Saving Graces (8 page)

My junior year I was a cheerleader. My sister, Nancy, had tried out for junior varsity and I had tried out for varsity cheerleading on the same day, and my mother sat home praying, both or neither, both or neither. It was both. And I was cheering at the Chofu v. Zama football game the day my father left for Vietnam. A year’s tour of duty. I said goodbye to him as halftime started and cried all the way through the second half. We lost the game—we didn’t win a game that season—and the Chofu fans thought I was the worst sport they had ever seen.

I had never been afraid before, never worried, even when there had been reason to worry about Dad. But this was different, this was war. Many of the wounded were coming to the military hospital near us, so it was a war we saw up close. Even though we got no music from the States, even though the magazines and movies came late, we did get news about Vietnam. In fact, we got it constantly over Armed Forces Radio and in the
Stars and Stripes
. We didn’t know anything about the Smothers Brothers, but we knew about Prime Minister Ky.

My mother was worried, too, and she did something then I had never seen her do—she pulled herself in. She piddled in the house, she wrote in her journals, she read constantly, but she didn’t answer the telephone. Her busy life engaged in her community, to which we had become accustomed over the years, was over. She was just waiting, waiting for Dad to come home. Everything was Vietnam. When the news of the war came on the radio, all conversation stopped. When Mother had the chance, she invited an injured soldier—we didn’t even know him—who had been sent to Japan to recuperate before returning to war, to spend Thanksgiving with us. And when Dad would get leave, even a day, the world would stop. If it was just a day, we would drive to Tokyo and meet him there. Oddly, I don’t think war changed my father as much as worrying about war changed my mother. When I campaigned in 2004, I would often say what I knew to be true about the families of soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan: they could not listen to the news, and they could not stop listening to the news. It was the paradox that made the waiting unbearable. And there was no escape, no relief. Not then, not now.

Dad lived in the Hotel Rex in Saigon, and while he was there, it was bombed nearly nightly. We would hear it had been bombed before we would hear whether there had been any casualties, and those hours before the all-clear were a lonely, miserable time. After eight were killed and more than one hundred were wounded in a December bombing, he moved out. We were relieved, for he was going to Tan Son Nhut air base, which was secure, or so we thought until April when it was bombed and 140 died.

When in 1966 I was the overseas winner of a Veterans of Foreign Wars speech contest, I think it is safe to say that I was the only contestant whose father was then engaged in a foreign war. Thirty years later, to the week, our son Wade was one of the winners in a similar national essay contest sponsored by Voice of America. In my case, and later in his, all the winners were to gather in Washington. Arrangements were made for me to fly from Haneda International Airport in Tokyo. There was terrible weather the day I was to depart. My mother and I stood in long lines after my flight was canceled, trying to get me on one of the few departing flights. Finally I was put on a flight to the States that was boarding right away. Mother watched from the observation windows as, in the dark rain, I walked up the steps and onto my flight. But just as I stepped into the cabin, behind the plane the sky lit up, as, on the incoming runway a Canadian Pacific flight from Hong Kong was cartwheeling in flames. There had been a plane crash four weeks earlier when a commercial flight fell into Tokyo Bay, and pilots and their families all believe, or at least fear, that crashes come in threes. And now this was crash number two. Mother found someone who found someone who got me off the plane, and, her hands shaking the whole way, Mother walked me past the waiting families of the Canadian Pacific flight as they stood in shock and grief. She drove me home, promising we would try again in the morning, when the weather would be better.

