Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I kept up my photography. One of the students at Schucht Village, a doctor named Merle Preble, asked me if I would show my pictures at the VA where he did some intern work. I put together a one-man show at the VA hospital library. Not a big deal, this show, but I watched a woman cry at one of my photographs and got a peek at the power of communication.

The leathery cadavers in the dissection lab weren’t what I was looking for; they weren’t human anymore, just objects kept in tanks of chemicals you studied to see how people are put together. I wanted to see the morgue.

Preble pushed open a heavy metal door, the kind you see on walk-in coolers. Inside the frigid room, feeble lavender light from ultraviolet lamps flickered, barely piercing the gloom. The floor was jammed with gurneys crowded every which way, burdened with bodies covered with strangely hazy glowing sheets. Naked dead people, hunched over inside big plastic bags hung along the wall, seemed to glower at me for staring.

Uelsmann assigned us the theme of death to explore with pictures. I’d seen lots of men slaughtered and it looked painful. I was afraid of it, so I thought this assignment might help me overcome my fear. I photographed myself, whitened with talcum powder, arms clasped on my chest, lying as if in state, so I could see what I would look like in the coffin. Pretty gruesome, but not very real. I asked Preble to get me into the medical school’s dissection laboratories and morgue with my camera. He said sure, and we went to the hospital late one night.

“Who are they?” I asked, looking at the people in the bags.

“Regular people. Died in the hospital,” Preble said. He looked at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I was feeling weak, but I wanted to fight through it.

“Can you photograph in here?” Preble asked. “It’s real dark.”

I pointed my meter at the wall, at a man in a bag. His arms were together in front of him, his head slumped forward. I could feel him decaying. The cold room smelled sweet and stale. Concentrating on my work, I moved inside, squeezing between gurneys. The meter said it was real dark; I would have to use a slow shutter speed. I took a couple of shots of the man. I thought I saw his face move when the shutter clicked. My hand brushed a sheet and I felt heat. I jerked away and looked at Preble. “This one’s still warm!”

He nodded, pulled down the sheet. I saw a little girl, about twelve, lying in the death light as though she were asleep. “Want to—”

“No,” I said quickly. I was suddenly overcome with the same horrible feeling that I’d had in Vietnam, that I was violating privacy. I had taken one picture of a dead grunt and agonized about it for years. I could hear the people in this room telling me, whispering: This is private stuff, Bob. “I think I’ve seen enough.”

Actually, more than enough. I was a wreck for days afterward. I never printed the photographs and got my first C in photography.

Near the end of my third quarter I got a letter from a friend of ours, Frank Aguilera, an anthropology student who was studying a remote country village in Spain to get his Ph.D. Frank said to come see him and his wife. Barbie. The idea that school would get me back on track was proving to be wrong. The graph of my grades was diving southeast. Grissom was disgusted with me. I decided to drop out at the end of the quarter and go to Spain for a while.

Patience was terrified. Just pick up and move to Spain? Now? No!

I told her I had to do something, school sure wasn’t working. She eventually agreed. With the money the VA sent me and that which we gathered by selling our car and other belongings, I got together the sum of $1,654, enough to get the three of us to Luxembourg, where I’d buy a used car and drive to Spain. Once there, I figured we could live in Spain on my disability payments of $145 a month. Hell, we might never come back.

CHAPTER 3

March 1969—Luxembourg. Kicking tires at used-car places, I found a brown 1954 Volkswagen, rumpled, ancient; but the engine sounded good. Needed tires, but I thought they’d get us to Spain. By the time we got to France, we had named it the Roach. We drove to the village of Almonaster la Real, Spain, in two days.

Frank and Barbie were happy to see us and we stayed up late talking about the old days at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’d first met them while visiting Patience. Actually, I was visiting Patience’s boyfriend, James Elliott, a friend I’d known in Florida. I was a drifter then, a college dropout living in a Chevy panel truck, and they liked me anyway. Patience had introduced me to her friends, who included Frank and Barbie and Bill Smith and Emily Arnold, each couple now married.