Trinity Fields (42 page)

Kip wanted in again. War was home; or else, this place that war infected, this place was home. Not fragile disintegrating Vietnam, but Laos, and the Laos of the Hmong. This was where he felt he had some chance. And his record was quite unimpeachable: over three hundred missions, and one downing. Granted it was a bad one, lost the plane and gave the enemy a chance to set up a flak trap. But he'd got out alive, and so had his backseater and rescuers.

And as I look at Kip now, the shadows beginning to lengthen in the park below the santuario, I can see on his face a somber serenity that begins to bring him into intricate focus for me.

“What're you staring at?” he asks.

“What?” I respond from down in my daze.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” he says.

“I apologize,” I say.

“Don't,” says Kip. “Maybe you did.”

And so what happened; where did things go after that?

Laos was at the edge, like a prophetic precursor to what was going to happen over the border in the main theater, and Laos wasn't going well. The Plain of Jars had been occupied by the enemy for some time—to the dismay of the Hmong who considered this high valley their ancestral domain—and though it had been retaken by Vang Pao's forces toward the end of the year, by early 1970 the North Vietnamese took it back, pushing deeper and deeper into Laos, threatening to advance as far as the town of Muong Soui, and when it did overrun Muong Soui, Nixon could no longer keep our activities in Laos a secret affair performed by proxies and the idiot savants of Long Tieng. The first B-52 bombers ever to enter Laos on an offensive sortie pummeled the Plain of Jars and by the end of February the secrecy that three administrations including Kennedy's had managed to hold intact was finished. In March, when I read the Nixon admission in the newspapers, I knew, at last, where Kip was. I saw the same thing he had seen, saw Laos hidden inside Los Alamos. And I thought then, This won't go on forever. Either we will wind up burning Hanoi into glowing cinders with a single detonation, drop the bomb that would light up the world, or we will pull out. It wouldn't hold together much longer. And where would Kip come out, tiny piece that he was in that massive jigsaw? Le Due Tho and Henry Kissinger kept talking in Paris, and in the meantime the North Vietnamese army advanced on Long Tieng. And those of us opposed to all that was happening advanced on Chicago, on Berkeley, on Washington, and on university campuses—and our protests spread across the capitals of Europe as well. And when men like William Calder came home, they more and more discovered that the hostilities they'd experienced in war were only half of the traumas they were going to suffer. This is history now and known to all, but when it was occurring the disbelief that fueled their rising frustrations was thicker than Mekong fog. How could it be that they'd been pressed into fighting an unwinnable war only to come home to a vindictive reception? It was cold. Very cold. And Kip had, for a few weeks, felt that cold—as it emanated from me, and even Jessica, without our fully knowing it. He fled from it, me, her. But that was not all. This time he ran toward, not just away.

He was allowed one more six-month tour. After that, he was told, he would be on his own.

I possess few keepsakes from my childhood on the Hill; for all my ambivalence about growing up where I did, I treasure them with a reverent enthusiasm, and keep them in a marquetry box of honey and ebony woods that my maternal grandfather, an amateur carpenter, a man I never met, had crafted when my mother was a little girl. When times are rough, I can close the door to my room, look at the relics, and feel a kind of solace. It would be a frivolous practice if it weren't so effective.

One of my favorites is a photograph of my father and me with Enrico Fermi. I am in Fermi's arms, all of several months old, and on his face is a passionate, clear smile. My father wears a smile, too, standing next to us. He is looking at his boy with eyes that reflect both love and distance. The photograph was taken at Edith Warner's house down at Otowi, I have since confirmed, which stands on the banks of the Rio Grande at the foot of the Hill, where the old Chili Line used to come through on its narrow-gauge rails. My parents had just attended the corn dance at San Ildefonso pueblo, when Fermi met Maria Martinez—no relation to our sometime companion Fernando—the famous potter. It must have been a wonderful occasion. The image is saturated with vitality. For years I swore I could remember the sound of the Nobel physicist's voice, but no one believed me. —You were too young, Brice, my father stated. I have never given up on this fancy of mine, even though Fermi left the Hill before my second birthday and was, by the time Kip and I were ten, dead of a cancer probably brought on by his experiments in the thirties in Italy, when he bombarded with neutrons everything from arsenic to iodine to copper to water.

