What it is Like to Go to War (24 page)

We don’t understand this feminine courage anymore; in fact, we denigrate it.

Can you imagine Cúchulainn raging before the gates of a modern American Emain Macha? The king is inside the walls, quivering with fear, and he shouts for the queen. She’s a lawyer. “We’ll get a court injunction against him,” she cries. “He can’t run around the walls slandering and threatening us like that.”

The king, who’s afraid to talk back to his wife because she’ll accuse him of being insensitive or exploiting his position in the patriarchy, thinks to himself, “Good idea, Mugain. But isn’t Cúchulainn the guy we send for to back up the court orders?”

The baring of women’s breasts to the returning warrior could take many forms today. For me it was as simple as girls serving tea. Bared breasts symbolize nurturing milk, children, family, community, life. Finally, for all of us, the breast that we lie upon as newborn babies is as home as we ever get.

Too many veterans, from Vietnam but also from Afghanistan and Iraq, are still waiting to come home. Take Raymond, who’d
been a Marine in Vietnam and now sells commercial real estate. Raymond is big. You could hug only half of him at a time. Yet his bulk contains a stereotype-defying sensitivity.

I went to a party at Raymond’s over the holidays. Kids wrestling in the basement, running around the furniture upstairs throwing a football. A piñata. The adults lit candles for the new year in a quiet ceremony in the living room as the children drifted in and out, some participating, some not.

In the kitchen, the quiet eye of the storm, I talked with Raymond’s wife, Dee. She and my first wife shared the not uncommon and deeply disturbing experience of living with a man with post-traumatic stress disorder without knowing where all the craziness was coming from. These women are veterans of a different war. For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated, and in despair from the dark cloud of war that hangs over daily family life. For too many years the public hasn’t recognized or sympathized with families of veterans coping with PTSD and has left them in silence.

Dee and Raymond had just been to Washington, D.C., for the tenth anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I asked her how it went. She looked quickly at the kitchen door, checking her flanks. “Pretty well, until the parade.”

“They had a
parade
?”

“Well, you know, everyone getting with their state contingents. They marched right through the middle of town.”

I listened.

“Raymond kept expecting to see the people on the sidewalks. There’d been a lot of press about the anniversary. There’d been the big turnaround about veterans after the Gulf War. And there were lots of veterans there. It seemed like a big success.” She
turned the water tap on and turned it off again.
Shhhhht
. It was like the static burst from a lonely night listening post keying the handset. “But there wasn’t anybody there. Raymond kept thinking they must be up ahead. Maybe when we get to Constitution Avenue. They’re probably waiting there. It’s right in the center of town. But when they swung around the corner into Constitution Avenue—uh-uh, no crowds.”

I was thinking to myself,
They expected crowds?

“Some of the men started to drop out.”

The cynical voice whispered again,
They still expected a crowd?

“Finally, they heard cheering up ahead. Clapping. They quickened their pace. Guys got back into formation. Of course, they thought, everyone is at the memorial where the parade ended.”

“Were they?” I asked. Maybe there
was
a crowd, my whisper said. I felt my own dead hopes start to rise.

“No. It was the veterans at the front of the parade welcoming the ones at the back.”

“Ah.”
What did you expect?

“Guys started packing and going home just after that.”

Raymond came in the door just then to get something from the kitchen. Earlier in the evening he had told me several stories about the anniversary. He had crashed a party of the 101st Airborne, U.S. Marine written all over his jacket. A silence. Old rivalries. The clubs within clubs. He had grabbed a beer, raised it overhead, and shouted, “Airborne!” Laughter. Cheers.

Raymond had told stories like these. Solidarity stories.

“I just heard about the parade,” I said.

“Yeah.” He walked back into the living room, forgetting what he’d come in for.

“Was Raymond sad?” I asked.

“Yeah. Raymond was sad.”

“And you?” I asked.

“Me? All those years? Raymond crying every Christmas because he lost his entire squad on Christmas day? Him sitting at dinner with his eyes darting all over? The rages? Going to bars in black neighborhoods and shouting ‘Nigger’ just to start a fight and coming home beat to hell? And no one ever told us what in hell was happening? What to do? No one. No help. Me, sad? I’m goddamned furious!”

