Robert Lunday: Fayettenam

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120 Cutting Horse Trail

59,000 words

Bastrop TX, 78602 (512) 718-9352 [email protected]

FAYETTENAM: A Memoir by Robert Lunday

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Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. – Franz Kafka

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RIFLE RAISED, knees bent for a forward thrust, the green plastic man is an inch from my face. The tip of his bayonet is skewed, but he looks straight at me. Except he has no eyes. I put him down on the linoleum, could stomp and crush him – but the ready rifle. He’s incapable of wavering. Some men are all one gesture, taking on the world: not certainty, or perfection, but sharpness of will. Show me your elegant hypothesis, its intricate clockworks; I’ll show you my green plastic man, knees bent, rifle raised; his stare with no eyes.

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3 February ‘69 Dearest Patsy, I have to write this in a hurry, so it will be short. I leave for the field at 0600 tomorrow. I will be acting CO because the CO was killed yesterday. I sent a check for $700.00 which should arrive a couple of days after you receive this; also, for the next three months, you will receive $320 per month starting this month. When I make CPT you will get another $100.00. Try to stay within your budget and save some money if possible. I love and miss all of my family. I love you more than anything, Patsy. Love Jim Write: Name & Rank Co “D” 2nd Bn 3rd Inf. 199 Light INF Bde APO 57 96279

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FAYETTEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA is our home town. The family lived at other posts, but it was always Fort Bragg/Fayetteville that the Army sent us back to. That’s where our mother stayed when the moving was over, so it’s home for all of us by default. Four Christmases ago my sister, my two brothers, and I went home to Fayetteville and were under the same roof for the first time in thirty years. We reminisced and wound up crying while our mother looked on and shook her head. The debris we’d been dredging up had to do with our two fathers, Robert G. Lunday and James E. Lewis: both soldiers, one long dead and the other disappeared. Debbie’s the oldest and was Lunday’s favorite, though I was the first son; brother Don came next. In 1964 Lunday and our mom divorced, and she married Lewis, whom Lunday had befriended during Operation White Star, Laos, 1962. Lewis and our mom had one child together – Kevin, the baby; and that was the family across several moves. Meanwhile Lunday Kurtzed out in the jungles of Vietnam. That’s how I described his career to myself after watching Apocalypse Now. Unlike Kurtz, Lunday eventually came back, retired a Lt. Colonel, worked as a produce manager in a supermarket, then died in a glider crash on October 27, 1977. He’s buried in Section 25, Site 553 of the Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida. Lewis retired in early 1982 and drove away October 3 of that year. He told my mother he was headed for a place called Vero Beach, Florida to see about a flying job: once again, the Sunshine State. Lewis is missing still, and I don’t see him in Florida; at least not above ground. But a missing man could be anywhere.

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That Christmas a few years ago my mother handed me a tin box of letters Lewis had sent home during his last of three Southeast Asian tours, ’69 – 70. She was giving me the letters in hopes I’d find a clue to Lewis’ whereabouts. Never mind that he wrote them a dozen years before he vanished. The envelopes are all Airmail striped; instead of a stamp, they have “Free” written in the soldier’s hand in the upper right corner: a perk you get for going to war. His penmanship was sharp and consistent: tightly threaded letters jabbed frequently with exclamation points, as if to rush the message along. Exhortations, instructions, warnings, lovemaking, accounting, hastening, fretting, the squint through smoke: menthol-cool, thin smile, pause, take a puff, then start a new line. You can really sense the pace of a mind in a handwritten letter. It’s as if he’s here: the script is his visage, his thin-eyed stare. Reading them all together makes a rift in time: the street sounds outside, the soap-opera urgencies or sitcom jangles, AM melodies, particular weathers, shirt patterns and hem lines: all of it floods into the present. I’m looking over the first one, from the general vicinity of Bien Hoa, 1969:

I will be acting CO because the CO was killed yesterday.

Mirror of souls, X of necessities. One man’s gone, the other takes his place. Living or dead, there’s no time for reflection: don’t think about it, just hit the ground running. I was chewed out and slapped for thinking too much, or not enough. Both were wrong, but how to know? Wait for the slap.

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4 Feb 69 Dearest Patsy: I made the trip just fine and I’m in the process of being reassigned to the 199th Light Inf. Bde. I did not get a chance to see Bob because I arrived on Sunday and he was out. I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to see him because I should join the Company ASAP. It’s been a very busy day and it’s a long way from being over. I’m C.O. of a company that was hit pretty bad, but they have bounced back and are driving on hard. I’m staying very busy and that is the way I like it. I can feel the weight falling off a drop of sweat at a time. I hope that you have received the $700 ck. If not, write ASAP and let me know; also any other problems. It takes about twelve days round trip for the mail. I’m really looking forward to hearing from you. Have the kids write also. Patsy, Baby, take some pictures, and send to Bob and me ASAP; also have one with all of you in it. (The whole family! OK?) Tell the kids to be good and that I love all. I love you Baby. Jim

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BOTH MEN were in Vietnam that year: Lewis and Lunday – “Bob” in the letter above. Another ex-soldier named Larry Chambers, in his book about long-range reconnaissance patrols, or LRRPs, refers to then-Major Lunday as “five foot nothing,” but to set the record straight he was five foot four. After the Laotian assignment in ‘62, he went back from ‘66 – ‘69 and then once more, to help with the winding down, ’71 – ‘72. What attracted my mother to warriors? Something more than the uniform; not the nomadic lifestyle, not the fancy housing, and not the high pay. She denies anything but coincidence: my first father, after all, had hardly seemed the soldier type when they were high schoolers and he played trombone. Lunday was her marital misstep, except as he led her to Jim Lewis, after a long delay. And it wasn’t the fighter she fell for; Jim Lewis was a lover, too. In a photograph from that time, they’re sitting together at someone’s house. It’s a party; Patsy’s in heavy makeup, big white earrings, styled hair, and looking at Jim Lewis with interest and admiration. He looks back, lips slightly open: charming her with small talk. Each has a drink in one hand and a cigarette dangling from the other. His head is shaved; he has no neck. Lewis is a boy, really, at this point, but he’s already a ten-year veteran, having enlisted in the Texas National Guard at age thirteen. Next to my mother, single again, a mere thirty-one – Lewis, even at twenty-three, seems older. His earlier photos show a hard-edged man-boy as well, someone always older than his years. In that party photo, his debonair, seductive smile draws the line of our future. Our mother, coyly, steps across.

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The photographs we sent per his request Lewis had laminated to secure them from the jungle’s ravages. All the same they grew dark edges where the rot crept in, but with our blackand-white, too-shiny faces protected from monsoons. Smiles like shields: snapshots are nervetraces, not likenesses. What were we grimacing at? The sun, yes; but ultimately at him. Pater, pattern: two fathers gone was a parallax of fathers crossed from two to one to twice-none. Distance is a father, absence is a father. Sometimes it seemed the Army itself was our father. Not Uncle Sam, not the Pentagon, but a presence figured by a standard Army image: an old tank, parked on a pedestal half-forgotten, near one of the invasion beaches, its treads frozen, gun barrel raised toward the Evening Star. The sky’s just going from baby blue to cerulean, but the only star that signifies is the white beauty mark on each side of the turret. It’s a flat, homely, perfectly-symmetrical star, unspiritual, unambiguous: this is the Army, this is us. The true and proven heroism of my fathers was brought home in parachute silk, starched fatigues, K-rations, P-38 can openers, Zippo lighters, entrenchment tools, and canvas with grommets. Grommets could make anything more durable and real. Everything that mattered was dyed Army green, stenciled with a stock number and that peculiar military grammar: Truck, comma, Utility; Potatoes, comma, Mashed. Movies and television suggested happy endings for everything. The confusion of the war would settle, somewhere on my boyhood horizon: Vietnam would be a walk in the park. The Commies would see the light, realize how much they loved America and Americans, and soon the reunified, happy, dragon-shaped land becomes the 51st state. Democracy rolls out like a fancy red Hollywood carpet, rises up like a big billowy circus tent, and flies forward like a straightarrow interstate highway with rice paddies on one side, waves of grain on the other.

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14 Feb 69 Dearest Patsy, Baby, I have to make this quick because I’m carrying the Co. out again. I don’t know how long it will be. I am receiving your letters and they are wonderful. I love you so very much. I feel a lot better now, after a little rest. Have you received the ARCOM [Army Commendation] Medal & Citation from GER [Germany]? Did anyone else get orders? Tell all my address and tell them to send news. Let me know when you receive the ck ($466.00) and the pay ck and how much it is. OK? Will you be able to meet me on R&R? We can do it somehow! Place an ad in the Daily Bugle at Ft. Bragg about the German TV – No sweat! I love and miss all of my family. Tell them I love them and to be good. Patsy I love you Jim [back of letter] Received #’s 7 & 5 w/pictures You are my beautiful Darling. Suit top and P.J’s on you look great! Jim

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VALENTINE’S DAY, 1969, and troop levels reach 539,000. How many soldiers write home? How many get heart-shaped cards bleeding crayon? Four-party Paris Peace Talks: let the love flow! Finally, the shape of the table is agreed on: round, flanked by a pair of rectangles. Geometry, like everything, is political: gather around, line up, and square off while I triangulate the age. Nixon at his inauguration speaks flowing words:

…in throwing wide the horizons of space, we have discovered new horizons on earth. … Eight years from now America will celebrate its 200th anniversary as a nation. Within the lifetime of most people now living, mankind will celebrate that great new year which comes only once in a thousand years – the beginning of the third millennium. What kind of nation we will be, what kind of world we will live in, whether we shape the future in the image of our hopes, is ours to determine by our actions and our choices. … If we succeed, generations to come will say of us now living that we mastered our moment, that we helped make the world safe for mankind. This is our summons to greatness. I believe the American people are ready to answer this call.

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Indeed we answered, but they put us on hold. Bravo all the same, Mr. President! Your words stir me now and would have then, had I not been in school preparing to live them out when I grew up, as an astronaut or a peacemaker. Maybe not an astronaut: I’m a raging claustrophobe. Still I was there, and I can see it all: The Moon Landing, that way – its Earth-rise to be, in later years an environmental call to action, and later still a montage-frame for MTV. And the Millennium, right over there: it came and went like a big exciting move from one bad neighborhood to another. In 1976, at the end of the Abe Beame administration, I got a job the summer ahead of college with the New York City Department of Health. It was primary season, and I thought I could win; but another Southern boy took Manhattan that year. Wandering midtown one afternoon, I found myself in a sudden crowd and heard Jimmy Carter himself, just a few feet away on the steps of the Americana Hotel. It was packed, and I never saw his wide-lapel smile, and the Americana Hotel is no more. On July 4, I left my room in Judson Church and hiked down the channels of Lower Manhattan, past the brownstones, loft buildings, across Canal, down through the valleys of commerce, past the Clock Tower Building where I worked for the City, to pier’s edge at Battery Park with a million New Yorkers behind me. Starting early, I was the first. Turning at water’s edge I saw that we were all there: every race, but on that pier everyone was Greek, of the demos: We the People waiting for the fireworks, drinking beer, staring at the Tall Ships and the Statue of Liberty.

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Behind me two guys agreed to meet twenty years later to celebrate this celebration. They were drunk and must have forgotten about it in five minutes. Maybe that promise went the way of most promises: out to sea. I made a vow to go back as well, and didn’t. Can’t I keep a promise to myself? I’m American, and live toward the promise. Rise from the couch, yawn and stretch, answer the call!

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21 Feb 69 Dear Patsy: We just came back from five days in the mud (waist deep). I can’t describe how miserable it was. The C.O. and 11 others were Med-evac’d for heat exhaustion; that was on the second day. The only reason I kept going was that if I went, there were no officers. I came back and found five (5) letters and the wonderful card with the pictures of my Darling. I also received the ck for $466.72. I want you to deposit it in the bank. Did Bob send you the money? If he does I want you to deposit it. Try your very best to save every cent, because I want you to meet me if I get an R&R. OK? It will cost close to $1,000.00 but it’s what I want if you can. It could be any time in the next 8 months. I love you more than I can say. I miss you terribly. I think of you and the kids all of the time. All of you had better remember me! If the boy’s car has 69 NC tags (sticker safety inspection, not dealer) on it then it’s OK for Debbie to ride in but I don’t like the idea and I’m sure that Bob wouldn’t either. Tell all the kids that I love them and stay sweet. Tell the two little ones I said “shape up.” Patsy! You are the best thing that ever happened to me. You are my life! I have always loved you and always will! I kid you a lot, and I have a temper, but it doesn’t mean a thing. I love you! P.S. Excuse the writing, I’m very tired! Love you, Jim

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IT’S AN UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD where you can be med-evac’d in February for heat exhaustion. Study this last letter a bit: heat, sweat, grit, and grime of the greater danger, the many nodes back into the man’s character. Observe, first and foremost, the working of a will. He stays on the mission because he’s the last officer: Atlas, shouldering everyone. It’s a short letter, because Lewis is tired. His mind goes to the needs of his troops and his family, with emphasis on the family finances; and as a tangent to those economics, the unpredictable MAJ Lunday, linked to the budget via child support he rarely sent. It’s important that she tends to the monetary details in earnest: Lewis counts on seeing her for R&R, to be granted anywhere between now and October. There’s much even in the conditionals of his sentences:

…if I went, there were no officers.

He was 28 that year; not young, really, next to these troops whose average age was 20; a man battling weight gain; not much of a drinker, but a three-pack-a-day smoker, always coughing. He would have been one of those dozen men helicoptered out of the heat and mud, but for that will. Look at his face: those eyes, that jaw, the head shoved down on a boxer’s shoulders. He pleads:

don’t let them forget me

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but his youngest, Kevin, was three when his father left. He did forget, and would not go near when Lewis came home twelve months later. A stranger materialized: blocking the light and barking orders, as if the battlefield had followed him through the door. Kevin, Jim Lewis’s only biological son, was too much his father, finding trouble as soon as he could crawl. One day I heard screaming, and looked out to see my baby brother running down the street with a fat lady in curlers and a moo-moo close behind. What might a toddler have done: pulling pigtails, stomping flowers? This was Lewis’s boy: he ran past our house and doubled back so the giantess couldn’t find him. You can love what you must. If I could find the formula for balancing freedom with necessity, maybe I could reach back in time and save a life. It was always unlikely that Lewis could have managed everything, hard as he tried. Right now we’re waist deep in mud and chin deep in debt. There’s an ex to deal with:

If he does

supposes Lewis of my first father, MAJ Lunday: buried traces of honor in that if. Lewis and Lunday had been friends, were alike in some ways; connected not only by the war, but also family. If he does send the money; and he didn’t. But notice the bridge:

If he does I want you to deposit it. Try your very best to save every cent, because I want you to meet me.

Lunday, the ex-husband, was expected to help pay for their R&R.

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That helter-skelter year the strange, vibrant-green jungles of Southeast Asia curled and shadowed the back of my brain, and were pinned to the kitchen wall in the form of a newsprint red-and-green map courtesy of the Fayetteville Observer, on which we marked our stepfather’s X’s near place-names we couldn’t pronounce. We lived in Fayetteville but would go to Bragg for the PX, commissary, or clinic by driving down Bragg Boulevard, which was the used-car, Korean-food, pawn-shop, massageparlor artery between post and downtown. Everything on Bragg Boulevard looked ready to pack up and move at a moment’s notice. But my view into the world that year was mainly Village Drive, where we lived while waiting for Lewis: staring down the curved street of yet another home-for-a-year, peering into the arc as if I might see past it into the maps and the evening news, as if Vietnam was just around the corner. You could almost hear it, and in a way, you did: artillery sounds you could feel miles from the firing ranges, all the windows rattling. Street names on Bragg travel through victories and retreats: Yorktown, Ardennes, Bastogne, Luzon, Normandy; then Son Tay, Kuwait, Just Cause, Desert Storm: Drives and Boulevards and Avenues, and not a few circles and cul de sacs: thoroughfares modeling foreign policy.

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We picked up and moved our household goods, but the household gods were always borrowed: ragged spirits that barely knew our names. We honored them by cleaning exceptionally well before departing. Not that we had a choice: you cleaned well, or demerits rained on your head. There was as well the dreaded DR, delinquent report: bad kids could sink a career. When you’re military, the sins of the children are visited upon the heads of the fathers. The gift of Army life was moving: a wealth of places and new starts. The moves were progress, or the illusion of it. Nomadism made us both nobler and more barbarian. From the writings of another military brat, the poet Andrew Hudgins, I’ve cadged the following from Ammianus Marcellinus’ Roman History, having to do with the Huns, “dwelling beyond the Maeotic Sea,” the chronicler tell us, “near the ice-bound ocean”:

None of them plough, or even touch a plough-handle: for they have no settled abode, but are homeless and lawless, perpetually wandering with their wagons, which they make their homes; in fact they seem to be people always in flight. Their wives live in these wagons, and there weave their miserable garments; and here too they sleep with their husbands, and bring up their children till they reach the age of puberty; nor, if asked, can any one of them tell you where he was born, as he was conceived in one place, born in another at a great distance, and brought up in another still more remote.

Military families can relate to those Huns: they’re our spiritual ancestors.

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We were settled back Stateside after two years in West Germany, ‘67 – 68. Some moves stand out as experiences in memory, but mostly, like other trauma, they pass quickly in a subterranean space: we flew, but it seems we tunneled, home again to the States. Back in Fayetteville, Lewis set us up in the new house, then left. Two months, maybe, we had minimal furniture and clothes from our suitcases before our goods followed by boat. His absence was palpable and sweet for me. I hardly noticed my mother’s grieving, and it was a grieving:

Wait for me and I’ll come back, only wait with everything you’ve got; wait for me patiently, when the others have stopped waiting

– so sang the Russian soldiers as they fought the Nazis, thinking of their women. During the war in Vietnam, American wives could count on a twelve-month limit – provided their men came back at all. Debbie, my elder sister, might have shared in my joy at our stepfather’s absence: she was fourteen, all roaring hormones and hankering for freedom. Don and Kevin were too young to notice: their father’s absence was a clearing where a large tree had stood. Somehow I had the notion that Lunday would have been more just as a father, and I kept his photo and not Lewis’ by my bed: a wallet-size picture in a drug-store frame, gold-lettered Nha Trang stamped in the bottom corner; salmon-tinted backdrop, the lush green beret with the

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5th Special Forces pin, eyes sharp but focused on something else, not me. I’d take the photo down and try to gaze it to life, draw his fire, but the eyes never changed their aim.

So SSGT Lewis met then-1LT Lunday in Laos, 1962. There’s a photo of them sitting on a low wall in a field with other foreigners, all in jumpsuits, tethered horses readied in the background: as if tripling the way East gets Wild West. Another photograph, much larger, that I kept on my chest of drawers while growing up: the two men together, close-up in a studio portrait, both in clean plaid shirts of different colors, looking – well, almost pretty in the hand-tinted image. Lewis is thin, in his face that is; and very young. Lunday is wedge-faced, crew-cut, and smiling broadly. Lewis’s smile is a bit subtler. Or he isn’t smiling: he’s looking clear about things, without any need to say. Bob looks like he needs to broadcast something: his face is made for it, even his jutting ears are made for it, and his good white teeth. That photograph more than anything else made real for me the strangeness of having two fathers. There they were in hand-painted color, smiling at me from the same abstract space. They were comrades, briefly enemies, then co-dads. I don’t know exactly when the portrait was taken; maybe during Lewis’s stint with the 101st Airborne in Phan Rang. Lunday might have paid a visit from his Montagnard village, and the two men, sharing a family, documented the partnership. Lunday was a phantom for most of my life; now he’s faded near to vanishing. Lewis has made a dogged spirit of himself, because he vanished for real instead of dying. He invades our dreams serially, insistently. Though he might stay silent for a few years, he comes back, then

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fades again. Since he isn’t dead for sure, we sometimes think he’s talking to us: from somewhere far, tropical maybe, and marked on the map of empire.

He was here a few nights ago: It was a flickering, oscillating dream: sometimes West Texas, sometimes East, but always Texas, where Lewis came from. I’m driving East along a state road, for endless miles just a few feet from the tracks: desolation, a town, desolation. My sight in the dream is sometimes onto the distance, the fields and skyline, and sometimes toward the towns: each building, each wind-blasted wall. Now I’m standing just outside a ramshackle by the road, nose up to a slit between splintery boards, light filtering through; and then just inside, like a prisoner looking out. Railroad ties slow-cook in the sun, pump jacks move up and down. There’s a sort of pity in me. I know this is another dream of Jim Lewis, wherever he is in the dream just yet. I sense a red and saffron blur behind my back, a humid stillness, and then a thin, minor music. Then Lewis is there, but maybe at an age before or after he’d been my stepfather. He’s oscillating: sometimes a boy, sometimes the age at his disappearance, just turned gray and retired from it all, a man about to vanish, but thick and coarse as the landscape. He stands there above farm implements as if one of them had morphed right in front of me. The sun-particles dance around him, making him spirit-like and distant, though he’s close enough to smell: cologne and menthol, barbeque and gasoline. Fire reflects from his blue eyes, though Lewis had no-nonsense brown eyes. The fire seems to bear down from the West, where mountains and sea are being crossed both ways by

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troop planes I can almost hear. It isn’t fire, but just the sun – a fairy-stream of freckled light between me and my Old Man there in the shed, the leftover-place in my brain where he still lives. The idea, maybe, for whoever directs this desert nightmare, is for one of us to take the short step over, to dare the river of light and touch: matter and antimatter, past and present, peace and war. Which am I? He stands there, steely eyes over a sneer. My dream is mine. Speak or get out! But this is Texas, dream or not, and it belongs to Lewis. A shadow passes, maybe a train or the latest troop transport above our heads. By now the river of delicate, blemished light between Lewis and me is gone. Then I’m looking at a plump, beaming, red-haired little girl, furiously freckled, obnoxiously happy and completely of her own moment. I’m thinking this is not what innocence should look like. The freckles are so angry they’re like bees. She’s squinty-eyed from the pudge in her cheeks, a big smile, calico dress and ribbons. Lewis is still there but she’s standing where he’d been, and he sits over by a dark doorway toward a garage or a hangar. He’s a fifties greaser now. It’s worse to have him only in my periphery. There’s the smell of petroleum again, then a fresh apple pie, the sweetest smell ever, and though it’s nowhere to be seen I can see the glazed tan of the crust and that’s where the sunlight went, sucked down into the pie shell like a backwards atom-bomb explosion. Lewis’s plaid, short-sleeved shirt is brand new and he’s smoking a Salem. It’s just-lit and the smoke is just curling heavenward, still no higher than my head; he raises his hand to take another puff, sucks in and flares the glowing end, squints, looks me over, and exhales.

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I can’t tell if he recognizes me, or if he does and wants to kill me if it’s worth standing up. I’m one lousy Texan, and that’s just the start of my problems. I never liked the nineteen fifties; always hated them. What was so great about the nineteen fifties? I say that to him in my dream (it’s still mine), and he chuckles, then frowns and says: “That’s the decade you were born in, Flipdick!” with the razor-edge of menace that was as much his ID to me as was his name. Lewis reads minds; he interrogates my dreaming soul. He knows that at times in my growing up, when he was away to Thailand, Laos or Vietnam, or later even gun-running to El Salvador or Nicaragua, even Iraq – I was wishing that he wouldn’t make it back. I wasn’t the first military brat to feel that about his dad. It’s a classic, and you could make a minor religion out of it. It’s the climax to Pat Conroy’s Great Santini. Call it sacrifice, or transgression; sick inverse of the Prodigal Son. There was always the possibility that he wouldn’t come back. There was always a war, the same war always, and he was always fighting it. He was a fifties monster, or a fifties manly scientist fighting the monster, the slanty-eyed Godzilla; he was the handsome engineer in a shortsleeved shirt, having a picnic under an elm at the riverside, his wife and kids around him; and then the war, and he went: chiseled eyes, rock jaw. There’s no Cinemascope to it. Lewis is just there in the dream-shack a few feet away, sitting on an old Pepsi crate, tired from a day at work, off to battle but home by dinner every night; smoking his cigarette, and the smoke is finding its way through a hole in the ceiling of this West-Texas shed in my dream; I’m fascinated, and follow.

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1 Mar 69 Dear Patsy, It has been a fast and hot day and it’s not over by a long way. I’m trying to meet everyone and locate equipment. I had to go take a couple of shots that I didn’t have a chance to get when I arrived in country. Have you heard from anyone in GER [Germany]? Did anyone get orders? I’ll bet that Sasson is still there with John Thompson. I was called in from the fld [field] last night and given a Company. My new address is Company “M” (Ranger) 75th Inf. 199th Inf Bde APO SF 96279 It’s the only AIRBORNE unit in the 199 Inf Bde. If you remember I showed you the article in the ARMY TIMES about the RANGER Companies… I’m very proud to get the command. Tell the kids that I love them and that I’m not a “Leg” anymore, and that I have a RANGER Co. OK? I’m glad that you had a chance to go bowling. It will take a few times to get used to the ball. I’ll bet you had a time trying to bowl with the young boys along! I wish I could bowl with you even though I’m lousy at it. Don’t forget to tell everyone my new address. I love you and miss you more than you can ever know! I think of you and the things that we did, but most of all I just miss not to be able to look at, and hold you, and yes, kid you a little. You’re my Darling and I’m very proud of you. I love you, Patsy! Jim

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THE TET OFFENSIVE began more than a year earlier, lasting several months. Now the enemy offers a “post-Tet,” a smaller offensive, making things busy and sending casualties into the thousands. Sappers and night raids; a worrying series of assaults, not over by a long way. Lewis, no longer a “Leg” (mere infantryman) as he says, but in command of a Ranger company, is in the middle of it all; and so were we, or rather so was Mother, who read the letters and gnawed her nails. Cronkite’s sad eyes every night, the casualty counts at the bottom of the screen, the letters: these were a keeping of time more than the calendar itself. But R&R is on Lewis’s mind, in his memo book, and on his calendar, which I have right here: a US Army Pacific MAN WITH A MISSION pocket calendar, each tiny day of each month of 1969 resolutely crossed through in angry ink. Beyond family matters, he asks about friends, mostly those they knew the year before, in Germany; we’d been with the 1/509th Airborne Infantry. It was a social tour, with time for skydiving, soirees, and rowdy nights at the Officers’ Club. Then several of them went to Vietnam. Did they all micro-manage their back-home lives from the war zone? Who could have been as dedicated as Lewis? Nor were their wives as timorous as my mother. That’s our myth; we need our ultimates. He was all hard and she was soft, all center and no edge. A couple of years later in Nebraska, when it was still only autumn, we set out one morning in our baby-blue Cadillac for the elementary, junior-high, and high-school drop-offs. A few light flakes started falling and my mother stopped the car straight away – half a block from the house; didn’t back up, didn’t turn around, but sent one of us home for Lewis, because she was determined not to drive in snow.

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Was she afraid or simply stubborn about her principles: that the Small World she had kept within, through all her world journeys, would provide the frame of her reality, no matter what the Big World pressed upon her? Millard, Nebraska saw lots of snow. The winter previous, on the very day we arrived, drifts nearly hid the new home: snow up the north side, a beautiful halfparabola. Mother took no chances with the weather, excepting the storm that was our stepfather. She was his woman and his port of calm, and never feared him as we did. But this thing about snow: it infuriated Lewis. He stomped out, bellowing, jerked open the driver’s door, and they bickered a while before he got in, slammed the door and sped us off to school. He took the missions he was given.

