Chickenhawk: Back in the World

Sang nodded. “And how many aviation battalions were in the First Cavalry?”

“We had two assault helicopter battalions of Hueys, a battalion of heavy-lift Chinook helicopters, and an independent group, the Ninth Air Cav. Altogether, the Cav had about four hundred helicopters.”

Sang nodded, scribbled. “What kind of food did you eat?”

“C-rations, mostly,” I said.

“The pilots did not eat better at their home bases?”

“Some did. We didn’t. The First Cavalry lived in the field. At our base at An Khe we were served canned food called B-rations.”

Sang nodded, spoke. Thong said, “He said he was lucky to get a fish head with his rice.”

Sang’s confidence, and now his professed Spartanism, irked me. “How many villagers did he kill to get the rice?”

Thong looked at me intently, shrugged, turned to Sang, and spoke. Sang’s face darkened. He shook his head and spoke, his voice angry.

Thong shrugged. “He says he never killed his own people. Only you.”

“Oh. The other Viet Cong killed the villagers,” I said.

Thong answered without translating. “Yes. It was unfortunate.”

That night, I shared billing with Wayne Karlin and Tim O’Brien at the Boston Public Library. Karlin read from Lost Armies; I read a few passages from Chickenhawk, all having to do with the Vietnamese. O’Brien read outtakes from his forthcoming book, The Things They Carried.

It didn’t occur to me until later that night, in bed, that people must consider me to be an important writer, to have invited me to that reading. Imagine that.

The next day, David Hunt asked me if I’d return to Vietnam with the other writers, a reciprocal meeting with the Vietnamese writers. I said I would.

My mother was in the hospital while I wrote most of this book.

On August 29, 1990, Patience and Jack and I, along with my sister, Susan; her husband, Bruce; my nephew, Sean; and my niece, Bevan, took a boat out into the Gulf of Mexico and sprinkled her ashes on the waves. My father refused to come. None of her brothers or sisters attended or even came to see her in the hospital. There was no love in her family, a sad thing to see.

We drank a toast of dry martinis, a drink she asked for as she lay dying, unable to drink anything. I tossed a full glass, with olive, into the water for her.

My mother, despite having a heart condition most of her life, was an energetic woman. She grew up believing the woman’s place was in the home, but had worked as a grocery checkout clerk when we first moved to Florida in 1945. Once, when my parents were struggling to make ends meet, she suggested that she go to school and become a nurse, but my father refused to allow it. He believed he should be able to provide for us himself. From 1951 to 1958, my mother did physical work on the chicken farm my dad started west of Delray Beach. We had a hundred thousand chickens on this farm, and we—my mother and father, my sister and I—did most of the work. After my dad sold the farm in 1958, moved us to Delray Beach, and became a real-estate broker, they were sufficiently well off that she could become the ideal of her culture—the wife of a successful businessman. She fulfilled her role by keeping our house as neat as a museum display and giving a cocktail party almost every Friday night.

At the age of sixty-four, a disease called lupus, and the drugs used to treat it, destroyed one of her hip joints. After spending nearly a year in a wheelchair, she decided to have the operation for an artificial hip joint. She was frail; the operation nearly killed her.

She called one day, a few weeks after the operation, said to come over, she had a surprise. When we got there, I saw her standing in the living room wearing a brand-new dress, beaming. After a year in a wheelchair, it was a miracle.

Two days later, she suffered a blood clot in her arm and had to have another operation.

She came home for a week, then went back in for other complications. She never left. I see her standing in the living room, smiling, happy just to stand up. I see her in the hospital, withered, in pain, dying. I see a cardboard box of granular ashes and dust.

My father, who had had another stroke, was now an invalid. With his caretaker gone—my mother had actually cooked for him as a cripple—he made conflicting demands of me and my sister. Depending on the whims of his depression, he wanted a new apartment, he wanted to go to a nursing home, he wanted a companion to live with him, he wanted to move in with us.

I had already started drinking scotch, drank more while my mother suffered, but I noticed with alarm that I was now drinking at least a bottle a week and increasing. I’d thought that drinking was a habit of the past, something I’d grown through.

As the date to leave for Vietnam drew near, I began to have more and more symptoms of distress. I refused to acknowledge them. I had made a commitment and I would stick by it. I called Larry Heinemann, told him I was having problems. He told me to try to hang in there.