How to Not Tell a War Story

How to Not Tell a War Story

Michael Lund

Smashwords Edition

Published by MilSpeak Books

A Division of MilSpeak Foundation, Inc. (501c3)

http://www.milspeak.org

Copyright 2012 Michael Lund

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

For permissions, contact [email protected]

Cover Design by John Lund

How to Not Tell a War Story was previously published in War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, Volume 24, 2012.

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For Soldiers and Those Who Care for Them

As Mr. Brent remarks (5/16 ‘Journal of Horticulture’ October 22, 1861 p. 76): "Every few seconds over they [common English tumbling pigeons] go; one, two, or three somersaults at a time. Here and there a bird gives a very quick and rapid spin, revolving like a wheel, though they sometimes lose their balance and make a rather ungraceful fall . . . .

Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, 1868

. . . said Wemmick. By-the-bye; you were quite a pigeon-fancier. The man looked up at the sky. I am told you had a remarkable breed of tumblers. Could you commission any friend of yours to bring me a pair, if you’ve no further use for ‘em?

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

. . . going to war, whether you’re the one on the frontline or the homefront, is like going to Mars, and living here with the Martians, and hearing only Martianese being spoken. . . . And then one day you go back to Earth, maybe just for a visit, maybe for good, and as you step off the spaceship, all around you in the spaceport you hear a Babel of voices, over the loudspeaker, passing you in the concourse, speaking in some strange foreign tongue, and all of a sudden, it hits you—that’s the language you grew up speaking.

—Kristin Henderson, While They’re at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront

Acknowledgments

Portions of two stories originally appeared in Route 66 to Vietnam: A Draftee’s Story (2004 BeachHouse Books). How to Not Tell a War Story appeared, in a slightly different form, in War, Literature, and the Arts (2012); and Exchange was first seen in MilSpeak Memo (March 2012). We are grateful for permission to reprint this material here.

My thanks to Sally Drumm at MilSpeak Books and to Bud Banis at BeachHouse Books (which is publishing a print version of this volume) for understanding what led me to write these stories and for judging them worthy. Bill Frank, Geoffrey Orth, Susan Robins, and Willie Smith, Jr. offered timely suggestions during composition, and the collection is better because of them. Any errors or oversights, of course, are entirely the fault of the author.

I would not have survived the experiences that inspired these stories or the years since without the love of my wife, Anne. If there are models for kindness in this work, they come from her.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Author’s Preface: Coming Home

How to Not Tell a War Story

The Ugly Sweater Party

Writing in the Sand

The Midnight Chopper

Who Do You Think Were There?

Fountain

Jody

Re-up

The Clean Plate Club

Exchange

Tumbling Pigeons

Reunion

The Concrete Boat

Boiling Lobster on the Fourth of July

Author’s Epilogue: Going Away

About the Author

Short Quote Credits

Author’s Preface: Coming Home

Forty-some years ago a friend drove my wife to New Jersey so that she could meet me when I returned from Vietnam. They had been teaching school together that year in Virginia. Another friend, resuming her interrupted college career, had shared an apartment with my wife in the months that I was gone. Those two women assumed a role that many did in that difficult period of American history: helping military families cope with separation. This book is in part an appreciation of their kindness and an exploration of models we need to follow with more commitment in the era of a volunteer military.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I began composing this study of the Vietnam War then and of veterans’ families later one early summer evening about twenty-five years ago. At a church vestry meeting, after the minister had offered an opening prayer that God direct and bless our actions, one senior member added, And remember those boys who gave their lives this day forty years ago. It was the anniversary of D-Day.

Eager to finish the meeting, get home to my wife and children, and continue preparations for the work day in the morning, I thought to myself, What’s the matter with you, old-timer? WWII is ancient history! Get over it. And silently I renewed a vow I’d already made: never to become one of those tiresome veterans who can’t move on, who find the rest of their lives insignificant compared to the intensity of that one experience.

I have, in general, been true to that commitment, valuing the accomplishments of my personal and (civilian) professional life far more than my very brief military career. However, in recent years I have also found myself drawn back in memory and imagination to my time in Vietnam. The stories that follow—all fictional, but inspired by real events—are one result of my inability completely to get over it. And, among other things, they are an apology to my fellow church member, now deceased, who prayed for his friends.

