Christmas Presents and Past

Like a skipping record, she again cried, “Oh, Will!” but this time she flung herself at him and he let go of the steering wheel to accept her into his arms.

He kissed her as if he’d never stop, as if he feared he’d never hold her again.

And as December drew on and a joyless Christmas neared, he kept kissing her that way. He didn’t want to talk about the future. Even his description of the physical for which he was required to report was so terse, she couldn’t imagine it.

“Mom said when I was younger, I had a heart murmur. This doctor couldn’t hear it. I’m 1-A.”

Desperate, she tried to continue an argument he wouldn’t hear. “You shouldn’t go to Vietnam for your dad. You should do what’s right for you!”

Will only shook his head.

They had to have been desperate for men, because Will received his induction notice before Christmas. He showed it to her. It had his name on top, and said, Willful failure to report at the place and hour of the day named on this Order subjects the violator to fine and imprisonment.

He was to report in three weeks.

Sometimes it felt as if Will was already gone. Perhaps a part of him was. When they had the chance, they made love fiercely, knowing how little time they had. Dinah, for one, could never forget that he might not make it home alive. But otherwise he seemed distant as he gave notice at his job and took finals to earn his high school degree.

Their worry drawing them together, she and his mother became friends in a way they’d never been. Once, when Dinah had arrived early and Will wasn’t yet home, Mrs. O’Keefe talked about her husband’s experiences in basic training.

“John told me once that boot camp was hell on earth. I keep imagining…” She gave a hiccup that Dinah could tell was a suppressed sob. “Will was always so sensitive. I can’t bear the thought…”

So easily, Dinah began to cry. “He doesn’t seem as worried about dying as he is about seeing things like the massacre at My Lai. Everyone says stuff like that happens all the time. What if he has to shoot a child, or a pregnant woman, or…or push someone out of a helicopter?”

She’d heard a story from a guy at a party who’d been drafted and was back. He talked about taking guys up to interrogate them, then when they were done, just pushing them out. She hadn’t been able to tell when he talked whether he was horrified by what he’d done, or whether things like that were so commonplace over there, he didn’t see anything wrong with it. Gooks, he’d said. And he’d laughed as he talked about this “gook” flailing in the doorway before being sucked out and plummeting toward a rice paddy far below. Saying “gook,” Dinah thought, meant that he hadn’t thought of that guy desperately trying to stay in the helicopter as a man, like him.

Or maybe he just couldn’t let himself think of him as a man.

What if Will came home safely but changed so much that he could talk like that about terrible things he’d done? Dinah couldn’t believe he would, but the possibility scared her as much as anything.

“Will you call me whenever you hear from him?” Mrs. O’Keefe begged. “I’ll do the same.”

“Of course,” she promised, and they hugged for the first time.

Will and she spent the day of Christmas Eve together. The weather was cold and damp, but they walked out on the breakwater anyway, holding hands. Sea spray dampening their hair and the surge of the waves as background music, he cupped her face in his hands.

“Promise me if you meet some guy, you won’t say no because you’re afraid of hurting me. You’re still in high school, Dinah. You ought to be able to have fun.”

“Have fun?” Her voice broke. “How can I have fun, knowing you might already have been wounded and I wouldn’t have heard yet?”

She couldn’t say, Knowing you might already be dead.

“I don’t want you to stay faithful out of guilt.”

She tried for a smile that must have been an awful sight. “It won’t be guilt. I love you, Will.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then said in a thick voice, “I love you, too.”

She unwrapped his present while they sat in the car in front of her house. Inside the paper was a shoe box, full of candles. Twelve of them, she counted. They were different sizes and shapes: a toadstool, a troll, a flower. Their scents mingled, creating a heady fragrance.

“One for every month I’ll be away,” he said. “When you burn the last one, I’ll be home.”

“Oh, Will!” Crying again, she flung herself into his arms.

“Promise you’ll write,” he said against the top of her hair. “Even if you meet someone else.”

She wrenched back. “I won’t meet someone else!”

“Even if you do,” he repeated, almost steadily.

Feeling her face crumple, she nodded. “I promise,” she whispered, tasting the tears.

Neither of them could say the words Merry Christmas.

