Christmas Presents and Past

And his girlfriend was one of them. She was using him as an excuse. She was doing it for him, not thinking that he might be more likely to come home in a body bag if she made it more dangerous for him here.

He didn’t know how he felt about the increasingly strident tone of her letters or the things she was telling him. Eight members of Congress had attended an antiwar rally in D.C. Will’s country had sent him here to serve, and now even members of Congress were saying his presence was wrong. He was confused enough that he kept writing about day-to-day stuff, like the red ants or the ice-cold Cokes they’d been able to buy from Vietnamese peddlers, but not about how angry he had begun to feel at her lack of support.

That month the monsoons arrived, adding new miseries to everyday existence. Storms hit with a ferocity Will had never seen before, drenching soldiers. To cross rice paddies they’d once walked through now required boats or a willingness to swim. Under fire one night, Will had to spend a night in a foxhole, and with the rain hammering down he was chest deep in water by morning. The mosquitoes thrived, and snakes wriggled by in thick streams of water. Will and the other soldiers improvised all kinds of folk remedies to make the leeches drop from their flesh. The one blessing brought by the incessant rains was some surcease in skirmishes.

The rains continued into September. He’d now become a short-timer. Nobody wanted to die, but the idea of dying when you only had months or weeks or days to go seemed worse. He started to think, Maybe I’ll survive, and that was dangerous, so he took to wearing his flak jacket again, discarded an eon ago because the damn thing was so heavy it was all but unwearable in this climate. When he walked by to the latrine or grabbed grub at dinner, guys took to calling after him, “Hey, San Francisco! Gotta wear flowers in your hair when you go home.” At first he laughed, but it began to bug him. Hippies wore flowers in their hair, not vets like him. He started wondering if when he eventually stepped off the airplane he’d feel like a stranger in a strange land, instead of embracing a sense of homecoming.

He had some hope when Dinah told him about the amendment that senators McGovern, Hatfield and others introduced that demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of the year. It might not help him—his enlistment would be up early in January anyway—but at least it would all be over. Everyone would come home, not just him.

But then Dinah wrote him that the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment was defeated in the Senate. The Paris peace talks might as well not be happening. Maybe it would never end.

He asked her whether her brother had registered for the draft and she wrote back:

Stephen’s refusing, and my dad doesn’t know how to feel. He doesn’t like the idea of defying our government, but he doesn’t want Stephen to serve in such a pointless, inhumane war, either.

Maybe he was getting sensitive, but Will didn’t know how he could not feel insulted by lines like that. Stephen wasn’t going, so why had he?

Eventually her brother did register, according to Dinah, but only after insisting that if he drew a low number he was running to Canada. Of course he didn’t have to; Stephen got number 245, she wrote triumphantly. Now he could brag, Will thought cynically, that he wouldn’t have gone, without actually having to make a sacrifice.

Will figured he was down to five weeks—man, was there any chance he’d get shipped out before Christmas? Get to finish out the last couple weeks of his enlistment at Fort Ord?—when he was ordered out on a sweep and search. Seven guys were airlifted to look for NVA activity in a wooded area past a village that had already been burned to the ground. Will, who recognized the valley, took point, something he hated. It was hard to stay aware of their surroundings and also keep his eyes fixed on the ground for booby traps or mines. Is that grass or wire? Why is a stick lying in the middle of the path? They all knew about stick mines, in which the piece of wood was attached to a mine with a trigger device. Step over it? On it? Nudge it aside? Take long strides? Short? Is it better to stay on a path that might have been mined, or beat through the vegetation and make so damn much racket Charlie would hear them a mile away and prepare an ambush?

One second he was walking, worrying, scanning the woods, scanning the dirt in front of him. The next, there was a clap like thunder, and the explosion picked him up, flung him forward and then slammed him to the ground. He felt pain everywhere, like fire ants running over him, biting, but the most excruciating was in his ears. Screams were far off, and he lay with his face in the dirt, too confused to grasp what was happening.

