There's a Man With a Gun Over There (16 page)

“The United States Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, is under attack, bringing the war perilously close to the American high command. Our correspondent Robert Schakne is on the scene.”

Jenny's mouth is open slightly, her arms are crossed on her chest.

I wish I could walk into this memory and talk to us back then. Warn us.

“You're in danger,” I would say, a ghost from the future.

“Walter, this may be one of the worst days in this Viet-namese conflict,” Robert Schakne says.

It's comfortable, sitting there, in that tiny apartment at 531-A East Maple Street in Fayetteville.

The books on the wall announcing my brilliance. A man who will soon know about crime and punishment.

I try to close my eyes and hold that moment there, but it flits away, just as it did beneath the soft plastic screen of my John Gnagy Learn-To-Draw set.

I didn't know anything about the war in Vietnam. I didn't, for instance, know the names of the battles I just looked up in the history book. In 1968 I'd never heard of Allelbora and Leatherneck Square and Masher and Double Eagle and White Wing and Dak To and Hill 881 South and Cedar Falls.

So much about the 1960s I didn't know back then. I didn't know that Huey Newton started a jail sentence in January of 1968, that the American Indian Movement was founded in July of 1968, and the Yippie! party in 1967.

I sat at my desk and smoked Winstons (“Taste good, like a cigarette should”) and memorized the difference between Italian and Shakespearean sonnets.

“Walter, this may be one of the worst days in this Vietnamese conflict.”

Here is the black steamer trunk with its brass rivets. I remember that night. I remember the piece of meat halfway to my mouth as I saw the United States military use a jeep to ram the gates of our own military compound, to retake the place from the Viet Cong. I remember being careful not to set my glass of milk down on the black surface of that trunk. I remember the way the CBS camera scanned the scene, catching images of dead Americans, of bullet holes, and of the fallen embassy seal. I remember sitting frozen there, as if something had changed. I remember looking over at my books, the neat rows of novels and books of poetry in the bookshelf I'd made out of boards and cinder-block brick.

This was different, somehow. Nineteen sixty-eight wasn't going to be like the other years, but I went on with my pork chop, my glass of milk. I went on studying the poetry of William Butler Yeats for my seminar with Professor Ben Kimpel.

The next week we saw Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, shoot a man through the head. Just like that. Poof. A little smoke. The man winces, as though he might have a toothache on his right side. Then he topples over. The moment of the shot is also in newspapers, and so the image reverberates from television to newspapers back to television again.

But the war was a long way away, wasn't it, even though every noon a little cluster of demonstrators stood at the intersection of North Garland and West Maple.

I stood on the other side of the street, watching them, as I sipped from a Coke I just bought at the student union.

“Those fools think the president wants their opinion?” someone in the crowd behind me said.

For Bill Ayers—who was a leader of the Weather Underground, a group that performed all kinds of violent pranks in the late 1960s, including setting off a bomb in a restroom of the Pentagon—“Nineteen sixty-eight began with staccato bursts and gunfire from all sides, the rat-tat-tat of everyday events tattooing the air. I was twenty-three. It was the year of wonder and miracle.”

Me, I turned twenty-three that year, too, but there wasn't the rat-tat-tat of much of anything for me, except on television. I was still grieving for the loss of my father, living inside the gauze of that grief, getting fatter from all the heavy meals Jenny prepared.

“Rickie, what are you going to do about the army?” my mother asked in one of her weekly phone calls.

For reasons I can't really explain, I wasn't worried. My fellow students didn't seem too concerned. When I talked to John Freeman and Larry Johnson, they generally said something like, “The army isn't going to want us.”

Here's John Laurence on
The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
: “Walter, death is everywhere in the ancient city of Hue—in the mass graves of South Vietnamese soldiers, in the open holes where the bodies of North Vietnamese sprawl, in the women who sit and grieve beside the bodies.”

I stayed up late, until one or two in the morning, learning the metrics of poetry, how to scan lines for iambs and trochees and the lovely hoofbeats of those anapests. “I spring to the stirrup, and Joris and he. Dirck galloped, I galloped. We galloped all three.”

Tea and cigarettes, a little daytime television, lots of literature—all punctuated by the rat-tat-tat of the war narrated by Walter Cronkite every evening at five thirty.

“Walter, death is everywhere in the ancient city of Hue.”

As the days drifted along, the story I missed was this one, from February 17: “Most draft deferments for graduate study and critical jobs were ended by the National Security Council. All graduating seniors at colleges, all first-year graduate students and all men who will receive master's degrees in June will be eligible for the draft.”

This was probably Walt Rostow's idea; he was the president's National Security Adviser then.

A few years ago, before he died, I called him in Texas. I wanted to know why he drafted me.

I called the institute where he worked in Austin. He answered his own phone.

“This is Rick Ryan, Mr. Rostow. I want to know why you wanted to draft me in 1968. Why was I so important to you?”

I could hear a scratchy sound. He had put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. I could hear a murmured question, probably to his secretary. I guessed he was wondering how my call got through.

But then he couldn't resist, I guess.

“Is this a joke? How can you expect me to remember a single draftee? We had a war to fight.”

“Did you really call him?” Carol asks me.

“Look. Those days are over,” Walt Rostow says. “You need to get over it. I certainly don't spend much time worrying about that period.”

Then the click of the phone hanging up, and the moan of the dial tone.

In April of 1968, my mother calls.

“Oh, Rickie,” my mother says, crying. “Your number's up.”

“What?”

“You have to go.”

“To Vietnam?” When I say the three syllables of that country's name, I feel as though a steel hand is squeezing my heart.

“Mom, tell me what happened.”

“It's all over for me.”

“Mom, come on. Tell me what happened.”

“You got this letter from the government, so I opened it. I shouldn't have, but I did.”

“What does it say?”

“Here. ‘Selective Service System Order to Report for Armed Forces Examination.' ”

“Shit. When do I go?”

“June 19th. In Milwaukee. It's a Wednesday.”

Time was slowing down for me. Slowing and slowing, like an episode from
Days of Our Lives
. “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” The film running at half or even quarter speed. I could hear my heart beating, as if it were now in my head, filling it with sound. I suddenly remembered the sound of those bullets going off in the basement.

You begin a triangulation from a known point.

“Send me the notice, OK?” I said.

“OK. Rickie?”

“Yes.”

“You won't get killed, will you? You're all I have.”

What is the known point?

26.

D
ecades later, when, for the first time, I'm watching the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination on the Internet, it occurs to me that I am seeing my era, frame by grainy frame, come apart, just as John Kennedy's head seems to explode when the bullet hits it: yes, that's it. That was the beginning of the end. That was the real “Fable of the Final Hour”—not 1959; not that poem I was reading to my roommates on that Friday in 1963—but here, on Elm Street in Dallas.

I sit there at my desk, in the terrible dark of two
A.M.
on a day in the twenty-first century, and feel lost and alone as Kennedy slumps over, and I'm frightened and I think I'm wandering around the back of the tapestry, where this piece of yarn connects to that one over there and I hold them and run my fingers along their coarse texture and wonder what the story on the other side is—the story I can't see, the story I probably don't want to know.

27.

“
W
hat's the matter?” It's Jenny, and she comes over to me. “Is something wrong with your mother?”

“No. They got me. I'm a goner.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have to report for my draft physical.”

“What's wrong, Ryan? Ain't life agreeing with you?” White-head asks me at one of the writing program parties that seem to be held every weekend.