The Vietnam Reader (80 page)

He could not describe what happened next, not ever, but he would’ve tried anyway. He would’ve spoken carefully so as to make it real for anyone who would listen.

There were bubbles where Kiowa’s head should’ve been.

The left hand was curled open; the fingernails were filthy; the wristwatch gave off a green phosphorescent shine as it slipped beneath the thick waters.

He would’ve talked about this, and how he grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. He pulled hard but Kiowa was gone, and then suddenly he felt himself going too. He could taste it. The shit was in his nose and eyes. There were flares and mortar rounds, and the stink was everywhere—it was inside him, in his lungs—and he could no longer tolerate it. Not here, he thought. Not like this. He released Kiowa’s boot and watched it slide away. Slowly, working his way up, he hoisted himself out of the deep mud, and then he lay still and tasted the shit in his mouth and closed his eyes and listened to the rain and explosions and bubbling sounds.

He was alone.

He had lost his weapon but it did not matter. All he wanted was a bath.

Nothing else. A hot soapy bath.

Circling the lake, Norman Bowker remembered how his friend Kiowa had disappeared under the waste and water.

“I didn’t flip out,” he would’ve said. “I was cool. If things had gone right, if it hadn’t been for that smell, I could’ve won the Silver Star.”

A good war story, he thought, but it was not a war for war stories, nor for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to know about the terrible stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds. But the town was not to blame, really. It was a nice little town, very prosperous, with neat houses and all the sanitary conveniences.

Norman Bowker lit a cigarette and cranked open his window. Seven thirty-five, he decided.

The lake had divided into two halves. One half still glistened, the other was caught in shadow. Along the causeway, the two little boys marched on. The man in the stalled motorboat yanked frantically on the cord to his engine, and the two mud hens sought supper at the bottom of the lake, tails bobbing. He passed Sunset Park once again, and more houses, and the junior college and the tennis courts, and the picnickers, who now sat waiting for the evening fireworks. The high school band was gone. The woman in pedal pushers patiently toyed with her line.

Although it was not yet dusk, the A&W was already awash, in neon lights.

He maneuvered his father’s Chevy into one of the parking slots, let the engine idle, and sat back. The place was doing a good holiday business. Mostly kids, it seemed, and a few farmers in for the day. He did not recognize any of the faces. A slim, hipless young carhop passed by, but when he hit the horn, she did not seem to notice. Her eyes slid sideways. She hooked a tray to the window of a Firebird, laughing lightly, leaning forward to chat with the three boys inside.

He felt invisible in the soft twilight. Straight ahead, over the takeout counter, swarms of mosquitoes electrocuted themselves against an aluminum Pest-Rid machine.

It was a calm, quiet summer evening.

He honked again, this time leaning on the horn. The young carhop turned slowly, as if puzzled, then said something to the boys in the Firebird and moved reluctantly toward him. Pinned to her shirt was a badge that said
EAT MAMA BURGERS.

When she reached his window, she stood straight up so that all he could see was the badge.

“Mama Burger,” he said. “Maybe some fries, too.”

The girl sighed, leaned down, and shook her head. Her eyes were as fluffy and airy-light as cotton candy.

“You blind?” she asked.

She put out her hand and tapped an intercom attached to a steel post.

“Punch the button and place your order. All I do is carry the dumb trays.”

She stared at him for a moment. Briefly, he thought, a question lingered in her fuzzy eyes, but then she turned and punched the button for him and returned to her friends in the Firebird.

The intercom squeaked and said, “Order.”

“Mama Burger and fries,” Norman Bowker said.

“Affirmative, copy clear. No rootie-tootie?”

“Rootie-tootie?”

“You know, man—root beer.”

“A small one.”

“Roger-dodger. Repeat: one Mama, one fries, one small beer. Fire for effect. Stand by.” The intercom squeaked and went dead. “Out,” said Norman Bowker.

When the girl brought his tray, he ate quickly, without looking up. The tired radio announcer in Des Moines gave the time, almost eight-thirty. Dark was pressing in tight now, and he wished there were somewhere to go. In the morning he’d check out some job possibilities. Shoot a few buckets down at the Y, maybe wash the Chevy.

He finished his root beer and pushed the intercom button.

“Order,” said the tinny voice.

“All done.”

“That’s
it
?”

“I guess so.”

“Hey, loosen up,” the voice said. “What you really need, friend?” Norman Bowker smiled.

“Well,” he said, “how’d you like to hear about—”

He stopped and shook his head.

“Hear
what,
man?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, hey,” the intercom said, “I’m sure as fuck not going anywhere. Screwed to a post, for God’s sake. Go ahead, try me.”

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Positive. All done.”

The intercom made a light sound of disappointment. “Your choice, I guess. Over an’ out.”

“Out,” said Norman Bowker

On his tenth turn around the lake he passed the hiking boys for the last time. The man in the stalled motorboat was gone; the mud hens were gone. Beyond the lake, over Sally Gustafson’s house, the sun had left a smudge of purple on the horizon. The band shell was deserted, and the woman in pedal pushers quietly reeled in her line, and Dr. Mason’s sprinkler went round and round.

On his eleventh revolution he switched off the air conditioning, opened up his window, and rested his elbow comfortably on the sill, driving with one hand.

There was nothing to say.