The weather was only marginally better the next day, and the airport was chaotic. Four days earlier, a fiery Argentinian named Horacio Accavallo had won the flyweight boxing title in Tokyo. In addition to two days’ worth of passengers trying to leave Haneda at once, Accavallo and his entourage were an impenetrable knot of yelling and exaggerated hand gestures, and as I tried to make my way into the lounge for outgoing passengers, I was stuck on the wrong side of this juggernaut. Two businessmen rescued this helpless-looking sixteen-year-old, took me around the edges of the dangerously vigorous crowd to the lounge where we all waited for our flights to be announced, bought me a soda, and asked about my trip. Their flight was announced first, we said goodbye, and mine followed shortly after. Mother watched again as I climbed onto my plane, and she went to her car for the hour drive back to Camp Zama. She had been in the car only minutes when, over Armed Forces Radio, they announced that a plane that had just taken off from Haneda had crashed into Mt. Fuji. The third crash. She was the daughter and wife of pilots—how could she have let me fly? She could hardly drive. She turned for Tokyo, to get to the American embassy or somewhere, anywhere, they could tell her what plane it was.

I spoke to her next nearly a full day later when I was in Washington. “It wasn’t your plane,” she said, telling me the obvious. “It took off at the same time yours did, but it was headed to Hong Kong.” Hong Kong? The businessmen, my rescuers, had been going to Hong Kong. I never knew their names; I had no one to tell how they had spent their last minutes helping me. No one to thank, no way to thank anyone, except maybe now, maybe here.

CHAPTER 5

CHAPEL HILL

W
HEN
I
WAS
in eighth grade, I sat one rainy day under the covered review platform on the Naval Academy parade grounds and talked to one of the younger Navy wives from our street. She was pretty, in white capris and a blue sleeveless shirt. I adored my mother, but she was, well, a mother, with shirtwaist dresses and a perfect French twist. This woman had wispy short hair, not done at all, and she sat on the cement platform and talked to me like I was a friend. And, as a friend, she said that when the time came, I should go to college where she had gone, Mary Washington College. I hadn’t heard of it, but if she liked it, I liked it, and I carried this flimsy notion with me throughout high school. During my senior year of high school—now back in the States, in Alexandria, Virginia—when it came time to apply to college, I applied to Mary Washington College, the women’s college of the University of Virginia, in Fredericksburg. And when I was accepted, I went. I went at the end of an era, the tail end of what I refer to as the Franny and Zooey years, after the novel by J. D. Salinger.

There was a time in the late 1960s when a world that had existed for decades ended. The world of men’s colleges, muscular and intense, and women’s colleges, serene and pastoral, and the weekend trips from one to the other. A time of hard-sided suitcases carried by well-dressed young women onto local trains, and then by sport-coated young men to the grand old houses of widows where bedrooms had been transformed into bunk rooms for visiting girls. I wasn’t Franny Glass, but like Franny, I took the train to the men’s college, in my case, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, for weekends. Like Franny, my date met me at the station and we walked to whatever approved guesthouse he had found for me for the weekend, where I would room with girls from Hollins and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon, and I would admire their elegant clothes and their shiny blonde hair and gold jewelry, and then later, like Franny, I would make fun of all that I had envied, drawing amusing caricatures of the other colleges to a date more intent on getting me drunk than being amused by me. It was the very last minutes of this era, and I was glad to be there, glad to have slipped in before the door shut forever.

The point of a women’s college, or so I had always thought, is that young women, uninhibited and unintimidated by young men, would blossom and find their rightful place in communities, and they would take that sense of confidence and sometimes entitlement with them into the world. You would have to ask someone who was inhibited or intimidated whether it worked. I was neither. I had been president of my class; I had been brash enough to get kicked off the cheerleading squad for talking back to a teacher. I am pretty certain I didn’t need to feel less inhibited, less intimidated. In the first weeks, still wearing my freshman beanie (yes, we really had to wear them), I was already flexing a robust independence. Asked in freshman English to write an essay that started “I began to become an individual when…,” I did not write the recipe-style essay (add a pinch of fun, bake for eighteen years) that won the best grade. Instead I wrote an essay about the abortion conflict and got one of the worst grades. And it was fine with me.