My mother’s favorite stress-release was bowling. I see her at the head of the lane in Capri pants, nicely coiffed, biting her lip, aiming the round missile toward the pins that might be the men in her life, or maybe us. Most of the time, the black ball sat in its bag on the floor of the hall closet, cartoon bomb without the fuse, ballast that kept us from floating away. Eventually it disappeared – lost in a move, given to a neighbor – but for a while, she was intent on the sport, and sometimes one of us was allowed to tag along. The emblematic memory for me is from 1963 or thereabouts: Lunday was at Bragg and the marriage was falling apart. It was the Space Age, Atomic Age, Crew-cut Age; it was the time of spies. Women had flared eyeglasses, men wore horn rims. Our Melmac had starbursts, and comets flew so close you could clean with them. The cosmos was our home: on the back wall of the Post Exchange bowling alley was a mural, glittery and deep-dark, of the entire universe. It

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was over-populated, a celestial Times Square with asteroids, comets, satellites, rockets, and more than one Saturn in cockeyed rings. It spread out to the left of plate-glass windows facing out on the parking lot. I’m plopped down on a swooped, molded seat at a chrome and Formica table, Coke and french fries, while my mother bowls. I stare into space, and the defeated pins make a sound midway between thwacking wood and breaking glass. The strikes spark out of my mother’s hands, the ball orbits back from the aphelion of the pin deck, and the cycle repeats: my mother’s at war, and she’s winning. It’s the laws of physics. The universe is on the wall and I’m waiting for the game to finish, waxy Coke cup in my palms, somewhere on Earth.

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2 Mar 69 Dearest Patsy: It has now been over a week since I received any mail! I’m sure it‘s because I’ve changed units. I hope that everything is going well for you. I love you and miss you. I guess the kids are growing fast. I hate not being able to be there with you and our family. How is Bobby doing with his bike? Tell him I said to be careful and to use his head for something besides his hat. He is intelligent but he needs to concentrate more. Do Donny and Kevin fight much? If they do, it’s natural for brothers that close in age to do so. Tell them I said to be good and mind you. I wrote Bob and told him that I thought Debbie was too young to ride in a Boy’s car. He should have written her by now and given his opinion on it. Tell Debbie that I trust her, but am not very big on boys because I used to be one. I love her and don’t want her to get hurt in any way. I believe that the TV could be made to work but I’m not an electrician, so who knows. Baby! Do you think that you can get by on $400 a month now? I hope so because I would like to meet you on R&R (understatement). I should have this unit for about six months and then either another Company or Bn. Staff for the rest of the time. How often do you drive out to Ft. Bragg? How much gas do you have to buy a week? Ask MacLeod to check the car (whining noise) and how much it would cost to fix. Does the Commissary have the things you need? It had better, because that’s all we can afford. Patsy! I have to knock this off and get some more work done, but remember that I love you now & always. Jim

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SMALL THINGS, family things, kids and machines that don’t work as they’re supposed to. We see his own yearnings for these things, and the home life they signify, but also the sense that he’s still projecting himself into them: not only as a stay against his present reality, but with the sense that he’s really there at home. He has our rhythms, and they’re weaving into his own. As the details add up, you see he’s sustaining himself. Lewis needs these things. Writing about the household life, reading my mother’s letters about it – her questions, complaints, intelligences – was passage home. Years earlier, before my parents’ divorce, Lunday had taken the opposite approach during his time abroad. He barely wrote, after a few months in Korea, in 1960 – 61, and stopped sending money as well; our mother had to get the Army to garnish his pay, and at the lowest point, accepted food baskets from a church. She didn’t tell me this, years later, to disgrace my first father in my eyes; she just knew I had a need for particulars. Why am I telling it now? To set the frame of what minimal portrait I can make. Bad father, good soldier: between the two is the man. Korea is so far away, so green, so filled with gumdrop mountains, one’s life starts anew on entering its scene. Worshipful oriental women, cold beer, buddies who laughed at your jokes. If there were rules and regulations, duties, missions, it only made the whole thing seem that much more separate from any previous or forthcoming life. We didn’t exist. We’d vanished, and when I look at the few color slides and snapshots – in one, Lunday’s got three long scratches across his face from a jeep accident – I see the transition he’d entered, in between his tromboneplaying and Green-Beret phases: in photographs from the latter, often there’d be a razor-line in the eyes, but for now it was just a giddiness, a delight in the immediate present; not the simple

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glee of a few years back, when he’d played trombone all around France with the 279th Army Band. In one way at least I’m Lunday’s son, and live to make for myself convincing alternate worlds. Lewis had seen that:

Tell him I said to be careful and to use his head for something besides his hat. He is intelligent but he needs to concentrate more.

Often, he could put it much more bluntly. His mission, when he turned my way, was to provide lessons in reality. So what stunt might I have pulled that got into my mother’s latest letter? Maybe nothing; I was the man of the house, after all, oldest male on duty, ten years old and in need of a general chiding for being a daydreamer, which was dereliction. Dreamer meant nothing: you were a man or a bum. I had to live by Lewis’s primary colors.

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4 Mar 69 Dearest Patsy: I received a letter dtd. 25 & 26 Feb today, # 18. It was sure welcome but I guess that a lot of mail was lost since I changed units. Kevin sounds like a real stinker. He got it all honest, as you know! I don’t want him to be a bad boy either so you will just have to be very firm with him. The rest of our children are old enough to know better. I’ve got a fine unit and some good people, and a couple of BUMS. We have a very interesting mission as compared to other units. I’m used to the climate again and back in shape. I didn’t realize how run down I let myself get. Even at that, I was in better condition than most of the people I came with because a lot dropped from exhaustion and I kept going – but it could be that I’m too dumb to quit. The way I figure it we should have enough for R&R right now – that is, if you can get by on $400.00 a month, and have received your ck for $344 and the ck for $466, and had $173 in the bank and $70 in cash at the end of the month, Or $1,053 total. But then we still need $400 more, because it will cost at least $1,000.00 for R&R if you can save it in the next few months. I get $30.00 a month over here and I haven’t spent $10.00 so far. Did Lt. Scott send you a ck for $50.00? I should get R&R around July. I won’t know for awhile but will be able to send you paperwork for Ticket about three (3) weeks before I’m to go. I’ll know in time for you to start pills. I want you to go ahead and get a physical, and all the kids also. You can buy the pills and start taking them when I give the word. Jim P.S. Excuse the writing, it’s getting dark!

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THE SECRET BOMBING of Cambodia begins early March, 1969, and is initially referred to as “Operation Breakfast.” Mission titles are often cute like that. This one came from the breakfast meeting at the Pentagon where Nixon assented to the plan. Here we can see a particular trope, one dependent upon a sudden shift of scale or context: small to large, venial to abominable, fortified cereal to fortified NVA bases, vitamin B-12 to vitamin B-52, sunlit linoleum floors to jungle carpet-bombings. In the letter above, Lewis has on his green visor: adding the dollars and cents, counting down to the R&R. It’s as if the whole war’s being fought for that week’s vacation from it. When I give the word – as if conducting a maneuver – he tells his wife to be ready to start taking the Pill: birth control as a part of his household management from afar, and his accruing desire.

Two fathers, and I was about to have two mothers; though I never got to know Lunday’s second wife, Simone, that well. Debbie, who never got over our parents’ separation, spent a year with the new parental configuration, but I saw the new Lundays only on brief visits. Besides Simone there were her four sons from two previous marriages, also to soldiers. Altogether we were a nuclear family, but fissionable; dividing in order to expand. Simone carried a deep past in her small but bold form. We were instructed to call her “Ly,” close enough to “Lee” among the white Southerners she married into. When Lunday met her she owned a bar in Saigon near the famed Continental Palace. Years before, she’d been a refugee from the North during the war with the French. In a letter further down, Lewis calls her a “bar girl”; but the straight part is that she was a mother and

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survivor. You’ll find her alive and well in Florida, a few miles from my father’s grave. I found a photo of her on the Internet taken sometime around 1967; she’s sitting with other Vietnamese women, each beside an American soldier. The caption identifies the men as Special Forces. The beer sign, the drinks and food on the table make it a bar scene. Some of the faces are identified, including Simone’s. The man who posted it, an assistant DA in California, made the web site in hopes of identifying his father. His adoptive mother gave him the outlines of his parentage – Vietnamese mother, American dad – but no names. He’d located Simone and flown out to talk to her, and made some progress on his names with her help. I emailed him just to see what would come of it, and we traded information on the phone. He was on his way to a Special Forces reunion in Fayetteville, so he could dig for clues about his unknown father; he offered to ask around for me about Lewis, as well. It wasn’t easy accepting my father’s love for another woman, even five years past the divorce. For a while I had the recurring fantasy that the four would reconfigure: Lewis would marry Simone and my own parents would reconcile. What did I know of the ways of the heart? I wanted a family square and solid, rooted as it was in my deepest memories and branching straight from the same crux. We could keep moving around the world in the Army way, fighting communists, spreading our American smiles; but I wanted the family to be free of history, itself a Home, transcendent of the no-place where we lived. Simone was strong and passionate, and a thief of one’s affections. My mother feared her as a rival for the love of her children, not her ex. It was warranted: Simone wanted to mother all her husband’s children. Before I met her, she’d cleared the way by dazzling my sister, who was allowed to fly to the wedding in Hawaii. Debbie brought back gifts from her for me and my

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brothers. I was given an ID bracelet with my name on it, BOBBY, the first pure gold I ever saw. To wear it was to betray my mother, so mainly I kept it stowed away. It was jewelry, and when Lewis got back he nixed it, anyway. A man could wear a ring and a wrist watch, maybe cufflinks and a tie clip, but bracelets were for girls. Nor did he like the POW/MIA bracelets that were all the rage. The gold bracelet was heavy and chafed a bit; and it reminded me that I had nothing else from my father except my face and short stature. Lewis forbade us boys GI Joes as well: they were doll-sized, cut from the Barbie mold and not for a warrior’s sons. Any little man we could fit in the palm of the hand, like the toy soldiers that came in bags from the five & dime, was OK. He even got down and played with us sometimes. His own boyhood had been shortened by necessity: his father, Jimmy, had walked out when Lewis was twelve, and he’d had to get three paper routes to help his mom take care of his infant sister. Then the Guard at age thirteen, and the putting away of childish things. Lewis’s urge to play might have been suppressed, but it came out in various ways. He was a big happy kid around a plane of any sort, and flew every chance he could. Lunday wanted to fly, too, and got a license to train glider pilots after he retired in 1976. Both men thought of skydiving as their art and that shared love was a bond of friendship when they met. Lewis had more focus, and maybe more hunger for it than Lunday. But my first father practiced skydiving, like everything, as fellowship: he loved people, loved friends, maybe more than family. Not more; just in lieu of. Lunday loved who was there. He loved his father, George Pascal Lunday, and they died together in the same glider in 1977. At a hundred feet up, while they were still in tow, something went awry: wind shear, or my grandfather having a heart attack and slamming the aileron pedals. The investigation never went beyond those guesses. Lunday saw something go wrong and cut away to save the tow plane,

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knowing the glider didn’t have room to pull out of the dive. So, a sacrifice: his life, and beyond that, his own father’s life, to save the pilot of the tow plane. That’s what I settled on. He’d saved a life in the air once before: in 1966, during a “HALO” jump (high altitude – low opening) in Taiwan, Lunday leaped out of the plane to disengage the snagged gear of the Chinese jumper who’d gone out before him; his weight did the trick, both men landed safely, and they gave him an Army Commendation Medal. It was the same impulsiveness as in other, less heroic choices; and maybe the same as when he nose-dived the glider in Pensacola. Simone was devastated. Staying with her during the funerals, I saw her prostrate much of the time before an altar she’d made of my father’s flight jacket and wartime portrait. At the funeral a minister who’d never met Lunday sang his praises all the same. I was nineteen, and wanted a eulogy that balanced the bad with the good. Let a man have the glory of his faults as well as his virtues: He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again. My Vietnamese stepmother had no uncertainties: she was all raw feeling, and threw herself noisily on the flag-draped casket as if a thousand men were inside, or the last good one. It was a different sort of mourning for the rest of the crowd, and you could taste the consternation. But it fit my father: he was overdramatic himself, even in death.

In a photograph taken in Tennessee, when my sister and I were on a visit to our Lunday grandparents, the two of us are posed with our cousin Brenda around the gravestone of an ancestor named John: my sister with an appropriately mournful expression – she was an actress! – my cousin and I, younger and oblivious to such meanings, squinting and smiling into the camera.

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The gravestone is jagged, uneven at the top, as if on its way to becoming a natural object again. It’s someone’s semi-rural yard, a lawn but no sidewalk, a drainage ditch and then the road. A fifties-style bungalow sits in the background across the street. A scrawl on the back of the photo puts John’s death in 1812. It’s near Nashville, but I don’t know where; so it’s lost again, at least for now. In another image from the same year, 1964, we sit in a creek atop a waterfall, a smallish one, as if to plunge down and through it into the stream of things. There are several celebratory photos of our threesome from the early sixties; we were the promise, the three of us, and it was rare that my sister and I traveled to Nashville; so a record was always made. On the day we went to the falls, my parents walked up ahead and I was trying to catch up. They were serious about something; sensing it, I tried to draw closer. I was barefoot, and the sticker burrs attacked the soles and sides of my feet with a vengeance. When I wore shoes the burrs clotted my shoelaces and it was an extended meditation to sit and pluck them out. The burrs were everywhere, but I took them as a personal insult that day. They were the inverse of fireflies that languidly declined your grasp after dusk; a random pleasure in the brief life of a summer nightfall, tracking away, but a few always falling into the jar for a moment of theater before release. Their evil twins were these burrs, creatures of the summer sun, always and everywhere as the fireflies were brief and native to the air, just at a child’s height. I couldn’t keep up with the somber adults, and it was a dreamscape, the biting weeds, separating me from my family. I panicked and wailed. Nanny, my grandmother, held me back. She wasn’t of a mind to coddle me as she usually did – was harsh in fact, as never: it meant that something was wrong.

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Written back into the moment is that I acknowledged it, my grandmother’s impatience and the disquieting buzz. That day my parents agreed to separate, and the dirt path from the creek was Divorce Road. Maybe most parents sit down and talk with their children when they split up, but I don’t remember it. My father just disappeared, and we never spoke of it, as if he’d always been gone; and of course he’d mostly been away, so his traces were easy to cover. Except that inside I adhered all the more tightly to the spare images I possessed. He became the sun that was always there on a gray day, but couldn’t be seen. A few times he did come back, unannounced it seemed, making a gift of himself. All the adult things that matter in a marriage, the feelings, the love and lack of it, the changes, the infidelities, the money, the growing apart, all of it buzzed around me, but without the adult words. Children are more troubled by some of those things because they haven’t got the labels, and the adult things are creature-like and angry and can’t be appeased. The narrowing helix troubles me, how wide and slow the arcs of time are early on, and then how close and fast they become when you’re older and want but to slow it all down. There was a tipping point in my thirties, but I missed it: where the speed of things was balanced with my ability to absorb, judge, appreciate, and wistfully regret. But there we were, the three of us, paused over the falls, smiling like idiots; and the water rushed on.

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28 Mar 69 Dearest Patsy: Today is another hot, dirty day. The sky looks like it is going to rain but it won’t, at least not for another month, then it will be just another type of trouble. How is that weather at home? Is the house warm enough? I received the package and (2) letters # 44 & 45 from you today, and of course I’m very happy about it! Baby, I can get cigarettes OK but everything else was needed and wanted. You can buy the tape cartridges at the PX or at a music shop. I do not think Debbie should go to Hawaii or any place else during the school year. I don’t want her traveling by herself. There are too many things that could happen. It is a shame about Ike, but he had a great, useful, and long life! I did not get to see Bob. The only way you can get to where I’m at is by boat or helicopter; either that, or be real tough and bullet-proof. It was nice of the boy to fix the trash rack, but when I was a lad I would help a beautiful woman like you in a pair of seconds. I’m sorry that I didn’t get more done before I left, but I didn’t have much ambition at that time. How is the car doing? Did Mr. Hill repair the doors? How is Bobby doing with his bike? Donny & Kevin sound like two bandits. Tell them to shape up. I had two men get wounded last night, but they are fine, and should get out of hospital in a few days. I had one idiot shoot himself in the foot. He’s OK, but when I get a hold of him he will wish he’d hit himself in the head. I love you, Patsy! Jim

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P.S. Girls do not entertain boys without adults in the house! Period.

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EISENHOWER was my first President, something like an infant himself with his big head and wisps of hair. Of late I’ve admired his round-edged, sensible ways, seeming at times to have made things motionless, but perhaps clearing a space for change. He warned us:

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together . . .

More than a mesh now; rather, a labyrinth.

Stepfathering is a hard splice. The stepparent has to bring his strangeness indoors. He usurps: Claudius to your Hamlet, a violent revision to the imagined and hoped-for life. Debbie and I were horsing around one afternoon while Lewis and our mother were out. She was rolling me across the carpet in a woolen military-issue sleeping bag, and I had the hood over my head backwards. We had sharp-edged, two-tiered side tables on each side of the couch and I bounced into the corner of one, cutting open my head through the sleeping bag. I saw just one cartoon star, and felt no pain at first; then the moistness seeped through the wool and I bellowed. Debbie got out of her silliness quick enough to pull the hood down and see the blood. It wasn’t the first blood I’d lost, but it was the first head wound; we were both chastened. She bandaged me, then we both cleaned up and waited for our parents to come home.

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When they got back, Lewis smacked me. I was shocked at the upside-downness of it: I already had an injury, and he slapped me for hurting myself. I could taste the unfairness, and had to swallow it since there was no objecting. My mother also didn’t object – at least not in my hearing. No one acknowledged the absurdity of slapping a child with a gash in his head. My sister got off with a scolding. He popped me again on some other occasion, and expecting a second blow, I picked up my infant brother. I didn’t actually project Kevin outward shield-fashion, but certainly that was my intent. It was a bit cowardly even for a six year old. Lewis was disgusted. He ordered me to put my brother down and turned away from the sorry sight. It was his face above all that did violence to me: face like a fist, eyes like bare knuckles. Soldiers develop the thousand-yard stare: Lewis looked like someone born with it. But he could have a twinkle in his eye as well. You wanted to find out what it was that would keep it there. I see him seething, but it’s unfair, more a reflection of myself. Something I would do triggered anger: and there he was calling me, “BOBBY” – flat, grim, foreboding blood; knots on my head, but then the stare would cool down to a loving gaze, and he’d hug me, tell me to clean up my own blood, and send me to bed. In the Army you slid from the womb straight into boot camp. I’ve been trying to find a Polaroid of brother Don, who was two at the time: he’s sitting on the edge of a bed and his eyes are blackened and he’s smiling. He got whacked for shitting his diapers. Potty training. What did a two-year-old know? Well, he didn’t know not to shit his diapers. And who would hit a child that age for shitting in his diapers, for anything? Only somebody who never shit his, not ever. But when I looked for the Polaroid, it wasn’t there. Did I dream it? The image, wherever it is, wouldn’t prove or disprove the end result. My brother Don never had the chance to shape

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his own protective space; that was the sad thing, whether he got hit for shitting his diapers or not. Don got good at drawing cartoons and doing voice impersonations. Otherwise he was quiet and reserved, and had the tendency to get up and leave the living room when Lewis came in, sinking down into his arm chair after work like a warrior king. Maybe Lewis wasn’t a monster; maybe he wasn’t that bad. Somewhere beneath the memories is the man himself. He’s a funky Zen koan: what’s the sound of one hand slapping you silly? Figure it out and the ghost of Jim Lewis will appear, down out of the dirty blue, smiling and showing the small dark hole where a hand-grenade fragment took out one of his incisors: fit yourself through.

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6 Apr 69 Dearest Patsy: I returned from OP [operation] and had two letters, 51/52 & 53. I lost two (2) more men, (1) wounded by booby trap in the legs, and one has hepatitis (I think). The wounded man will be OK and will probably return to the US because it will take awhile for him to heal. It’s a very helpless feeling when you get booby traps, because you can’t fight them. A man gets wounded, and there is no one to get back at. I feel bad about it, but am glad that he will recover soon. On the first of Apr I had just returned from a mission, and Bob came out to see me, along with Jerry Kidwell and Rufus Sandoval, who I joined the Army with. He’s from Waco and had got out for three years. It was the first time I’d seen him since 1958. We talked for almost an hour. He and Jerry work for Project Delta. I’m trying to get a hold of Bob again to get a ride to Nha Trang for a two-day Commanders’ (Ranger) meeting. It starts on the 8th, ends on the 10th, no luck so far! I’m looking forward to it! (Anything to get out of the rat race). If Jack Kelly has orders, then good for him! He didn’t answer my letters. I might run into him over here; doubt it! I guess the rest of those people will stay in GER forever! It’s good work, if you can get it! Patsy! You’re doing a great job at keeping expenses down, and I know how hard it is with our family, or any family. Patsy, I love you, and think of you constantly. I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you, and always will. Tell the kids that I love and miss them, and to be good! I love you, Baby! Jim

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EVERYTHING’S FAR off: it’s night now, the frogs are chirruping after a dense rain; the ceiling fan’s traveling a breeze against the hair of my forearm, and this is a world. The brain’s a sentry, on guard against tomorrow. If I let that song that just finished play again, can I have back the minutes? The frogs are riffling time through the night, stretching it, scrunching it – take a deep breath, flatten the peaks of accordion time. Lewis shows some bitterness, in the last letter, toward comrades still in Germany, with their easy jobs. Some will eventually follow him to Vietnam, though often to posts in the rear, safe from danger; some will go like Lewis to the jungle, and some will die there. When he disappeared in 1982, none of the old Army buddies called or came around. It felt like a conspiracy of silence, but now I think the few who heard about the disappearance kept away because they feared they could vanish, too. Even before you go missing, you can be in a place where no one can reach you: no mail, no satellite-to-radio phone calls; no rides out.

The first home we had together after Lewis married my mother was a little box of a house in Fayetteville behind the main strip mall at that time, “Eutaw,” which I thought some alternateuniverse Western state. Geographical things to a six-year-old are only a bit larger than psychological things in their jurisdictions, or maybe smaller. The Big World, just how big was it? How densely braided are the streets of the world, and is a mayor bigger than a king? Utah, given a lavender tint by the mapmakers, might have been closer or nearer than Eutaw. Geographically they’re discrete and adjusted to scale; psychologically, they’re both on Mars.

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I’ve been to Utah a couple of times, driving through from elsewhere. I didn’t feel quite white enough among the citizens there. But away from the Denny’s or the Cracker Barrel, the wide-girthed natives staring at me for a stranger, out into the mountains, of course it didn’t matter. A roadside restaurant is a psychological space, but you can leave mind for mineral whenever you want. Sometimes it’s the best way to stay sane: get down into the salt of yourself. If you’re a white man, the Aryan pelt gets skinned in no time. And the street we lived on was Acorn, of which there were many. Many more pine needles and rough orbits of pine cones on the land, those half-creature things, hand grenades. Pine cones lie in wait, daring you to pick them up: do it wrong and they hurt you, never mind who’s head you were going to lob it at. What other use could such squat things have in the world? Throw them! That they suggested weaponry was part of Nature. Life at age six teetered between the animated world and the real: acorns with their caps on straight, gigantic in the hand-like paws of smiling cartoon chipmunks. Any animal I might have met wandering the woods near our acorn-sized house was a potential friend or enemy, like the snapping turtle in a creek under a bridge. He clamped on the chuff of my right hand when I tried to take him home. Maybe he was trying to take me home. He was a big rock-shaped thing, but I shook him off somehow without thunder. Out of pure grade-school malice, my friends found him or some similar creature, and smashed him to bits in the road above the creek. I saw pieces of his shell like a broken toy and strands of his innards, and felt sick: not squeamish from gore, but from witness. I had a sliver of conscience already, and it seemed wrong to have done that; and I knew it wasn’t out of love for me. Vigilantism loves itself. It was the brutal balance, old as the tribe. Then a momentary quiet, that unnerving quiet around something dead; a car goes by and the world goes on. From some

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vantage point – maybe not all that far out, really – the turtle’s passing is no more or less significant than the death of a boy. As for my hand, after a few years, the scar was gone. The war story wasn’t the same without it, and one move later the gang of boys was not there to confirm. That was the unfortunate thing about moving every year or so: your reputation started over. That was also the good thing. Friendships were a constant flux. In my mind now, individuals join compositely, are forever young, framed by definite spaces, faces with soundtracks drawn from the Top 40 of the moment. Having been a civilian for most of my life, I barely recall the specialness and even superiority we felt as military over non-military. One gave little thought to the other branches of the Armed Forces; Army was the real military, of which the others were variations. But we felt superior to what? In the civilian schools we were the smarter kids; we had multiple vision, because we’d been over the horizon, had seen other lands and witnessed the particular, potent American stride. America was an idea traveling with us wherever we went. We felt superior to civilians because we had flexible accents, or no accent, spoke like the voices on TV news, the voice of rationality and assurance. But most of all we felt superior to the civilians because our fathers were powerful men, some who had killed; defenders of everything good, though we had to concede that somehow that included civilians. Many years ago, and many years after our living there (a memory itself as in the middle of a sea), I went as an adult to find that house on Acorn Street; amazingly, it was still standing. It was just as black and white as the photographs I had of it. Naturally it had shrunk to a depressingly small size, as always happens; and had sunk as well deeper into the gulch. The

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gulch or depression I’d not remembered, recalling the space around the house as flat and without hems and haws in its address to the road. It was a shortcut of memory, perhaps. Now my memory of the pilgrimage itself is suspicious, as I must have been in a dark frame of mind, recently married, unsure of what I was; about to enter a long melancholy. One might knock on the door of a former residence, hoping to be greeted by the present occupants as a kind of relative, having shared the same space; a kind of ancestor, whose knowledge of the house in its younger days will draw their wonder, enrich their lives. But “I used to live here” is an intrusion, a theft to those who live there now. The little house might remember you, but won’t admit to it. It remembers the last coat of paint, the last flush, the last click of a door latch. These things must seem as living to it as its occupants. Mind and mineral, geology and geography and psychology and religion – measures of accident, but somehow, as far out as it goes, still human. I didn’t knock on anyone’s door that day. At first I wasn’t sure I had the right house, then I was sure from something visceral, my Madeleine maybe, but stale and dry. It was the shutters, the way they put eyes on the old house, an expression of sadness. I recognized the house, and it did not recognize me. Wood and mortar might be sentient, but they’re rarely sentimental.