There is a correct way to welcome your warriors back. Returning veterans don’t need ticker-tape parades or yellow ribbons stretching clear across Texas. Cheering is inappropriate and immature. Combat veterans, more than anyone else, know how much pain and evil have been wrought. To cheer them for what they’ve just done would be like cheering the surgeon when he amputates a leg to save someone’s life. It’s childish, and it’s demeaning to those who have fallen on both sides. A quiet grateful handshake is what you give the surgeon, while you mourn the lost leg. There should be parades, but they should be solemn processionals, rifles upside down, symbol of the sword sheathed once again. They should be conducted with all the dignity of a military funeral, mourning for those lost on both sides, giving thanks for those returned. Afterward, at home or in small groups, let the champagne flow and celebrate life and even victory if you were so lucky—afterward.

Veterans just need to be received back into their community, reintegrated with those they love, and thanked by the people who sent them. I wanted to be hugged by every girl I ever knew. Our more sane ancestors had ceremonies like sweat rituals to physically bring the bodies back into civilian mode. Mongolian warriors
were taken into heated yurts and had every muscle that could be reached pressed and rolled with smooth staves, squeezing out toxins, signaling the psyche and the body that it was time to stop pumping adrenaline.

There is also a deeper side to coming home. The returning warrior needs to heal more than his mind and body. He needs to heal his soul.

It was two in the morning and dark. The dead had been summoned for several days before and were now gathering outside Old Mission Santa Inez. It was cold for southern California, and wet. Six months of drought had just been broken by the first Pacific storm and the surfers were reporting twenty-footers.

My friend Brother Mark, a Capuchin friar, had spent the evening before with a friend of his, a former nun, setting up candles and laying out the tools of ritual, and the large old mission was hushed in their glow. On the floor in front of the altar stood a large single paschal candle, the sign of the risen Christ, and deeper yet and beyond, into twenty thousand years of our common ancestry, it was the power of the phallus rising from the earth. I had spent the evening writing what I wanted, and never had the chance, to say to my dead friends killed in the Vietnam War.

Brother Mark was in full regalia. “If we’re going to do this thing, Karl, we’re going to do it full force, with two thousand years of tradition behind it.”

It was the Mass for the Dead.

I handed Brother Mark my diary, the battered book that I had kept with me every day I was in Vietnam. It was with me on every godforsaken hilltop in the mountains of the north. It was with me in every firefight. It was with me when Isle died and when
Utter died. And it was with me when I died. It was with me on the hospital ship
Repose
. It was with me when I was drunk on my butt at Vandegrift Combat Base. Along with it was a small green notebook, filled with medevac numbers, R&R dates for kids in the platoon, notes about the last Red Cross message to talk to the three kids who hadn’t written home in the past two months and whose mothers were wanting to know if they were okay, hastily scribbled defense plans, hole arrangements, machine-gun fields of fire, possible lines of approach by an attacking force. It had patrol checkpoints and daily brevity codes for radioing in positions. “Cigarettes will be at 7530. NFL stars at 8131.” I could radio in that we were located at “from Pall Mall, up 11 and right 5” or “from Hornung down three and right seven,” and the skipper could figure out where we were, so we could rain down fire and death on others than ourselves.

Brother Mark placed these books on the altar next to the wine, water, and bread.

“You ready?”

I nodded.

He handed me a silver spoon and I spread frankincense on the glowing charcoal in the censer. I carried it, tossing smoke, while Brother Mark spread holy water, and together we walked toward the huge oak doors at the far end of the aisle. Brother Mark unlocked the doors. I pushed them open into the night.

“Welcome, friends of Karl. Welcome, former enemies. We welcome you. Come in.”

I felt them filing in. They had been waiting, patiently, gathering outside beneath the dry grass hills dotted with dark green oaks. Gathering to wait there in the dark. They had waited for a quarter of a century.

