Top Down (18 page)

“No story yet, Bernie, I’m sorry to say,” I said, after his “Whattya got, Young Jack?”

“How can that be, for Crissake? You’ve spent six days and five hundred dollars—at least—for no story? What happened?”

“Don’t know yet how it’s going to turn out,” I said, and then without taking a breath I added, “I stayed in a friend’s private home—so there is no hotel room cost, by the way.”

“You’re not thinking about pulling a Jerry Compton on me, holding this for a book deal sometime down the road, are you?” said Bernie. Compton was the
Tribune
reporter who had taken his Alamo novel/movie money and run. “I know you want to write books when you grow up, too.”

“I’d never do anything like that to you, Bernie.” That was a lie—kind of. There was nothing I’d rather do than exactly what Jerry Compton did. Write a book, sell it to the movies, write—write, write, and write. And it had already occurred to me, of course, that there could, in fact, be a book someday in the Van and Marti Walters story.

Bernie didn’t immediately respond, which I knew usually meant that he either was preparing a blast or had already decided to move on. Hopefully he was ready to move on to my new assignment—whatever it may be. My fingers were crossed.

“Okay, okay, can’t win ’em all,” said Bernie, to my great, great relief. “As I told you, I’ve got something else lined up for you anyhow. I’ll tell you all about it when you get back this afternoon.”

“Tell me now, Bernie. What is it? The White House?”

“No, no, no White House, Young Jack. Vietnam.”

“Vietnam!” I had already imagined myself on television questioning Nixon at White House news conferences …

“Yeah, Vietnam. Yeah. Things are getting worse—if that’s possible. Nobody’s quite gotten over the Tet Offensive and the marine withdrawal from Khe Sanh. And of course, the election of Nixon. The campuses are getting wilder. More than half a million U.S. troops there now. The
Tribune
wants to put our own man on the ground. All we’re using now is what we get from the wires and The Times News Service. Our guy could do some overall stuff but mostly about Dallas-area troops. You’re a natural for the assignment, being a marine. Maybe go for a couple of months.”

I told him that sounded fine with me. But it really didn’t. And I wasn’t sure exactly why.

I got a taxi to take me to Gunny’s shop and then on to the airport.

Gunny Dickens, in accordance with the tradition of Semper Fi trust, did not unwrap or otherwise check the weapon to see if I had, in fact, cleaned the barrel and the chamber and the rifle’s many other parts. He barely looked at it as I handed it to him.

“How much for the seven rounds, Gunny?” I asked. “I used them all.”

“On the house, marine.”

“Hey, thanks,” I said.

“None of my business, but did you kill something or save something with that rifle, Lieutenant?”

“Saved.”

“Learn anything new about the Kennedy shooting?”

“Not a thing.”

“I didn’t think you would. Semper Fi. Nothing new to learn.”

“Semper Fi.”

We shook hands, and I returned to the taxi.

I told the driver that I had to make one more stop. The downtown federal building.

S
ERGEANT
L
AMBERT
’
S FRONT
desk at the recruiting office was unoccupied, but a voice from the rear called out to me:

“What can I do for you, young man?” The voice had a
taste of Bernie’s “Young Jack” to it but I put it aside when I saw a marine officer, a major, coming toward me. I could tell his rank from the gold leaves on his shirt collar.

“I was looking for Sergeant Lambert, sir,” I said.

“He’s not here. He’s out on a call—talking to some kids about to graduate from high school north of town,” said the major. He was a tall, thin, late-forties man with a blond crew cut and three rows of ribbons on his chest. One of them was a Silver Star.

“Could you give him a message, please, sir?”

“Certainly,” said the major, leaning down on Lambert’s desk to grab a pen and a piece of paper.

“My name is Jack Gilmore. I’m a former marine. One-Nine—platoon commander, got out in ’62. Sergeant Lambert did me a favor, and the message is—”

“Lambert told me about you,” the major interrupted. “He sure did. Said he put you in touch with Gunny Dickens.”

“That’s right, yes, sir. Please tell the sergeant that everything turned out well. And that I thank him for his help.”

“I will do that. With pleasure.”

My business with the marines was now finished. And I turned to go.

“You know, Lieutenant, Sergeant Lambert said he put the arm on you about maybe going back on active duty.”

I stood absolutely still. “He sure did, sir. Yes, sir, he sure did.”

“Hold on a minute while I get something for you out of my office.”

I held on for a minute right there where I was standing until the major returned. He had a piece of paper in his hand.

“If you’re so inclined, Lieutenant, all you have to do is sign this, turn it in at Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington, and you could be on your way to being a marine again,” the major said.

I took the paper in my hand, thanked him, and snapped my fingers as Sergeant Lambert had the other day.

Then I went outside to the airport taxi that would take me to the plane for Washington.

M
ARTI WROTE ME
a note that was dated exactly a year to the day after we parted at the Kinderhook bus stop. But her letter took more than ninety days to make its way from the Washington bureau of
The Dallas Tribune
, where she assumed I still worked, to Vietnam, where, as a captain, I was commander of Bravo Company, Third Battalion, Third Marines.

She said her father continued to make progress but still had a way to go before he was completely out of danger. Dr. Reynolds remained on the case in his own fashion—staying involved but as out of the way as possible.

And she wrote beautifully and warmly about what I had done in helping her but mostly for not printing a word in the
Tribune
, or anywhere else, about her dad. She thanked me for honoring both the spirit and the letter of our off-the-record agreement. “You are a most honorable and good man, Jack, and I regret very much having thought otherwise,” she wrote.

