Chickenhawk: Back in the World

I’d thrown her box of my Vietnam letters into the street on one of our moves in Gainesville a few years before. Patience saw me do it and told me to get them back. I said I wanted to forget about ever being in Vietnam; it was time to forget. “Fine, forget it. But they’re my letters.” She got the box and kept them.

I opened the envelopes and suddenly traveled back twelve years.

18 February 1966

Dear Patience—

Sometimes, the above greeting stops me cold! Dear, Dear Patience I love you so much!

I’ve flown so many CA’s [combat assaults] lately, that it’s getting to be commonplace. The rattle of our own machine guns don’t even make me start any longer. The return fire still makes me, shall we say, anxious. I haven’t taken any hits lately. Today, we went after some wounded troops at an LZ that was under VC mortar attack. They were zeroing-in on the landing pad as we approached, but we escaped (natch).

I’m so very tired of this rot! When we need R&R’s the most, they cancel the program for all officers! Gee whiz and heck! It makes me think black thoughts about the army!

This will be extra short tonight.

I love you.

Bob

p.s. Please send some more envelopes.

I felt my face flush. There was nothing literary about my letters to Patience. They were clumsy, flippant, and artless. I seldom talked about what I was doing in them. However, they were enough to fix past events in time for me. I put the 750 pages in chronological order and sorted my list of events to match.

When I got the chronology straight, I decided first to write a few of the scenes to see if anyone wanted to read them. It’s one thing to have a story; it’s another to put it on paper.

The memories came back as I typed. These weren’t my funny war stories. I wrote what I felt then, and the feelings still hurt. The guy in “One Leg” was a grunt whose testicles and a leg were blown off. I had to get him and his four buddies to an aid station fast. I wanted to get them back. I really tried. I felt like I was rushing over trees in the la Drang Valley, again; trying to make it to Pleiku, again; hearing my crew chief say the guy died, again. They all died, again. I saw a glint on One Leg’s wedding band as they dumped him on a stretcher. Tears came for the first time.

I showed my story to Patience and our friend, Rosemary, who was in the creative writing program at the university. They both cried, which I took to be a good sign. I wrote several more scenes, sixty or seventy pages worth, and discovered I had something to say. These were not smoothly written, publishable vignettes; they were stories with feeling and they affected people. I could smooth them out. What else do you need?

CHAPTER 9

February 1979—I decided I needed a break to put my memories in order. I’d read that there was going to be a total eclipse of the sun in February. The path of totality would cross several western states, one of them Montana. I remembered I had a friend out there, James Elliott, Patience’s old boyfriend and a guy I’d known as a kid. I called him up. We hadn’t talked for eighteen years, but, on the phone, it seemed that no time had passed; we got along just great. The only subject that still made Elliott’s voice change was Patience. Otherwise, things were fine. I told him I wanted to come out to see the eclipse. Was he up to an adventure? Yes, and he would pay my way.

I took the train from Waldo, Florida, to Sandpoint, Idaho.

Elliott met me at the station with his girlfriend, Eva. When we got to his place in the wilds of western Montana, I laughed. His house was virtually a copy of mine. It was four feet longer, but everything else was the same including the A-frame upstairs. We sat in his cabin drinking wine and swapping stories about our childhood that put a glaze on Eva’s eyes. Elliott and I took the bottle outside and stumbled around in a genuine Montana blizzard, fell down in the snow, laughed like idiots.

The next day, Elliott, Eva, and I set out in his truck across Montana to rendezvous with the shadow of the moon. We talked about the old days and what we’d done since we split up in New Orleans. I told him I was going to write a book about Vietnam. He smiled dubiously.