Chapter 3

Two weeks after Christmas, Will’s Dad drove him to the Army base.

At first Will’s letters were hopeful. Basic training wasn’t so bad. Dinah wouldn’t believe the muscles he was developing, he bragged.

She and his mother exchanged news, phoning each other the minute a letter arrived. Dinah was now calling his mother by her first name, Barbara, instead of Mrs. O’Keefe.

With support waning for the war, Will wrote, he and the other recent draftees believed they might never end up abroad at all.

The 3rd Marine Division was sent home at the end of November, and the 3rd Brigade 82nd Airborne just a few weeks ago. Why would they withdraw experienced troops and then send a bunch of us who have to be taught how to tell the barrel of a rifle from the butt?

Dinah wanted to believe he was right, but she read in the paper about how the government was spying on everybody who participated in any kind of antiwar protest, and that didn’t seem to her the action of an administration committed to ending the war and healing the country. And even though troop levels were declining, CBS News reported there were still 475,200 U.S. military personnel left in Vietnam at the end of 1969. With one-year enlistments, hundreds of thousands of those must need replacements, and the draft had been held for a reason.

She didn’t say that aloud to his mother, though, or in her letters to Will. As it turned out, she didn’t need to. A hastily scribbled note arrived, telling her his battalion was shipping out.

Dinah kept writing almost every day. She was afraid that her day-to-day news must seem pedestrian to him, but Will assured her that wasn’t true. So she hid her worries and continued to write about classes, local gossip and her own struggle with her parents over her future.

We settled on a compromise, she wrote, pausing with her pen above the paper as she remembered the last in a long line of scenes. Beside her burned a tall, twisted candle, the first she’d lit to measure the months until Will would be home, filling her room with a sweet, fruity fragrance that reminded her of Grape Nehi.

The latest scene had taken place over the dinner table. It seemed as if half the time Dinah and her mother ended up silently scraping most of the food into the garbage. Nobody had much appetite when they were fighting. If she and her father weren’t clashing, then Stephen and he were. They fought over Stephen’s hair, his grades, his friends, his music. Dinah, at least, was still torn between the desire to please her parents and her outrage at the world her generation would inherit. Her brother was far more outspoken and unapologetic about his rebellion.

But Stephen hadn’t been home for dinner tonight. Lucky her, she had her father’s full attention. Face apoplectic, he’d slammed his fist onto the table, making dishes rattle. “You’re going to college and that’s final!”

Dinah’s heart was pounding so hard she could hardly breathe, but she kept looking at him with outward calm and said, “What if I don’t?”

Her mother hastily interceded. “Dinah, you have your whole lifetime ahead of you! We simply want to make sure you have the grounding you need to succeed. You’re too good a student to quit now….”

“If you don’t go, you’ve had the last penny of support from us,” her father roared.

“Are you going to tell me what I have to major in, too?” she yelled back. “What if I go for Women’s Studies?”

“You know that’s not…” her mother started to say.

He bellowed some more. Dinah jumped up and fled to her room, so upset she was ready to throw some clothes in a bag and take off. Susan’s and Christina’s parents were too conventional to let her stay with them, but she bet Monique’s mom wouldn’t care if she moved in until graduation. She could get a part-time job to supplement her summer’s earnings and help buy groceries.

She’d actually started grabbing clothes from a drawer when there was a soft knock on her door.

“Who is it?”

“May I come in?” her mother asked.

After a moment she sank down onto the bed, hugging an armful of shirts to her chest. “It’s your house.”

Opening the door, her mother said mildly, “I’ve always respected your right to privacy.”

Tears prickled in Dinah’s eyes. “I know you have.”

“May I sit down?”

She nodded.

They sat side by side for a long moment.

“Honey, I know you’re sure cooking is what you want to do with your life. Your dad…well, he just doesn’t see it as a profession. He thinks short-order cook.”

She rolled her eyes. “If he’d just educate himself…”

“Let me say my piece. You’re seventeen…. Yes, almost eighteen.” She waited while Dinah started to protest what she knew was coming—you’re too young to make smart decisions for yourself, blah, blah, blah— then subsided. Mom started just as she’d anticipated. “We all think we know what’s best when we’re your age, but most of us find out somewhere along the way that we were wrong.”