Somebody shook his arm. “O’Keefe? Goddamn it, O’Keefe? Hang in there, we’ve got a medevac coming.” Even the voice was muffled, like real crappy reception on the radio.

He rolled to the side and shoved himself to his knees. No idea how much time had passed. Five minutes? An hour? His brain was settling like a snow globe after you quit shaking it. A mine. It had to have been a mine. Shit. Had he triggered it? That last stick in the path? He’d stepped over it…. No, he realized, mind still working real slowly, if he’d triggered it, he probably wouldn’t be able to kneel.

Oh, God, God. Roaring like a wounded water buffalo, he swung around to see the men who’d been walking behind him. The blood. God, God, the blood. That had to be Van Gorder who no longer had legs, and who was that behind him? He couldn’t be sure, because the soldier no longer had a face and was clearly dead. Others were wounded; the cries were theirs.

Will groaned and flung himself to the side, puking up everything in his gut.

Shit, yeah, he’d stepped over the stick. But Van Gorder hadn’t. And Will was responsible. He’d led them to their deaths.

Things became a blur then: the eventual arrival of a helicopter, blades beating and leaves flying; getting loaded; medics hovering over him. Eventually an operating room in Cu Chi, where he shook with the cold and realized it was air-conditioned.

A surgeon with a mask over his face appeared in his line of sight. “I’m knocking you out, Will. You’re going to be fine, but we need to clean shrapnel out of these wounds and stitch you up.”

He threw up when he awakened, and again after they let him suck ice cubes.

“Lucky you were wearing your flak jacket,” he heard twice. Most of the damage was on his legs, although they’d pulled a sharp piece of metal out of the back of his neck.

Eventually an officer visited to tell him that he might have made it back to his unit under other circumstances, but since his enlistment was about up, he was going home.

“Do my parents know I was wounded?” he asked.

“They were notified.”

Going home took two more weeks. At last he flew into Travis Air Force Base. He’d recovered enough to make his way down the steps himself and to hobble across the tarmac. Wives and parents were crying and holding out their arms. He searched the crowd for faces he knew.

At last, there they were. His mom and dad, and with them was Dinah, older but definitely the girl he knew, not the hippie in the photograph. Her hand was pressed to her mouth, and tears ran down her cheeks.

They collided as much as reached for each other, all four of them. They were all trying to hold him, and shit, yeah, he was sobbing like a baby.

The drive home was surreal. It was evening, and fog hung low and thick. Through it he kept glimpsing Christmas lights. That made sense. He’d left right after Christmas, but somehow he hadn’t even thought of the holiday. Earlier, he’d planned to buy presents for his parents and Dinah before he flew home, but he’d expected to have time. He had only a few souvenirs, but they were all of a war Dinah despised. She wasn’t proud of his service, so his Purple Heart wouldn’t be deeply meaningful to her.

He and she rode in the backseat of his parents’ Buick. She reached over and took his hand. In a quiet voice, she said, “We’re so glad you’re home, Will. We’ve been so frightened.”

“Yeah. Boom—” he clapped his hands “—and, hey, you can go home, O’Keefe. Kind of a surprise ending to the party.”

He felt her surprise at his levity. His mother turned her head, too.

“They said…some other men were killed?” she asked hesitantly.

Bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it. “There was a mine. I was lucky.”

His mother turned to face the front so quickly, he knew it was to hide her distress, though he might have had trouble seeing it in the dark.

Beside him, Dinah said fiercely, “Well, things will be different now.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I brought something for you.” She held out her hand.

Puzzled, he took what she handed him. It was stiff, but cloth. A patch? Headlights coming the other way briefly illuminated it. It was a peace symbol—white—embroidered against a blue background.

She touched the front of his fatigue jacket. “I’ll sew it on there for you. Now you can speak out.”

He wanted to drop the patch, or thrust it back at her. Instead, he just sat there. His voice sounded a little strange. “My Christmas present?”