My conviction not to remain stuck in the past was officially adopted one day in Princeton, New Jersey, spring, 1971. I was standing beside an open grave into which the body of a young soldier killed in Vietnam was about to be lowered. Stephen Warner’s mother, his father, his younger sister, and family friends watched as military personnel (I was one member of that escort team) removed the flag from the casket, folded the Stars and Stripes in the honored triangular fashion, and handed it to his mother.

I had been with the Warner family for several days, and I believed this would be my last act in a drama I had been caught up in two years earlier. When the ceremony at the gravesite and a small family gathering afterward were concluded, I would go to a local motel where my wife, (having arrived with her colleague from work the day before) would meet me. Within days I would become again a civilian, having put to rest (may they rest in peace!) the pains and pleasures of service.

I had never anticipated having a military life; so I saw my two-year stint as a break in a planned civilian career. I didn’t realize for some decades that being in the service is not something you can edit out of your personal history. The military stays in you and you in the military, no matter how short that time.

Stephen Warner had been, like me, a draftee. He had completed his undergraduate education at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and gone on to his first year of law school at Yale, committed to the civil rights movement in this country and opposed to the war overseas. The Army selected him, as it had me, to be a correspondent; and he discovered, after he arrived in-country, an unanticipated mission. He would tell the story of the infantry, the grunts. Armed with his notepad, pen, and camera, he began, as it was termed, humping the boonies and recording what he learned. Now, unexpectedly, I find myself attempting to put into words the thoughts and feelings of my fellow soldiers.

One of those ironies of conflict you don’t believe when you hear about it is true in his case: he had orders to go home before the last mission that took his life. He turned down the early out, offered as part of an accelerated drawdown which President Nixon had mandated, in order to accompany one more time the unit he had gotten to know and whose story he was determined to preserve in word and picture. Traveling with that infantry platoon headed north in support of allied forces (ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam) during the Laotian incursion, he was caught in an ambush and died from the explosion of an RPG (rocket propelled grenade).

Because I was within days of my DEROS (Date of Expected Return from Overseas Service) and the end of my two-year enlistment, our unit’s commanding officer assigned me to travel back with the body as an official military escort. Within a few days, we flew out of Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base to Hawaii and on to Oakland, California.

Tucked away in my pocket on that journey was a letter addressed to Stephen’s family with which he’d entrusted me some months earlier. Composed before he began going into the field, and including several postscripts as those operations continued, it made clear that, should anything happen to him, they were all to understand he had chosen this path. He insisted that he had never felt his life more meaningful than it was in his role as reporter, documenting for the nation the heroism and selflessness of his fellow soldiers.

Presenting my own travel papers to military liaisons at Travis Air Force Base in California, I was eventually sent across the bay to the San Francisco Airport and flew east from there on a commercial flight. Through some mix-up, I was not on the same plane as Steve. I was a failed escort.

We reconnected, however, at Dover Air Force Base, and we would ride together in a hearse to Stephen’s hometown. Before that short journey, I had to be issued the correct dress uniform, something the Delaware personnel thought should have been done elsewhere along my route. I could offer no narrative about that other than that I had presented my papers to the appropriate officials at each point in my travel. But again I had not performed the duties of an escort very well.

In a room adjacent to the morgue, where I saw a number of mortuary affairs specialists preparing remains for burial, I was outfitted with a uniform that probably was intended for a dead man. They would be the clothes I wore home to Virginia, the ones that hang to this day in the closet of my upstairs bedroom.

An officer and another enlisted man, who had performed escort duties before, were in charge of the process from Dover to Princeton. With one exception, I simply did as I was instructed. Perhaps in violation of military policy—which could, for all I knew, have dictated I surrender Stephen’s letter to the Army when I learned of his death—I handed it to Steve’s father as soon as I could speak to him alone.

When it was clear I would be in Princeton for several days before the funeral, the Warners insisted I stay with them at their home rather than in quarters provided by the Army. I slept in Stephen’s bed. Because I had no civilian clothes, they asked me to wear some of his; and, of course, I complied. I ate at their table. In an unhappy exchange, it seemed as if I was, for forty-eight hours, Steve Warner having come home from war. We all wept, however, on the day he was buried, as the bugle sounded taps, the guns saluted, the flag was folded.