There was something just a little sad in her mother’s voice that made Dinah ask tentatively, “Did you?”

“If you mean, do I wish I hadn’t married your father, no.” She laughed a little. “Despite his occasional bullheadedness. But I hate my job, and I hate knowing I could do better than the men I work for. So yes. I was sure at eighteen that all I wanted to do was get married and have a family. Now I wish I’d gotten an education first. I wish I’d majored in business. I’m thinking about starting to take some classes.”

“Really?” Dinah asked in surprise. She was ashamed to realize that her mother’s grumbles about her job had just been background noise to her. She hadn’t really listened. “That’s great!” she said. “Is Daddy okay with it?”

“He’s the one who’s been encouraging me. It’s taken me a few years to see he’s right.”

Dinah blinked. “Daddy?” Her father was willing to surrender some of his creature comforts, maybe even some income if Mom cut back to part-time, so that she could find more personal satisfaction in what she did?

Seeing how stunned Dinah looked, her mother shook her head. “You don’t listen to him any more than he does to you. You’re both bullheaded.” She hesitated. “Whether you’re willing to see it or not, the truth is, he wants what’s best for you. He’s just convinced he knows better than you what that is.”

Dinah grimaced. “I noticed.”

“You and Will both talk as if college is like being on a chain gang. Everybody I know who went thinks those four years were the best years of their lives.”

“But I don’t want to be a teacher, or…or…”

“Most of what you learn in college isn’t vocational. Would it be so awful to develop analytical skills, or become a better writer? Maybe more informed about world events?”

“I’ve been in school for thirteen years.”

“College isn’t like high school. And there’s no reason, even if you go to a state school, you couldn’t live in the dorm. You’d be independent, without actually having to pay the bills or cook and clean.”

She’d thought her parents would expect her to commute to classes to save money. That it would be another four years just like high school.

Still…it would be four more years.

She said slowly, “What if we made a deal? What if I agree to go to college for two years, and then if I’m still sure I want to go to culinary school instead, you and Daddy would let me do that?”

There was a moment of silence.

Excited by her idea, she continued, “I’d be twenty then, not eighteen. You’d been married a whole year by the time you were twenty. So Daddy couldn’t argue that I wasn’t ready to decide what I wanted to do with my life.”

“No, he couldn’t, could he?” her mother murmured.

“Doesn’t that seem fair?” She held her breath, waiting for an answer.

“Yes.” Her mother nodded, at first a small bob of her head, then a more decisive dip. “Yes. I’ll talk to your father. But it sounds like a deal to me.”

Dinah wrote to Will about the situation.

Daddy agreed, so I’ve applied to both San Francisco State and the University of San Francisco. My parents winced at that, because tuition is so high at private colleges, but I’ve applied for a bunch of scholarships, too. At least I know getting into S.F. State won’t be a problem. I don’t want to have to go farther away, even to Davis or Chico. I want to be here once you come home.

It was a whole month before she heard back from him, and it didn’t sound as if he’d gotten that letter from her yet, because he referred only to things she’d said earlier.

Flying in, I thought Vietnam was beautiful. Lush and green, laced with brown rivers, these perfect squares of rice paddies and rubber plantations laid out like checkerboards. But, man, it’s hot here. By the time we carried our duffel bags across the tarmac to the truck, we were all dripping wet, it’s that humid. And it stinks. I mean, the whole country, as far as I can tell. I keep asking guys who’ve been here for a while, and they say it’s untreated sewage and rotting vegetation and who the hell knows what else, but this one guy who is on his third tour in-country says it’s death. Bodies rotting. Seems to me he’s enjoying trying to scare us, like an older camper telling ghost stories, but it made my hair stand on end, I gotta tell you.

Dinah called Will’s mother right away to tell her she’d gotten a letter, but when she read it out loud, she left out that last part. She skipped right from “who the hell knows what else” to his next paragraph, where he told about landing at Bien Hoa and riding in a convoy past shacks of corrugated tin and skinny children chasing the trucks and begging.

Man, people tell me not to wish for the rainy season, but the dust has us dirty all the time right now. You couldn’t recognize me. The dirt here is red, and when you sweat—all the time—it sticks to you. I already feel like my skin is stained with it.