I answered with a brief note of thanks with an apology for
not having told her directly that I was definitely not going to go with her dad’s story. I told her I had gone back into the marines but offered no explanation. There was no mention of Vietnam but I assumed she probably figured that out.

There was no further response required or expected from her, and we each continued on with our very separate lives.

I thought often about Marti over the years but it was not until late 2008, forty years later, that she came back into my life.

It’s a difficult story to tell—but, as they say in federal budget deficit politics, if not now, when?

I served two tours in Vietnam, my second as a battalion commander, the high point of what turned out to be a twenty-two-year career as an active-duty marine infantry officer. I retired in 1990 as a brigadier general assigned mostly to writing special speeches and other high-level PR kinds of things for the commandant of the Marine Corps in Washington.

Jan, my wife, and I chose Charlottesville as our retirement home, a most glorious place to live. The magnificent green landscapes and cool breezes of southwest Virginia combined with the intellectual stimulation provided by the University of Virginia’s faculty, libraries, and events—debates, lectures, performances—was perfect for us.

From Charlottesville, only a two-hour drive from Washington, I developed a substantial second working life as a free-lance
writer and former-general television commentator. My TV appearances on military issues, mostly on cable, Sunday-morning network shows, and PBS, have especially helped augment my marine retirement pay. I was used by the media extensively during the Iraq war as a critic of George W. Bush’s sending Americans into harm’s way based on unproven intelligence. Later, my public support of allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military drew many invitations. Those kinds of positions were not expected from a retired marine one-star with much combat experience.

The Jerry Compton dream to write a novel pretty much disappeared when I left the news business. The closest I came was outlining a fictional story of a Kansas bank president who posed as a former marine combat officer in order to increase his business and local civic prestige. He not only learned the marine lingo and culture but also bought a small metal Silver Star lapel pin on eBay that he wore on his suit coats. It all ended badly for him, as it should have, but he was a good phony marine and it took a while for him to get found out. I thought of it as a novel of expectations but I never got around to sending the outline to an agent or a publisher.

While going through some of my old papers for a possible nonfiction Vietnam memoir, I came across my unused reporting notes from the bubble top adventure. I duly remembered what Bernie Shapiro, the
Tribune
bureau chief, had said about my holding the story for a book. I laughed at how long that meant I had been holding it now. Too long, too late? Maybe not.

And I wondered, for possibly the millionth time, about what had happened to Marti Van Walters.

A skilled user of the Internet (one of my grandsons calls me General Google), I easily located Marti Van (Walters) Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Her official bio on the Penn website said she had earned her master’s at Penn, gotten a PhD at the University of Chicago, and then returned to Penn as a member of the faculty. She had remained there ever since with her husband, a physics professor named Lou Jackson. The Penn bio said Marti had written extensively about modern American women writers, most particularly Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. The Jacksons had two daughters as did, interestingly enough, Jan and I.

My phone call to Marti—done cold with no email warning—got a surprised but most bubbly, joyous, great-to-hear-from-you response. She said something about having seen me on television and that she “more often than not, agreed with you.” We decided to meet for lunch in Philadelphia sometime “just to catch up,” but I pushed it further. I said—lied—that I had to come to Philadelphia in a few weeks to do some research about a piece I was writing on Tun Tavern, the place where, legend has it, the first U.S. Marines—mostly while drunk—were recruited in 1775. She agreed.

“I’d have known you anywhere,” she said to me three weeks later when we greeted each other at the upscale French brasserie on Rittenhouse Square she had suggested.

“Same with you,” I said, returning the favor. “I’d have recognized you from ten miles away.”

Actually, it wasn’t just a favor. She really did look remarkably the same as she had forty years before. Her hair was graying but still short, and her face, while showing a few wrinkles, still blossomed like a happy flower. Her sixty-year-old body, which I silently admired through a light green pantsuit, could have passed for a twenty-year-old’s.

The marine “exercise thing,” as my family called it, had kept me in pretty good shape, too, if I do say so myself. My hair, also short, was mostly white but it was still there, as were the flat stomach and good build. And I hadn’t lost even a fraction of an inch off my six-foot height.

I had, without much thought, put on a tweed sport coat with charcoal slacks and an open-collar sport shirt. I didn’t realize until I was on the train that my outfit was only a slight change from my old reporter’s Glory Suit.

“If I am sixty, and I am, then that makes you seventy,” Marti said with a laugh.

“And I am,” I said, picking up the joke.

“Remember how we talked about the ten-year age difference?” Marti asked.

I assured her that I definitely remembered.

“Was that the real reason you kept deflecting me when I threw myself at you and your bed?” she asked. “I’m sorry, but I just have to know.”

“Trust me, Marti, there is nothing I would have loved more
than taking you up on … well, you. But I kept thinking you were just a college kid and it would have been taking unfair advantage or something like that.” I left out the part about the ethical qualms of a journalist sleeping with a source—which, to me, she still was at the time.

“Have you done many what-ifs about me?” she asked.

I wasn’t ready for that one. While much had gone under many bridges in the last forty years, the question brought me up short. Perhaps not all of the water was gone?

“No, not really,” I dodged. “My mind was kept too busy with being a marine.”

Then, to swat her question away even further, I asked, “Notice anything new about me?”

She gave me a hard look and said, “Frankly, no. You look great—the same …”

I looked down at my wristwatch and said, “It’s over twenty minutes and I have yet to excuse myself for a smoking break.”

“You quit?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“When?”

“Seventeen years, seven months, and four days ago.”