“Well…” She chuckled, a musical sound he’d dreamed about. “I have others for you. But…yes. A first present.”

Something he didn’t want. Didn’t understand. A symbol that repudiated everything for which the men around him had died.

“I’m so glad you’re home for Christmas,” she murmured.

Chapter 4

The Will O’Keefe who left for Vietnam was not the same Will who had come home that foggy night before Christmas.

It had been naive, Dinah realized, to think he would be. Anyway, she had expected change. Just…not so much.

Physically, he had gone from being a boy to being a man, growing another inch—his mother insisted on measuring him—and adding muscle. The planes of his face had become harder, as if a sculptor had decided it needed more definition. Ironically, his hair was longer now than when he had been inducted. Not long enough to be tied back, but shaggy enough to make him appear untamed. The smile, revealing his essential sweetness, came rarely.

Oh, and he’d started to smoke over there. He was rarely without a lit cigarette dangling from his lips or between his fingers. Dinah was trying to become accustomed to the taste, but failing. Once she suggested he think about quitting, now that he was home. He just looked at her, tamped out the one he’d had between his lips, deliberately pulled out his packet and lit another, his insolent gaze on her the entire time. It was an uncomfortable moment.

One of many. The laid-back guy she’d known was laid-back no more. Sometimes he was distant; she would realize, in the midst of telling him something, that he wasn’t listening. He’d be slumped on the sofa or her bed in the dorm, his gaze fixed on a wall, and he was a million miles away. No. Half a world away. In Southeast Asia.

He brooded, and his sense of humor had become more cutting. He had developed a volatile temper. Once, when they were in the city and a car backfired, he hit the sidewalk facedown while she stood and stared. Then, he jumped to his feet and ran after the car yelling obscenities, giving the driver the finger. When he came back to her, he was still simmering, as if that poor old guy behind the wheel had been deliberately trying to set Will off.

He was sexier, of course. Christina, with whom Dinah was rooming at S.F. State, said after the first time she saw Will in January, “Wow. I never got what you saw in him, but now I do. He has that Steve McQueen thing. You just know he could be dangerous.”

Dinah did sometimes find herself reacting physically with a barely contained wow. But mostly she missed the sweet guy who had been so attuned to her.

Then, of course, she immediately felt guilty. Was that why she’d fallen for Will? Because he was totally into her? Was their whole relationship about her? Well, if it had been, she resolved, that was going to change. He needed her now. She could tell from the way he made love to her, with intensity and desperation, and in the way he turned to her at night after one of his nightmares, clutching her as if she was all that stood between him and his monsters.

Of course the old Will was still there. Once in a while, he opened up and talked to her. Really talked. Never about the awful stuff she knew had happened to him, but as if he were tentatively propping open a door. She had incense burning in her dorm room once, and he told her how you could smell it in the villages over there, especially at night. He talked about the M-16 rifle and what a piece of crap it was, jamming incessantly and often at the worst possible times. He got off one time on the dust, just a red cloud that covered everything, got into weapons, made clothes that had been washed and hung out dirty before they dried. And the bugs. One guy was chopping bamboo, and red ants fell on him, dropping inside his shirt, stinging while he was running around screaming. Some of the stories were funny, some so alien to her experiences that it helped her understand why he was having trouble just walking back into his old life.

When she asked, he’d talk some about patrolling or guarding a bridge during monsoon rains with convoy after convoy rumbling over it, but he never talked about his injuries or about whether he’d killed anyone.

Once, she pushed a little too hard, and he looked at her and said, “You trying to find out if I bayoneted any babies?” and then turned and walked out. She didn’t see him that time for three days.

She’d been excited about introducing him to her new friends, but he seemed uncomfortable with them, invariably staying on the edge of the crowd.

Tonight he came by her dorm room unexpectedly. It was April, and a bunch of people were over to talk about the demonstration they were going to the next day in support of a huge one planned in Washington. They sat cross-legged on her floor and on the beds, while others squeezed around the door and spilled into the hall. When he walked in, there was this kind of silence. He had on his fatigue jacket, as he almost always did these days. She couldn’t quite figure out why he wanted to label himself a vet, but she could tell that’s what he was doing.