His letters for the next couple of months were like that. He described water buffalo, enormous beasts with rings in their noses. Even small children seemed to handle their family buffalo with ease, as if they were pets.

Although I don’t think the buffaloes like Americans. Every time I see one, it eyes me and snorts.

She laughed at that, and at his claim that the rats over there were as big as terriers. She didn’t laugh when he wrote about voracious mosquitoes or leeches or centipedes, but she kept thinking, As long as a few bug bites are the worst thing he has to worry about.

But she couldn’t seem to forget that first letter he’d written from “in-country,” and two things he’d said.

When we got off the airplane, guys who were heading home were waiting to board. They looked so much older than us, even though they’d only been here a year. It was their eyes, I think. They looked as if they knew things I don’t want to know.

There was that, and then there was the smell.

It’s death.

After the things she saw on TV, she believed it.

After even a couple of months in ’Nam, Will felt himself changing. It wasn’t as bad here as it had been a year or two before, he knew that, but it was bad enough. Not for everyone—guys with any pull at all got themselves assigned to support and stayed put in Saigon or Cu Chi, where the living was good. There were officers’ clubs, enlisted clubs, swimming pools. Will had heard of one guy who was drafted, too, only somebody found out he had his lifeguard certification and now he was putting in his year as a lifeguard at a base swimming pool. Will spent his days guarding engineers sweeping the roads for mines, and his nights, after what sleep he could snatch, stumbling through the jungle and splashing through rice paddies on some kind of patrol looking for the enemy, scared the whole time. Where was the justice in that?

Being bitter wasn’t new. Having a good reason for it was. Lying on his cot trying to sleep but thinking about home instead, he was embarrassed about how much he’d resented his parents and for so little reason.

He was hardening. Not in ways he liked or was proud of, but he didn’t think he’d have survived if he’d stayed as naive as he’d been, or as affected by the sight of suffering and death. Man, even in Cu Chi, soldiers smoked weed right in front of God and their superiors, shot up heroin with little more discretion, refused orders and bought sex with local prostitutes for a couple of bucks. Yeah, Ma, life here is a little slice of America.

What bothered him most was that now he could look at dead bodies lying beside the road and feel nothing. He’d quit wondering what Vietnam had been like back before so many villages had been bombed or huge stretches of the landscape had been denuded by napalm. He’d discovered quickly that you didn’t want to get to be really good friends even with your fellow soldiers. There was an intense closeness, sure; when a helicopter dropped off six or seven of you somewhere in the darkness, man, you might as well all have been attached by umbilical cords. You breathed together, you listened together, you stuck together. Nobody was cocky at night. Charlie was better in the dark than American soldiers were. Nobody disputed that.

But the other guys got themselves killed sometimes, and Will found he couldn’t let himself care so much it paralyzed him.

Mines and booby traps were the big threats. If there were any big NVA concentrations out there, Will’s company never found them, though that was the stated goal of the nighttime forays. He was in a few firefights, where branches around his head exploded and he emptied the magazine of his M-16 into the woods where he saw answering flashes of fire from enemy weapons. But most of the deaths happened when someone stumbled over a trip wire or when the engineers missed a mine buried in the road that went off when the next truck rattled over it. The first time Will saw a guy get his legs blown off, he lost it. But it got so he was just so damn grateful he wasn’t the one to have put his foot wrong, he didn’t waste the energy mourning the guy who had. No, that didn’t make him proud.

One of the things that got to him was the fact that the U.S. was making no headway. Guys were dying, but for what? The U.S. never seemed to gain a foot of ground. The NVA melted away when American or South Vietnamese soldiers entered a village and reappeared as soon as they were gone. At first when he went out, he didn’t even know where he was going, but after a couple of months Will began to realize he was seeing the same stretches of river, the same rubber plantations, the same banana trees, over and over. They weren’t fighting a concrete war that was earning them anything to write home about. And nobody thought the South Vietnamese troops, to whom they were gradually handing over responsibility, were going to be able to hold back the North Vietnamese.