Standing at the curb near our house on Acorn Street, corduroy cuffs rolled up to show a deep-red flare of flannel lining, Sears cardigan bunched over the waistline, I would squint beneath the after-school sun at passing cars. Fins, languorous and wavy, with all their emblematic promise of speed and forthrightness: “Chevrolet”: doesn’t it sound so wonderfully gay? Cars were made for camp and parade. They’d slip by, true to their fishy ends, wide-eyed

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stares, big-hipped chassis. I don’t know how many convertibles I ever saw outside of a magazine or TV ad, but I do know I saw bent elbows jut from open windows, relaxed, hairy, winking their faux-butt cracks at the sun. Or sometimes an extended arm, as if to drag fingers in a stream, but a cigarette smoking itself at the end as the other arm turned the corner. Short-sleeved shirt. Driving was sailing, flying, dreaming, going; I didn’t much care for being a passenger, but I could do all kinds of driving from the street corner just watching the cars go by. Those triangles of ventwindows, tacked to the wind, little sails. The squinting was a kind of mask or a shield. The car would pass by, slowing to turn the corner, but the slow turn might have been the car’s intention to stop and question me, enlist me, accost me. It was a way of playing chicken: squinting was what a tough guy did, a soldier watching the tanks lumber by; a cowboy in the dusty plains. Take these two images of me at the curb squinting near Acorn Street: one, I’m adult-like, tall and strong, perhaps a tough NCO with a cigarette glued to his lip. The other, I’m just a little boy, but one dimension over from who I really was: edgy, aware, as if I kept coming back from about five seconds into the future. But I’m a boy in any world: strange, since I had the hardest time seeing myself as a boy when I was a boy. The disjunction between my sense of self, my body image, my fit into a certain life and what I now reconstruct in memory, standing as if outside, looking over and down at the boy: it’s a little sad, as if one of those cars did stop, and I was kidnapped and never returned. Disappeared, and they weren’t doing the milk-carton thing yet. And the driver of the car was I – the adult, who still can’t quite imagine who or what he is, who stares at the fellow in the mirror as at an invader, who can’t always remember how old he is; it was I, I was driving the car. But where are we going?

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A reservoir of the perpetual flow of scenes that I felt a part of, an actor. Waiting out by the street: something will come, something is coming now. Let’s say there was a father in that car. I had two fathers, a biological and an empirical one. The father in the car was some stereotype, Platonic Father of Fathers, a TV-Dad, a savior in my moments of dread. The car was returning, looking for me; it was gassed up for a voyage to the world beyond corners. There was a waterwheel somewhere in the woods near Acorn Street, in a stream on its way to a reservoir. I came on it by accident and sat watching for a long time as if its turning told a story. The moss-stained wood paddles, the muscular creak of the machinery, the angry-looking axle, and the suffering water rising and falling. Every walk in the woods was a search for the uroboros, center of the world or some substation thereof. What made everything move, measuring it out? What rounded off every instant before it dropped back into the stream? I wanted to find Ultima Thule, or whatever I would have called it then: somewhere where my father was, though he was a god, a face in a cloud. Even movie stars were more real than he. Ultimate North: go and return victorious to the gabled home, sit in a fleshy chair by the most faithful lamp, and read of my own adventures. I kept an animal graveyard in the lot across from our house: last rites for rats, possums, mice, birds, frogs, lizards, whatever littered the woods and sidewalks above the level of insect. Shoeboxes became coffins; popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue made crosses. My mistake was in thinking it sacred: a kid named Douglas from the top of the hill trashed it when I was elsewhere, dug up the graves, strewed the bones and broken crosses.

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There was no offense. That is, I felt none, sensing instead that my rituals were false. But I cried, mourning the loss of a previous self. Nostalgias had already taken me: at six I longed for the prelapsarian age of five. To cry; something more rudimentary than a sense of personal justice. It was easier then: what ailed you was a torrent of tears that burst betimes above ground, then returned to darkness. The afterlife is only one of our graces. Kids, like a different race: measuring out a step-world untraceable to adults. At the creek, some of the stations along its length struck the fancy as riverine and wild. Somewhere, it joined the sea. I knew I could trace it belowground if need be. I had seen an advertisement in a comic book or a Boy’s Life for a miniature submarine – on the same page as the ads for X-Ray Specs and Sea Monkeys. The drawing of the little boy at the helm (facing right, toward Progress) was determined and happy. I was taken with the idea that this was the real thing, that I could order it, assemble it, and launch it into the secret ocean. I doubt that I ever broached the topic of ordering it. The cost was six dollars. The ad appeared frequently. Before turning seven I took it for a hoax, though a plane from lawn-mower parts and plywood seemed doable at least to age ten. As for Sea Monkeys, they’re real: genus Artemia, species salina.

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15 Apr 69 Dearest Patsy: Believe it or not I’m still on Radio Watch but I should get my RTO [radio/telephone operator] back when it gets light. I wanted to write and ask what kind of China you like (design on it) flower or plain with gold or silver rim? I like plain because it is proper wherever you are (country) also it comes in settings for 12 persons. 151 pcs. or 96 pcs. Let me know which you like ! OK? Type and # of pieces. Also do you want silver or bronze ware to use with it? It comes with service for 12 or 8, that is, 118 pcs or 80 pcs for 8 – what do you think & want? It would be sent to the States from Japan PX. Also it comes with design and modern. Let me know which of it you want! I guess you can tell that I’m looking at a PX catalogue! I want to get something for you. I don’t really know which size we need 8 or 12 because it’s formal type dinner ware. There is no big hurry on it because I have plenty of time to order it. This was just a note, but I had the chance to write, and wanted to tell you that I love you more each second. You’re my Darling! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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THE CHINA, not yet chosen, paid for, or shipped, will be another significant link between where Lewis is and home, like the obsessive plans for R&R and the minute details of housekeeping. All three are also, despite his sometimes business- or war-like tone, essential to the ongoing romance in the letters. How much your parents love each other is not always a noticeable part of one’s childhood, though it might be the placental security around it. Given the seething rage of which my stepfather was capable, the gentler, slightly comical, ongoing love-game he played with my mother was one of the more comforting aspects of growing up. Lewis would come home from work, when work was not on the other side of the world, to sweep our mother, to her pretend annoyance, off her feet; then combining sweetness with ribaldry, performed his acts of attention, meant for us all: a ritual of renewal – not only for their marriage, but for the traveling tent that was our family. And the tent needed a full set of china.

For some, love’s a performance; for me, it’s treading water. Even learning to swim was an affair of the heart. The summer I was twelve, the Officer’s Club pool was just up the hill from where we lived that year, prime place for pre-teen social contact. My swimming wasn’t beautiful, but with much wasted energy I got where I was going. I still don’t breathe properly, and my motions are somewhat spastic, but I can make it across. Once, I swam a mile – safely around the edge of a lake, always within a few feet of the shallows. Years later I tried to go a manlier mile, straight across the center of a lake, and nearly drowned. I

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cramped, and then a storm rose, pushing the waves wrathfully against me. Fishermen pulled me out. I considered the harrowing experience punishment for hubris. At the start of the summer I couldn’t even float, but I was doing flips off the high dive by August. The point was to find common ground, or water, with a Norwegian girl, daughter of a visiting NATO officer, who had marveled me all school year with her platinum hair. More, it was the way she carried herself; and even after living abroad for two years, I’d never noticed that people could be different that way. We bear the imprint of our contexts; an environment I could sense but not quite see surrounded the Norwegian, and entranced me. North has always attracted me more than the tropics. Besides that, I couldn’t pronounce her name (no one in class could), and her face had a strangeness of expression I took for wisdom. If you can’t say someone’s name, they look bigger or further away, and yet their presence has a wild animal intelligence that draws you. She must have known English, but was aloof or frightened, and I don’t think she spoke to anyone. My favorite subject that year was Geography, and I dressed her in the Aurora Borealis: atmospheric phenomena were more palpable than sex. Once, I bumped into the Norwegian girl in the pool, a head-butt to her belly. She was wearing a rather elegant black one-piece. My head was down in the water, and I was swimming blindly. Striking her midsection, I lifted up in surprise to see what obstacle it was, but it was the object of my affections. She pushed me aside and continued her own graceful strokes across the pool. It was the perfect blend of degradation and exhilaration. Shunted aside but noticed: it became a measure for relationships to come. Through the rest of the summer, I aimed at doing flips off the ten-foot dive, and managed several among the

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many painful belly and back flops. Not yet familiar with my own mortality, I kept trying until I learned how it was done; or if not how properly, at least in my own awkward way. More often, like Rousseau, I burned with a love for no object, or for too many: little girls and the occasional grade-school teacher or neighborhood mom. My fourth-grade teacher, I was convinced, had the hots for me: a case on my part of confusing teacher’s pet with lover. It was a characteristic if not a cause of sadness, and that, too, was an early lesson: that sadnesses could be savored, and that such a life was the sum total of symptoms. Look from some distance, a great abyss, and realize it’s not necessary to jump so as to appreciate the immensity. Let it mist and rain upwards, and it’s real enough.

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18 Apr 69 Dearest Patsy: Honey, I received the box today, and the cookies are great. Of course, I had a Pvt. eat one first and then observed him for (3) minutes to see if he lived before I tried them. Who in the RAT-FINK put a Van Dyke on Raquel Welch in Look? – there is a law against that sort of thing, or at least there should be. You’re beautiful and look sweet, darling. These are the best pictures that I’ve seen. Your hair and all of you look fantastic. Needless to say, I’m enthralled with you, but more than that, I love you. Don’t cut the hair. Keep it full like that. Sit close to the A/C and stay cool. Tell Debbie that I love her, and thanks for the box. All the kids look like angels, but I know that sometimes they act in the other direction. I can’t look at this picture enough! Patsy, I love you so very much, and miss you more than I can say, but I receive great strength because of you and our family. I try to use everything that I’ve learned to be a good C.O. for my men and most of all so I can come home to my family. “My strength is the strength of ten because my heart is pure.” It really is! I love you! Jim

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IT MUST HAVE BEEN I who drew that beard on Raquel Welch, and I feel a twinge of terror even now to think that I offended her chief admirer, Jim Lewis. My mother fed him images as he requested. We all feed on them; what’s memory but a series of snapshots, some torn or faded? It must have been so even before photography. The old photographs try to speak. But there’s always a stalled conversation behind and between the images. If I could hear it, I might learn their names, but also what made them happy and unhappy, the dreams that came true and those that died. I’d hear their names, most of which I was never told when these images were handed on. If I could learn their names I might gather something more of their lives, because a name intuits an impression of fate. Photographs are meaningful only as fictions: each one is a unit of fact, a bit of data toward historical truth, but the stack of photographs, the tumble of them, their sprawl over the table: that’s toward a collage or a movie of made-up meanings from the scores of faces. Snap, snap snap: the hobby, commodity of home photography, and here I am the inheritor of their cheap and antique smiles, not one of which I would ever throw away. They might have been pennies when they were taken, but now they’re bullion. Here are the few dozen faces I know, then underneath, dozens more I can’t name: distant relatives, friends of relatives, passing acquaintances of a relative I didn’t know; somebody passing on the street, many in uniforms of various wars, all the strangers but one in the class photo. Even that one, which? Dead, dead, dead. Something of the past comes through. The moment itself is medallion-like, picked up and turned over. Then my sight goes further in, I’m Achilles falling headlong into the shield: some

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rush of detail, practice of rituals no one understands; snatches of song, speeches, conversations, voices in prayer, though I can barely hear. Things seem broken at first: too many cracks and leaks, too many pillaged drawers, contents blown into disorder, everything drowned or burned. But when I settle into some channel of feeling, when the faces appear, something is saved. Within the dream, at least: getting it back here, fitting it to words, is the challenge. Often I’m left with no more than a faint rhythm: Delibes’ “Flower Duet,” something sweet like that, a little too sweet. It finishes, and immediately I forget the melody that caught me like a pretty face in the street, that made me turn but then went blank. That’s my debility: I feel, but I’m tone deaf; melodies, like faces, leave me.

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25 Apr 69 Dearest Patsy: Honey, I received your tape and two letters today! I’m sorry that you’re upset, and believe me I do understand. It takes about 10 – 14 days to write, and then receive and answer. It’s bad, but better than nothing! What do you think about the cartoon? I guess all parents feel the same about their daughters. I got to a phone and called Bob and asked when he was going to get married and take leave. He said today that he had put in another extension, and that it would not be before school is out this summer. I’m sure that you have received my 3rd tape by now and it should have answered some of your questions, re: what I think Bob is going to do (NOTHING). As far as Debbie living with him: I doubt that he would take that responsibility. I guess I’m the one to blame, I always could see right through Debbie, and she knew it! She resented me for taking Bob’s place in her life and yours. I don’t blame her for it, and have tried to be a good father, but have failed. Young girls and boys are impatient, but Debbie is too big for her britches, and Bob is not helping her any by wild promises! I doubt that it will ever come to her having to make a choice about who she will live with, but if she is not happy with us then she can (as far as I’m concerned) move in with that family. That woman may tell Bob that she wants Debbie, but I don’t believe it. She is (or was) a bar girl, and has (4) boys. She may really love Bob, I don’t know! I think Bob would love any woman that was close to his size and oriental. I’ve never met her, but I think she is taking him for a ride and has been. I really hope not, because Bob could be a great person, but he says one thing and acts another way.

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I was promoted today by C. G. [Commanding General]. I wish that it could have been you, Darling. I remember (2) years ago and it was wonderful. I can see you now in that beautiful blue dress with white collar! Patsy, I love you, and all our family, but it was you I married, and nothing is going to spoil it. That is, nothing, family, friends or anything! Honey I’m sending one set of orders for CPT; just put them with my other papers. Patsy, you’re my life! I love you! Jim Excuse writing had to write fast! [insert: cartoon drawing from Playboy]

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STILL FOLDED in the envelope with the letter: a page neatly torn from a copy of Playboy, multi-paneled vignette of a teenage girl (looking nothing like my sister, but neatly capturing the stereotype of the American girl) bringing home a nice boy who nonetheless morphs, as the middle-aged middle-class parents look on, into a biker-style, troll-shaped monster, then back to the nice boy as the young couple walk out the front door and the parents sob. As it turned out, Debbie did marry a Hell’s Angel, father of her son now grown and off to college, who at the age of two saw his dad dragged from the house by FBI men off to prison. My biker brother-in-law got out just as his son was finishing high school. Without the excuse of prison, I’ve seen my nephew twice in his life, spoken a handful of times on the phone. Love is an ocean; I’ve treated my own family like fauna, randomly associating with them when a current has brought us closer. But everything was close in ’69, even with the two fathers so many miles away. Here in the letters we get more into the recurring troubles of my first father, my sister, and “us”: an insurgency, a fight without a front, without boundaries, an entrenched affair, the enemy among us. Debbie was a cause of pain for my mother; pain transmitted by mail to Lewis, who was obliged to fight on two fronts. Over the months to come, the Stateside battles would engender skirmishes between the two fathers in Vietnam. Lunday stands accused, berated, mocked even, perhaps deservingly. But Lewis doesn’t let himself off the hook, either: I tried to be a good father, and I failed. This isn’t martyrdom, but an abbreviated strategic assessment. He tells my mother that he “saw right through” Debbie, which gets to an essential difference between him and Lunday as well: both my sister and my first

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father were high-octane dramatists. Lewis saw himself as the plain and ugly real thing, and took pride in that. But Lewis, too, was a performance. Near the end of the April 18th letter, he evokes the Galahad of Tennyson:

My good blade carves the casques of men, My tough lance thrusteth sure, My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.

I peg Lewis more as a Gawain than a Galahad: the one in Malory, driven both by his lusts and the loftier desires. Maybe it was the force that made him want to fly planes as well as fall from them; but in the end, it might well have been a grail-like thing that made him leave. Where’s the line or two from Kipling in these letters? – if you’re looking for verse from such a man. Never mind the middlebrow stuff: it was limericks about men from Nantucket I recall him speaking, when lyrics rose to his lips at all. As for Lunday, he was a man who tried very hard, and generally succeeded, in rising above both his shortness and his shortcomings: more of a Gareth, maybe, among the knights. But his way of transcending his failures as a father was to cut away, as with a faulty parachute, and start over.

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29 Apr 69 Dearest Patsy: Honey, my pay will not change before May’s payday, but you should get about $560 then and June P/D and then in July around $920.00 each month. The kids should receive an allowance. Debbie $3.00 a week, Bobby $1.50, Donny and Kevin $.25. Based on their conduct! I would love an allowance myself. I get $30.00 per month. Should I go ahead and order the china & silver or wait until after R&R? I think that we should wait, and then I would still have six months to order & make sure it’s delivered OK! It will cost about $160 for both and when it’s delivered you will have to pay duty on it, about $15.00! That’s not a bad deal, because it will be worth about $700.00 in U.S. How is the weather at home? I guess that you’re starting to get pretty days. It will soon be one big swamp here. The monsoon should start soon. It is hot as an oven now, and no relief in sight. ALL of my experienced EM [enlisted men] are gone, and I’ve got all new people. That’s good, though: I can train them like I want to, if they last long enough. Patsy, I remember the first time that I ever saw you, and how I wanted you then, and was determined that I would. I remember so many things about you, and the things that we did. We wasted time, but it worked out just right! Do you remember the time I climbed on the bar and hung the mistletoe? ALL that for a kiss on the cheek. Shame on you! I put in for R&R the first week in Aug. I should get orders in July for it, & will send them to you for you to buy a plane ticket. Call & see how much the roundtrip will cost at Piedmont! OK? Let me know ASAP! Love, Jim

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IS HE SITTING in a tent, a hut, a dug-out? Just a candle when the dark comes on. Are the numbers in his memo book, or simply in his mind? He carried a government-issue evergreen breast-pocket memo book, of which several are still preserved, one with a hole where the shrapnel stopped just a millimeter short of the heart. The little books are filled with money lent, money owed, money needed, money expected; navigational notations, fuel calculations, distances. All in his sharp, narrow, frequently all-cap and underscored hand. Numbers are written down, written and re-written; sweat drips on the lined pages, jungle rot and paper-clip rust. Numbers are little candles in his mind as he drops off to brief sleep; sent to a file-box in a corner of his mind while he calls out orders, chews men out.

Lewis tried to get me into boxing when I was fourteen. He’d been an amateur slugger himself as an enlisted man; steering me that way was a feeble effort to give me what final shaping I could take. It was a miserable experiment. I loathed hitting someone even more than getting hit myself. Male intimacy as much as the violence disturbed me. The few times I got close enough to touch anyone, I apologized. My temperature for fighting was low; survival didn’t seem to depend on it. And it no longer seemed to depend on pleasing Lewis, just on avoiding him, which his postwar fog was making easier. So I sparred a couple of times, disgusted everyone, and was left alone. But I’d discovered the gym; left to myself, I found my own rituals of physical culture. Aside from the weights I developed a fascination with the speed bag, the bouncing loops I could make in its little alcove;

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the rhythm, almost a mirror of my own nerves. It was doodling, drawing the same cloverleaf over and over, getting it right: battapa-battapa. Overall, sports was not my thing. Now that it hardly matters, I can swing at a softball well enough; but when I was seven Lewis signed me up for Little League, and I never hit or caught a single ball. I was so despised by my teammates, it seemed I stood outside myself and joined them in humiliating me. A pitcher walked me to first, perhaps out of pity; still I did it all wrong on the way into home, scraping the length of my leg and hip raw when I slid and getting tagged out. I recall only that one dusty-red game in which even my friends abandoned me to shame, and for four years that was the end of sports. Purgatory for me is still a baseball diamond. In junior high I discovered my talent. That something as natural as wrestling had rules and precise movements was enlightening, and I was the best of three or four boys in my weight class on the team. I met my end as a wrestler when I was matched, unfairly I thought, with a kid from Boys Town. They were a poorer lot, which is saying much, as my teammates were mainly sons of factory workers and farmers; but the Boys Town boys were tougher-looking, and motley, without proper uniforms. My opponent looked heavier than I was, definitely out of the weight class. He wore an over-sized leather belt to hold up faded sweat pants, and as we wrestled the belt buckle dug into me. When he grappled me with his thighs he farted fiercely, and I gave in from the travesty more than the smell. At the end of the match, I voiced my objections to the three injustices: his greater girth, his belt-weapon, and his flatulence. I found it especially heinous that breaking wind could count as a legal move. Everyone ignored me, and the next pair took their places; I’d lost.

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In the back of my mind, creeping forward, was the fourth advantage of my opponent: his blackness. Being black made him a better fighter. This was less a thought than a tiny shit-stain, a leak from my soft insides. The notion rose and quickly faded and I sulked back to the bench. Sports was an existential puzzle: why try to win when next week, next season, you’ll probably lose; as if to lose the present is also to lose all previous wins? Oh, but I missed the point; not only in sports but in life. Coward, born loser, spoilsport and liar: there were victories, a few, some wins that I held dear. But I was merely forgetting what I already knew of the pointlessness of things. The second time we were at Fort Benning, I signed up for Pop Warner football. I had the pads and jersey, cleated shoes, and I practiced, but was so useless the coach never remembered my name. More than the coach was against me. For Saturday games there were two stadiums on post, not close to each other. I set out on my bike for one stadium, vaguely wondering as I pedaled if it was the one we’d been told was the site of the game. Both Saturdays – before I gave up trying altogether – I arrived at the stadium I’d chosen and confronted a void: not a soul on the field or in the stands, just the fool I was in my pads and helmet, howling into the emptiness. Only the Good Soldier Schweick had it worse, failing to find the front and captured by his own side; but he was more sanguine than I. Why would there not have been some other pair of teams making use of the other playing field on a fine Saturday afternoon? But the memory is true: I arrived in a punishing despair each time, knowing, almost, that I’d chosen wrong even before I saw the emptiness.

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It was a classic post-apocalyptic scene: no one was alive, the world evacuated, and I was so alone the sky stared down at me, the stadium a big eye-ray down on my pathetic, left-behind, shoulder-padded self. The other stadium was close enough that I might have made second quarter; but instead I slunk home. More room on the bench: thinning the herd. Back home, each time, the TV was on; Lewis barely looked up from his magazine. That it happened twice must have seemed suspicious, or uniquely me. In high school I became a runner, a pretty good one, on a cross-country team. Crosscountry seemed to escape tensions and contradictions of sport as I saw it. We could cross the finish line one before the other, but we were a team, our points combined, and we won or lost together. On the other hand, each runner ran alone: he tested his time against all times before, and raced mainly with himself. Among them I discovered again that I had a talent; but unlike before, I saw that it came from the combined excellence of a team. There was a pleasure in winning, but the pleasure was more in the chase: increasing the distance with those behind me, closing it with those ahead, sometimes winning the pure open field in front, which was worth more to me than the finish line. Around that time I read a novel I’d found at the Benning Library, Walking Davis by David Ely. The hero walks around the Earth. I learned later it wasn’t so fantastical. A man named Dave Kunst finished his global walk in 1974. He’s my one sports hero, and I have his signed portrait on my wall. Ely’s novel, if not great literature, was inspirational: the walking man, Davis, transcends his athletic and financial purposes and keeps walking after he completes his first circuit of the globe, entering into the dimension of world-walkers and leaving this world behind.

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In 1969 Bernard Moitessier was set to win the first non-stop solo sailing race around the globe; but he bagged it all and kept on going, back again around the Cape of Good Hope and East to Polynesia. Such remarkable men are bodhisattvas, showing the rest of us the paradise beneath our feet. World-walking became my trope, a saintly form of disappearance. The cross-country races tended to be through woods, fields, along creeks, and down farm roads. It was a lot like reading. When I ran I played a fast song in my head, whatever was on the radio at the time, but the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man” was a favorite, and I would run to it, run after it, letting the pursuit take my mind away from the pain of pushing limits. It was good to be done, and it was good to have done. There at the end, the body came down from its high, and it didn’t matter when or where it was: I was the stadium and I couldn’t get lost. Longer races were beyond me, and I don’t really get the passion for marathon running. But I admire the ascetic cut of the long-distance racers in profile, how they seem to draw out the humanness of a landscape; creatures more water and air than earth or fire, though they’re bearers of the flame.

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1 May 69 Dearest Patsy: I’m sorry but I have not had a chance to make a tape, but will ASAP. I didn’t get any mail today, but they say that I’ve got a tape & letter coming tomorrow. It has started to rain so I guess the monsoon is here early. It is not raining hard enough yet to cool things off. I sent a card yesterday to Mother & (1) to you. Jack Shannon will be in RVN on or about 27 July. Stamper, Kelly, and Curtis should get here this month. Honey, do you remember CPT Bob Young? Well, he was killed last month, and I just found out; I really hate that. He was an outstanding person. Patsy, I love you more than anything! I miss you so much that I feel ill. If I can get to rear, I’m going to order the china & silverware ASAP so that it will get there NO SWEAT. Total for the two checks will be $186.00. I feel that I should go ahead and order it. Patsy, Baby, I have to cut this short, but remember that I love you! Jim P.S. Tell kids I love them!

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HE’S BEEN DOWNRIGHT obsessed with that chinaware. She still has it boxed up in her bedroom, because there’s nowhere in her current house for a china cabinet. An Army wife, retired or not, needs to keep a few moving boxes stacked around for good measure: they’re a shrine to the god of our roving ways, although the china itself was of my parents’ strong and shared desire to settle down. How many other men dedicated themselves to tableware? It is strangely framed here: Lewis passes on the news of yet another KIA acquaintance, CPT Bob Young, “killed last month,” an outstanding person. A man or a boy had to work hard to get an outstanding from Lewis; dying wasn’t enough. But the real connection here between the dead and the living is in what follows. Lewis, who’s been planning to scrimp and save and ship that china later – R&R is the priority for this man, remember – decides that he’s going to go ahead and buy it now, not later. Why? Because he’s just reminded himself, and my mother, that he might not live long enough to write the check.

In 1965 we left Fayetteville for Waco. Looking through the rear window, I was full of hate for many miles into the dark, all over a punishment for an infraction I can’t remember. How large is a seven-year-old’s hatred? How many watts? It seemed to fill the car, and more. I kept it deep inside me, lest he hear my thoughts. We drove all night and the road opened up to the world, the car radio emitted starlight and soft music, our parents talked about complicated things.

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Lewis drove one-handed and smoked, his window cracked open. The cigarette seemed to lead the way. I slept and I pretended to sleep. The long black Studebaker was thinking under its hood about us. I see it now, shot and buried in a hole somewhere. For a vehicle older than a decade or so, you have to provide a name and respect its emotional life. The Studebaker was Bessie, and to bless her journeys you had to pat her lovingly on the dash and call her name. Automobiles are a second home, and our family lived in more houses than we owned cars. We drove all day while I watched through the rust holes in the floorboard the road rushing by. We arrived, and Waco was another planet: crawdads and horned toads. The crawdads I found under stones in the creeks and kept in Coke cups until they died. The horned toads I had staring contests with down on my hands and knees when they appeared in the dirt, and I noticed a distinct resemblance between Lewis and them: both were native to those parts. Lewis moved us in with his mother, Mildred, and teen sister, Pam, the better to care for all on a Sergeant’s wages. The new house was old, formerly a farm house, with traces of its rustic past tucked away here and there. It was an improvement over Acorn Street, large and organic, with improvisational spaces; haunted, by default. From the kitchen you could walk three ways: toward the dining and living room; toward the rear, first through a well-lit den where my grandmother lived, then out toward the garage and not one but two backyards. Or third, to the right of the den, into a large bedroom that was also a passage into the narrower hall toward the master bedroom and the living room, dark and funereal, where we spent little time; and stairs toward the girls’ shared sanctum in the attic.