He could not talk about it and never would. The evening was smooth and warm.

If it had been possible, which it wasn’t, he would have explained how his friend Kiowa slipped away that night beneath the dark swampy field. He was folded in with the war; he was part of the waste.

Turning on his headlights, driving slowly, Norman Bowker remembered how he had taken hold of Kiowa’s boot and pulled hard, but how the smell was simply too much, and how he’d backed off and in that way had lost the Silver Star.

He wished he could’ve explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important. Max Arnold, who loved fine lines, would’ve appreciated it. And his father, who already knew, would’ve nodded.

“The truth,” Norman Bowker would’ve said, “is I let the guy go.”

“Maybe he was already gone.”

“He wasn’t.”

“But maybe.”

“No, I could feel it. He wasn’t. Some things you can feel.”

His father would have been quiet for a while, watching the headlights against the narrow tar road.

“Well, anyway,” the old man would’ve said, “there’s still the seven medals.”

“I suppose.”

“Seven honeys.”

“Right.”

On his twelfth revolution, the sky went crazy with color.

He pulled into Sunset Park and stopped in the shadow of a picnic shelter. After a time he got out, walked down to the beach, and waded into the lake without undressing. The water felt warm against his skin. He put his head under. He opened his lips, very slightly, for the taste, then he stood up and folded his arms and watched the fireworks. For a small town, he decided, it was a pretty good show.

NOTES

“Speaking of Courage” was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa.

In the spring of 1975, near the time of Saigon’s final collapse, I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war. He had worked briefly as an automotive parts salesman, a janitor, a car wash attendant, and a short order cook at the local A&W fast food franchise. None of these jobs, he said, had lasted more than ten weeks. He lived with his parents, who supported him, and who treated him with kindness and obvious love. At one point he had enrolled in the junior college in his hometown, but the course work, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war. He -dropped out after eight months. He spent his mornings in bed. In the afternoons he played pickup basketball at the Y, and then at night he drove around town in his father’s car, mostly alone, or with a six-pack of beer, cruising.

“The thing is,” he wrote, “there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam … Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him … Feels like I’m still in deep shit.”

The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn’t know what to feel. In the middle of the letter, for example, he reproached himself for complaining too much:

God, this is starting to sound like some jerkoff vet crying in his beer. Sorry about that. I’m no basket case—not even any bad dreams. And I don’t feel like anybody mistreats me or anything, except sometimes people act
too
nice, too polite, like they’re afraid they might ask the wrong question … But I shouldn’t bitch. One thing I hate—really hate—is all those whiner-vets. Guys sniveling about how they didn’t get any parades. Such absolute crap. I mean, who in his right mind wants a
parade?
Or getting his back clapped by a bunch of patriotic idiots who don’t know jack about what it feels like to kill people or get shot at or sleep in the rain or watch your body go down underneath the mud? Who
needs
it?

Anyhow, I’m basically A-Okay. Home free! So why not come down for a visit sometime and we’ll chase pussy and shoot the breeze and tell each other old war lies? A good long bull session, you know?

I felt it coming, and near the end of the letter it came. He explained that he had read my first book,
If I Die in a Combat Zone,
which he liked except for the “bleeding-heart political parts.” For half a page he talked about how much the book had meant to him, how it brought back all kinds of memories, the villes and paddies and rivers, and how he recognized most of the characters, including himself, even though almost all of the names were changed.

Then Bowker came straight out with it:

What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole. A guy who can’t get his act together and just drives around town all day and can’t think of any damn place to go and doesn’t know how to get there anyway. This guy wants to talk about it, but he
can’t
… If you want, you can use the stuff in this letter. (But not my real name, okay?) I’d write it myself except I can’t ever find any words, if you know what I mean, and I can’t figure out what exactly to say. Something about the field that night. The way Kiowa just disappeared into the crud. You were there—you can tell it.

Norman Bowker’s letter hit me hard. For years I’d felt a certain smugness about how easily I had made the shift from war to peace. A nice smooth glide—no flashbacks or midnight sweats. The war was over, after all. And the thing to do was go on. So I took pride in sliding gracefully from Vietnam to graduate school, from Chu Lai to Harvard, from one world to another. In ordinary conversation I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in detail, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I’d allowed myself to get dragged into a wrong war, all the mistakes I’d made, all the terrible things I had seen and done.

I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. Yet when I received Norman Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

In any case, Norman Bowker’s letter had an effect. It haunted me for more than a month, not the words so much as its desperation, and I resolved finally to take him up on his story suggestion. At the time I was at work on a new novel,
Going After Cacciato,
and one morning I sat down and began a chapter titled “Speaking of Courage.” The emotional core came directly from Bowker’s letter: the simple need to talk. To provide a dramatic frame, I collapsed events into a single time and place, a car circling a lake on a quiet afternoon in midsummer, using the lake as a nucleus around which the story would orbit. As
he’d requested, I did not use Norman Bowker’s name, instead substituting the name of my novel’s main character, Paul Berlin. For the scenery I borrowed heavily from my own hometown. Wholesale thievery, in fact. I lifted up Worthington, Minnesota—the lake, the road, the causeway, the woman in pedal pushers, the junior college, the handsome houses and docks and boats and public parks—and carried it all a few hundred miles south and transplanted it into the Iowa prairie.