Stephen had such vision in 1971 that, in that same epistle, he instructed his family, should he not return alive, they were to donate his journal, his letters, and his pictures to his undergraduate institution, Gettysburg College. Some of them are available today online at that library’s special collections website; and there is now a Center for the Promotion of Peace and Conflict Resolution inspired in part by Stephen’s life and writing. In 2003, Gettysburg alumnus Arthur J. Amchan’s Killed In Action: The Life And Times Of Sp4 Stephen H. Warner, Draftee, Journalist And Anti-war Activist was published by Amchan Publishing; it includes a detailed account of his life and writing.

When the Warner family took me to a local motel after the service and a family reception at their house, I could only speculate about what would happen to any of us in the future. For the parents and sister, there would never be a resumption of life before Vietnam. I recognized how fortunate I was.

Inside the motel restaurant, I found my wife having dinner with that generous friend and co-worker, who’d made the special effort to help reunite a married couple. The other friend who’d shared the apartment with my wife was moving in with another student; but she remained close to be a support for us both. In that moment in a New Jersey motel restaurant, then, I reconnected a past with a present civilian life.

Still, I was not yet completely out of the military: I had to report in the morning to Ft. Dix, New Jersey, to be processed out of the service; and my wife had to return to Virginia with her friend to be back at work on Monday morning. I don’t recall any particular anger or frustration at the red tape involved in being issued material, filling out forms, receiving my final pay. After all, I was home.

At some point—perhaps that Monday or the next day—I was officially released, DD 214 (Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty) in hand. I retained a commitment to the Army reserves, but knew that, in nearly all cases, that meant four years of inactive duty. I flew from New Jersey to Washington, D.C, and travelled farther to Richmond, only an hour and a half from the little town in which my wife had been teaching school during my absence. There I experienced a final delay.

It was too late at night to ask her to drive down, pick me up, bring me home, and still be ready for her classes the next morning. I was prepared to rent a car at the airport, but, having only cash, I was turned down by every company. They would only take credit cards. Finally, I went to the bus station downtown, where a bus would leave at something like 4:00 in the morning. Again, this was not a painful experience, considering where I’d been.

At something like 6:00 the next morning, I called my wife from the local station, and she drove less than a mile to take me, with all my belongings stuffed into a single duffle bag, and return to our apartment. She left almost immediately, and I slept that day, content that all was well and that all would be well.

It has been.

But there is, among other things, survivor’s guilt. I was home safe; others were not. And the meaning of that fundamental fact has over forty years knit its way into my consciousness and become intertwined with my fellow church member’s prayer for the fallen men of an earlier war. Doing such things as visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the nation’s capital, read accounts of other conflicts, see the nation return to war in the twenty-first century has inspired me to pray for my generation and to compose these stories, which I hope, may be helpful to others.

They are not all sad, though some are. Most involve the assimilation of hard choices and unlucky events into productive lives. And these stories also feature those who accept veterans back into their world after service, often understanding in profound ways what can or must be done for healing to occur. Again, my wife’s two friends inspire some of the fictional characters you are about to meet who help in similar ways.

T. S. Eliot said that in our beginning is our end, and in our end is our beginning. So, I start this collection with what I thought was the end of my experience, a sad day in Princeton, New Jersey. But as that same day inaugurated a forty-year effort to understand the months that immediately preceded it, it is also a beginning. I pray for those who continue to take up such struggles and ask you do the same.

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How to Not Tell a War Story

They all knew they were going to die. Not by the occasional rocket, less frequent mortar round, or stray bullets from hot firefights across Cam Ranh Bay, but because of some stupid, fucking accident. Show-Me would be reading a letter from Sandra back home in Fairfield and step in front of a deuce-and-a-half, not going so fast but with such momentum that he felt only a slap on the side of his head. High on a dozen Falstaffs from the E-4 club, Bernard the Jew, having survived the projects in Brooklyn with no father at home, would fail to see the warning tape and fall into a construction hole. He lay in the shape of a crowbar for two days, his neck broken. And John-john, who had not yet grown up, was convinced he suffered from undiagnosed allergies. He was stung by a scorpion and died in his bed, genitals swollen to the size of a bowling pin and . . .well, bowling balls. So they prophesied.

It didn’t happen, despite past events that inspired such likelihood. And, naturally, they wanted their own stories to stop short of tragedy.

There had been, after all, Janowsky and Sharp. Well, several tours back, but, still . . . dead, dead, dead they were.

It was Tet one year later,