Another is a postcard from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. My mother and father, who were on vacation driving around Texas and the southern part of New Mexico, sent it to Jessica and me on our fifth wedding anniversary. On the back, in my mother's hand, is the message, “Dear ones, happiest of anniversaries from this dusty old place, from your dusty old folks who want you to remember that Love is the Truth and Joy is the Consequence, many such consequences and truths to you both, Mother and Dad.” My father wrote out, “And don't forget to have fun every so often”—as if he knew whereof he spoke—beneath her philosophical admonishments.

In the box is a dried rattlesnake tail that gives off a percussive hiss when shaken in the air, and never fails to conjure the fear I felt when I killed its bearer with a camping shovel back when I was a kid. There is a fossil ammonite I found near Nambé Falls in a shale bed, remnant of the days when that whole wilderness was a seabed submerged under a branch of the Gulf of Mexico. There is a petroglyph made in school using a hammer and nail on small flat riverstone. The image is the best I could manage of the plumed serpent. Dry things fluid with memories.

Kip's letters are here, too, as are some baby pictures of Ariel, and my father's wedding ring, which Mother asked me to keep for her after he died. —Shouldn't he be buried with it on? I asked her, when she pressed it into my palm at the funeral home.

—He's not married to any mortal person now, Brice, and I hope one day you'll come to understand that.

—Whatever you say, Mom, I answered, knowing that I could never bring myself to wear it. I have his wristwatch, too. It keeps perfect time, though I seldom wind it and have never worn it either.

The things are talismanic in their way. Whenever loneliness sets in, or nostalgia, or even insecurity of some kind or another, I will look at these several objects, and often I can find something that will work a little sorcery on me and make me feel the deeper rhythms or balances of my life. A metaphor for it would be a sailor in moorage who, feeling adrift, must weigh anchor every so often to make sure the cable is still firmly attached to the ring, and that shank and flukes haven't corroded away.

For the weeks that followed this exodus from the apartment, I lived a hermit's existence. My marquetry box held fewer talismans then, but I opened it over and over again, as if there were some answer to be found therein—which, of course, there was not.

I remembered another of my mother's aphorisms, Never try to make crumbs into a cake, and put the box away.

Graduation exercises had come and gone. I hadn't attended. I took the New York State bar exam in a bloodless daze. I knew the material backwards and believed I would pass, but hardly cared if it turned out otherwise. I could always try for a clerkship, I figured, and keep up with my activities against the war in some legal frame even if it meant only watching from the sidelines.

I read. And what I read darkened my already-deep depression. Masuji Ibuse's
Black Rain
was published that year, and every page of its account of the life of the young woman Yasuko, who survived the bombing of Hiroshima only to be slowly poisoned by the black radioactive rains that fell on the city afterward, every page moved me. I read, “In Sorazaya-ch? at the northern end of Aioi Bridge, I saw two women seated on the ground amidst piles of broken tiles, weeping silently. They were both about twenty, and looked like sisters.” It brought to mind me and Kip, and the strangeness of Kip's name once more being woven into these histories bothered and awed me,
pika
being the term survivors closest to the hypocenter used to describe the heat flash that converted their children into boiling char;
a kip
, then, asserting my estranged friend's innocence, was just the opposite—a benign dark, rather than a destructive light.

When what I read didn't make me sadder than I already was, it tended to make me more angry about what our blessed country was mixing itself up with only a quarter century later. The wars kept getting merged in my head. Napalm, orange rain. Atomic bomb, black rain. We kept showering the East with insidious rain. Ibuse's novel mingled with my law books and legal outlines. And I was as porous as I might ever be. It soaked into me like ink into dry white cloth.

