Chickenhawk: Back in the World

I cleared trails all over our property, exploring every inch of the land. Our property was triangular, nearly eleven acres of old hardwood forest—live oaks and hickory trees—with dense underbrush between them. When I’d gotten a good idea what the land was like, I decided to build near the center of the triangle on high ground because river land floods occasionally. We figured that eventually we’d build a larger place on pilings next to the river when we could afford it.

I drew up the final building plans for the cabin at the library in Gainesville. I’d never designed or built a house before. When I had a question about what size beam to use, or how the foundation piers should be made, or how many electrical outlets I had to have, I walked across the street to the county’s building permit office at the courthouse and asked them.

Six months after we got there, a truck brought us a load of wood, pipes, shingles, and nails and dumped them at a clearing I’d made. I was going to turn it into a cabin.

We couldn’t afford to set up a temporary electric pole, so I used hand tools. We started the project thinking that we would all work on it. That lasted only a few hours. I wanted to finish the cabin fast. I had no conception then about the process being the important thing. I wanted results. My internal voice was scolding me about being a quitter and a loser because I left a good job to live in the woods. And how could I move my family into the boonies? And what the hell do I know about building houses? And on and on until I would go into rages and throw tools into the woods and scare Patience and Jack away. So unless it was absolutely impossible for me to do it myself, they stayed away while I forced building materials into a cabin with the power of sheer anger. While I built the cabin, Patience began writing a book, a fantasy novel. Of the two of us, we expected she would be the first published.

We moved into the cabin before it was finished, a common country habit. People around me were building houses while they lived in them. Another Vietnam vet, John Tillerman, was building a house about a half mile from us. He was some kind of sailor, or something. He moved in before he finished, too. Seemed like a good idea to everybody: dry the place in (meaning that only the roof and exterior walls were finished) and then work on finishing it on weekends. Wrong. Everybody moved their stuff in and that was the end of it. Working on the place created a sawdust-plasterboard-wood chip mess and it was just too much work to move everything out and back in every weekend. I’d built a bench and a table downstairs, and Patience and I slept in the attic, under exposed insulation. Jack moved into the school bus. The windows were unglazed, covered with flaps of clear plastic sheeting stapled to the window frames.

However rustic it was, the cabin did keep the rain out. In winter, we heated the place with a little cast-iron wood stove that worked great. We had plenty of firewood.

We accepted this level of completeness as complete enough and began to wonder what we would do when my severance ran out.

Now that Patience was writing, I’d been thinking about Bill Smith’s occupation a lot. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Bill and Knox at lunch one day. I told Knox I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to use my Vietnam experiences as the basis for a novel. Knox asked me to tell him what I did over there. I talked for an hour. When I’d finished, Knox said I should forget about writing a novel: I should tell the story in my own words.

“A memoir?”

“Yes,” Knox said. Bill, sitting beside him, nodded.

“Shit,” I said. “Plenty of people had worse things happen to them in Vietnam. Why should anyone care what happened to me?”

“Sure, maybe that’s true,” Knox said. “But they aren’t writing about it. If you write it like you tell it, you might have something.”

I decided to write a memoir.

Did I have enough to say to make a book? I sat on the bench in my cabin and started listing the events that were still vivid to me. I labeled them with titles like “One Leg” (about trying to haul some wounded grunts to a hospital only to have them all die) and “The Rifle Range” (a sandy field near Bon Song where we were mortared). I scribbled furiously until I ran out of memories. I counted the list. Two hundred and forty distinct events. Plenty for a book. However, though I remembered the details very clearly, I really didn’t know, with any confidence, when they had happened. Vietnam was a confusing time, almost a dream to me. I’d flown thousands of sorties; I’d seen hundreds of firefights—everything blended together. I couldn’t recall, for certain, the order of things. I asked Patience if she had the letters I’d sent her from Vietnam.

“Yeah, asshole, I do,” she said, laughing.