Then word came down: they were going into Cambodia. Everyone knew the Vietcong supply lines passed through Cambodia, and supposedly a sizeable chunk of the North Vietnamese Army lurked there. Will was scared but also exhilarated. Finally, they were going to do something meaningful.

On April 29th the combined U.S. and South Vietnamese force pushed across the border. The first camps Will’s platoon found were deserted. They felt like ghost towns. He had the uneasy feeling that eyes watched from the surrounding jungle.

They damn near stumbled over a camp hidden in thick bamboo and found pots still cooking over fires.

“Don’t touch anything!” the lieutenant reminded them sharply.

“Yeah, you think we’re stupid?” McAlister muttered. They’d been warned that everything would be booby-trapped.

Pretending not to hear, the lieutenant signaled them. “Let’s keep moving.”

The bamboo stirred as they started back into it. Will wouldn’t have wanted to be point. Even moving behind others in his platoon, he watched carefully where he put his feet.

The long whistle of incoming mortar gave them a split-second warning. Will threw himself flat onto the ground and scrabbled with his hands as if he could dig himself into the earth. He heard obscenities and prayers all around him and didn’t know if some of them were coming from him. Rounds shredded the bamboo above him. He heard grunts and screams but didn’t dare lift his head. Then the rat-a-tat of a machine gun firing, and Emilio Ramirez, the one guy he could see, jerked and flopped like Raggedy Andy, blood wetting his uniform and the ground.

That was too much. Will brought up his M-16 and opened fire on full automatic. Rock and roll, the soldiers called it, just emptying at the berms he could see ahead now that the bamboo was cleared.

“Back, back!” voices called out.

He crawled to Ramirez and pulled him along as he went, rounds exploding around them. Medics met him, but they were shaking their heads within seconds. He wasn’t surprised, but he couldn’t have left Ramirez there.

“You hurt?” they asked. “Where are you hit?”

He looked down in surprise and saw that he was soaked in blood. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

Helicopters roared overhead.

They looked him over and decided the blood was Ramirez’s. He ran to help load wounded into the medevac helicopter.

In the wake of the gunships, they took the NVA position, but by that time the enemy soldiers had fled, leaving only their dead and a few wounded behind.

The whole campaign ended ingloriously, with no major victory to claim.

Will wrote about it to Dinah, and in her next letter she told him that the nation had arisen in protest when Nixon announced the incursion into Cambodia:

He didn’t even have the guts to call it an invasion. College students across the country are rising to demand the end of this unjust war. I’ve been joining the protests. When I told my parents I wasn’t going to classes, they didn’t say a word. That tells you how deep the outrage goes, when even their generation no longer speaks up in the president’s defense. We’ll bring you home, Will. I promise we will.

In May, she told him about the Kent State shooting, students gunned down in cold blood by National Guard soldiers. He already knew about it, and had seen the photograph of the girl kneeling over a prone body screaming in shock and disbelief.

Dinah sent him a photo of herself about then, surrounded by other protesters at some demonstration. She had changed. Her face was thinner, more determined. She wore an embroidered band around her head, ragged bell-bottom jeans and a short jacket painted with a crude peace symbol. The guy next to her carried a sign that said Stop Killing Babies.

Is that what she thinks we’re doing? Will asked himself in shock. There were stories, sure, and once he’d helped burn the hootches in a village that had been harboring Vietcong, but nobody bayoneted babies. He hated remembering the terror on the faces of villagers they’d herded out before lighting the straw roofs, but they’d made a choice.

He’d been antiwar himself before he came. Now, he didn’t like knowing that part of the reason the troops were frozen in never-never land was that people back home weren’t giving them the support they needed to actually win. Whether the war was right or wrong no longer seemed to matter. Widely reported demonstrations gave the North Vietnamese hope. They could keep melting away. Every time bombing was halted, the outcome turned further their way. All they had to do was outlast American will. In the end, Vietnam would be theirs. Everyone here knew it. And that meant that tens of thousands of American soldiers had died for nothing. Whatever he’d thought or believed before he came, Will had a fire in his belly now when he read about the demonstrators who weren’t just demanding the end to the war, they were implying that he and every other guy who’d come hadn’t had the guts to refuse, or else they’d enlisted or accepted induction so they could rape women and kill babies.