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Baby Kevin slept in our mother’s room. Lewis was away most of that year so it wasn’t his room exactly; but the whole house was his, and a dark awareness around it. This was his first absence since he’d become our father. It was hard to believe he was gone, but equally hard through the months to imagine his return. From books I knew that every old house was supposed to have an attic, a hearth, a basement, and a storm cellar; this one in Waco had all but the last item. Thanks to my new stepgrandmother, it also had a Victorola which she kept in our disused living room. Once she showed me how it worked. It towered in a wooden cabinet like a house of its own, and its horn flared into a robot blossom. I wanted to crawl through and down into whatever world was there, but it was kept in an alcove that spooked me: a turn in the asymmetrical house that abhorred children and forced me back when I was alone. But the attic, the girls’ room, drew me in. I crawled at the base of the stairs early evenings after school, a pest, as they pretended to do homework together, languidly turning textbook pages while the Beatles or Herman’s Hermits played. When my cowlicked head rose from below the top stair, they yelled at me to my joy. I was grudgingly allowed up once or twice. They shared a small Beatles memorabilia collection that today would fetch thousands, or at least hundreds. If I touched any of it I got whacked, but what good were things you couldn’t touch? They kept the figurines on a desk they shared, guarded by a squad of Troll-doll groupies with green and magenta hair. My room was the space around the fan in the back window, next to the kitchen; and beyond that, the broad space between the kitchen and the hall toward the front of the house that everyone walked through, making it a lobby more than a room. My room was also my brother Don’s room. He’d been the baby, but then Kevin was born before we moved to Waco; so now,

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Don was more my little brother than his mother’s toddler. He had a bed in the other corner, nearer to our mother’s room. At night I crawled into the sound of the fan and flew. The drone of all night and eternity came through its blades, the breath of possibilities too quick to catch, but it didn’t stop until sleep shut the doors and windows in me.

Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” looked down from a high wall, some window into another world. The strange lad taunted me with something: a familiarity I had yet to gain, the right place or person to know. I was sitting outside the principal’s office while my mother made arrangements for my entering second grade at the new school, Provident Heights Elementary. The worst kind of move was to go from military to civilian, and to start the new school in the middle of the year: being stared at, as I got from this Blue Boy of Texas, then tested and rejected. History for me was a vaguely medieval passage from nothing to now. The assured if slightly crooked boy in the image seemed to figure history and guard it, not against my entrance, but patiently for my arrival. History, the lighting of its halls, was future more than past. That this painting was a copy, that there was a difference between a copy and an original, was beyond me. The placid, condescending stare entranced. The wait, like any waiting, was long. The blue, the stare, becoming that boy, my sitting on the hard bench, sunlight competing for dominance of the present; mid-morning angled sun, a stairway; the stilled boy on the bench, motley and original and still there; the real air of an oil painting, and its shadows as deep as the trek through a fairy tale. Awareness had fallen back on me from some future moment: self accordioned out, a

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suspension, then the collapse; my name called, and the cafeteria smells catching me in the dread of time again. Classrooms from various parts of the world inhabit me, all more or less the same, though some were in old buildings, with high windows that opened like doors; and some new, with aluminum-framed windows that cranked open, and with boxy heaters instead of heavy, cast-iron coiled things, heaters like antique animals that rumbled with a life force deep inside. Teachers’ desks, blackboards like space-windows, dark and sketchy, as chalk-clouds formed words and were wiped away. Rows and rows of lift-top desks carved inside and out, barnacled with gumblobs and worse; residue of eraser and pencil shavings; the neat groove for resting your pencil. Rows of pupils, two or three adored, always from afar. One girl, Audrey, was ten, but I remember her lipsticked and sultry. She had a five-minute crush on me that I managed to vaporize in less time. “Guess which boy I like?” she cooed, and I started naming every other one except myself, and she walked away before I finished. Oh, Audrey, I’ve never met another woman named Audrey, you’re the only one. But I couldn’t step forward. I couldn’t whistle, either; still can’t. I was brilliant at kickball. Sending it out practically to the other corner of the field, I ran not once but twice around the field for a lark. In the excitement no one noticed my first run home and I was tagged out midway on the second pass. The ignominy! I protested, but no one cared. In October the next year, a school carnival. Lewis was due back and already on my mind. Strange to be in the classrooms after dark, and the teachers costumed; rooms emptied of desks for haunted houses, bean-bag tosses and bake sales. I tried the cakewalk, then musical chairs, and luck was always to the left or right. The carnival was winding down, and in a corner of a bedsheeted classroom was a gypsy, someone ’s mother in headscarf and hoop earrings. Thinking

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of my immediate future, I asked: “Will my stepdad ever beat me again?” and the gypsy was annoyed, then pitying. Somehow she had an image of the returning danger. “Likely, darlin’, very likely” she drawled, and took my ticket. Such was my fortune; but I didn’t know what “likely” meant. Would he or wouldn’t he? The oracle left me in the dark, as oracles do. We sporadically attended my grandmother’s church, Highland Baptist. There was nothing high about it; no hill in sight. Perhaps the hill was Calvary, but I knew nothing of Calvary, only cavalries; though both are salvation. Church services are dreadful occasions. Why anyone would want to sit through it all: the nth-time ritual, the sermon, the hymns, standing and sitting, all that sickly niceness after, plus the old-woman perfume? Blessedly I remember little of it. Instead I see myself in Sunday School, most of it art, games, and stealing glances at the Sunday dresses, the true gates of paradise. That summer we had a week of Vacation Bible School in the church basement: long folding tables and an infinite supply of Elmer’s glue and macaroni. The last day we were told to bring shoe boxes for dioramas. The shoebox diorama is a brilliant invention. Mine that year was a jungle scene, a small dark Viet Cong hideaway with real dirt on Elmer’s glue and fake grass from old Easter baskets, then a scribbled backdrop with every green in the big Crayola box. One of my plastic soldiers had the starring role, but the VC remained hidden in the Easter grass. Since it was mine, I felt as if I’d invented something better than Television, and it stayed on my chest of drawers until we moved. After he returned from Vietnam, Lewis shot my mother while she was gardening. He was practicing with a BB gun and caught her in the calf by accident; she was perturbed more than wounded.

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The two backyards were separated by tall hedges; an alley ran behind, and to the right, a windrow stood between our yards and a cornfield. Near the alley you could tip the trash cans and find grass snakes in coils, pick them up in twos and threes to wrap around your wrists like bracelets. They’d bite, but it was a perturbation like my mother’s calf wound. They squeezed the skin and became a part of it, nerves on the outside. In the back-backyard I dug a swimming pool two feet by four and laid the garden hose to fill it; naturally it filled with brown sludge, then drained away. I dug deeper and found an arrowhead. The swimming pool fled from mind and I became an archeologist. That was the only one that turned up, and it traveled through several moves before disappearing. In the front-backyard my mother and grandmother hung the laundry, and when the sheets billowed in rows it was as good as a swimming pool, but more like flying. It was only a few feet of linen but you could travel thousands of miles. The trees and brambles close to the cornfield became my cell, command post, or ship, depending on the battle: always the unity of my make-believe was war. A beautiful death like the burning pyre in The Vikings was the goal. The Civil War became my main epic for a time, because I had a Confederate kepi my grandparents bought at Rock City in Chattanooga. For hours I fought on one side and then the other, but mostly the North despite the gray Confederate hat. I disdained the South, though I was one of them.

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10 May 69 Patsy, Honey, I received letters # 85 & 89 today when I returned. I guess 86, 87 & 88 will get here sometime soon. It’s a shame about Jack Steere. He must have opened right under the other man. Jack was not too good on air work! I’m glad that all of you were able to watch the Team jump. I would love to be able to ask you for my cigarettes and lighter, among other things. Did you receive the $50.00 ck? It’s lucky that I ran into LT Scott, otherwise I’m sure that the money would have been forgotten. Did you notice that I made out the ck, & he signed? I received a letter from Jack Shannon telling when he gets to RVN. Remember the $60.00 he owes me? Well, he bet that he could make Shelly Milliner, and swears that he did! (You know how he lies, though!) I don’t accept it and he still owes me $60.00. (BURN this!) Patsy, you are my life and everything that I want in life! I love you and am very proud of you and our family. I want only to make you happy and proud of me. I’m not very smart & look like a bandit, but do my best. Tell the kids I love them! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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MANY MILES TO THE NORTH of Lewis’s area of operations, in Thua Thien, along the Laotian border, the battle for Hamburger Hill begins; taken with many lives, it will return to the NVA by June. Even stateside, soldiers are dying: the blunt epitaph Lewis offers for his friend Jack Steere, killed in a midair collision, “not too good on air work!” sounds callous, but the black humor is self-recognition. Lewis had vectored that kind of death many times. In the jungle, every bit of news is treasure; even the bad news. The curt laugh is closure. Then he says:

I’m glad that all of you were able to watch the Team jump. I would love to be able to ask you for my cigarettes and lighter, among other things.

Did we see this man die? The segue is strange: this love, this death. But this letter was meant for the fire, after all – as their author says. As I read them, my fingertips feel the heat.

When I was sixteen and Lewis had made me shear my long locks, I was morose for many days. Lewis sat me down and told me a considerably more rough-hewn version of this tale:

A farmer was walking one frigid day to market with his cow. The cow, every now and then, would drop steaming dung to the rock-solid ground. Passing through the most desolate region of forest, the farmer came on a bird collapsed

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and near-dead from cold. He looked back to where his cow had just deposited another steaming mound; he looked at the frigid bird; then he looked back at the mound. Letting go of the rope, he scooped up the limp little bird, went behind his patiently waiting cow, reached down to the dung, parted it with his hand, placed the bird inside, and gently molded the dung around it, up to the bird’s neck. Pleased with his good deed, the farmer then proceeded to market so as to sell his cow for slaughter. After a while the bird, its blood warmed by the dung, came back to life. It opened its eyes and looked around – as best it could, being up to its neck in excrement. How good to be warm and alive! The bird began to chirp in celebration. Then coming up the path and hearing this noise, a wolf, all skin-and-bones from hunger, hobbled over to the strange sight of a bird up to its neck in shit and singing. The wolf looked at the bird, and the bird looked back, caroling all the while. The wolf then reached down with its mouth, pulled with its teeth at the chirping head, extricating the bird from the dung and placing it on the ground. The bird, still singing, shook its wings to discharge the last flecks of excrement; and it looked up at the wolf, who waited until the bird had finished cleaning itself. Reaching down again more forcefully, he devoured the bird, licked his lips in satisfaction, then continued on his way through the empty, silent woods.

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It was the strangest and least violent lecture I ever got from Lewis. He hadn’t popped me one for a couple of years, so I didn’t mind the Russian folk tale, as he described it: maybe to give it a bit more of a pungent odor. Those who put you into the shit don’t necessarily mean you harm, and those who get you out of the shit don’t necessarily mean to do you good. The bird was I, Lewis was the kindly Farmer, and my peers were the Wolf. Hair long or short was Shit, the Path was growing up, and the cow was just a cow.

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18 May 69 Dearest Patsy: Today is one of those days! A good friend from Laos was killed last night, along with 14 other U.S. personnel at a MACV outpost that was overrun. It gives me the ASS every time I think about it. I expect that some U.S. troops will be pulled out sometime in the future, but this WAR will still be going (10) years from now. May be a different country, but same WAR. I sent in and had checks cashed that total $238.00, but with the $50.00 ck that I sent home the amount I spent is $188.00. I have $100.00 in cash that I’m going to carry from now on. There are things that people need that will be paid for by US, but you have to wait forever for it; that’s not satisfactory as far as I’m concerned. You should get about $550.00 this month & next, about $920.00. I received a letter from Jim Fenlon the other day, & he said that his area is getting rockets nightly. It’s pretty much the same all over! I get so fed up with Bde and VN [Vietnam] that I can’t talk sometimes. No big thing, I’ll grow out of it, the last of Jan 70. Honey, I love you so very much, and need you, I always have and always will! Tell the kids that I love them, and to be good! I love you, Patsy! Jim P.S. They sent out the info for R&R so I want you to look at it.

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BEING MIDDLE CLASS SUBURBAN was the shrink-wrap on a new morality and sanity. Nothing stayed still. Military middle-class, military suburban; much of the furniture was Government Issue, the housing was sometimes a sad, distant bivouac, the screen in the screen door was flaccid and wavy, the neighbor’s kids just moved from halfway around the world and that’s where you were going in a month. Orders: the soldier received them, an actual piece of paper with the Army seal and a general’s signature. Collateral: the rest of us felt like baggage. What might I have become if I’d stayed still long enough to watch one street, one town grow with me? Where are you from? is the classic challenge for military brats. We have no answer, or too many. For me there’s Fort Jackson, South Carolina, or perhaps Columbia, the neighboring town, since a military post is not a town, exactly; but I have no memory of the place, because we left when I was three. It was in fact my longest posting, another criterion to support its claim to home-town status. We went back to Fayetteville-Fort Bragg often enough to call it home, and my mother’s still there. Then there’s the town where we lived when I graduated high school and left home: Kannapolis, NC. But I was a nothing there, for the two years already full-tilt into the future. No, not Kannapolis, a dying place even then; its mill is a museum. I was happiest at Fort Benning, where I was also most miserable. To visit there, as with most other military bases, I’d now need permission. A young guard brandishing an automatic rifle would stop me, check my credentials, look me over with suspicion. I might drive backward a bit and lay claim to Nashville: both parents are native Tennesseans, and our cousins are still there.

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Of course there’s Houston, where I live now and have stayed longest; but as always, I waste time dreaming of the next home town, maybe somewhere temperate and with mountains in view. The next is as always my hope for brighter days. A permanent address is something always elsewhere. I’ll get there, but not yet; it might be made of granite. After college I adopted Manhattan as my home town, but any native New Yorker would laugh. I never made the claim publicly; it was a wish, an attitude. Almost anything can make a home. The cardboard boxes we moved our stuff in, emptied, became houses, towers, fortresses, or vehicles. One measure of the seasons of a move was the changing presence of moving boxes: after arrival, we’d wait for them, and then live among them for many days. Then with the furniture and everything in place, we’d still have islands of boxes waiting for some decision. Some would be stored out of sight, but before long we’d be filling up new ones for the next move. Schoolmates were left behind, and although I knew they were moving too, growing older as I was, a year or two sufficed to fix them in a certain scene so that I might revisit them in my thoughts and pass on what I knew of being older: memories of the few who had shown sympathy with me, who had struck an accidental pose I thought I understood, or whose sadnesses had seemed wisdom. They didn’t stay frozen in time, but grew a little until I forgot them.

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24 May 69 Dearest Patsy, Honey, I got back to our base camp this morning & found letters # 100 & 101, and as always it was very welcome. I enjoyed the letter and the picture greatly! My unit has been working north of here for the past few days with the 82nd ABN. It was good to get back to this place even though it is a dump; it’s home over here. Did Bob get in contact with Debbie? What is he going to do & where is he assigned? I can’t understand him, and in the future will not attempt to. I know that he is 36, and acts like he’s 14! It would have been easy for him to send a note telling me what his situation was, but he didn’t. I didn’t know anyone in the 82nd, but I only saw a couple of officers & NCO’s. The unit I was in before (2/3Inf) sent out an eight-man ambush patrol the other night, and five were KIA & the other three WIA. The idiot that sent them to that A/P might as well have shot them himself. I get the ASS bad sometimes so that I can’t stand it! How are the kids doing? Tell Donny that I enjoyed his drawing! Kevin must be able to draw on something besides the walls. Tell him I said send me one or two! I guess the kids are happy that school is just about over for the year! What are their plans for the summer? I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to being with you on R&R. I want to hold you, and love you so much that I can’t stand it sometimes. I put in for the last week in July or 1st week in Aug. I should find out in the next few days. Patsy, I love you! You’re my sweet Darling, and always will be. You’re always in my thoughts. I love you, I love you! Jim

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LUNDAY RATES OCCASIONAL mentions in accounts of the war by soldiers who met him, usually in his role as Commandant at the Recondo school in Nha Trang. They taught LRRP techniques to soldiers from all over the war zone. Also, he took part in POW recovery efforts. In the fifties, before he got commissioned, he played valve trombone in an Army swing ensemble. Soon the vertu of combat training, Special Forces, and leaping from planes got hold of him, and he gave up music. One of my stepbrothers, Marcel, showed me the mouthpiece from his trombone: that was all my father had kept of his music career, along with a stack of records. Marcel wanted the mouthpiece, but he gave me the records, mostly 78’s; they’ve disappeared. Now all I’ve got of Lunday is the bracelet given him by Montagnard tribesmen he lived with. His brother Don gave it to me the day of the funeral after the crash. I wore it on my arm twenty-five years. It’s a bent length of brass and I used to squeeze it when I was anxious or bored. The metal became attenuated and weak, so I retired it a few years back to keep it from breaking and disappearing altogether. Part of Lunday’s eight months in Laos in 1962 were spent training Royal Laotian forces in a place called Sayaboury. In the spring of that year the following appeared in The New York Times:

Laos Army Balks at Attack on Reds Bars a U.S. Plan Because it ‘Would Get People Killed’ By Jacques Nevard Special to the New York Times SAYABOURY, Laos, May 24

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Pro-Communist guerillas are terrorizing villagers south of here and threatening the Mekong River supply line, but officers in command of nearly 1,900 Royal Laotian Army troops in this province in northwestern Laos are reluctant to move against them. According to the United States officer in charge of training the Royal Laotian forces here, the high command in Sayaboury province rejected a plan for clearing it of Communist guerillas with the explanation that “it would get people killed.” First Lieut. Robert G. Lunday of Nashville, Tenn., pointed to a map today and said that the tiny guerilla band had effectively cut off boat traffic on the Mekong between Huie Khuoa Kaung and Paklay, a distance of about forty-three miles. The refusal to move against the guerillas means that all movements of the Royal Laotian forces in the area have to be overland, a slow and arduous process in this primitive largely roadless region. Heads U.S. Team Lieutenant Lunday, who is 28 years old, heads a six-man United States Army Special Forces team assigned to Sayaboury to improve the fighting capability of three volunteer battalions of Right-wing troops. Since the pro-Communist Pathet Lao movement broke the year-old cease-fire in the Laotian civil war and captured Nam Tha on May 6, the morale of the Pathet Lao guerillas in this province rose sharply, Lieutenant Lunday said. They began shelling Sayaboury Province from mortar positions on the east bank of the Mekong but the shells fell in the forests and there were no casualties. “I guess their shooting is not very accurate either,” the slight, wiry United States officer said. But two weeks ago the Pathet Lao band on the west side of the Mekong ambushed a Right-wing company, killing nine men and wounding three before escaping into the bush, apparently with no losses. Fond of Villagers In the three months Lieutenant Lunday and his highly trained specialists have been here they have grown quite fond of the local villagers. “These are decent, honest people,” the officer said. “They are the most unwarlike people I have ever seen.”

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While he did not complain, it was clear that the peaceful nature of the local troops had made the training a difficult process. For example, when the Pathet Lao guerillas began shelling Sayaboury, the Right-wing soldiers were given landmines to plant in the event of an enemy advance. But instead of putting the mines between the enemy and themselves, the Sayaboury defenders planted them behind their own positions. “If they are attacked and run, they will have to go right through their own minefield,” Lieutenant Lunday said. To add to the difficulties, the soldiers did not keep records of where the mines were planted and many of the recent casualties among soldiers and civilians in the province have been from stepping on the mines. The United States Special Forces team puts the Laotians through a training cycle of four to six weeks. The men seem eager and willing to learn, Lieutenant Lunday said, but the officers and noncommissioned officers are excused from the training. The result, the lieutenant added, is that when the units go back into the field much of what they have been taught is quickly lost. There’s more of Lunday in this Times article than I could ever have gathered from my own memory or family record; besides that, it’s a good taste of history to come. Various Laotian and Cambodian objects Lunday brought back were hung on the wall of the Nashville home. When we visited my grandparents, I stared at the bow & quill full of arrows and the rice-paddy hat in the guest room. The wood and reed were of an eerie hue and texture, pieces of a different world. They couldn’t be domesticated to my eye, and made the bedroom wall a holograph of the forest. We had a small library that followed us: a Bible with pretty pictures of Jesus patting white American kids on their heads beside a picket fence; some umpteenth edition of The Army Wife, another bible; Norman Vincent Peale, various well-worn children’s books, and a picturebook of France that made me feel I’d been there because I looked at it so many times.

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Also, there were three small paperback editions of Tom Dooley’s memoirs. Dooley was a Navy doctor and humanitarian who wrote of his doings in Vietnam and Laos between 1954 and ‘59. The books had black-and-white pictures of young Americans treating horribly sick Southeast Asians, before-and-after photos, and in the after shots the patients were always smiling at the friendly and helpful Americans. Dooley was, early on, the singular face of America in Indochina: decent, heroic – and fun, too. My father must have been doing the same kinds of things, I assumed: helping sick children, joshing with old crones whose few teeth were solid black from the betel nuts they chewed. Dooley turned out to be a complicated man, accused of exaggeration, rampant selfpromotion, and ambiguous sexuality. He died and was largely forgotten before the American war had really begun. I had a dark brown Laotian elephant’s tooth as big as my head that Lunday had brought home. It sat on a bookshelf or a dresser, and had moraine-like ridges that I traveled with my fingers. The tooth was stolen during one of our moves, and must have been half the size I remember. My other Laotian gift was a wooden elephant not worth stealing; I still have it on a shelf. It’s kitschy, and my wife hides it out of sight when she can, but I find it and put it back. It had two proud tusks, then one, then none; a small American flag thrust into the hole formed by its curled trunk, and one big foot propped on a globe: circus elephant or imperialist mascot. For no particular reason I Googled the Times correspondent who’d met my first father, imagining some serendipitous spark from their crossing paths. There is, after all, a smidgen of empathy in his report; Nevard had a heart. After retiring as a correspondent, Mr. Jacques Nevard worked for the New York City Police Department, then the Transit Authority. In 1977, after news

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reports on financial shenanigans in the TA, he leaped from a balcony despite his apparent lack of involvement in the scandal. Nevard’s death was a few days after my father’s death in his glider, but I know the coincidence means nothing. Two men met in a jungle, and later channeled out of this world in proximate time. We’re figures of happenstance, and the criss-crossings that score our surfaces are a magical if largely unreadable script.

Lunday poured all his fatherly attentions into my sister, his first-born, and by my time his passions were already elsewhere: other women and the arts of war. My sister he knew and had committed his heart to, whereas I was a tiny stranger. In between his Far-East journeys Lunday planned a trip to Washington, perhaps for briefings. My sister was nine, and he intended to bring her along. I was only five, and conflated going in the car to the airport with going all the way on the fabulous voyage. No one had packed for me, so I packed for myself: a Little Golden Book and two jugs of Play-Doh. My mother saw my misunderstanding, and explained that I’d not be going. The distinction between the airport and final destination was too obscure for me, and I remember the intellectual sting; but also, the more palpable injustice of being left behind. As the man-child, I should have had a special right to go along. My mother was always there, and I couldn’t conceive of worrying otherwise. My father was taking my sister to Washington, and I knew it was the center of important things. As an adult I lived in D.C. for a year or so, Writer in Residence at St. Albans School for Boys; and would walk down Wisconsin Street through Georgetown and to the Mall, haunting the

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Smithsonians of an afternoon. Sometimes I’d go to the Wall and watch the mourners and other tourists. There are phone-book sized directories for calling up the names of the dead with the tip of your finger, telling you which section of stone bears the name you want. But the names of the missing, the scarred, and the soul-dead aren’t there. The Vietnamese and others who died on both sides aren’t there. But you’re there: the black marble reflects your face as if from a void beneath the lace of names. Above the wall, the earth is a green mound. Give each blade of grass a name and you have a memorial to the enemy, the irksome allies, the delayed-dead, the altered futures. Grass has to be cut, but it always comes back.

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28 May 69 Dearest Patsy: Hi! Baby, I received your letter (# 105) today. I really enjoy your letters, and it makes me feel a little closer to you and our family! As far as where we stay on R&R, I really don’t care, except I do want a nice place with bath, TV, Air Cond. and a restaurant close by. I don’t know anything about Camp De Russy but it sounds like we could save money there. I want you to write the R&R center & ask for a price, facilities, etc., both at De Russy and other places. I told you that I received a letter from Jimmy [Lewis’s father]; well, it had a 6¢ stamp, and it came at the same time as one you mailed on the same date. So go ahead & use 6¢ stamps, & save 4¢ on each letter! I’m glad that Bobby tries hard to help you. He’s a fine son, and I love him very much. Tell him I said “Thanks for doing the yard.” Tell all the children that I love them, & to be good! I don’t know anything about Bob or his plans. Did Debbie listen to the tape? What did she say? I don’t really remember what I said, I was very tired & upset at the time. I guess that I should have waited before making it, but I wanted to get it in the mail then, because I don’t know what I’m going to do from hour to hour, much less day to day. Anyhow, I hope that she knows that we do love her, and just want her to be happy. If she feels that she wants to be with Bob, then that is her decision to make. Bob always talked about her, but never the boys. Well that’s fine by me. I’m going to adopt them when I return to the US anyway! You don’t think that it would upset Bobby too much, do you? Hope not! I most certainly will send instructions for R&R, my Darling! That is, any and everything that I can find out, & based on the information that you receive from R&R center. One thing I do

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know is for you to stay away from any cabs once you arrive. They have a game called “rob the Army wife”; that is, fares are out of sight. Also they get kickbacks from hotels, cafes, etc. so it will be best if we do make reservations before R&R. Travel agencies don’t really impress me. I prefer the U.S. mail any time! Every time I think that I’ve got a sun tan it comes off when I bathe in the river. Oh well, no big thing! The heat is just as bad as always. My back is clearing up a little bit. It really gave me fits for a while. I had tears in my eyes every time my pack shifted! The kids in my unit are really learning fast. I’m proud of them, but I don’t let them know it. I’m just as nasty mouthed as always, & have even learned some new ones. They call me MR. NICE GUY! HA! Nixon said that 25,000 would go home. It shouldn’t take over 30 years to get the rest out! I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to being with you. In your letter you said “Maybe you could raise my morale.” Honey, you could raise more than that! I’m so very lucky for having you for my wife, and of course the kids. Everything will get right when I get home to you, My Darling! I love you, Patsy! Jim P.S. Make sure your shot record is good for period of R&R.

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AFTER I LEFT HOME for college in 1976, Lewis adopted my brother Don. My parents never mentioned adoption to me, and I don’t know what made Lewis drop the idea. Maybe the look on my face: too much a Lunday. Maybe they asked and I said no, but I can’t imagine saying no to Lewis. Even when he was gone, Lewis was too much here and now. Lunday always seemed more exotic; my first father was an emblem of distance and all the freedom it stood for. Where he was, where he was going, where he had been were always far away. Though he rarely and only briefly returned, he brought the world with him. In the bottom of the hall closets in the succession of our homes we kept a green, cast-iron slide projector that sat dormant but for once a year, when we hauled it out for service. There was a hatbox always on the top shelf, piled with photos and several cases of slides from various years; but the main feature was always drawn from the carefully ordered contents of the flat metal case underneath the hat box, which, like the projector, was magical in being older than I was. In the box were a few hundred Kodachrome slides from my parents’ nearly-three-year stay in France in the nineteen fifties. Lunday was in the Army Band, and the family as it existed then – mother, father, daughter – lived in an alternate universe accessible through the cyclopean eye of the projector, cast onto the living-room wall. Phantasmagoria of family beneath foreign skies, down foreign avenues and alleys: familiar if younger faces, but without the weight of my own staring back. Folding myself into the prehistory of ego, I could almost find the cause of things to come: divorce, war, and this God’s insomnia called Time.

