Deros Vietnam (20 page)

“Nah, dude said I could take it later,” Arthur replied, looking to Lanny for corroboration. Lanny was bumming a smoke from the guy standing behind them.

“The black recruiter told me it don't matter what you score on the test, you're in.” The big guy smiled. “California, here I come!”

The Hawk stung their cheeks. Arthur tried burying himself deeper into his jacket. Glancing at the fancy shops and deluxe buildings, he couldn't believe he only lived a mile west of here. What did these people know of his life? His troubles? Ain't no work for a guy like him in there.

The line started, then stopped. Small, slow steps. Around the corner floated the sound of sweet harmonies. Arthur strained to make out the words from a familiar Chicago song, but the Hawk blew the song away before he could remember the words.

The Girls They Left Behind

Lieutenant Brian Miller left behind Karla Bennett, his grade school, middle school and high school sweetheart. The cutest girl at Most Blessed Sacrament, Karla played Mary to Brian's Joseph in the first grade nativity play, at which point they decreed that divine intervention had brought them together and nothing, not even a war, would tear them apart.

Sergeant Arthur Poole left behind his fiancée Martha Brown, “the finest piece of ass in Kansas City,” as his good buddy Willie Brown once described her. Arthur knocked out Willie's two front teeth for his saying that, and Willie never talked any trash about Martha again.

Corporal Joe Hudak left behind Sally McBride, even though he didn't know it. Spirited, strong, independent girls like Sally always found him. Sally was out there, somewhere in the USA, and once he got “back to the World,” Joe would find her.

Petty Officer Hector Colon left behind his wife Pilar and her six brothers and sisters, two dozen aunts and uncles and 37 cousins. Hector would have to get Pilar out of El Campo, Texas, if he ever wanted to talk to her without some family member around, interrupting or commenting.

Private First Class Billy Donovan didn't leave anybody behind, so he pretended his sister Linda was the girl back home—a confirmed fox—according to the guys in basic training who'd seen her picture. “Man, if the game ends up in a tie and you have to kiss your sister, then life is good,” his bunkmate Tommy DeFelice told him on more than one occasion.

The girls they left behind wrote letters and sent care packages and longed to visit their men on R&R in Hawaii. They watched the nightly six o'clock news but covered their ears when the reporters started to talk about the number of U. S. casualties in Vietnam.

They worked at low-paying jobs and went to movies with their girlfriends and spent lots of time with their families. They gave dirty looks to the guys who came hanging around. They went to bed every night with a prayer for their man's safety on their lips.

They waited.

The men who came back home were not the same men the girls had given such tender goodbyes. Brian Miller left large parts of himself in Phu Bai where he'd stepped on a C-40 anti-personnel mine and lost both his legs. Arthur Poole complained about the treatment of black soldiers who were still second-class citizens after they got back to the States. Joe Hudak threw his medals at the White House and convinced himself he was a war criminal. Hector Colon was pissed off all the time because he couldn't land a decent job. Billy Donovan never really came back.

The girls they left behind had to pick up the pieces.

Karla Bennett became Mrs. Brian Miller and tried to get Brian to sing along to the songs on the radio just like he did before he left. She spent six days a week working at the local Safeway and when she wasn't at work, she was taking care of Brian. She wondered if she'd married Brian because she felt sorry for him.

Martha Poole tried helping Arthur find a job and made an honest effort to like the Vietnam vets he brought around all the time. She twisted the shiny bracelet on her left arm, a lucky charm her mother had given to her years ago, and with every twist, she told herself that Arthur would get back home from Vietnam.

Sally McBride eventually found Joe Hudak, but she lost him pretty soon after that. He seemed like the perfect guy at first, but when he got back from a D.C. protest, Joe stopped sleeping with her, or even touching her, for fear of contaminating Sally with his Vietnam transgressions. She was angry about Joe's avoidance and she was mad about the war and the government and the VA and everything else. She was debating when exactly to split.

