and even and smooth as the curl in the neck of a glass cider jug.

But that is not the only sound to be heard late at night, James. We can sit on the thick slate curb, under the parkway walnuts, and hear the squeak of wicker chairs; the tumble of ice melting to slivers in glasses of Coke and tea and whiskey, the whisper of bedroom conversation that is all hisses, and the snapping and popping of buttons; women flapping and fluttering their summer dress fronts; the shrill squeal of children racing through swirling clouds of fireflies, a game better than tag; someone spitting on dry pavement; the snick-snick-snick of a loose pack of town dogs trotting across the schoolyard blacktop. Then comes the sound that all but stops the others, even the dogs—the step, tap-step, of that gimpy kid wounded in the war, that guy Paco, walking home from the Texas Lunch.

All those night sounds bristle, brushing back and forth under the
trees, and everyone who’s sitting back, listening, hears. And we hear, don’t we, James—the river pouring over the spillway, the ring of jar lids, the giggles, the clear click of the cast-brass tip of Paco’s cane.

And the girl with the rooms across the hall from the top of the stairs at the Geronimo Hotel listens, too. The girl, James—her name Cathy, remember—small-breasted and bony-armed, built like a smoothfaced, tallish boy. Nowadays, whenever Paco sees her, she’s wearing one of her father’s dress shirts with the cuffs rolled a time or two to the middle of her forearms, the shirttails loose around her thighs, with a starched collar as stiff as a military uniform tunic. Nearly every night now (these the deadest, hottest nights in the deadest, hottest weeks of August and September, James), the girl will sit on the broad, dusty sill of the alley window, with her small, clean feet drawn up under her, and lean her cheek against the filthy screen (her spying game done with; “No fun,” she’ll tell you facetiously, James, in a parody of pouting). She listens the way a meditative person will gaze into a bonfire. She perks her ears with deliberate intent, listening ever so keenly for the sharp click of Paco’s black hickory cane on the asphalt, and the sure and steady, slightly off-rhythm of his walk—step, tap-step. Her moist, sparkling eyes will dart this way and that round the room, and she’ll glance out the window, rubbing the cool, smooth, nut-brown skin of her knee (her whole body as brown as buttered toast, James), with the breezy heat of the tin-and-tar roof rising in her face, and she’ll count the courses of smoothed railroad brick in the alley below. She will stare absentmindedly at her own fingers as she strums a limp gold anklet with manicured fingernails. She will imagine Paco’s hands, bleached white and water wrinkled, his sour, sweat-soaked T-shirt clinging to the hard flat of his belly, that glazed-over, glossy look in his eyes—which in most folks is simply work weariness, you understand.

Every night now, when she hears the click of his cane on the asphalt change to the mellow, hollow thump of the hotel stoop, she will uncurl herself and crawl crablike across her bed. She will primp on the move and brush herself down, using her fingers for a whisk, smoothing that lime- or peach- or cocoa-colored dress shirt (opened a couple of buttons at the neck), and strike a pose leaning against the
warm wood of her door. Sometimes she will hold the door open just so far, with her head and shoulders poked into the hall as though she’s just out of the shower and still wet and doesn’t want to drip on the hallway rug, but the front of her shirt will be nearly all unbuttoned, and there will be enough light shining down her front to be teasing, enticing. And sometimes she will put just her head in the light, with her body to one side behind the door, and she’ll have a glittering gleam in her eye, as though she doesn’t have a stitch on. And you’ve got to know, James, that some nights she doesn’t, but those nights are for
her
benefit, not Paco’s, because being buck naked when she smiles that smirk down at him makes her feel so goosy and juicy, and some nights she can’t help but giggle. She will wait for Paco to come in the front and stop at the bottom of the stairway, standing stoop-shouldered, leaning so heavily on that goddamned cane some nights it will bow. She will wait for him to raise his eyes, looking up through the railing rungs, and see her in the dim amber light of the several head-high hallway sconces—the light shining on the smooth, browned skin of her legs and face, looking like dry, oval slivers of yellowed antique ivory, the air musty and rich like a bowl of sun-warmed, softening fruit, and the skylight over the deep, high stairwell nearly painted over with roofing tar.

She will stir slightly, waiting to see that look in his eye that is unmistakable in a man who has not been to bed with a woman for a long time. And Paco will nod, almost imperceptibly, and
then
will begin the race, the
new
game, the struggle to get to the top of the stairs before she slips back into her room and closes the door. It is the one solid rule of their game, James. If Paco can get so much as the tip of his cane in the door before she shuts it, he can come in (“You can fuck me, sugar!”).

Paco has struggled up those stairs many a warm night, ass-whipped tired, his legs tingling and throbbing, wobbly even, his feet soaked and sore—that goddamned lye-soap rash on his arms as red as rope burns. Washing dishes by hand ain’t no pleasure and it ain’t no joke, James.

And tonight, just like any other night, getting in Cathy’s doorway doesn’t happen. She’s not there, but he’s not interested either. Oh no. Tonight he comes up the street and into the hotel, hits the stairs, and
just keeps coming. Tonight Paco has been sitting on the damp, hard clay of the riverbank near the spillway, listening to the skinny-dippers horsing around in the sand-bottomed shallows downriver from the old railroad trestle, drinking quart after quart of decently warm beer fetched from Rita’s half the night—waiting for the air to cool—and there’s no telling what time it is.

He tops the stairs and limps along the hallway to the left with his skeleton key in one hand and his cane in the other (the roof rafters crackling overhead, cooling; the chain of the
HOTEL
sign twisting and squeaking—on rainy nights we can hear the neon sizzle and buzz). He works his door open, steps in, and closes it behind him with a slow and heavy click (as firm and final a sound as we are liable to hear in that hotel, James). The hall light vanishes from the room except for that flat, slender sliver under the door, which is no bigger than a piece of oak lath. Paco squeezes his head against the warm wood of the door (the smelly varnish almost gooey to the touch), squeezing his eyes shut with the pure relief of being home, taking a bit of a breather. He’s got a still, stuffy, smothering little room, with a crumbling 8×10 linoleum sheet, a ragged mahogany dresser with the veneer shredding to splinters, and a coffee-colored bedstead with a brown bedspread—all that woodwork smelling of solid old age. There is a scum of dust in all the corners, and fuzzy wallpaper you would swear was flocked if you brushed against it in the dark. He rattles around in his darkened room, peeling off his T-shirt, unbuckling his belt and unzipping his fly, scooting his pants down, skivvies and all. Then he flops on his creaking bed, the way drunks do. His head and arms loll this way and that, and his legs hang over the edge of the bed with the balls of his feet brushing the floor. He sets his hands wide on the raspy, graying sheets, stares
hard
at the curling chips of paint above his head, then takes a good long breath, and, with a sudden, sharp exhalation, lifts his legs onto the bed. And it’s godawful painful, James. Sometimes the pain shoote right up his legs and thighs into his back and arms (he can hear the pins and screws grinding against the bone some nights; oh, the grimacing squint wrinkles he will have). The very tips of his fingers tingle as though someone has pricked them.

He takes a long moment to settle in—to get his sore, throbbing legs
and the small of his back just so among the lumps. The air is hot and heavy all around him, and the sheets are as itchy and scratchy as snapping-dry flannel. (Everything has been warm and sticky and uncomfortable all day, every day and all the night through for weeks now, James. Bread won’t rise right. Beer foam looks pale and greasy and slippery. Your clothes bunch thickly at the crotch and cling to your back and down under your arms, for instance, and folks are awkward and bitchy and ill-tempered most of the time.)