There is a camaraderie at a women’s college that is intellectual and social and political. This is not to suggest we were made out of one cloth. The student referendum on whether to allow us to wear pants to class, rather than dresses, failed, for Pete’s sake…in 1968. A fellow student turned me in one time when, after getting out of physical education late, I wore my shorts—under my buttoned raincoat—to class in violation of that dress rule. (She should know, if she reads this, that I could name her but choose not to.) We dated fraternity men who wore sports coats and Marines from Quantico who wore uniforms. We acted or danced or—in my case—wrote, or we did none of these. We were not all friends, but within that larger body, we worked out communities, often more than one, which met our needs and allowed us to find essential parts of the adults we would become.

As a freshman at Mary Washington, I had a junior roommate. While my parents tried to figure out how to pay for college, the freshman dorms filled up, and I found myself in a grand old dormitory rooming with Christine Cole from Warren, Ohio—her blonde hair shaved like a boy’s, her paintings of nudes propped along every wall of our room, her expensive clothes hanging, tags still attached, on every door frame. Other than my younger sister, she was my first roommate, and I wasn’t sure my parents were going to let me—dressed head to toe in a peach Villager outfit, except for my red beanie—stay in a room with this…grown-up. But they did. I stayed, and Christine tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce me to coffee and cigarettes and, successfully, to bridge and to her circle of literary friends—Christina Askounis, as beautiful as she was eloquent, Linda Burton, sexy and mysterious, Susan Forbes, daffy and adorable and brilliant, and Ann Chatterton, maternal and warm. They were sophisticated; I was naive but smart enough to sit silently on the sidelines, learning as I was listening, the sponge all mothers hope their children will be—although I suspect this was not what my mother hoped I would absorb. I hoped I could, by osmosis, acquire their ease with words, with professors, with men. With the girls my own age—with Nancy Bolish and Karen Adlam, Ernie Kent, Debbie Oja—it was easy, weekdays of work and weekends of fun, fraternity houses and trips home, boys like Kellam Hooper and Toby Summerour, and vegetable soup in Ann Carter Lee Hall.

I wanted to be grown and sophisticated. And I wanted to be young and carefree. I succeeded at neither. I was still a girl, used to boundaries and rules, struggling with a complex world, made more complex by war. I tried to push aside the Vietnam War, which had dominated my life—and not in a positive way. But I could not, and not simply because it was still in the news but because it was still in my house. My father was in charge of all the Navy ROTC units across the county, and when I would call or come home, he would complain about “those college students” who had fire-bombed an NROTC unit at one school or were staging a sit-in at another. I was two people then—the carefree college student, hanging on to what I thought was a normal American life, and a military daughter. My political opinions were forming, but I was quiet. Or quiet at home. I was in Washington, in Georgetown at the Tombs, a watering hole frequented by Georgetown University students, when the word went out in March 1968 that Lyndon Johnson was withdrawing from the race for the Democratic nomination for President. The place exploded into celebration.

In the State of the Union address in 1966 Johnson had beautifully expressed his angst about this war. “Yet, finally, war is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate…therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world.” But since 1966, he had become a symbol to young people of intransigent commitment, a commitment that was written in their young blood. So the strangers in the Tombs, and I suppose in places like it across the country, linked arms and sang protest songs and celebrated, years too early, the success of protest. The next month, April 1968, brought the blood of Martin Luther King, Jr., followed by the blood of Robert Kennedy in June. Johnson had been right, and not just about the war: there was still madness in this world. Men of purpose were dying. Men of greatness and men whose names we’d never know. I wanted to do something, but not the something I saw that summer on the streets of Chicago. I didn’t want to throw a rock or burn a flag, certainly. But what could we do that would make a difference when men who might have made a difference were being killed?