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Who really believes there was a life before they entered it? But I knew that before me there had been the heavy green-gray slide projector and its world-forging eye. Years ago on a visit home, I discovered the bulb, also older than I was, had finally died. It was a challenge ordering a replacement for such an old device; but losing the projector would have been like losing a child, or children: the versions of our younger selves. Never mind buying a newer, fancier contraption: the specters lived more in the machine than in the slides. The images didn’t move, but I loved the theater of projections: my movie-star mother, cherubic sister (outside the slides, I’d not known her in that mode), my snazzy, trombone-playing father, bright-eyed all. Lunday had been a camera buff in the fifties, a lover of gadgets, good with his hands and possessing a sharp eye. While in the Army Band, he photographed everything: landscapes, buildings, local citizens, Army buddies and their wives or dates, and his new family. He’d flown ahead to France in 1955, and my mother and sister followed on the S.S. Darby, thirteenth largest ocean liner in the world: my mother remembered that, having stored the fact like a charm in one of the many velvet-lined drawers of her mind. Her grand jewel is the comedy of their arrival: she and the baby finding no welcome after an ocean crossing, then boarding the wrong six-seater plane for the wrong town. A series of chivalrous Frenchmen and American servicemen got her eventually to the right airfield and a raucous welcome from the whole 279th Army Band. It made up for the typical Army negligence. This getting lost and found again was a fairy tale I loved to hear, and even now she finds her way back to telling it under any pretense. Generally it was the soldier-husband who set off on adventures, and the wife stayed home; so this was her one quest, despite all the traveling.

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They lived first in Châtelaillon, a village south of La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast; then further in, at Poitiers. Those were good days to be American: you could carry it with you and claim sovereign soil wherever you walked in Europe, grateful Europe. Even France loved us, if toleration is love. This projected world seemed to grow younger every time we performed the yearly ritual. That effect was helped along by the excellence of the Kodachrome. French rooftops, castle turrets, crowded cafes, black berets and Peugeots along the curbs; black rivers purling beneath bridges, where my mother, with her daughter in her arms, leaned against a post or posed in an archway or squatted in the sand; long skirt gathered around her, squinting against the sun, the Atlantic behind her cold and vitreous. Gallic faces, medieval-looking street furniture and architecture, artfully crumbling transoms and war-damage and the weary war-survivors, looking back from their aperitifs at the camera or following their cigarettes into oblivion: the world’s age had such a texture, and I adopted it as my secret style. There are recurring faces besides theirs: a Hungarian woman who worked as their nanny, war refugee who had yet to move on; blonde, standing full in the door, attractive and smartlooking, my two-year-old sister wrapped in her skirts. The Hungarian cried the day they told her they were being sent back to the States, and wanted them to bring her with them. I watched her appear and disappear from the wall so often I felt I knew her, and wanted to find her again and bring her to the New World as she’d wanted. Typically my father set the compositions well. The Hotel Moderne, festooned with American flags; yellow flowerboxes with red and pink blossoms are placed evenly in all the windows, and yellow pots hang from posts along the street. Halfway into the foreground, a bright

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red gas pump stands framed with the same floral scheme and Mobil’s red Pegasus on its dome. A gendarme in a crisp white kepi crosses the cobble-stoned circle between the gas island and the hotel. In front of the hotel, my mother holds a shopping bag in one hand and my sister’s hand in the other. Everything’s neat and balanced, both as civil engineering and photographic scene. The red of the American flags returns in the Pegasus, and again in my mother’s lipstick; the white in the gendarme’s cap matches the buttons on her dress. “Hotel Moderne” captions the image from within, and he captures it all from just outside as if framing an idea. But my mother seems to look for him, doesn’t see him there behind the camera, which he should be shouldering now, getting the car to retrieve them from the Hotel Moderne. Prehistory has folds, implications more complex than the life. Ancestry is only part of it: the long prelude dangerously poised between threat and blessing. Although I didn’t exist in this France, I used to think I was conceived in it. But the months are wrong: my parents had already moved to South Carolina. Maybe the idea of me started there, at least. I traveled to the region on my own decades later, in winter, to lay claim to it: wandered around La Rochelle and Châtelaillon in search of the slide images. I had prints of some of the slides in my jacket pocket, and out of kindness or just for fun one old man swore he remembered the young American couple with their little girl. I went away half-fooled with snapshots of my own, now buried away in the same hatbox.

I was a film fanatic in college, and after in New York and Houston, cities where one could feed a healthy habit in revival and art houses. But as with my writing life, the film-going had its roots in childhood: a private, mute engagement, asocial, secretive, as if I were the only

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soul in the world who knew of these things. Books were there, marked and worn on the library shelves, but I couldn’t imagine who else put their hands on them. Late-night movies on rare occasions revealed an Italian or French ennui and existentialism, but who else watched them, I didn’t know. College was the first time I met other moviegoers. In the family, trips to the cinema were sporadic. We had three or four excursions to the drive-in. It’s sad to have lost the drive-in theaters: the field of cars, on rows of mounds to aim them toward the screen; gray boxy speakers hooked to the window glass; the screen’s usurpation of the night. Beneath it, a miserable playground: two swings, a rickety slide, paint-chipped seesaw and depleted sandbox while the movie played anamorphically above our heads. My Uncle John managed a movie house in Nashville for a time. On one visit, my sister and I were treated to a strange double feature of Sterile Cuckoo and Reptilicus: Liza Minnelli’s lonely college girl and an equally unwanted giant lizard grown back from its thawed-out tail.

A few years back Uncle John sent me a video transfer of home movies my grandfather had made from the middle thirties to the early sixties. The cinema of kinfolk: I saw the jewel of my mother’s twenty-something smile and sway, and two decades earlier, my infant father sitting in a galvanized tub beneath a summer’s day. His mother, Ella, died giving birth to him. She flits on the edges of a few frames, and then is gone. A few years later his new mother, Mary Belle: coquettish, sweet, thin as silk: on a swing, crooking her finger at my stylish grandfather, who approaches in a wide floral necktie, sits, and kisses her rakishly; or she walks toward him slowly as he holds the camera, magnetized, drawn like Eurydice, then disappearing: the camera itself is

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Orpheus’ compulsive turn. Her boys and the neighborhood kids do the same thing: move towards the camera, smiling and curious, haunting their futures. Some grow up to be soldiers. The infant’s eyes are stunned by the world, have yet to see anything but shadow and glare. That baby in the tub, my father who crashed to earth in a glider with his own father, more than forty years later. In baby pictures, you can see we all start out stunned, surprised, gaping at the world’s broad strokes. Gradually details appear, we learn the names of things, make choices; between the raw self and the world, a character takes shape: the me or the you, a negotiation. Do we love people or patterns? Where do you and I become distinct from each other: this father’s face, so much like mine at certain ages, though his developed that sharp, jaded, killer’s stare. Flesh sloughs off, bones crumble, and even spirit seems to die. In New York, January, I was on my way to a revival house, St. Marks maybe, where On the Waterfront was billed; I stopped afterwards at Astor Place Liquors, scored a fifth of Mescal; went to a party I’d planned to skip, sat in the hallway and drank the whole damn thing down to the worm. Later, around midnight, it was below freezing; I walked near-naked up Avenue of the Americas, home to Chelsea, baying at the window where my roommate slept; my key lost, so drunk I was seeing 360˚. My dead father in jump boots, green beret and fatigues walked up and put a dime in the phone for me, dialed the number, and my roommate came down and dragged me upstairs. Three days later I woke to an epic nausea and my roommate’s looks askance. No mescal since.

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When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, it played in grainy, ghostly real-time on TV. With my Instamatic I snapped several shots of the broadcast, and Debbie’s boyfriend, Jack, said he had a friend who’d develop the film; but I never got it back. The shots must have been worthless, anyway. For a moment, news from the war took a backseat, and the Moon was closer. The Eagle had landed, but still flew hourly sorties and other missions above the craters of Vietnam. Sound and silence more than moral distance separated the two worlds. If our acts could be sealed off in a box in the cold quiet of space, we could study them and re-design history before we let it loose on Earth. But we get no chances for revision. Every broadcast of everything we do is beaming into space, some say. Others say that’s a fallacy, and all we’ve broadcast decays before it reaches the nearest star. But if it holds together, tracking toward Andromeda, another of our regrets: headed for the Sun and sure destruction, the last of many heady nostalgias already catching fire at its edges, beautifully haloed with its own demise. I had my first up-all-night at age eleven, when my mother was too emotionally weary to pay attention. I got no further than the living room and a Universal Studios horror-show marathon history of the world, UHF Book of the Dead for suburban America. Horror was all the bad things that might exist, and rules for how to kill them. So much TV in my head, in my whole body, there on the couch, and finally the sun came up like the main act.

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10 Jun 69 Dearest Patsy: Hello, Darling! How are you today? I just now found out the date of my R&R. It is 28 July till 3 Aug 69. I should get orders to send to you in the next couple of weeks. We need $1,000.00 to ensure that everything is taken care of. Go to the bank, & talk to the manager. Tell him that I want a $1,000.00 loan to be repaid in (3) payments, the 1st of which would start on 5 Aug and the last on 5 Oct 69. There shouldn’t be any trouble on a short-term loan like that, but I want to check on it now, so that everything can be straight when it’s time for you to depart. If the bank can’t make a loan of that amount then we will have to get (2) loans. I want you to go see Della, and tell her what I want to do. She will help you at the bank. You have my power of attorney. The reason that the payment should start on 5 Aug is that you have to leave the morning of 27 July so that you will be there ahead of me, and the paycheck will get to you after that date, & you need time to return home and make the payment. Paycheck will be $930 each month. Honey, don’t delay it because time is important now. Let me know what you find out! Patsy, I can’t tell you how much it means to me to know that I’ll be with you on 28 July. I can’t wait to hold you in my arms. Don’t worry about things so much (at least try); maybe they’ll straighten out. You’re my sweet Darling! I love you Patsy! Jim

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11 Jun 69 Dearest Patsy: Hello, my beautiful Darling! How are you today? I received your letter of 6 June today. I’m glad that Debbie made the trip alright, and that Bob & Simone were able to meet her. In your letter you said that Bob said he saw me (2) weeks ago. I guess his memory is as erratic as everything else. The last time I saw him was 12 April, and I talked to him on the phone the day I was promoted. No big thing! What did you find out about the loan or loans? There is another way, and that is to call United Airlines and find out what their Fly Now – Pay Later plan would cost! They could arrange the hotel, etc. It would have been better, I guess, if I had waited until Oct for R&R (as far as money), but I wanted to see you as soon as possible. Also, I’ll have a different job then, and may not have been able to go on R&R, not to mention the fact of the kids going to school, etc. I guess that I should not have loaned the money out, but these kids live for their R&R, and they couldn’t have gone without the money. You can call me a “sucker” if you want to, but I did what I thought was best. As far as Bob is concerned, I guess that you should answer his letter. Tell him that Debbie’s welfare is the thing that we are concerned about. Smoking, etc. The main thing is her sense of values, which I feel are distorted by this situation. I don’t want Debbie to leave our home, but I will not put up with the way she is acting, either. If she wants to stay w/ Bob & Simone, then that’s fine. It may give her a sense of responsibility again. The thing is, she will be a bum if she doesn’t straighten up, and soon. I could go on forever, but it would just be words. It’s easy (most of the time) to say I’m sorry, and it takes a very mature person to think out & research an answer to a problem. Bob sticks his head in a hole when it comes to facing

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“Life.” It’s weird, because he has to make fast and accurate decisions as an officer. He does this well, but as far as “Life” itself, he does not. I can’t believe how fast the boys are growing. They are a fine, healthy bunch, and I’m very proud of them. I fixed (waterproofed) several of their & Debbie’s, & of course my Darling’s pictures, that I carry with me at all times. The last pictures you sent, your hair was just right, & I like it very much. Like it? I love it! Honey, I don’t want you to think that I’m going to lock you up in a room in Hawaii! I intend to look at all the sights, & buy you presents, etc. I don’t really care what we do as long as we do it together. I’ll try to be on my best behavior, but won’t promise anything. I may put my hands on you in public, or say something that officers aren’t supposed to, but I was Jim Lewis before I became an officer, and that is what I am now. OK? I believe that we can make it on R&R for $400, but we should have $600 just in case! Again, I don’t care where we stay as long as it has the things I mentioned before. I want to hold you to my heart, and feel & smell you, & a million other things that excite me just thinking about. Baby, you’re always in my thoughts and heart. I love you, Patsy! Jim

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THE TENSION BETWEEN THE TWO MEN has ratcheted up to insults – from Lewis, anyway – but it’s still a Cold War of sorts, and will remain so. Later they will experience, in fact, a Détente at approximately the same time as Nixon and Brezhnev. My mother was worn out from the stress of managing a teenage girl. A few years later I had my own small rebellions, but settled early into the role of Good Son to offset my sister’s legacy. Debbie’d been smoking, skipping school, going around with long-haired older boys, talking back, avoiding chores. We’ve all regretted every harsh word to our mother, every betrayal; decades now of remorse for each of us, because we know she remembers everything we did. Every one of our insults was an added labor pang. It isn’t that she’s unforgiving; but it’s precisely measured, and itemized for every sin. When my mother went into labor with me, Lunday was in the field tossing grenades. She called a friend, another soldier named Ray Schrump, to drive her to the maternity clinic. Capt. Schrump was a future POW. In May 1968 he was captured by Viet Cong while on patrol near Cambodia, and wasn’t freed until Operation Homecoming in ‘73. After his release Schrump stayed in the Army and rose to Lieutenant Colonel. Somehow, the man who drove my mother to the maternity clinic was supposed to fit into my portfolio of self, like a godparent or namesake. His name was in the news a few times, his wife was interviewed on TV, and when he came back, like the others, he was honored. He retired and ran unsuccessfully for Congress. Schrump’s name and service information were inscribed on a POW/MIA bracelet, one of thousands that were made and sold in the early seventies. Online a few years ago, I found a woman about my age who had worn one of the bracelets with Schrump’s name. She told me of

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trying to find the man a few years earlier and contacting his family: as if the bracelet had given her a responsibility, or a right. It had been a small amount of her emotional life as a teenager, after all: sitting in class, American History let’s say, fidgeting with the bracelet on her wrist day after day – one would wonder about the man behind the name. In my case it was the birth-legend, the substitution for father, but also, the POW story made for a parallel to Lunday’s death and Lewis’s disappearance. The forced march, being absented from the world by his captors, amplified for me the journeys that my fathers followed. My Internet friend reported that Schrump’s family was irked by her intrusion, and she found out very little. One tidbit placed him in Iraq as recently as a few years ago. Lunday, had he survived, might have ended up back at the edge of empire, and Lewis might be there now, sipping a beer with Schrump or someone else near the Euphrates, still patriots, but for better pay.

South Carolina, Fort Jackson, Richland County: summer, whitewalls are spinning down the road, the maternity clinic is a converted WWII barracks just like the Kindergarten I would attend later at Bragg. My mother is large with me in the passenger seat. She tells the future POW that this is his most important mission. He’s a crew-cut, short-sleeved, boar-necked fellow; he laughs and tells my mother to hold on tight and make me wait. At the clinic, my father shows up just as Schrump’s car pulls up to the door. So he was there: in one of her retellings my mother must have mentioned it, giving him some credit. In fatigues and field cap fresh from grenade practice, where his aim was true: he had the dust of his profession on him, so they kept him out of the ward, but he waited outside.

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Lunday had a portrait painted of my mother from a photo he’d taken. I have a copy of the photograph, but it’s faded to the point that she has no mouth or chin. She, too, is disappearing. The painting itself stays in her cedar chest that she was given by her stepmother as a wedding gift; the chest is very old, has followed her through every move, and was recently refinished. Slowly, she’s been giving each child its contents, but it’s still nearly full. The painting, wrapped up in a Sears bag, is about the size of a bathroom mirror. The face is a simple, full-front portrait from the bust. She wears a black dress with a black-and-white polka-dotted scarf, and her hair is as black as the dress, with sheens of red the portraitist decided would look dramatic. It’s accurate as to the likeness, neat and balanced, if slightly mechanical. In the same bag is a crayon-on-cardboard replica I did when I was eight: a bit squarish in the head, the eyes too wide, but with enough effort at detail and countenance that it must have mattered to get it as close to right as I could. I wonder if I was trying to capture my mother’s true face, or only the portrait of a younger woman I’d never known. Which was the truer symbol of my love and dread? The portrait had a frame for a while, and hung in two or three homes we lived in after I was born. I remember it in the hallway across from a room I slept in, and with the door cracked open and the hall light shining on it, the face was terrifying. I knew it was my mother’s face, but the shadows turned the eyes down demonically at night. In daylight, they were wide open and expectant as my mother’s own eyes were. She was beautiful, but at night it was something terrible that watched over me, a forties noir dame à la Dr. Moreau. It was the face of the mother who held me before sleep and read to me, the same who put on makeup for special occasions, hairspray and jewelry from the lacquer box Lewis sent back from Vietnam on an earlier tour. It was she whose face, when I stood beside her at the mirror, had

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a droopy eye that fascinated me, because it was only there in the mirror. The woman who wore the makeup and set hair was the same who did dishes and laundry. They went out, Lewis in his dress whites or blues, and since we went to sleep before our parents came back, she was her morning-self, loose hair and pale lips, the next I’d see her. The party face went out, but never returned.

One of us would make a peanut butter sandwich and throw the jar, empty we thought, into the garbage. Mother would observe, solemnly, seeing the act through, and then go to the trash to retrieve the jar. This must have happened more than once, but it was not a lesson we were capable of learning. It was a performance that had to be: she would take a butter knife out of the drawer, peel a slice of Wonder Bread from its bag, reach with the butter knife into the empty jar of peanut butter, surgically cutting, or rather scraping like an engraver, at the residue there: one must see the artist with his burin, scratching deftly at an image of the mind’s eye. This remainder she would draw over the Wonder Bread until it was glazed brown. Then as a final act she’d show us the jar now undeniably empty, and the slice of bread, each in a hand, and ask: “Do you see what I just did?” and she was not referring to the magic trick we had just witnessed, but to the practical morality of the Great Depression. Perhaps her own mother had possessed the skill to eke even more matter out of a jar. This one, to our eyes, was now factory-clean. But maybe no jar is ever empty. When I visited for Christmas a few years ago, I studied her kitchen cabinets. She cooks mainly for herself now, but still the shelves are stocked with canned goods and all the ingredients

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a family kitchen needs. Look closely, and you see that the soup and canned vegetables are eerily neat; look even closer, and you see they’re alphabetical. I judge it a worthy shrine to the Good Life we had under our mother’s care, and she keeps it all there in preservation of the family that vanished one by one. In another cabinet I found an old tin of bay leaves, and a frisson of remembrance passed through me. I’d stood in a kitchen thirty years earlier holding that same tin of bay leaves, and remembered then standing in yet another kitchen ten years earlier at the age of five, studying that very same, slightly-rusty tin of bay leaves, wondering how long it had been among our traveling possessions. Perhaps she used one bay leaf a year for fifty years, and it’s still not done; or, like Baucus and Philemon, she was kind to one of the gods; and he blessed her, or blessed our spice cabinet. The eternal tin of bay leaves was still there, and I stood on the outer edge of the mise en abîme, looking into our family’s history as our mother had slow-simmered it. Centering one neat shelf was a jar of Kayo syrup. I don’t remember anyone ever actually using Kayo syrup, but it was always there with the molasses, which also never got used. This bottle of Kayo syrup was full, and there was just a hint of anachronism about its label. Examining the bottle, I found an expiration date of 1977. I thought of the Sex Pistols, Jimmy Carter, and the energy crisis, and imagined the Kayo syrup as precious fuel. It had seen five presidents and the zeitgeist had shifted several times while it waited patiently, but it was syrup after all, and the very emblem of patience. It had moved several times and inhabited many kitchens, like us. I put the bottle back and closed the cabinet.

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4 July 69 Dearest Patsy: Well, Darling, I’m not as good as I thought I was. I was moving my company across very thick jungle, and ran smack into a NVA base camp. Snipers in the trees and MG’s at ground level. I tried two attacks, and I got hit both times. It was a bear because you couldn’t see over 6 ft. because of the undergrowth. I woke up on the Medevac and am not sure how many people I lost. I know of at least (4) KIA & (10) WIA. Patsy, I love you and the kids! I’m fine, I was hit 4 different places: mouth, chest, arms (2). I lucked out! I love you, Patsy! Jim [back of letter] P.S. I think they will send me to Japan, but I’m not sure. I’ll write ASAP. I’m fine, don’t worry. J.

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LEWIS WAS TRANSFERRED in late June from M Company, 75th Infantry, back to command of D Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry. On July 3, 1969, his company was involved in a significant battle with the North Vietnamese 33rd Regiment. Bullets and grenade fragments in the chest, mouth, both arms – a crucifix gesture; lost several men, spent several days in a field hospital, got decorated, then back into the thick of it right before his R&R. While recuperating, starting right on the 4th, Lewis kept up housekeeping – on his fungusinfected back, strung with IV’s, still 13,000 miles from our front door. After the first note, he sent another, also on the Fourth of July; the second seems to show a memory lapse; understandably. But he offers a few more garnered details:

I found out that I’m not bullet proof, but anyhow, I’m fine. I lost 12 KIA and 20 WIA at last count. The kids did an outstanding job for me and I did my best, but it was not enough. I got frag from a grenade in my face and chest and two bullets took out a little meat on my right arm, and a small piece of frag also. No sweat! I will be out of the hospital in time to meet you for R&R. The Red Cross should not have told you because I told them not to. Send mail to D Co. 2/3 and they will bring it to me. Baby, I’m OK! and must be in good shape because I’ve cussed out the whole world. I’m in the 24th Evac. Hosp. at Long Binh. My face is puffed all out of shape, and I’m missing a couple of teeth, but I should look just as ugly as ever after a week or so. Right now I look like King Kong, and feel like he did when he was shot off the Empire State Building.

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The fight lasted over (8) hours. I was hit every time I got up an attack. I can’t tell you how bad I feel about the dead and wounded. Patsy, I love you so very much, and can’t wait to see you. I’ll write every day and let you know what is happening. Plan on meeting me on the 28th for R&R.

A day later and he’s back to the household, dealing with news from ten days before, then putting on a comedy act:

Honey, I wish that I could tell you what to do about Debbie, but I don’t know what you could do that you haven’t done already. I’m very upset with her actions, but can’t think of an answer! ** They got out the rest of the frag and took more x-rays today, and also kicked my big butt out of bed. I feel fine, except believe it or not it’s not my wounds that hurt, but a bad cold that I’ve caught. It only hurts when I laugh! They stopped giving me IV’s, and that really made me happy; the only bad thing is now I have to get a couple of shots day and night right in the rear end. It’s funny because I can hear the nurses and medic arguing about who has to inject CPT LEWIS. I’m not the most loved patient, and I’m sure they will kick me out soon. Hope so! ** Tell Jack Shannon that he is honor bound to at least get a toenail shot off! If not then I’ll claim a foul, and demand my tooth back. (1) inch higher & I would have lost my right nipple – now that would make for a good conversation piece!

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** P.S. This hospital has nurses that look like boys, but they do a great job.