Pilar Colon spent most of her time on the phone, talking to her family back in Texas. She and Hector had moved north to Kansas City and were having a hard time adjusting. Her mother and sisters gave her daily, long-distance advice and propped her up. Hector was unhappy about their big phone bills.

Linda Donovan gave up on connecting with her brother Billy, so she dated a lot of Vietnam vets and volunteered at the Kansas City Vets Center. Always a good listener, Linda had a knack for saying the right thing at the right time and making people feel comfortable, which was probably why she became a group leader at the Center.

The men who came home gave up on just about everything, including the girls they left behind. They quit their dead-end jobs and stopped going to the State Employment Service where by-the-rules VFW types scolded them with their eyes about their appearance and their attitudes.

They gave the VA the finger and coughed up the shit they inhaled from the Vietnam jungles.

They joined the VVAW but watched their backs during raucous meetings where guys conspired to kill Nixon and blow up the Pentagon.

They missed the “three hots and a cot” the Army had delivered them daily.

Or they missed the adrenaline rush and the opium highs.

They missed their buddies.

They cursed their lives.

The girls they left behind joined the same therapy group, but they didn't call it that. Their rap group met every Wednesday night for two hours. Inside a tiny room with dirty beige walls, castoff furniture, and one lone light bulb they bared their souls and cried and swore and hugged and hollered.

The rap group girls, as they called themselves, smoked cigarettes and drank Mountain Dew. They broke the ice with bean bag tosses and swapped stories about their men. They laughed when they wanted to cry and cried when they thought they would laugh.

Linda Donovan ended up needing the group more than the group needed her. Her brother Billy died in a high-speed car accident and his death left a hole in her heart. The other women gave her the time and the space to bandage that wound.

Martha Poole and Sally McBride almost came to blows, but they dropped their guards and forged a bond. They both liked Goetz beer and rummage sales. Karla Miller helped Pilar Colon shop at her Safeway on double-coupon days. Pilar made quesadillas for Karla and the rest of the group.

The girls they left behind begged the men who came home to talk to them about how they were feeling, to hold them tight in bed at night, to join them in their Wednesday rap group.

The men who came home didn't know what to say. They were still fighting the war.

The girls they left behind grew strong and at ease. They sang Aretha Franklin songs and harmonized on “Neither One of Us” by Gladys Knight and the Pips. They cooked and they cleaned and they worked and they believed.

They held their men's hands and they prayed to their god. The only people they told about their own pain were one another. And they only did that on Wednesday nights.

The girls they left behind were no longer girls. They were women. They were pillars of strength and rivers of wisdom. They were the North Star and the true compass.

And slowly, eventually, they brought their men back home. To stay.

Every Picture Tells a Story

His fascination had started out as a nuisance, a distraction. But as his time drew closer and the noose around his neck tightened, it had become more a matter of survival.

Today, it had grown into a full blown obsession. That's why he had waited all these weeks for the book to arrive, why he'd begged and pleaded with the librarian to order it in the first place. By now he was absolutely convinced that if he knew more about Vietnam and its history that he would find a way to survive.
Yes,
he told himself,
if I have a deeper understanding of what makes the Vietnamese tick, then maybe, just maybe, I won't come home in a box.

So, finally, here it was. She was signing the book out for him.
Viet Nam Su Luoc
by Tran Trong Kim, published earlier this year. She was smiling, obviously proud of herself for her persistence and resolve. She reminded him a little of his Aunt Mae, what she probably looked like when she was younger and her body had shape and she even cared about sex.

Yes, here it was. Now his entire body shuddered in reflexive response as he stared at the inside title page. There it is.
Nh
ữ
ng b
ộ
s
á»­
Vi
ệ
t nam - Di
ễ
n
Đ
àn H
ạ
t N
ắ
ng.
Jesus, what a fucking idiot! Why hadn't it occurred to him that the book would be written in Vietnamese? How completely stupid could he be?