And they filled the church. My dead friends. Kids who died before I even learned their names. North Vietnamese soldiers
I had killed, and the ones my friends had killed, shadows and wraiths connected with us all, connecting us to each other. I had invited an officer I just hated. It hadn’t been easy. Truly, there was a time when I wanted to kill him. A friend talked me back to normal insanity. But I knew there could be no forgiving of myself without the forgiving of him. And I also knew that he never thought too highly of me either.

Then my grandparents all filed in and sat down in the front pew.

We began the Mass. About halfway through I stopped Brother Mark.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“They’ve all gotten up and have crossed the aisles. They’re hugging one another, shaking hands.”

We waited about five minutes, until they got back into their seats again.

I read aloud to them what I’d written the night before. “Andersen, all the sergeants thought you were kind of a fuck-off. Maybe you did too. But on Helicopter Hill you did everything—gave your life, maybe to prove you weren’t. You’re not a fuck-off in my mind. Thank you.” I told Clifton, “You took me on my first patrol. You took out the machine gun and died. Thank you, Teacher.” All I’d learned from Clifton probably saved many others long after he died. I told Isle how sorry I was I’d rushed him that day to kill the retreating NVA. He piped back, “Hell, Lieutenant, I was a Marine. I wanted to kill them too.” Others laughed, even the NVA. I told the officer I was sorry for hating him so. I thanked him for coming. “I know you thought I was just a fucking hippie. Neither of us was a perfect officer. I forgive you. Please forgive me.” When I saw him seated below me in one of the pews, he was no longer an old man against whom I’d held bitter anger for all these years. He was a relatively
young man, killed when he was around thirty-eight or forty. I saw him as a young man assigned a battalion in combat and in over his head. I no longer felt angry. I felt sad. He and I just looked at each other and understood where we both had fallen short.

The door had been left open. I would occasionally look at it, open to the night, afraid some unsuspecting parishioner would arrive early for quiet contemplation before the morning Mass and find us there with the dead. But the night held us in secret.

As the Mass was ending, the light built up around the Santa Ynez Mountains, outlining their barren ridgelines against the gray. The open door changed from a black hole leaking light and warmth to a gray portal, where light came in.

“This Mass is ended,” Brother Mark said. “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

And they went, slowly, silently, with joy, with the feelings of a good class reunion, the feelings of a good wedding.

Brother Mark shut the doors and we put away the vessels and hung up his robes and we drove into town and had breakfast.

Two nights later a dark presence entered my bedroom, waking me from a sound sleep, a presence so malignant and evil it seemed to fill the room with dark oppressive liquid, squeezing the very air from my lungs. I felt the prickles running up and down my spine. My wife was sleeping in another room, unsuspecting; my kids were in their bedrooms. Whatever it was, it was angry, and it had to do with Brother Mark and me messing with the dead. I knew this was way beyond me, so I just started praying for help. I got the one-armed Viking who’d been with me in Vietnam. I got the Great Mother. I got the Archangel Michael. I grabbed the crucifix of the risen Christ that Brother Mark had given me at breakfast after the ceremony and I held tight and I whispered, “Jesus, if I’ve ever needed you, I need you now.” I sat
there, terrified, for over an hour while this presence beat against me and my helpers.

I’m not a person who is into pixie dust. I didn’t know what to make of this. It returned two days later, and the same scene ensued, with me terrified and my spiritual helpers holding off that evil. A Jungian would say I’d encountered the archetypal shadow, not just my own shit this time but the shit of the entire world, the entire race of humans and beyond humans from time beyond reckoning. I knew in my head that evil existed, but this was the first time in my experience it was palpable. This time, instead of merely seeing the results of evil, bad enough to give me nightmares for thirty-five years, I had hooked in direct. I went for days feeling the house was under siege. I talked to Brother Mark. He and I decided it was beyond us but he’d ask around for help. He called an older priest who was familiar with the Mass for the Dead. This man was now at the Vatican. He told Brother Mark that when you try to break the hold of evil on a soul, evil will fight back—hard. Brother Mark came over to the house and we sprinkled holy water all through it and even around it. What I had come to call the Presence came back anyway.