A couple more letters, in which he instructs Patsy not to tell his mother about what happened; asks her to pass along his invitation to comrades not yet arrived in country: “Come on in, the water’s fine!”; then, once more, to R&R: what clothes to pack for him, and assurances they’d still be making up for lost embraces, however sore his wounds. Some things seem larger than life. This year I’m traveling through, via air mail, is flashed through with events bigger than the tin box the letters are stored in. Lewis’s injuries and what they stand for are larger than my life, and the disappearance a dozen years after is the largest thing, and yet the smallest of all. I’m in love with the layers of things, how they stack and peel, diminish and grow. Every word I write adds or destroys a layer of the life I’m trying to show. That’s my pleasure: if I were Hamlet, the drama would never have ended. I’d have opened up a meta-narrative, wandered off and never returned to the stage. The layers: 1) The events of the battle that took place on July 3, 1969; its infinite angles, the innumerable perspectives, sights and sounds and smells: the moment itself, now lost; 2) The newspaper article that we still have a copy of, which we read on Independence Day: the briefest mention of my stepfather’s unit, their being involved in an action, a certain number of KIA, WIA, and the details of the enemy; 3) My memory of our reading that article: the first worries, starting with my mother, who must have been holding the newspaper as we read it together. Gathering it from the

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yard or the stoop that morning, unfolding it, placing it neatly on the corner of the kitchen table until early afternoon, when my mother would read it with a second cup of coffee; 4) The preservation of the newspaper as document; its yellowing, the folds becoming creases, the advertisements now antiquated; 5) A memory of playing on the kitchen floor and looking with vague, childish concern at my mother, whose moods I was somewhat attuned to, as she sat for what seemed hours staring at the back of a Red Cross envelope, afraid to open it and read what she had taken for a death notice; 6) The receipt, days later, of a series of envelopes also marked “RED CROSS”: Lewis’s letters post-battle about the field hospital, recuperation, and return to his unit; 7) Months later, the official documentation: citations, of which I have dainty, onionskinned, green- and salmon-colored carbon copies: straightforward narratives highlighting heroism; 8) Photographs of his R&R, Lewis’s dapper moustache covering the scar above his lip; 9) The eventual Silver Star (downgraded from a Distinguished Service Cross) and Purple Heart; 10) Photographs of the Commanding Officer pinning the medals to Lewis’s chest; 11) Photographs of the man in uniform in later years, with the requisite fruit salad of ribbons and clusters; 12) The man’s own words about these matters – few and rare, and never directly to me; 13) Physical and indexical evidence: the scar and the gap in his teeth, the memo book he’d worn in his breast pocket, with the bullet hole;

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14) Memories of others who were there, found in various places – veterans’ Internet chat rooms, in recent years; 15) Miscellaneous remnants, such as the folded, yellowed clipping I found years ago while snooping in one of Lewis’s old wallets, long after he’d disappeared: an account of the death of one Cpl. Michael F. Folland, who’d thrown himself on a grenade to save Lewis’s life, for which he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor; 16) The domain of History, words in books: specifically, Michael Lanning’s (see below); 17) Other soldier’s letters, assumed to exist in other cookie tins, shoe boxes, etc.; 18) Everything that the Other Side or sides (Vietnamese both North and South) might provide as further layering, parallel to and beyond everything listed above; 19) The words I’m writing now, refracting the history into my own story; 20) All that I’ve failed to imagine. A sampling of documents. First, a statement by a Platoon Sergeant present at the battle:

STATEMENT

On 3 July 1969, at approximately 1430 hours, at grid coordinates YT269043, Company D, 2d Battalion, 3d infantry 199th Infantry Brigade (Sep) (Light) encountered an enemy NVA force of estimated company size. The enemy force was entrenched in fortified bunkers. Enemy snipers enfiladed the area from the trees. The Company D. Commander, Captain James E. Lewis, began to develop the situation. The terrain was double and triple canopy jungle. Cpt Lewis called in repeated artillery, light fire teams of cobra helicopters, and air strikes on the enemy positions. However, the enemy continued to remain within 50 meters of our perimeter and thus avoided much of our artillery and air fire power. Company D took casualties of nine (9) US KIA and 13 US WIA throughout the action. Cpt Lewis received arm wounds by an enemy grenade early in the action. Cpt Lewis refused medical treatment. He continued to shout instructions over the

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deafening gun fire as he sought to employ the most effective fire against the enemy. Cpt Lewis directed his platoons to attempt to envelop the enemy positions. However, the enemy, more familiar with the terrain, had already begun to encircle our company. Cpt Lewis, meanwhile, enlisted the aid of another US company, Company C, 2d Battalion, 3d Infantry, who launched an assault on our flank which drove off the enemy envelopment. One of our wounded men lay forward of our front positions. The area was raked with enemy machine gun fire. In spite of his arm wounds, Cpt Lewis crawled forward three or four times to rescue the wounded man. When machine gun rounds fired over his head, Cpt Lewis hurled two grenades at the enemy bunkers. On two instances, Cpt Lewis picked up live enemy hand grenades thrown at him and threw them back. Finally, an enemy grenade landed near Cpt Lewis, killing the US soldier next to him and wounding him in the chest, side, and mouth. The last wound cut through his lip, and knocked out a tooth. Cpt Lewis was bleeding badly and could barely talk. Cpt Lewis’s courageous example and continued indomitable leadership made the difference in holding together our beleaguered company, minimizing casualties, and inflicting heavy damage on the enemy. Cpt Lewis continued to direct an orderly withdrawal of our company to a safe position where the air strikes could be directly brought in on the enemy bunkers. JAMES H. HENRY 28 September 1969

PSG, 3d Plt Co D, 3d Bn 3d Inf

*

Another statement, from an officer not present:

STATEMENT During the 3 July 1969 action for which Cpt James E. Lewis has been cited, I was in command of 2d Battalion, 3d Infantry. I interviewed numerous men from Company D after the action, and

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consequently I am intimately familiar with all of the circumstances surrounding Cpt Lewis’s extraordinary heroism. At approximately 1430 hours, 3 July 1969, Company D, 2d Battalion, 3d Infantry, contacted an entrenched NVA company size force. The action was initiated as Company D cut its way through dense jungle in the vicinity of coordinates YT269043. The enemy was dug into a well prepared complex of bunkers and fortified positions and waited until Company D advanced into the camouflaged base camp area before initiating the action. The initial enemy fusillade was instantaneous. The enemy delivered a devastating volume of automatic weapons fire, hand grenades, RPG rockets, and fire from snipers in trees. Many casualties were sustained in the first few seconds. Company D fought back. Cpt Lewis immediately began to develop the situation. He moved forward under the intense fire to get a better estimate of the situation and establish control. He called in artillery fire and helicopter gunships, continuously exposing himself to enemy snipers and murderous machine gun fire. Casualties continued to mount. Cpt Lewis continued to give orders, supervise the evacuation of the wounded, and maneuver his platoons. The enemy stubbornly persisted from their fortified positions with more grenades and small arms fire. Deadly enemy fire pelleted the area. Nine (9) US were KIA in Company D. Twenty two (22) were WIA. Cpt Lewis directed his platoons in an attempt to envelop the enemy force. The NVA were familiar with the area, however, and had already nearly encircled Company D. Cpt Lewis received slight arm wounds early in the action. He refused medical treatment, however, and continued to lead his unit by forceful, aggressive example. Using his radio and map, Cpt Lewis moved through intense enemy fire to the forward most position of his lead platoon. There, Cpt Lewis personally led four (4) heroic rescue attempts under fire, to reach a wounded US soldier forward of enemy troops. Each time, Cpt Lewis was driven back by murderous enemy machine gun and automatic weapons fire. While attempting to neutralize an enemy machine gun bunker with the aid of two men, Cpt Lewis picked up and threw back at least two live enemy hand grenades. One enemy grenade then landed near Cpt Lewis. The grenade killed the US soldier next to him, and severely wounded Cpt Lewis in the right side and in the mouth. A grenade fragment had cut through his upper lip, knocked out a tooth, and lodged in his inner cheek. In spite of his two wounds and bleeding from the mouth, Cpt Lewis continued in command, and conducted an orderly withdrawal, taking his wounded men with him. Cpt Lewis moved his company to a safe distance, to permit US air strikes to pulverize the enemy positions. Cpt Lewis continued to supervise his company in cutting out a jungle landing zone for

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evacuation of the wounded. Not until his company was completely reorganized and a replacement company commander had arrived did Cpt Lewis relinquish command and consent to medical evacuation. Cpt Lewis’s personal example of bravery in the face of enemy fire, his sound tactical judgment, and coolness in directing his men, was the dominating factor in the rallying of his beleaguered company. As testimony to the size and importance of the base camp discovered by Company D, the following is a list of enemy items subsequently destroyed or evacuated from the enemy positions, vic YT269043: 1

– 82mm mortar with base plate and 2 sights

1

– 60 mm mortar

1

– AK47 rifle

1

– Diary

1

– 107mm rocket

1

– gas mask

49 – Booby traps 3 lbs – Documents and medical supplies 9,900 – Rounds AK47 ammunition 25 – Bunkers destroyed, size 8’ x 10’ x 6’ with 2 layers logs and 2’ earth overhead 45 – Rounds B-40 rocket 10 – Rounds B-41 rocket 25 – RPG boosters 1,000 – Rounds M-60 ammunition 35 – Booby trap pressure release devices 50 – Grenades (potato masher) 1

– AK 50 Cylinder

6

– 82mm mortar rounds

1

– Anti personnel mine

50 – Rifle grenades 4

– Grenades, HT 50

400 – Pounds C-3 demolition 15 – Machetes

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15 – Sets of clothing 10 – Pair boots 3

– Crosscut saws

20 – Pounds cooking utensils 50 – Pounds bananas 150 – Pounds rice 10 – Pounds tea 10 – Pounds food preservative 5

– Pounds peas

20 – Pounds salt 10 – Pounds tobacco 2

– Flashlights

1½ – Gallon gasoline 3

– Cans cooking oil

1

– Radio antenna John A. Mess LTC, Infantry II Field Force

*

Next, an excerpt from Michael Lanning’s book, The Only War We Had:

Another hundred meters along the trail, I came upon McGinnis and CPT Lewis, the Delta commander. Lewis, a tough-looking man about McGinnis’ age, was drawing on the ground with the barrel of a .45 pistol. A bloody field dressing was clinched in his teeth. His RTO explained while Lewis drew pictures.

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The teenage radio operator calmly told us their point man had been hit in the legs by machine gun fire. The platoon medic and then the platoon leader had been killed trying to get to the screaming soldier. The three were just across a large deadfall of logs and branches a hundred meters to our front. Each time the platoon had reached the deadfall, the enemy had resumed the machine gun fire. A dust-off trying to drop a jungle penetrator for the wounded had been hit and had to withdraw. The RTO continued. During the last attempt to reach the wounded man, the gooks had thrown hand grenades and fired RPG rounds. McGinnis, Lewis, and the RTO agreed on a plan. My platoon and Little's were to assault the enemy position from the left flank. Delta was to attack in the same action as before. Delta Company was losing its effectiveness as a unit. All its officers were dead or wounded. Lewis rallied together about twenty men to try to retrieve his dead and injured. The point man's cries for help still mingled with occasional bursts of random fire. The gooks were using him as bait. I stayed on the far right of my platoon assault line. Twenty meters away, I could see Lewis getting ready. Blood ran down his chin, soaking his fatigue shirt. His eyes were calm, however. I noticed he wore the right shoulder patch of the 101st Airborne from a previous tour. This was not his first fight. As soon as the second platoon was in position on my left, the entire front opened fire and began to crawl forward. Tracers from two enemy machine guns were intersecting at the deadfall. RPGs and grenades impacted the killing zone.

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We made about fifty meters into the thick jungle. A call on the radio led us to pull back. We met again with Lewis. His RTO explained as Lewis drew more pictures that they had made it across the deadfall. More men had been hit and the rest had had to pull back. Lewis tried to talk. His top teeth and palate had been knocked loose by pieces of frag grenade. He could only grunt. We waited for the other two Charlie Company platoons to get into position where they could support by fire. Sassner reported that the jungle was so thick that they could do little good. Lewis held up one finger. He wanted to try one more time. We moved back to our positions as Jong dropped salvo after salvo of artillery into the gook position. He was working with the Delta FO who was bleeding from a leg wound. The arty halted only briefly when gunships rolled in with rockets and mini-guns. We resumed the attack. It took a half an hour to make it to thirty meters of the enemy position. Tree branches and leaves fell like hailstones as the enemy bullets cut the vegetation above our heads. Five meters to my left, Hefferman took fragments in the face, but he continued to fire his red-hot M-60. In the relative open area to my right, I could see that the enemy's fire was now concentrating on Lewis. Grenades filled the air, going both ways. Many failed to explode. Frightened hands on both sides forgot to pull the pins in the heat of the battle. We could move no farther forward. Again we were ordered to withdraw. Tears were now in Lewis’s eyes. His RTO was no longer with him. A weeping Delta soldier said the RTO had jumped on a grenade to save Lewis.

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Lewis motioned he wanted to try again. McGinnis explained the situation to the Battalion and Brigade Commanders who were orbiting the area in their C&C birds. By now, the fight had been going on for nearly six hours. Darkness was closing around us. The Battalion Commander ordered us to withdraw and get the wounded evacuated. Sounds no longer came from the deadfall. Lewis was growing weak from the loss of blood. Sassner was working a couple of hundred meters to our rear to clear an area for a dust-off. The night was black when we finally were able to get six of the wounded on the bird. I noticed that the lieutenant with the minor wound was the first to be wrenched up on the cable. Lewis, still protesting, was last.

*

Last, the AP account we read in the Observer on July 4, 1969 – before my mother had received notice from the Red Cross, and days ahead of Lewis’s first letters post-battle:

North Viets Cut Down U.S. Troops That Stumbled on Red Base Camp SAIGON (AP) – North Vietnamese troops opened fire on U.S. Infantrymen who entered the enemy base camp 27 miles northwest of Saigon, killing nine and wounding 19, military spokesmen reported today. The battle marked the heaviest losses American troops have taken in a single battle in the past several days. The fight raged from noon Thursday to nightfall. Enemy losses were not immediately known. “We were looking for an enemy base camp area and we found it,” said one American officer from the 199th Brigade. One of our elements walked into it without realizing it. Then the whole thing came down around our heads.”

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Complete Surprise Firing from their heavily entrenched positions, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong cut loose with a stream of rifle, machine gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire, completely surprising the American company of 150 infantrymen. Field reports said the nine Americans were killed inside the enemy’s bunker complex. Six were hit with rifle fire, the others with grenades, in the close-in fighting. American reinforcements were rushed to the area in an effort to seal off the enemy. While Air Force bombers and Army Cobra gunships tried to keep the North Vietnamese pinned down, the infantrymen tried to tighten the cordon. “The seal was not too effective,” a U.S. officer said. “It was a large area, a bunker complex with concertina wire, trenches. We swept the area today. We found no bodies, just blood trails, medical supplies and leaflets encouraging Americans to surrender. They (the North Vietnamese) apparently picked up and moved out before we got the seal. It was a fairly good sized camp.” *

The article goes on to other war-related news; this battle that figured so heavily in our own lives was not worth more than half a column by itself. There’s the other article mentioned above, some months later, about Folland’s mother receiving her dead son’s Medal of Honor. Lewis carried it in his wallet for a long time: talisman, reminder of a debt. There must have been other exchanges, in both directions: lives saved and debts incurred, and a debt like that can only be paid forward.

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11 July 69 Dearest Patsy: Hello, My Darling, how are you today? Today has been a busy one for me. I got out of the hospital at 0930, and got to Bn (Rear) at about 1200, then met (3) of my new platoon leaders (2LTs), then talked to some brass for awhile. The idiots are putting me in for the Distinguished Service Cross, and that’s crazy. That’s second only to the Medal of Honor. I don’t know if it will be downgraded to a Silver Star or not but I feel it should be, because I only did my job. Your letters dtd 2 & 3 July were the first that you sent to “D” Company. You asked who got “M” Co. I turned it over to 1LT Harper, who was my new X.O. Things happen in a hurry over here. When the Company (D) got knocked apart in June then LTC Mess (Bn. CO) went to the CG and asked for me. I was pulled off a mission and given about 30 hours to put the company back together. That’s the way it goes over here! Patsy, I have to cut this short, but will write ASAP. Tell the kids that I love and miss them, and to be good! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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21 July 69 Dearest Patsy: Hello! Beautiful Darling. I can’t believe that in (10) more days that I will be able to hold you in my arms, and a million other things. I received your letter of 16 July today. You asked if I wanted any reading material. No thank you, I’ll read the label on your underwear! John Thompson is assigned to 2nd Bn 502 Inf. 101st ABN Div. I called 101 Rear and found this out. He had already departed for his unit. I also called CWO Sam Rader. He has a knock job in SAIGON. Big office, air conditioner, etc. It’s nice work if you can get it, and if you can look at yourself in the mirror each morning. I feel fine, and all the swelling is just about out of my face. I had the stitches taken out of my arm today, and most of the ones in my chest. I’m going back to BMB (Rear) to see if they can make me a tooth (bridge) before R&R. It is the (1) to the left of (2) front teeth (top) & it really feels weird because I always had good teeth – before. My upper lip still is numb, but looks just fine. I’ve got a small mustache to cover stitches but it’s driving me nuts and I’ll probably shave it soon. Patsy, I love you so very much, and I need you always. There is never a minute that you’re not on my mind. I’m so very proud of you, and our family! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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MARY JO KOPECHNE is lost to the waters of the Chappaquiddick; Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin find the Sea of Tranquility. Lewis marks the map where he nearly died; there’s no X for where he is now. He’s healing nicely, is somewhat concerned about the preservation of his appearance, but stays focused on the most immediate concern: R&R.

In the winter of 1985 I escaped a failed relationship by leaving town, state, and country. Ireland from afar seemed the perfect lover. I traveled first around the continent, passing through Mainz, where we had lived seventeen years before. After a cheap meal outside the train station I got my hands on a map, but it didn’t show the American military facilities: the Germans’ willed forgetfulness. The American housing area was somewhere high above the Rhine, several miles away from the military base itself. Somehow, riding buses here and there, I fit myself back into a 1968 cityscape as seen by an eight year old, begging help of strangers in my poor German, and found the housing area, still there. Google the location now, and it’s a big blank above the city and the river: not only are the base and housing area gone, but the satellite view suggests a quarantine before rehabilitation. I found my way to the hilltop gate and walked through as if in search of my smaller self, stumbling home from school. The compound was small enough for a kid to have run about almost anywhere on his own: Post Exchange, baseball field, school, snack bar, and the German candy stores and kiosks just outside the entrances. Lewis went out every day to Robert E. Lee Barracks, where his unit was. In contrast to my parents’ fifties sojourn in France, the current family unit rarely got out of the housing area.

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We were essentially in America, and Germany occasionally visited us: mainly as hired help, whom my mother had the curious habit of addressing in English spoken with a faux-German accent. It seemed to work. Although the family didn’t get off post, there were school trips to the town center, a villa on the Rhine, a fire station and the Gutenberg Museum. As eight year olds, we preferred the fire station. I loved it all, because I could hear the turning of pages in the picture book I was in. We lived in one of several apartment buildings with coal cellars, where trucks disgorged black mounds we romped on until the driver scared us off. Chimneysweeps came through in top hats and shook our hands to give us luck. Luck was exactly the thing I believed in, a spark that jumped hand to hand. Sometimes someone passes through and nods existence in your direction. Shake hands if you can. I believed myself a chosen one; but it’s just being born. The yards between the apartment buildings, the fields stretching out toward the bit of noman’s-land before the town took over, the view from the swing set between our apartment building and the one behind – if you sat on top of it, or swung high enough, you could glimpse the spires and cranes of the town and the sun setting over the Rhine. The spires were the medieval city, and older: Mainz, we learned in school, had Roman beginnings. The cranes were the German Miracle: the constant rebuilding, still going on in this late stage of the Postwar Era, within view of the new Romans, us. I spent hours at the Post Exchange reading comics. Ex-Nazi soldiers, some missing an arm or a leg or an eye, came on post for shopping. Perhaps I exaggerate their numbers as well as their wounds. They were a surly, and there was a grit to their resentment, as dark as the coal. From our kitchen window you could see bunkers left in place after the War. They were of an ancient-looking brick, tucked into earthen mounds like gross miscreations. The German

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military had fenced them, and town residents used the one near our street as an occasional dump. American kids snuck in past the fences and NO TRESPASSING signs to smoke and neck. Just inside the fence, where the smaller kids were brave enough to go, were stands of horse-chestnut trees, and we collected the fruit for ammunition. When the windfalls weren’t sufficient we aimed projectiles into the limbs: rocks, sticks, and on one occasion, the legs broken off a table, one of which came down on someone’s head. A pool of blood formed on the top of his skull and he ran squealing home, un-trespassing himself. Some of us went further, through gaps in the walls of the bunker itself. There were machine-gun rooms above, or so we dubbed them; and treacherous spiral stairs that led to them. You could come out on rare occasions with spent shells or other treasures. One lucky fellow unearthed a helmet and stole off with it, abashed and silent, as if it were a lopped head. The apartment buildings were brightly painted stucco, blue and yellow, with big American cars parked out on the street, because the Army let you ship your vehicle overseas. The summer sky seemed also to have followed us there, big and blue and familiar. Some things of the world are just the world, and some things are of local texture. At age eight, I wasn’t sure what was particularly American and what belonged everywhere. In winter, it was under a German, steely dark that kids trooped off to school in the morning, and the ground stayed white for longer than I was used to as a Southerner. The sky then was low, and it was like living indoors. I learned that snow quieted things, and that snowflakes fell up as well as down. My mother’s Hummels staged a mute fairy tale on the sideboard. A Deutschmark was about the size and worth of a quarter. Christmas was twice Christmas, because we lived in a snow globe. A wealth of small differences filled the environment, showing that the world was intentional: curb-moldings, fence-geometries, patterns in gratings and railings; the gothic

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signage, the shapes of door knobs, the thin, sober rectangle of license plates, and the different chance-faces in the headlamps and grills; the alien sirens from too-small police cars. I had pneumonia the first winter and my sister’s room became the infirmary; I performed my affliction to the rest of the family. A substantial benefit was that Lewis was less likely to knock me about; I was perversely protected. Campbell’s Tomato Soup was my main sustenance, and its flavor and red-orange tint still signify otherworldly fever and concern. The great dread in my life was still Lewis’s wrath. More accurately, it was the seething, tight-lipped menace, a narrowing of the eyes, verbal insults followed by a cuff or a blow, and I was left with a fat lip, a knot on my skull or a forehead bruise. He wasn’t cruel. It was a few pounds too much weight on the line, a bit more stress than should have been applied, and I don’t know why it was worse while we were in Germany. He was, now that I think of it, in between tours of war. My mother and sister didn’t interfere, but it was their petitions that caused him to change. Past a certain point he hardly needed to strike more blows: I learned to stay keen to his moods. Terror starts inside, and we are in control. Yes, I’m talking about a child; but I have to live back into that child, so my pity today is for the wrathful man.

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13 Aug 69 Dearest Patsy: Baby, I received your letter dtd 5 Aug today. It was very welcome because it was the first since you got home. I’m sorry that the house was a mess and that everything was not squared away for you. Our car is NOT insured for any driver below age 25, and that’s it! I’ll bet the kids were happy to see you. I know that they were very proud that you came back. Tell them that I love and miss them. My trip back was OK, but sad like you said in your letter. Patsy, it was wonderful to be with you. I’m sorry that we didn’t go to more places, but all I wanted was to be with you and that’s what I did. I hope that the days go just as fast as those did. You’re my Darling! I just received some great news. I’ve been selected to attend the Advanced Course – Class # 70-6 at Ft. Benning, GA, starting on 26 APR 70. I’m really proud, because there are captains over here with 3 years in grade that have not been selected, also a few Majors. It means a move when I get home, but Honey it will be worth it. I feel bad about taking the kids out of the school, but it will help them also. Be proud of your ugly husband, because that’s all I want – your love, and pride. Honey, I’m fine, and will take care of myself. You take care of yourself and our family, and remember you’re my sweet Darling. I love you, Patsy! Jim

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BACK HOME, and back to war, from the R&R. Lewis and his bride had stayed in the hotel room most of the time, as he brags, but there’s a photograph of them sipping drinks at Don Ho’s: you couldn’t leave Honolulu in those days without a “Suck ‘em Up!” snapshot. There’s Lewis in his moustache, to cover the scar; and Mom, smiling like she’s having more fun than she’s allowed. It was August and Woodstock was drenched, and the Manson family wreaked havoc in California: mud and blood. After Lewis returned, we moved to Fort Benning for the first of two times. Briefest of our moves: nine months. We lived on Kandle Drive in a neighborhood named for Custer. At the bottom of the hill was a diseased old tree hanging over the street. It had a cavity filled with bees that streamed forth like a shout when you harassed them, whereupon they’d chase you righteously up the hill. Along the curb, in wet disgusting holes near the sewer drains, you could reach down in late spring and collar the biggest frogs. They stretched out to a heinous length and got slapped down on hoods of cars for sadistic surgeries. I only watched, but watching is worse. I turned twelve, and it seemed everyone had forgotten my birthday, and that I was obliged to cycle through the same year all over again. That was also the year, or years as it were, that I resigned from Halloween. Was I child or man? Consciousness itself was the uncertainty about it. I walked several steps behind a clutch of costumed kids instead of staying home to give out candy. Lurking and uncostumed, I was more phantom than the phantoms. From inside, we’re children and never adults; adulthood is screened on to us. Pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of childhood, and as Updike says, a man is a failed boy. Innocence keeps

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somewhat to broad outlines and primary colors, but a chromatics does get in and we are nuanced to death. It’s unfortunate to feel older, always too impatient with the age put on you by the calendar. The feeling lasted well into my thirties. I enjoyed for a few years wistfully wanting to be a little younger, and then the anxiety came back in reverse. I look at my teenage son and want him to stay young, even go back a few years, while he pulls fretfully forward, as I did. Adolescence is disquieting for the parent, because someone you love disappears and another takes his place. But it’s all disquieting: the startling pregnancy, the unstoppable growth and then birth, ear aches, drops on the head and various shortfalls: somewhere short of genius, saintliness, etc. – all disquieting, and love carries it over. But time should have accrued, all those years making a series of rooms in a mansion to live in, or at least visit, of spent youth. Instead I wait in a long line, and worse, I wander up and down looking for my proper place. Meanwhile the show we’re waiting to see is over. But it’s annoyance more than nightmare, and maybe dying is a capital annoyance. Everyone in the line when I look close is a different age of me: all squinting and impatient and unwise. Besides uncertainties about age, I dreaded going door to door. To trick or treat, solicit, beg, canvas, proselytize, even simply to deliver, like the UPS man: terrifying acts, exposures so raw I felt I’d bleed to death from the door slamming in my face. Simple introductions frighten me. You need to know me already, if there’s anything that will please you at all. LT Calley was at Benning the same time we were, under base arrest not far from where we lived. We met him, Lewis and I, while out on an errand. Parked behind some woman’s Triumph, we observed the Lieutenant assist her in giving it a push. Lewis wryly if not too cleverly remarked that her husband must have been bound, gagged, and locked in the trunk.

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Calley himself was a not-very-big fellow in civilian dress, harmless in appearance, in command of his minor mission; but hapless, one could tell, in his eyes. The woman was blonde (hence Lewis’s jibe, for blonde was always fair game), bouffant, and bouncy. Sex-farce, “ordinary” crime – husbands in trunks – was a way to distance the taint of My Lai. Scapegoat or not, Calley the junior officer was uncomfortably close in type. Lewis had gone to OCS at around the same time as Calley. He was distancing himself in his own crude way, but for whose benefit? I was twelve; old enough to notice that this was a time of doubt for Lewis. For a while he let his hair get longer (we’re talking millimeters), bought an 8-track player for his Karmann Ghia and listened to rock rather than Roger Miller or Johnny Cash; and had just the slightest air of alienation from Army life at times, as if that were all the loss his war experience had exacted. If I was youth culture there by his side, then the tossed-off joke about the bland Lieutenant was as close to anti-war as he would go. Also at twelve, I wanted to be charitable. It comes more naturally to some than to others; to me it came awkwardly. Society was just taking shape around me, the human cloud beyond family and individual circumstance. The charitable feeling didn’t last long. Society for me is barely seen through the moiré of a newspaper image, behind the shoulders of a TV newsman; rolling in on the airwaves, a great mirror reflecting Current Events. It drew me to be generous; to give, though I hardly knew what. Charity is love, and love is an itch; how to make it more? I went down to the Army Community Service, which was located, like many other facilities on Benning, in a barracks with white pines dropping carpets of needles. I got papers to fill out and have signed on my behalf, and found a way to give for one summer and part of the following school year, before my giving-spirit gave out.

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I was supposed to work with kids, emotionally troubled kids a few years younger than me. The gifts I brought to the task were, first of all, an ability to hold the confidence of the mothers who ran the program; and second, enough energy to keep everybody running around, doing things with their hands or singing loud songs until they ran out of steam. Also, after someone or everyone would start throwing tantrums and weeping and fighting, I had gentleness enough to settle them to their sleep mats until time, that blessed time, to go home. There was a boy who came to the summer day-camp with his wild tilted afro, a few years older and neither a camper nor a counselor. He was just there with us, singing his song made from many songs, a mad medley that he was always belting. What came through most recognizably was Clarence Carter’s “Patches.” He was slow, autistic, Gumpish; but he sang on the bus back from a picnic or swim, bouncing on the uncomfortable seat with his eyes closed; sang as if he was living both parts of the song, the father and the son.