I read other materials. I read the Constitution. I don't know why, except that maybe it was the search of one adrift for grounding—the same way some people turn to the Bible for solace, I turned to legal briefs and legislation, statutes. The Treaty of London caught my interest, and soon I was back in the Second World War again, but rather than meandering, a peculiar weave began to evidence itself to me. Was I forcing my father's war to connect to my own? I'm not sure. Even now I don't know whether coincidence is the result of simple luck, or whether it is brought about by someone unknowingly forcing two elements to come together as if by means of a kind of spiritual gravity. I drank water from the tap, I ate scrambled eggs and fried cottage cheese and the occasional raw carrot. What is there to do in solitude but read, dream, doubt, drink water, and eat the occasional carrot?

During the trials in Nuremberg, after the conclusion of the Second War, the United States prosecutor Justice Jackson set forth a simple tenet regarding equity in the making of rules of conduct between states. He said, “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” In other words, what's sauce for the goose, and so forth. Given the circumstances, his impulse to invoke decency and fairness was admirable. Victors are not always so principled. I copied the sentence out onto a sheet of good paper and it went up on my door beside the newspaper photograph of the burning monk.

It was prophetic, in its way. The Treaty of London would be ratified in August 1945, making all “wars of aggression” illegal. I doubt our fathers, when hammering out the details of the treaty and solemnly affixing their names to it, could ever have foreseen how it would come back to haunt them. But it did, and in no time at all. Only a generation later the words
war of aggression
became a buzz phrase of the sixties antiwar movement. In our commendable labors to make sure that the War might never be repeated, we established doctrine that we ourselves could not—could never—hold to, so that the very articles of treaty we held in such high regard in the wake of the collapse of Germany and Japan cast a longer shadow than we'd expected, and sank our clay feet in deep, dark shade by the time Kip and I came of age. Who is angel enough not to be fond now and then of a righteous bitter irony? Mine may have been black laughter, but laughter is laughter.

Soon after I'd entered my first year of law school, I had read through some of the testimony and decisions made in Nuremberg, not just because
that
war tugged at me—our final nuclear acts were, to my mind, crimes against humanity sufficiently heinous as to have merited prosecution no less severe than that to which the Germans were subjected—but because I had begun following cases of citizens who for legal reasons refused to participate in Vietnam, and I came upon
Mitchell
v.
the United States
. It was a wonderful case. Mitchell would lose as a defendant, then again as an appellant in the second circuit court, and finally see his case thrown out in March 1967 by the Supreme Court, which avoided dealing with the material problems raised in the defense by finding Mitchell's claim injusticiable. I thought, Hey, wait a minute—the Supreme Court can't just walk away from this without so much as offering an opinion. But they did. Only Justice William O. Douglas dissented, and in his dissent raised, to my mind, the touchiest legal issues surrounding all such cases. In a way, his dissent was Mitchell's triumph because it opened up the eyes of some of us who came along a few years later to challenge the war in the same courts a little more efficiently. Though most of our suits fared no better, the executive branch and Congress surely began to feel the heat from all this litigious activity. And Justice Douglas, pressed by that final appeal, did connect for me some of the immoralities of my father's war to my own.

It seems David Mitchell was called up for duty but refused to report for induction. He would have nothing to do with the selective service system because it was his contention that the war in Vietnam was being conducted in violation of various treaties to which the United States is signatory—primarily the Treaty of London, in which an individual is not exempted from responsibility for participating in a war of aggression just because he was ordered to do so. Just as the claim made by German officers in Nuremberg that they were following orders was insupportable, so the American soldier is responsible for his decisions in battle because, no matter what, a person is always accountable for immoral, unethical, criminal acts, war or no war, orders or no orders. If a war is waged in a manner considered unlawful by the community of nations, the individual caught in its mesh cannot later say, I was just following orders. A soldier is still possessed of reason and is obligated to use it. Such was the argument.