“Hey, man, you coming with us tomorrow?” Ronnie Epstein asked. “Having veterans against the war front and center, that’s far out. It speaks to people, you know?”

Will hadn’t let her sew the peace symbol to his jacket. The only patches were the ones that identified his unit.

He ignored Ronnie and looked at her. “Tomorrow?”

Dinah told him about the demonstration. “You’ve been saying you might come to one.”

His lip curled. “No, you’ve been saying I might.” Just like that, he walked out, as had become his habit when he didn’t want to talk about something, leaving an uncomfortable silence behind him.

This time, Dinah got mad. Seeing the look on her face, people got out of her way and she stormed after him. She caught up with him in the parking lot, where he was opening the door to the beat-up pickup truck he’d bought after returning, the one with a driver’s-side window that wouldn’t roll up.

“What was that about? Were you trying to embarrass me in front of my friends?”

“You shouldn’t put me on the spot in front of other people.”

“You’re against the war!”

“Yeah? So?”

“Then why won’t you speak out?” she demanded.

“What am I going to say?” He paraphrased a popular chant. “‘Hell, no, I won’t go?’ It’s too goddamn late. I went.”

“If you’re ashamed that you went, how you come you wear that everywhere?” She gestured at the fatigue jacket.

“Because I’m not ashamed. I’m damn well not going to sneak back into society like I should be.” His eyes burned into hers.

Her anger faded, leaving bewilderment. “So wear it,” she implored. “Use your service.”

“To undercut the guys who are still over there? Maybe I should have just slipped over to the Vietcong side and told them where to set up an ambush!”

Her mouth fell open. “We’re trying to bring the American soldiers home so they won’t be in danger!”

“Do you know every soldier there hates hippie demonstrators?” His voice raked her. “We’re over there dying, and the NVA is watching TV, seeing half a million Americans marching on the Capitol and knowing they can just keep killing us, because they’re gonna win. Yeah, and then you know what?” He thrust his face out so it was inches from hers. “Then we get home, and those same hippie demonstrators who are trying to save our lives spit on us and call us baby killers!”

Her heart almost stopped as she saw the fury and bitterness in his blue eyes.

“I didn’t know….” she whispered. “Has anybody done that to you?”

His expression closed. Just wham. Fort Knox locking up for the night. “No. I was speaking metaphorically.”

“Do you feel like people look down on you?” Dinah asked.

His laugh had a harsh edge. “Go talk to your friends. Their heroes are the guys who run for Canada. It’s sure as hell not guys like me who were too damn stupid to get a deferment.”

Struggling with shock, she protested automatically, “You’re not stupid….”

“That’s not what you said when you found out I hadn’t applied to college.”

“I was scared.”

He shrugged, suddenly indifferent. “Fact is, I was stupid. I’m just a grunt. But I have some dignity. You’re not putting me on display, front and center,” he mocked, “so I can tell the world I done wrong and now I’m repenting. Just shove it, okay?”

He got in his truck, slammed the door and backed out without looking at her again. Her last glimpse of his face showed it tight, the color of anger hot across his cheekbones. After that, she saw only his arm, where he’d rested it on the door, the dull green of his fatigues a placard she’d been too dense to read.

How was it she hadn’t realized how he felt?

He was ashamed of her, was all she could think, standing there engulfed in the shock. Of course she’d been antiwar before Will was drafted, but it was because of him that she’d plunged with such fire into the movement, helping to organize protests on campus. She’d gotten tear-gassed in Berkeley, even arrested once although the charges were dropped, not just because she believed passionately that the war was wrong but also because she was driven to save Will, who had been compelled to go.

And now he was angry, claiming she’d endangered him and was endangering the soldiers still in Vietnam, as if she hadn’t given any thought to her beliefs or the repercussions of her actions?

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