The war and the protests were still going on in the fall of 1969. My father was assigned to the NROTC unit at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I transferred there with him. There was no one there to watch me, no one who might put my protests on my father’s fitness reports, but I was still self-editing, still taking care not to do anything that might hurt my father. My attendance at campus protests was just that: the almost invisible protester. Even on December 1, 1969, as we sat in the student union watching as blue capsules were pulled, like bingo balls, and the dates on them read, in the first Selective Service lottery since 1942, I sat silently at one of the tables with friends. I don’t remember any noise at all until the first date, September 14, was posted on the board, and a fist slammed on a table behind me. With each ball, a new boy was placed in a symbolic draft line; the first dates called marked the first to be drafted. We were all there together, hoping together, but this fist was my reminder that we were mostly hoping individually, hoping for ourselves or our brothers or our boyfriends. I know because I still know my brother’s lottery number, 116. 116. He was safe; he could continue college. The crowd at the student union dwindled at the end, the lucky and the unlucky both now knowing their places, if not their fates. The sense of unrest renewed itself after Christmas, after exams, but life on a Southern campus—even one known for civil rights and free speech and workers’ rights protests in the past—was still primarily life on a Southern campus.

But on May 4, 1970, at a protest at Kent State University in Ohio, four students were killed by young National Guardsmen who had been ordered there by Governor Rhoades. Campuses across the country caught fire, and Southern campuses, which had so far been relatively tame, caught fire as well. There was an article in one of the early issues of
Ms.
magazine that I remember as being titled “Click!” written by Jane O’Reilly. She writes about the moment you realize you might be a feminist. The example I remember is that your husband agrees to pick up the laundry at the dry cleaner, but—
click!
—you are the one who has to remember that it needs to be picked up. I had a click moment, a moment when I pushed aside my impotence. When I heard about the killings at Kent State, I ran into the common room to tell other students in my dormitory what had happened. One boy just looked up from his hand of cards and said, “They probably deserved it.”

Click!
Who was this boy, who spent his afternoons playing cards, to say such a thing? He would do nothing to protest, and if I did nothing, I would—for all of history—be just like him. I might as well play cards or fiddle if this did not move me to action. Maybe I had stewed silently in the past, maybe because of my father or because of the faces of wounded soldiers I had seen in the hospital in Japan; maybe I was understandably conflicted about the tone of protests against our military instead of against our policies, whatever my reasons for inaction. But this was different. And in that moment I was different. I watched Allison Krause’s father on television, his face flat and sad and helpless.
Why did they shoot her? Why did they shoot my daughter?
You couldn’t hear that, I thought, and not be different.

That night we gathered, radicals and liberals and people who were simply leveled by what had happened in Ohio. There were a hundred, maybe more, filling the room. I stood against the wall and listened. The first to speak were voices of unrestrained anger—ugly rhetoric and talk of violence. The diatribes continued, each one besting the last. At times they didn’t even seem to be talking about Kent State at all. The Chicago Seven, Bobby Seale, everything was part of the rant. One fellow even pounded his fist against the wall and screamed,
What about Albania?
Albania? I edged toward the door. I wanted to do something, but maybe this was not where I needed to be. Then Forrest Read, an English professor, spoke. We were talking about Kent State, he said, and we needed to listen to the new voices in the room. The diatribes stopped or at least slowed. The nonviolent coalition prevailed, and I set to work. Going to meetings, putting up posters, handing out fliers, I was a worker bee doing whatever was needed. And in what seemed like minutes, the war protests that had been at the edge of campus life were now almost all there was of campus life. When the consensus was to boycott the remainder of classes in the semester—a protest, fortunately, approved later that month by the Faculty Council—I went on strike with everyone else. I did continue going to one class. The great professor Hugh Holman had agreed to teach one undergraduate class, definitely the first he had taught in years and probably the last he ever taught, and, because there was an imposing reading list, there were only about ten undergraduates in his American Novel survey. But it was worth it to hear him talk with such fluidity about the literature, the art, the social fabric of each novel. I kept going to his class—but I went with a tape recorder, and I taped his lectures, which he gave to the two of us who still came. Then I typed the transcript of the lectures onto mimeo sheets and printed them, smelly and purple, and handed them out to Todd Cohen and Fenner Urquhart and the others who were not in class. I didn’t know them well, but I knew what they were missing, what they were paying for this statement of principle, and I was trying to help. One day when I was packing up my tape recorder, Professor Holman asked me why we were striking. “It is useless, you know,” he told me. “They don’t hear you in Washington.” “We know that,” I said, “but we can’t do nothing.”