His heart was in his throat and his head was pounding as if Jon Bonham was inside his head, banging away on “Good Times, Bad Times.” Jesus, but these were bad times.

He was done for.

He followed his nose to the clammy, dark recesses of the old library, sat alone among the dusty shelves and forgotten tomes, and gingerly opened the book as if it were a booby trap. Slowly, ever so slowly, turning the pages of Tran Trong Kim's manuscript, he stared at the pictures.

The recorded history of the Vietnamese people was unfolding in front of his eyes, but he could only experience it through illustrations, colorful drawings, and faded photographs. Maybe Vietnam's history was made up of images, not words? But words were what he needed. Words were what reassured him. Words were his life.

There was one particular drawing that grabbed him and wouldn't let go. The bright colors jumped off the page, especially the gaudy yellow background that reminded him of the French's mustard he used to put on his hot dogs at baseball games. But even more arresting than the bright yellow was the image of a tall, proud Vietnamese woman astride a large, white, menacing elephant.

He had never seen anything quite like this before. The young woman looked pissed and defiant, a crown upon her head and snakes that looked like swords in each hand. Her gown was yellowish-brown with what looked like a green flak jacket over her chest. The elephant, too, was dressed in this off-yellow and green material, his left foot lifted off the ground as if he were marching and his head and eyes titled directly at the viewer, one of his sharp, pointed tusks almost jumping off the page to stab you in the heart.

He sat there bewildered. He tried thumbing through the rest of the book, but kept coming back to that same page, that stunning image. Who was the young woman? Why was she riding an elephant? Who was she fighting? What did it all represent?

And why did they both look like they wanted to kick the living shit out of him?

* * *

Eventually, the janitor found him there, asleep with the book open on his lap. The tall black man closed the book, lifted it from the white boy's lap, and placed it on top of his cleaning cart. The janitor gazed quizzically at the cover, immediately recognizing the language as Vietnamese because the accent marks over the letters looked exactly like those in the pictures his son, an MP at MACV headquarters in Saigon, sent home during his tour.

You Baby Ruth

Every day my mother tells me to stay away from the round-eye Americans. When she talks about them, her voice grows taut, much like the
day-thep gai,
barbed wire, the soldiers surround us with.

“Nguoi My that xau,”
she says to me, “American very bad.”

I obey my mother but I am curious about the bad Americans.

Every night, after we bed down the water buffalo and prepare the
N
Æ°
ớ
c ch
ấ
m
and rice for the next morning, my grandmother tells me and my younger brothers and sisters about the Chinese, French, and Japanese who were here before the Americans. She speaks of great battles and heroes.

My favorite story is Trieu Au, a peasant girl like me, who launched a revolt against the Chinese nearly two thousand years ago, long before the Americans and the French. Trieu Au killed herself rather than surrender. My grandmother tells me her last words:

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

At night, I go to sleep dreaming about wearing golden armor alongside Trieu Au as we ride elephants into battle against mighty whales. I look strong and mighty, and my sword is swift and silent, lopping off the flippers of the whales that dare rise up in our path.

* * *

My father is away fighting and my brothers and sisters are too little to help with the harvest, so I rise before the sun to fetch the water from the well. I move quickly like a cat in my sandals made from the rope and rubber that the Americans leave behind in junk heaps. I start a fire in the cooking pit outside our hut and fill the pot with rice. Then I go inside and wake my family—my mother, grandmother, two brothers, and two sisters. I eat my rice, grab the food my mother has packed for me, and rush into the rice fields.

We can waste no time during the rice harvest. The American soldiers are always bombing, digging up, or spraying our fields. I strip down to my underwear and go to work, using the sickle my grandmother sharpened the night before. I like the feel of the mud between my toes and the swishing sound the sickle makes as I cut the heavy stalks of rice from their submerged roots. The stalks are tough. The sickle must be sharp.