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10 Sep 69 Dearest Patsy: I received letters # 191, then 193 dtd 3 Sep & 4 Sep. You must have lost your count. Things are about the same as always over here. My body is covered with Jungle rot, but no problem – it will go away after I get home. We got out of the Jungle yesterday & I had my first shower in about 3 weeks yesterday. It really felt great! It should be a fairly easy week. My Co. is in a block along the edge of the Jungle. I had to go to Bien Hoa yesterday, and I saw Jack Shannon. He really has it made! It made me feel like I should make more money than him. I’ve put (2) of my NCO’s in for commissions & they should receive them in the next few weeks. I hate to lose them, but they deserve it! I received a letter from D.A. [Department of the Army] telling me that I was going to School, & when. I was told that we could get on-post quarters. I think that would be best because I don’t want to fight the traffic every day. I received another letter saying that the Army will send me to college after Career Course if that is what I want. I don’t know what is going on, but everyone is sure very nice to me lately. I got a letter from Jack Shannon. He is at Bien Hoa in Co A Special Forces. He has a pussy job (Asst. S-4) for them. That means he lives as good as Sam Rader! Honey, you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I love you more than I can say. Try not to worry about things, and don’t let Numbnuts (Bob) upset you! You’re my sweet darling! Always. I love you, Patsy! Jim

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UNCLE HO DIES September 2, and a South Vietnamese Colonel muses to a reporter that the war will be over by the end of the year. It is, but only for Lewis and other short-timers; and Lunday is forced back home after three and a half years, but works his way over again one more time as the war winds down, in the early seventies. After the brief time at Benning for Lewis’s Advanced Officer’s Training, we went on to Nebraska for two years of college in the “Bootstrap” program: officers stayed Active Duty and drew their regular pay while in the classroom. Debbie had already gone to live with Lunday, now a Lt. Colonel, Simone, and her boys, at Ft. Riley, Kansas; so, they were not, after all, “1,000 miles away” as Lewis wished. No matter: we were a few hours north for two years, but rarely saw them. Debbie went to Kansas on her own, and when the rest of us drove out to Nebraska we stopped at Riley to pick her up for Omaha: the father/daughter experiment had gone sour. Despite all the bluster in Lewis’s letters, all the vituperation against Bob, all the namecalling in the letters, the two families, joined at the shoulder as they were, got along fairly well; things were always civil, even genial. But I was a kid, and wasn’t always ear to the wall. The Lundays’ Ft. Riley home: typical senior-officer’s quarters as are found on most old posts; high-ceilings, two stories, basement and attic, disused maid’s quarters and such. My first father’s new family had recently settled in, snow on the ground, far from their tropical home. There was little furniture, but Lunday had nothing to draw on after half a decade overseas; and Simone, most likely, had yet to learn how to appoint an American home. My sister and our Dad did not get along very well. Our father was too lacking in foresight to keep a teenage girl in line. More, their enmity sprang from the too-closeness of their personalities: a liking for melodrama, sharp-spiked emotional reactions to everything, and a

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tendency to bend the truth, to paint everything a pleasanter shade than it really was, and then break down when the truth came knocking. Debbie claimed he pointed a gun at her after she’d stayed out too late with boys. They must have both contributed to the hyperbole, pointing a gun at each other all the time. He’d have killed himself first, then her. Nebraska, two years. We arrived in the dead of winter at the first house Lewis had ever bought, in a brand-new subdivision with only a few finished streets. On the day we arrived it was dominated by snow drifts to the eaves of every house. Nothing lay behind our house except white: white ground, white sky. Also white people like I’d never seen. The only black family in the neighborhood had been encouraged to leave just before we got there. By summer the area was all built up. The snow-waste depressed me, but the homes were another sort of wilderness, all the same, same, same. But we owned it and that made it different. It was brand new, our first house ever without previous occupants, and had a two-car garage. The basement was my room for awhile, then Debbie ran away and I was given her room upstairs; she came back and took over the basement. Sun seemed always to come in dirty through the windows, but it might have been my grim perspective. What was it out of doors, the flatness, the paltriness of buildings under so much sky, that made any effort seem squalid and pointless? Adolescence was on me; its flag was the condom-windsock a scabrous Scout held out to passing cars when our patrol went on a roadside hike to the only tree for miles. This same boy was in class with me, and brought black-and-white photos of his sister having sex to homeroom. I remember distinctly not looking at them when they were passed around and regretting it after. That boy had dirty blond hair and always wore a tee shirt of some

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off-white hue. When he was near, I wanted to flap my arms and soar above the Nebraska plain. So much flatness got into the brain; how could a place so apparently everywhere be anywhere? I’d brought along from the first stay at Benning my Sears telescope, having practiced tuning the device through many a backyard session. I might have hallucinated it, but saw Saturn in its rings for a quivering instant: touch the tube only slightly and you careen millions of miles off target. I spent the rest of the night trying to center on it once again. It was enough to make me a scientist, and next I turned to the Sun itself, devising an investigation into its spots. The Sears package came with filter attachments for Sun and Moon: one was a greenish glass, and that was the Moon’s; and the Sun’s was orange. For a few weeks I drew sunspots onto several sheets of notebook paper taped into a panoramic scroll, using colored pencils to draw lines for each one as it moved, or as I thought it moved, across the sun’s face. But I suspected randomness, as with acne. I inked them in like beauty marks, then took a ruler to reach down the makeshift scroll to plot their dance and vanishing across the week. The coloredpencil lines were my cat’s cradle of Science. I had no hypothesis, no method beyond the obsessive and aesthetic lines. It was just me and the Sun, staring at each other.

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29 Sep 69 Dearest Patsy: Hi! Beautiful! How are you doing? I’ve been getting your mail just fine, but have not had the chance to write. The Company is doing fine. I act like they are not, but they are getting good. It’s hard for me to accept, but I’m old in their eyes. Their average age is 19 or 20 years old, with 8 months in the Army. The NCO’s only have about a year & ½ in the service – not much experience. The officers are 21 – 22 – NO EXPERIENCE! Things here are much the same except we are scheduled for a (2) day break on 3 Oct. I hope that we get it then, because my people need it. I’m ready for a break myself. If we get it then I’m going to try to stay over at the S.F. Camp where Jack Shannon is. I intend to get kneewalking drunk & sleep right next to the Air cond, also eat about 9 steaks, etc. I’m glad that the kids had a good time at the small circus. How did Kevin like the animals? You asked about my back; well, it’s a mess, but I’m used to it now so, no sweat! I love you, Patsy! Jim P.S. I got a letter from Mother saying that she wanted to remarry. I told her to drive on. She said she wanted to wait, but that would be stupid to wait until I returned to U.S. Love you! Jim

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LEWIS APPROVES of his mother’s remarrying; Claude, the lucky man, was gentle, and took to step-grandfatherhood with ease. We visited the new couple in Waco twice before he died, not too many years after they married; but I recall their contentedness. Claude was a retired construction worker, like Jimmy, Lewis’s real dad. He deferred completely to his new stepson, just as his wife did; the CPT had been in charge of that family since the age of twelve, and Claude was wise enough to leave it that way. My grandmother had been a bit prickly in 1966, competing with my mother for the role of Chief Homemaker in Waco while Lewis was in Vietnam on a previous tour. Remarriage mellowed her, and she saw her daughter, Pam, finally grown and making something of herself as a nurse. Both women died in the ‘90’s, Pam just forty, from diabetes. I was in Japan and missed the funeral; a couple years later I made my grandmother’s. From the talk at the reception after, I surmised that her son’s vanishing was all her later life had been about. They’re all gone now, and I can’t go back to Waco without a Lewis in it.

1972 saw us back at Fort Benning for two years. High-school age, I felt more open to the world around me and claimed my territory. Perimeters were to be punctured and the world redefined every day: personality was fed by trespass. In all my family’s journeying I never saw anyone but my own siblings grow up around me, because each move put us among strangers who might have been always as we found them. No one really changed but us. A relationship works by our contending with change; in high

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school all you are is change, and so I made friends who were more important than family. It seemed so, but I barely remember them now. We lived on Bjornstad Street, an exotic, Nordic name of some general in some war, and now he stretched out a few modest blocks of cheap duplexes for junior officers. Our block faced an enormous green three football fields wide and framed with sycamores. At night, after homework and TV, I liked to walk out into the field because the dark folded in behind me, and the wind in the sycamores made a surf sound. It was black enough to make the stars closer than the street, and the houses reduced to their laugh tracks and dishes clinking in sinks. The stars came right down into my head and it was better than drugs. At the opposite end of the green from our duplexes, Colonels’ white elephants spread in tiers up the highest hill on post. The senior officers’ families lived in their own world of an old Southern elegance with high ceilings, fireplaces, pantries and stairs. The walls had wainscoting and built-in cabinets and shelves, and the glass was beveled. I had a friend or two up there, and we’d spin LPs in parlors instead of living rooms. You could look down the hill and across the green at the lowly duplexes, and pity us our lack of alcoves and cellars. On the eastern side of the housing area was a golf course with a patch of woods tucked in between the greens and the last houses. Golf held no appeal, but paths cut through the woods and I ran them every morning for a while, in between my freshman and sophomore years, when I was bent on a Franklinesque self-improvement. I kept a chart of progress and had a Lilias yoga book, and pretzeled myself before the morning run. Back home before anyone else had risen, I made coffee and cinnamon rolls and read the paper, pretending to live alone. My hair got long. When Lewis came into our lives, for several years my brothers and I wore buzz cuts. By 1970 my hair got permission to grow a bit longer; by the time I was fifteen it had gone AWOL

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down to the shoulders. Then one day Lewis woke up from his postwar daze and ordered me to the executioner again. I was reduced to a modest above-the-ear look instead of boot camp again, but heartbreaking it was all the same. I loved my long locks the way you’d love a pretty girl.

Stateside, military brats are usually obliged to go off post to the civilian high schools. Maybe it’s meant to ease us into the idea that we don’t belong on post, since we’re really civilians. In 1972 busing was just getting underway in Georgia, so we were fodder for first-year segregation of the Columbus school system: all the black military kids were sent to an all-white school, with the expected violent reception; and the white brats were sent to an all-black school, Spencer, which had been the first black high school in the state. Things went a bit more smoothly at Spencer. For one thing, it was known our arrival meant more funds; for another, the kids and the teachers didn’t hate us before we showed up. If you were an Asian or Latino military brat of high-school age, you went to Spencer. That was the black-and-the-white of it. There were one or two black kids that went to Spencer as well, because their fathers were colonels. It was rank, not race, that had separated us, but the filth of the age infected us in small ways; many friendships did not survive it. We rode Army buses to school, and it highlighted our different status: dark green, somber, ugly, heavy-looking Official Business buses. The school was in the so-called inner city, a couple blocks from the house where Carson McCullers was raised and never went back. Facing the school were projects that reminded me of the buildings we’d lived in overseas. One day I missed the bus and knocked on someone’s door to ask if I could make a call. The lady looked at me with a tired eye and told me to leave a nickel by the phone when I was done.

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Early Freshman year there was a fire. One darkened end of the school retained the throatcatching smell of burnt wood and cooked chemicals, although the charred black walls were painted over. The lockers still breathed it out when opened. I had an eye for a civilian girl named Maria; we took Biology together. Maria was Catholic and exotic. We sat in the auditorium at lunch and kissed athletically. Not me so much as my hand would try its best to trespass Maria’s neckline or skirt, but she had tripwires top and bottom and cut me off every time. I don’t really know what my hand was hoping for. What surprised was that she didn’t object: lips still locked, eyes closed, again and again her defending hand blocked my roving one and she took no offense. I thought it something about being Catholic or Mexican instead of Protestant and anguished Anglo, but maybe it was just her. After a while my hand was trained and stopped at the meridians on its own, respecting the rites of our affection.

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14 Oct 69 Dearest Patsy: Hello, my sweet Darling! I can’t tell you how much I miss you, and need you. I got out of the jungle again today, and I had about 5 letters from you. It really made me feel great as always when I get your letters. Mother is marrying a man called Claude Rivers, I think Dec 20th. It was nice of the CO to write you. Please send a reply & tell him I’m a nice guy & responsible, etc, if you don’t mind. You can tell him that I love my family very, very much. I stayed at Sam Rader’s place on 5th & 6th. Shannon & Steve McEleveen stayed at the same time. Maj. Fenlon couldn’t make it. Steve has gained a lot of weight. He said that Gloria was 8 months P.G. & that they bought a small house in FLA, also that they had never split up. I was sure glad to know that. Patsy, you’re my whole life. I love you so very much. Time is passing so very slowly. I miss you, I need you, I love you. I love you, Patsy Jim

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AT FOURTEEN I hitchhiked in big circles. When I put my thumb out, I wasn’t going anywhere but around, just finding the boundary of the day. It was a compulsion almost: some stage beyond kicking the can. Social life was little more than scattered moments of bad behavior. Everything new was a transgression, and no way forward but consequence. My hitchhiking domain was the area around the post and town, downtown and sometimes out toward the countryside, but only furtively on the post itself, buzzing with MP’s who might snag and drop me home with a DR for my stepfather. That would have been the death of me, and yet it was a perverse source of power. That sort of travel, walking-standing-hitchhiking, was an organic measure of time-space, the factoring of chance as a reduction or growth of the world, a darkening or brightening. I returned as the combination of rides allowed. I knew I might not return. It was a hobby, a substitute sport for a ball-challenged boy. And it was the habit of staying in motion. Mostly it was a manner I could call my own: a mission for someone lacking a mission. It also strikes me now as exhibitionistic and sexual. But I’ve grown too keen to projections, correspondences; thumb, thick and thunder share an ancient root meaning “swollen,” and the thumb is a brazen fellow. At fourteen I was jailbait: my hair was long, my ass tight, my thumb erect. It mattered that I couldn’t drive on my own just yet. A few times I’d gotten so angry at Lewis I actually considered stealing away in his new Karmann Ghia, and even pocketed the keys a few times. Somewhere in my brain I knew it mattered that I’d never learned how to drive, and would not get far. The idea of stealing the car was freedom and also suicide, which have a

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passing acquaintance with each other. There would have been no coming back, so I hitchhiked around the county going nowhere. Often I went downtown, out the long wooded road that separated Benning from Columbus, down the boulevard toward the dying center, with its cobbled half-tarred-over streets and disused trolley tracks. Or out the other side toward Alabama and country, a state park where kids hung out and hunted psychedelic mushrooms. Near town I bloodied the other thumb, once, when a sliding door on a bread truck slammed shut, and the lady and gent of the next ride offered to buy me Band Aids at K Mart. Instead, the lady sat in the middle and massaged my thumb, and tried to draw it down under her outlandish miniskirt, outlandish to me because she must have been fortyish to my fourteen. But the gall of it made no difference and I came on contact. The anticlimax was to leap from the car when they hung a slow right near the post office. Horn-rimmed voyeur husband with the face of James Earl Ray and his big-haired, lonely honey: still circling somewhere, and looking for me. It’s no fun to be miles from home, on foot and glued to your underwear. Of the ride I found home I have no memory: a low-flying angel, I think. One early evening I got picked up by two eighteen-year-old working girls in a baby-blue VW. A tire went flat and I changed it while they hovered and made commentary, because they knew I was busting my tire-changing cherry, and respect for the moment was called for. There was a chatty gun salesman who had me drag the gun valise out of the back seat and hold the merchandise while he recited their specs; the young soldier home from the war but not quite home, eyes straight ahead, never uttering a word. Travel should be a piece of you, and make you a part of something, a measure of its wear, the worry on its back. Walking in a freeway city: you and the bums and the whores and the

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newly-arrived without wheels, or the people who don’t like to trouble their friends when their car’s broken down; or people without friends. And the bus to me feels like a trap, slower even than walking sometimes, and God knows where it’s really going. I have gone miles out of my way because I was too stubborn to get off the wrong bus and go back. Why go back when you know the world is round? Or no sidewalks, roadside weeds that bite, and you feel like a sinner just for being on foot; or a saint, if your mood’s right. The world under foot is large and slow; you take note of the grass blades and gravel at the same rate as trees or utility poles when you’re traveling by car. They’re two different worlds, fast and slow; walking through a neighborhood you usually drive, you can let yourself get pulled into windows and the houses talk to you. If you stop walking, the world keeps traveling, and you can feel it; and you start to sink a little, and then you know that the world and its choices are infinite, even if bounded. So I went missing every day for a while, but returned before anyone could notice. The last I recall was a ride out to the state park. I’d scored my first hit of LSD, taking on faith that’s what I’d paid five dollars for. The dealer was a guy two years ahead of me in school who worked afternoons at the PX record store. He always wore big cowboy boots and bragged about how many times he’d slipped 8-tracks and cassettes down their sides: Deep Purple, Derek and the Dominoes, the latest posthumous Hendrix. I’d ridden shotgun with him a few time times, and trusted him. It was a concert day at the park and kids were everywhere. I swallowed the tab and waited. Nothing happened until after I’d forgotten that something was supposed to happen. I expected it to be like stepping into a Peter Max painting or an old Fillmore poster. It was a hot day; the music stuck to the skin. A Coke tasted ambrosial and froze in my throat. Wandering dogs

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held forth on various themes. A guy with red hair and beard intoned Longfellow and was Longfellow. Longfellow, Longfellow! I called to him, and his beard got redder. Hitching out to an armory dance in Phenix City the night before, I’d met a girl named Reba. At the dance the LSD tab was in my jeans, but I held off. She offered to meet up with me at the park the next day, and I thought of her face in black-light hues as I wandered the outskirts of the concert crowd. She’d taken me for the friendly stranger, and she was right. By the time I found her she was famous: everyone knew her. Her face was still purple, but it was traces of makeup mixed with acne cream. She was beautiful and led me away, and I was wavy like eighth notes on a cellophane streamer. She sat me down on a slope away from the crowd, but the music was still curling around the trees. She was talking about something, nothing, sitting next to me, and her name was this strange country wildflower growing between my feet. I picked one of her sisters out of the ground and with botanical precision pulled it apart. Reba cooed the latest news in my ear, and her own love for me was playing out like a stock ticker though I noticed nothing. Piles of love-tickertape were gathering on the hill. Pretty purpleskinned Reba, all Dixie in flower-patched Levis, hungering for me, I was certain, later, when my head came back; wanting to sing to the friendly stranger her Deep South lay, singing her news to me, and I was lost to a wildflower.

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1 Nov 69 Dearest Patsy: Hello! My darling, I hope that your birthday was a happy one, and that you know how much I wanted to be with you. I love & miss you so very much. Did the silver & china ever arrive? If so, was it what you wanted? I hope so, because I don’t really know anything about those type of items. What should I do about Christmas? I guess the best thing would be for you to go ahead & do all the shopping for the kids. Is there anything that you want that I can buy or order over here? Please, let me know as soon as possible. Time is going very slow over here, but at least it’s passing. My 1st Plt received (14) Bronze Stars (V), and (2) Silver Stars a couple of days back. “D” Company is the most decorated unit in the Bde. I’m really proud of all of them. The CO received your letter and thought it was very nice of you to write. Honey, how are things going for you? I really hope that you have no problems, but I know that there are a hundred a day. Anyway you’re doing a wonderful job as always. Patsy, you’re my sweet, wonderful darling, and I miss you so very much. I think of you continually, and wonder how you’re doing! Always know how much I love & need you! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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A NIGHT, back seat, car passing over a bridge. Benning, 1973. My wild time, all of six months before I returned to bookworm and good son: drunk/stoned night on the town with friends. My scruffy chin got us beer and cheap wine at the store, and the doobies were everywhere. Night, back seat, bridge. I was in love with someone and she was next to me, but had jilted me the day before. She’s holding my hand out of pity, but we’re on drugs and I’m dragging out the break-up. Her quirky-beautiful Germanic name, Ulla, became a duchy in my brain, though I now lack evidence she existed: no yearbook from that year, no snapshot or trophy. On the bridge I was anguished and flung the door open to jump. It was not wanting to go over the side; it was wanting to go off the page and into another book. Ulla was distraught and a bit wasted herself, and I felt bad. She was worth a grand gesture: elegant, whatever elegance might have seemed to a tenth grader – deep Marlene Dietrich voice, melancholy eyes, a practiced, weary pose. Her crying was more stunning than sex, more lingering. Being dumped is one of life’s most exhilarating experiences. Probably train tracks down there, or the Chattahoochee River. Fragments are packed away in my brain: cheap adolescent perfume, cigarette smoke in her sweater (she’s autumn disappearing into winter), flesh, hormones, hair, saliva. For years a change in the wind might draw it all out, and she’d be in the crowd up ahead or turning a corner. I started writing poems so I’d have something to give her; she typed them and gave them back. Ulla had a belt made from the braided hair of an ex-lover who cut it off for her after she ditched him: she invented that tale, or I did.

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Ulla broke up with me but I kept my hair, too short for a belt-braid. I kept writing poems and learned to type them myself. Ulla doesn’t Google but poetry’s still there, if just as fickle. To revise: at fifteen I fell in love to start writing poetry. Ulla: thanks, wherever you are. I hope the braid still fits.

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2 Nov 69 Dearest Patsy: Honey, I received your letter (#247) about Bob sending money, also saying that Debbie & Bobby were going to live with him. That is just so much (bull--). Bobby & Donny are going to be adopted by me just as soon as I get back to the U.S. Debbie as far as I’m concerned can decide what she is going to do, but she will stick to her decision once it is made. Bob has no claim legal or otherwise on the kids. The only reason that I say let Debbie decide is that she would always be throwing it up to you or worse. If she wants to stay with us, and I hope she does, then she will do as we say. She should not doubt what I say, because I mean it. As far as Bob goes, he is not capable of keeping himself straight much less keeping his new family squared away. He can claim Debbie on his income tax, but that is all. I hope that you have kept your records on money he has sent as opposed to what he was supposed to. If he pushes me, then it’s all over! I’ll bet Kevin is very happy with his tricycle. It’s hard to for me to imagine him big enough for it. You will really have to watch him or he will go AWOL! I guess we should get Donny a small bike for his birthday or Christmas. Tell the kids that I love them & miss them & to be good; also, I did receive Debbie’s letter, and will answer it soon. She asked about Christmas presents for me. There is really nothing that I can use over here as long as I’m in the jungle, and that’s where I’ll be so just forget it this year. All I really want is to be with you, and our family! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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NOVEMBER 3 AND NIXON gives his Vietnamization speech: Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. Troops are going to slow-crawl home, singly, many finding humiliation as they walk in their khakis through the airport terminals. Lewis gets to wait a while for his: When he was taking classes in Omaha, somebody poured sugar in his gas tank and left an angry note about the war on the windshield. The student-run newspaper had done a long article on his career, emphasizing the skydiving but mentioning the tours in Vietnam, and it made him a target for the low-grade, late-start protest movement on the UNO campus. He was pissed off when he got home, mainly because the anonymous protester had trashed the old Willys jeep Lewis had restored himself. But I could tell the attack dispirited him. We were far from our own kind out there, and it was hard to hold up.

Air museums: tarmacs with long rows of antique flying machines in purgatory. We’d go on long road trips to visit them and Lewis would recite the stats for each plane. He knew everything about every aircraft that ever existed. Knowledge of flying was his chief wealth, genius, and first romance. If he died flying, it was a mercy. It’s easy to see Lewis in a small plane, the Globe Swift he used to own or the Piper Cub he liked to borrow for lessons: I’m flying alongside and there’s low-sun glint off the fuselage, then he gets ahead of me and the drone of the engine goes down and down, until I only imagine I can hear it. Lewis was remarkable for the as-if-obvious way he made his dream of flight come true. The first lessons came late in his career, but after the first time it was as if he’d always flown. He

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invented flight. His disappearance was a flight, his returns to dream and dread and memory are flights, night-flights, sometimes parachute drops into the back parts of my mind. I greet him in fear and dread, sometimes resentment, sometimes as a peer. But at the point in the dream when we become equal, I’m already waking; it’s merely a wish before rising, a visit to the alternate world of his having stayed. He loved to play: chiefly skydiving, which he took dead serious, but years before he took his first flight lesson, he flew miniature planes. They were small but very real, balsawood and paint, small struts and wings, intricate engines, acrid fuel. He carved, assembled, painted, then flew them by himself, all of it himself, though we could watch; we’d lose the dining-room table for several days, because newspaper covered it, and the wood, and the glue and paints, all of it pungent, all serious; we couldn’t touch, we couldn’t even imagine touching. When it was ready, we went to the park to watch him fly. By 1974, in the postwar doldrums, Lewis was briefly put to pasture in a recruiting job. Office work left plenty of room to look for excitement off the job, and he finally took lessons and got his pilot’s license, flying every chance he could, studying and taking exams and getting into the cockpit of every kind of craft until he was an expert aviator. Later he taught Kevin how to fly. I only went aloft with him: besides my bad eyes, flying took more math and good sense than I possessed. Skydiving, though, was our religion. Communion was when the planes cut their engines, then specks appeared from behind, floaters on your eye. The specks got larger and discharged streams of color that swelled and rounded to domes. Below the domes, the specks grew limbs and heads. Soon you could tell one from the other, and the specks were men.

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Then the thud and roll, and the death of the silk, except on those blustery days when it threatened to drag them across the sand or the tarmac. Then the jumpers, small and far, with the silk and cord like their own swaddling garments in their arms, marching black-booted through the rippling heat. Lunday got dragged once, when his chute billowed on landing, before he could pull it in and bunch it to his chest. Bed-ridden, scraped and bandaged, one arm in a cast, he cracked jokes about his size, being slight to the wind. Lewis, too, got dragged coming down at Wahoo, Nebraska, the closest thing to a jump club when we lived in Omaha. He broke a big toe and got generally bruised all over, but was back to it in no time. Jumping gave me my first sense of the supernatural. But it was natural, or at least it made sense that men went up in machines and came back down again, tired and sore. It had its own defense, which was to go and do it again. Lunday jumped all the time, but my earliest memories of taking part in the ritual are with Lewis. At the time he was one of the Golden Knights, the Army’s sport parachute team. He had 92 world records by that point. The number stuck in my head: it was particular to him when I was six or seven, and 92 of something was the pinnacle of achievement. In addition to weekly practice with the team and training with the 82nd Airborne, he spent just about every weekend jumping. Sometimes it was from a P-130, a good-sized plane; sometimes a small plane, a high-winged Cessna with the right door taken off. More often they went up in a big Chinook that swirled the dust and sucked at our clothes and skin. The thudding of the blades was unearthly, and when I was small, sent me crawling under the car. Wives sat in folding chairs, visoring their eyes. Kids tracked around the drop zone, off toward its edges. At Bragg I wandered toward a firing range to retrieve spent shells. When I held

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them in the air and tipped them they were Coke bottles, and threads of sand spilled and curled like the just-opening chutes. When I was heavy enough, Lewis used me as a weight to keep his rig in place while he prepared the chute for folding and packing. I sat on the harness or stood with my back into it, leaning away from where he pleated the silk or untangled the lines. His full canopy above was proof I’d done my job right. Someone’s life was a little in my hands. If it was the last jump, some men threw the whole mess in the trunk and took care of it back at the jump club. But I was the oldest son, and helping fold the chute was an apprenticeship. Parachute silk was alive to the slightest wind. On the ground it looked like an alien thing, but in the sky it was the better part of a man. When the men were aloft, time slowed and the sound of voices was held back. During an air show, a ground-breaking, or the Fourth of July, colored phosphorus smoke flumed from their ankles. Then at a certain altitude the voices came through; men talked to the air, were breaking through again to the ordinary world.

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25 Nov 69 Dearest Patsy: How are you doing? Have I told you how very much I miss you? I love you more every day, if that’s possible! Honey, I want you to write & tell Mother about the action of 3 July, & that I was wounded, but that I’m fine, & explain that I didn’t want to get her upset. The reason I want you to is that I should get a medal soon, and it will be put in the newspapers, so I don’t want her to get upset over that. I can’t think of any other way to do it! OK? I was told by the C.O. that he was going to take me out of the field in a few days. I hate to give up the company, but he said that 10 months in the fld. was enough for anyone. I’ve had a command the whole time except for a few days in Feb. I’m going to 53 Air. I will be in charge of all the airmobiles, etc. It should be interesting. The pictures are great! What’s with Kevin’s hair? He looks like a Beatle, but still all boy! Bobby looks good in his Scout uniform, & Donny has really grown by bounds. Your picture is beautiful just as you always are! I was told today that I get out of the field on 1 Dec and will be S-4. [Specialist 4] I’m ready; every day it gets harder to get moving & make decisions that kill or wound my people! You’re my Darling! Tell the kids I love & miss them! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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I WAS BOTH A GOOD AND A POOR Scout. The goodness was simply in following the steps to Eagle; the poorness was my chafing nearly all the way through: I hated uniforms and was no team player. I hated the whole business nearly from the beginning, but liked acquiring the material marks of progress. Maybe I only used to tell myself that I hated it, or I only hated parts of it. Actually, I liked hiking, since I was naturally peripatetic: walking and thinking, or pretending to think. Walking was the feeling that I can escape or find myself, and thinking was the illusion that it worked. After I had gained some seniority, I discovered that I also liked telling other kids what to do. That, however, was not in my nature; it was a perversion of my natural inclination to stay unseen, to absorb rather than emit. Also, I liked having a handbook that told me what to do. More ambitious than a cookbook or a how-to manual, more contemporary than Hammurabi, more to my style than Emily Post, the Scout Handbook was by itself larger than the activity of Scouting as I experienced and understood it, and I liked reading it or rather daydreaming with it more than I liked Scouting itself. In my particular edition – Seventh, first printed in 1965 – the illustrations were an important part of that dream life. They were both practical and idealized, and in the consistent, detailed progression across nearly every page, they comprised a world and a life that one might choose as if it were already mapped out; yet it was also virgin and wild. And there is no real, stated author to this wisdom; even the artist is unnamed, as if the whole thing were distillation.

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There were some things that the Handbook left out. I can’t find, leafing through it, any mention of womankind except for a few small illustrations: a proud, attending mom, a praying mom, and a mom letting her Scout son pull out her chair. Naturally – or unnaturally – there is nothing about sex. One finds an extensive hygiene section, some nice drawings of athletic, shirtless Scouts, and even one naked Scout in a shower – nothing at all Calvin Kleinish about any of this – but beyond that, any eroticism in the Handbook seems carefully cloaked within the “Knots” chapter, or perhaps a small section on bewaring of Live Wires. I’m browsing the instructions on swimming. After I learned, it was the lakes at summer camp I loved best. Lake water was alive and sexual. Instead of touching yourself, you let the lake or the waterweeds do it for you. Also, and not coincidentally, it was morbid. The waters reminded me of death, and embodied death as a vague thing almost appealing. I had no words, no Jungian archetypes to define it: the mysterious subterranean, the lulling motions, the deceptive draw toward deeper waters; days when the lake lay still under a gray sky, distant voices on shore, and the somber pines above the miniature bodies; the somnolent weight of things, and the unseen gentle hand drawing you further from land. One might sleep and settle into the amniotic bath, and the great lathe would slowly turn above, and you could feel its crystal needle shaping precisely what you were. But none of that was in the Handbook. Oh, Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau were there, because the Handbook was quintessentially American; there’s no avoiding the Romantic weave. But darkness was meant to be leavened out, if not completely eradicated, from something meant for teenaged boys. The Handbook was for clear-cut and reachable achievement, as if all life and wisdom could be merit-badged into you. Everything in institutions like the military or the Boy Scouts is tied to awards, certificates, degrees: getting them, or not getting them. Maybe it’s all

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small-minded, really, and doesn’t connect to “Citizenship,” the true dimension of Scouting. My mistake was in aiming too soon at symbol and neglecting the thing itself. I particularly disliked Scouting after the first couple of years, because I wanted to be cool; but I was never anything close to cool. Being a Boy Scout was exactly what I should have been doing. I was hopeless in environments that did not automatically and overtly level and rank everyone. Schmoozing and networking don’t matter much to a Boy Scout. You move up according to tasks checked off in pencil and presented to a higher-up who initialed your progress. It was good for me, and got me out of the house; but I wanted to go further. The more I stayed with it, the more it mattered to Lewis that I saw it through: Eagle Scout, all the way, even if I was thirty before I finished. My preferred strategy was to fade, eventualities ever on the horizon, blanching into might-have-beens like large, distant mountain ranges. But to my dismay he would not let me fade, and I had to finish what I’d started. When I got within sight of sixteen, I stepped out of my usual reticent self and begged for my driver’s license. The problem was that I’d been stalled for a long time as a Scout at Life, right above Star – second-highest rank. I thought that was as good as making Colonel, and Lewis himself hadn’t even made Major yet. But he refused to consider taking me to the Department of Motor Vehicles until I finished what I’d started in the Scouts. When I finally got the coveted license I went right out and dented the family car. I approached the task of finishing in what I considered an intellectual manner, made a checklist and got it done item by item, with little emotion, and quit one day after my ceremony. It was Lewis’s achievement more than my own. Generally, the things I learn leave me soon after I abandon a regular practice. When the ritual enactments are done, no trace of skill remains. But I go back now and then to re-learn what

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little of a language I used to know, an instrument I played, a handiwork my hands had warmed to. Rope-lore has lately become an attractive cultivation, a kind of literacy and ethics. Every few years I pull out a knots manual (there are better ones than the Boy Scout Handbook) and try once more to learn them: the choreography of bondage. The problem is that I don’t have a regular need of tying things together, and so the knot-knowledge fades again like all good habits that go unpracticed. A Square Knot has to do for everything, and that’s no way to go through life. Camping was the purpose of it all, like battle to a soldier, if less bloody. Fire was the main event: sparks, coals, smoke, and the scent in your clothes for days. In bitter cold you can never find the right balance between warm and roasting, and your back would beg for its turn at the flames, and then your front would scream to turn again. They sent us to the woods so it could absorb our foolishness. Capture the Flag, dispersals and collisions, shouts and complaints all through the dangerous dark; rules unraveling and trampled outright, all ending with an injury to bring the men out of their tents in anger, a humbling scold and whispered recriminations back and forth as we packed it in and fought off sleep. Wildness peaked in the most expansive weariness, erasing everything but the essential. At a place called Little Grand Canyon in southern Georgia, we spent a Friday night with our tents pitched on the edge of a precipice. In the dark it was like a sky beneath us as well as overhead, but without stars. We ran around all night, and probably came within inches of the abyss, sensing it only by a change in the air. Asleep in the tent, I felt its promise of immensity and the urge to leap, as if there were a darkness past the darkness. We were a small group, and our scoutmaster had trusted us to the older boys, hippiescouts with slab sideburns and flag-patterned peace-finger patches on their knapsacks. They had

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an admirable world-weariness that still seems old to me, though they were only eighteen. I believed that they had put us at the perfect distance from disaster, and the weed they passed around, my very first, was insurance against falling. They were just old enough to go to the war, and maybe staying extra long as Boy Scouts was a deferment. One Scoutmaster had a particular method of rousting boys that he called “yanking the chain.” After bursting through the tent flaps, he’d reach down into each sleeping bag and give our willies a tug toward the morning. There was nothing tentative, furtive, or lingering about it: just a quick yank on the buzz-snake, a manual reveille if you will. It was too forthright a jerk to count as pedophilia, at least in those days. The cliché of the perverted scoutmaster is too easy: any concentrated single-sex activity will have a certain amount of homoeroticism, and is good for you. The world is mainly chimerical; we fit nice names on things, but it’s all tied with string somewhere, and sex is the main thread. My first kiss was on a Boy Scout camping trip. Fate and poor planning had placed some Girl Scouts at a neighboring site, well within lurking distance, and there were numerous romantic encounters in the woods after lights out. Mine was a simple stroll down the fire road with someone I’d seen in the halls at school: Brenda Hayman, a ROTC groupie who’d not normally pay attention to the likes of me. But out here I was in uniform. Camp-out though it was, she wore a thick layer of lipstick: my first kiss came with calories. Brenda was taller, so I had to stretch for it. Her mouth and Pert-scented tresses I can still taste, but she thought nothing of me the next day. Last year, visiting someone in the countryside halfway between here and Austin, I was walking on a long path through a meadow behind the farmhouse. Suddenly, a pitch dark wrapped itself around me. Above was the starriest sky I’d ever seen, pure spangle, and the Milky Way

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flung hard down the middle. Names of constellations came to mind like old friends. My wife came looking for me, but I was lost in the stars. I recalled my finest hour in Scouting: roughing it in Iowa as initiation for the illustrious Order of the Arrow, a kind of graduate fellowship for Scouts. A dozen of us got sent out to survive for the evening, each of us with two matches, an egg, a slice of bread, and of course our Handbooks. I lay down face up, alone on my own bluff, stars staring as I fell asleep. The bluff was spare and round, a small world to itself, like the Little Prince’s asteroid. In the middle of the night I woke: something, nothing. The hill beneath me was gone and I was flat on my back in space; the dial had turned counter-clockwise. For a few seconds, past and present jostled in my eyes, and the stars seemed to move: a few degrees’ rotation, like a mobile dangling above a crib. Just out of reach!

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3 Dec 69 Dearest Patsy: Well! Baby, I’m now the BN S-3 Air [staff officer], however I’m still in the jungle. We have a Fire base, and the C.O. told me I have to get it organized. It’s not going to be very easy because I don’t have a lot to work with. The mail is messed up because of the change, but I’m sure it will be OK soon! I was told that I will be awarded the D.S.C on 15 Dec, the same day that the C.O. departs. That’s no bad deal because that is the nation’s second highest valor award. I can take it and 10¢ and buy a cup of coffee. How are the kids doing? Tell them I said hello & that I love them. Did Bob get back to U.S.? What are his plans? Where will he be assigned? I’m going to adopt the boys! Did you receive your ck? It should be for about $8.60. If I ever get back to a PX I will order something for your parents. What do you suggest I send? Not much news over here; things remain the same as always. I really felt bad about leaving the Company, but I guess that’s natural. I know that they will be OK if they use their heads for something besides helmets. Time is really dragging now, and this will be a long (2) months. I can’t tell you how much I want you & need you. I love you! I think of you every minute. I love you! Patsy Jim P.S. Did Iris have her baby? Tell everyone I said hello! What kind of shape is the car in?

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MY OWN SKYDIVING career was short, and meant mainly to undo what at sixteen I understood to be my stepfather’s disappointments in me. It was about more than me: his disaffection, his disillusionment, his disorientation, all of it a phase perhaps, but he let it become his destiny. As to his disappointment in me, I felt like a member of the public that he had to let into his house, and I don’t mean that he didn’t love me. He loved me dearly, but I was a strange thing. Clearly I was not headed for a career in the Army. If I jumped, I thought I could ease the strangeness between us. Lunday had passed on to me a Korean-War-era parachute. It was heavy, packed large and bulky, and was not too quick to maneuver. I packed it myself, but Lewis checked; if it was done right there was nothing to say. My jumpsuit, too, had been passed down from Lunday. It had patches on it from his various achievements and memberships. It still held his shape, a ghost-garment or sloughed skin: a long red, white and blue patchwork up and down. Military jump training, as I witnessed at Benning, is a multi-staged affair: learning in large numbers, shorn ducks in a row; classroom training, then repetitive tumbling from a fourfoot platform, then the 34-foot Towers: one by one sliding down a cable into a mound of sand; then the 250-foot Towers: contraptions that the Army purchased from the 1939 World’s Fair, and they still convert them back to amusement rides for civilians once a year on Independence Day. The arms come down, the canopy fits into a basket-like frame, the arms pull you high in the air and the baskets – four, in X-formation – let you go. Then, finally, a true parachute drop, low from a C-130, static-line unfurlings of human kite-tails bursting a few hundred feet above ground into gray blossoms of slow-motion, sashay descent. The drop zone we used for my initiation into the sport was frequented by hippie- and

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biker-types more than military. Lewis, at that point, was working as a recruiting supervisor, and we were far from an Army post. I followed the civilian method of jump training: a $75 fee, the most expensive birthday present I ever got; waivers, consents, and various other pieces of paper; then a few minutes of basic, common-sense instruction about how to fall, and especially how to land. The first physical instruction was a repeat of the games I’d played on the porch outside the Jump Club when I was five and six: leaping off a four-foot platform until you get the roll perfect, tumbling both left and right: arms tucked in, no bruises, no broken neck, every time. Then you learn how to pack, and that, too, I had already. After that you put on your rig, a bit more streamlined and comfortable these days; but my Korean-War-era equipment had thick straps that took time to buckle and tighten: with my stubby legs it was like riding a bison. Suited up, you put in some practice getting out on the strut of the small plane, pivoting, splaying into an X and letting go, still on the ground for safety’s sake. Get the X right and listen to some physics lessons on balance in the air, acceleration, rotation, etc. Although the first jumps are static-line, you practice the ripcord pull to get the counter-balancing right and keep from spinning, thus causing your purling silk to wrap you in a shroud. Finally you get in, go up, jump out. The instructor asks if you’re sure, you nod, step out onto the wheel and grab the strut; he slaps your rear, and you go. The most unnerving part is not the leap out, but the ride up: the take-off from the dirty runway with a line of pines racing alongside in a blur, then the g-force pull on the stomach right after the plane’s aloft. After that, you’re far above the world and it isn’t real. The exit is given additional drama from machine silence after the engine cut; as you step out, the wind hits you like a wall and wakes you to the instant. If every choice we made could be as real as the letting go: unfold the instructions, make your arms-and-legs X, and there you are.

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The first time at least, a total blank: up and down don’t exist for a moment, an indeterminate moment, because time has also let go. Your mind’s working through its few steps; not mind, really, but body-memory: on the first jump, your twelve-foot static line is doing the thinking. An invisible hand draws you from the bird-like, parallel-to-earth alignment into a morehuman uprightness, but in the air, no posture is more upright than the next. Then the white silence, plane flown away; above and below more or less where they should be, and you’re halfway between Sol and soil: patchwork landscapes, languid earth broad and democratic, fences and walls too small to keep you out. But you’re falling, not flying. Look up into the belly of the chute to confirm that it’s full, voluptuous, and untrammeled by the lines that should lead straight down to you, point of the cone. Toggles on either side of the harness close manifolds, or openings in the canopy. If you pull one, it swings you around in the opposite direction; pull both and you slow your fall to drop further down field. It all comes too quickly: the earth hardly rises at all and seems just there, patiently waiting, as if you could choose not to return, pick out another planet to descend on, another state, another family, another you. Soon enough sound rushes up, depth returns, shadows loom and time has you in its weave again. You are, as it were, skydiving back into your life. A balance of skill and chance marks any act of survival. We all do it every day driving a car, but too habitually to enjoy. Falling has a poetry all its own, and it’s in the quick reckoning of altitude, direction, distance, and wind speed; it’s in the simple meter of counting out before the pull of the ripcord, and it’s in the trustful timing of impact. The rule, for beginners anyway, is to anticipate your landing by focusing on the horizon and not where your feet will strike. It’s counter-intuitive, but if you resist, you’ll lose faith; your feet will work hydraulically up and down, guessing which will touch first, and you’ll break a leg

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or catch a bad sprain – like me, on Jump Number Three. So you look at the horizon line as if for one last taste of true distance-within-you, and maybe that’s why you want to get up and do it all over again, despite your knocking knees. Three other guys made their first jumps that day, all under thirty. They were silent on the way up and screamed when they leaped out, and sensibly so. Perhaps it was a last chance to try their immortality. Not counting war and other lethal actions, most men don’t accept that they can die until their mid-twenties. Maybe the mind gets it first, but then the body needs to test the theory for itself. Me, I was just trying to please my stepfather. I didn’t believe that I could die, but I did believe that Lewis could kill me. So when I was up in the air looking down, and it occurred to me that there was something a bit tricky about leaping out of the sky, any trepidations I felt were trounced by his image on the ground, waiting; there was only one way down, and it wasn’t the same as the way up, Heraclitus notwithstanding.

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16 Dec 69 Dearest Patsy: Happy day! I received (3) letters from you today. I was beginning to panic, & wonder if you had run off with all my great fortune, and become a “hippy.” It is great to hear from you, & I did know that things would get right with the mail. I think it was stupid for the kids to go to Nashville for (1) day – that is, if he was planning to come to Ft. Bragg. If Bob has plans about Bobby, then he can forget them! Cindy is a cute name for a little girl. Ask Iris if Cindy will give Kevin some! Yea! I didn’t think you would! I know that it is a very busy & hectic time for you, and that with Christmas, etc. you’re going in all directions at once, but it should calm down after Xmas. I think that you should get the windshield fixed ASAP, because when I get home we have to take care of many details, and move in a hurry, etc., not to mention a few other things like being together. I have to go to Washington the first week in Feb. Do you think we can get someone to keep the kids for a couple of days? I need to talk to Inf. Branch. I would like to take a slow drive up, and for once relax together. Patsy, I love you! Time is really dragging by, and would you believe I’m restless, & grouchy, and worry about the Company. I think I made a mistake leaving it, but I was tired! I received a perfect OER [Officer Evaluation Report],but I thought that it would be. Tell the kids I said I love them & to Be Good. I love you, Patsy! Jim

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GROWING UP was to be free in my five-year-old mind. Men, at least, could come and go at will. Women always seemed to wait. The going out was not complete without the coming back. But there came a point for each of my fathers when coming back was not possible. To live is to keep the two forces in balance, and so I position myself opposite my fathers, because their absence marks the limit of a world. In college I kept a passage from one of John Adams’ letters to Abigail above my desk:

I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

– skipping, in my case, the math and engineering, and leaving the tapestry and architecture to my betters. Adams’s words appealed to me because they seemed an argument against the warrior’s way of life, rather than a defense of it. I wasn’t giving much thought to poetry’s long and bellicose history.

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26 Dec 69 Dearest Patsy: Hello, Sweet Darling! How was your Christmas, and the children’s? I want you to know that I wanted to be with you, as always. Anyhow, I hope that it was a happy day for my family. What did the kids get for Christmas? I guess Bob bought Debbie a yacht (no money down, no money paid) or something just as useful! What did we send your parents? My Christmas was just another day except for an outstanding dinner (we managed a hot meal for all), and not quite as much going on. I finally had time last night to unpack my suitcase. I’ve got a full laundry bag of clean, but mildewed, clothes to send out. I gave away my jungle fatigues (tiger-striped), because hopefully I won’t have any more use for them. I watched TV for the first time in a while, and saw an old but good movie, “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” that I really enjoyed. I’ll have Christmas when I’m with you, Darling! I’m really counting days until 30 Jan. It will be 1970 by the time you receive this! I’ve had a lot better years than 1969. I just want you, to be with you, to hold you, & love you, and be with our family. Tell the kids that I love them, and to “Be Good.” I love you, Patsy! Jim P.S. Did Bob get his orders changed? I’m receiving your letters almost every day! Yes, I did receive the Silver Star!

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KANNAPOLIS was a company town for Cannon Mills. When Lewis was sent there in ’74 it was fertile ground for recruiters. I hated this last move, away from Benning and the culture of Army posts. It was rural, and before we got there I knew I’d languish. The perspective is awkwardly composite: leeriness before the move, general boredom and anxiety during the two-year stay in what seemed a foreign place; relief and condescension for many years after. I don’t know if I ever bothered honestly to reassess that final period of my growing up. At seventeen I fled on Trailways to New York and never looked back, as if all Dixie were down a long dark hole. Even my family didn’t see me for two years, though they had left Kannapolis by then and gone back to Bragg. As a company town, Kannapolis was an unincorporated community. We lived on its North side, more toward the farmers than the mill workers, or “lintheads” as they were called at football games. School was a two-year journey through day-to-day dread, and so I seek my memories more from idyllic wanderings near our rural-route address with no discernible town. It was a road with brick one-story houses on one side and woods on the other, except for a small shack directly across from our home. If you looked through our window at the shack, sometimes you’d see someone looking out; but we never saw anyone come or go. It was a family joke and we hummed Dueling Banjos to it. Mailboxes stood at various tilts and there was more traffic in dragonflies than cars. Sometimes I walked the two or three miles to Kannapolis on a county road with high grass on either side, bait shops, trailer homes, nondenominational churches. It was five or six ticks each way, and I’d suffocate them with lighter fluid when I got home. My reasons for

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walking to town were to go to the YMCA reading room, the closest thing Kannapolis had to a library, where I worked as a volunteer one summer; and to visit a little store that carried some literary magazines: Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and such. I’d been writing for a year or so, and poet was closer to something I could be than soldier. Until I saw the magazines, I hadn’t been sure of other living writers. Who else in town was buying and reading them? It occurs to me only now to ask. Down the other end of our street was a town called Enochville that was mainly a small church and a deep gulley. It was named for the Enoch whom God took straight to heaven for being a good man. Down the wooded gulley was a trailer home where a girl lived who would later bother me at times in school with lewd remarks and a sneer like a reptile. Her hair was thin, short, and dirty, and that bothered me because I was a Breck girl. Specifically, she asked me if I’d ever played the “skin flute.” I said no, and that was the right answer, although I didn’t realize for another two days what instrument she meant. There was a deep drop into woods behind our home, leaving perhaps four feet of a back yard. I was still a runner, though no longer for a team. Instead, I ran down through all the crisscrossing trails in the woods down the gulley, across a creek and out into meadows that rose toward farmland on the other side. During one of my runs I smacked into a cow’s head thrust through a mess of honeysuckle, and we scared each other in classic comedy fashion. On another day a man standing on a hill pulled his overalls down as I ran by, waited for something, then pulled them up again and walked away. The muteness of it absorbed all sound until I turned and walked away myself, abandoning my run. Along the trail were several stations. One was a fallen trunk stretched a few feet above dry ground, then out over the creek: this was my bridge to anywhere, because it went nowhere

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and I walked out to its edge every time I passed. Second was a Siamese-twinned birch with a deep socket in the joint that filled with rain. I imagined it a pagan sort of Holy Water. The creek itself was rock-strewn and clear. Here time flowed at its own pace, but most everywhere else I fretted over what wouldn’t hurry. Back toward home was a dogwood, the tree that yielded timber for the cross and got twisted and dwarfed. It guarded our kitchen door and gave scant shade. My mother was on a work slow-down. Something was wrong in their marriage – Lewis had had a brief affair, confessed, and suffered my mother’s anger in uncharacteristic tight-lipped fashion until he broke one day and slammed his fist through their bedroom door. The hole went unrepaired for months, a jagged porthole. That’s as close as he came to violence against her, not counting the accidental BB-gun shooting in Waco, years before. Due to the slow-down, I took over much of the kitchen duty as well as some of the other housework. I tried to help, mainly because I had guilt for what we all expected of her, but also because keeping house was an immediate satisfaction and hastened the day. It assisted the imagined life, and made me less a child. The walls were bare except for a Girl Scout calendar, each date annotated and diagonally marked off as it passed: she was tired by then of hanging what would have to come down again. The school bus stopped out front and took me to another little town and the high school. I had few friends, or none, depending on the definition. There were a couple of people who talked to me, coming over to where I sat almost as if visiting a prisoner. A few teachers reached out to me. A mysterious girl left notes in my locker, but I never saw who it was. Of course I only assume it was a girl; but the little circles dotting her i’s support it. For a few moments I worried it might be Trailer Girl. The notes arrived irregularly over several months, and grew sarcastic near

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the end, though still affectionate. She never proposed our meeting, nor did she offer other ways for my responding. I still hope she wasn’t grotesque. My English teachers one after the other took me on as a project, and it was of great value in the long run. One urged me to read Dag Hammarskold’s Markings as a cornerstone to build my literary self upon. Another steered me toward journalism and social justice, and I should have listened. Another, buxom and not young, dark-tanned from a lotion or lamp and bottle-blonde, taught poetry as burlesque. A bit of Shelley lit up her nipples like penlights. The whole class was mesmerized, or just me; she taught with her body and we learned. One other outsider came to the school the same year I did, a tall girl I decided was Slavic and who succeeded much better than I in making friends. We spoke sometimes, and she invited me over to meet her father, a psychologist, because I’d claimed an interest in his discipline. The psychologist was the first adult I had an extended conversation with who wasn’t a teacher, a soldier, or my mother. His face was of distinctly different countenance from anyone else I’d met, and it was the face I put on authors of scholarly works I read for the rest of high school. He stood for the quintessential scientist, the imminently sane and well-balanced humanist. He was somewhere at the opposite end of the pants-dropping farmer, both figures framing for me the outlines of a wilderness. One girl warned me of hell fires, but she was round as a beach ball by the end of our junior year, and mournful as she went back and forth to class. It was a slightly more enlightened era, so they let her stay in school despite her pregnancy. The chastened look must have been an unspoken requirement. I still worry that she’s right about me. She was a dark-haired lovely, so her words settled in deeply enough to make me anxious. Within my kaleidoscope of faiths and fears, Jesus’ face

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appears at the center point of flexion now and then, spreading and dissolving as the colors and forms transmute toward the edges of the outer circle. My religion is still revealing itself, a trembling mandala like colors in oil. I admired all the popular, mainly blond and curvy girls, companions to strapping, tall, athletic and Christian boys, all homegrown. Even their acne seemed healthy, American, and right. There were, besides the jocks and future farmers, a small number of freaks and longhairs; I avoided them. Among the boys at school, there were only two who ever talked to me. The first was very tall, dark, and cool, and claimed to be a Muslim, though not so far as his mother and pastor knew. We talked in the lobby during lunch about communism, black nationalists, Zen, and everything else we were vaguely aware of as different from the norm. The other fellow was a red-headed boy who always wore a bright bandana around his neck that gave him a bit of flair, a rock-star look in my eyes. We sat beside each other in Homeroom. He was in a band called “Hogfat,” a play on “Foghat” and a touch of rural self-deprecation. He spoke proudly of the great fun they had, and I wished I could play something so I might join; something besides the skin flute, that is. I never heard them play, but I took it on faith that they were decent. It was a fine time, after all, to be a Southern rock band. For those two years I never truly connected with anyone else; never went to a party, to someone’s house (except the psychologist’s), never went cruising or took in a ball game. I tried once talking to a girl on the school bus, but she whispered for help. It was stupid and mean to have held my breath for those two years, and simply to have waited for adulthood to come along like a train. I could have cheered for the team, praised Jesus just to be polite, or joined the Drama Club. All I did was sit in my bedroom reading and writing.

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I’m leaving out one important aspect of my time in Kannapolis, which was that I maintained a side-life as a Buddhist. Perhaps I’m omitting it because my participation took place not there but in Charlotte, half an hour away, only once a month or so. It was, since no one from either place witnessed my involvement in the other, a hidden fold. In any case I was a halfhearted Buddhist, curious enough to try it for awhile. If I’ve disgraced the warriors, I’ve also disappointed the peacemakers. Those particular Buddhists were a proselytizing, world-wide organization that chanted en masse and made you pass out business cards to strangers in public places. About half the members were American, the rest Japanese and Korean, and everyone dressed very neatly. When the monthly activities included trolling for new members at parks or malls, I tended to work the fringes, and tossed my business cards in a garbage bin before it was done, rather than talk to strangers and risk rejection by the nine out of ten; or worse, be engaged by the tenth, and find myself selling something I was incredibly lukewarm about. But it was a great thing for me. All the other members, in their twenties and thirties mostly, treated me like an equal, and listened to my nonsense with patience. My sponsor was an ex-Marine named Mitch, a young man with a pretty sister named April. I went to meetings regularly in hopes of seeing her. Mitch had been given my phone number by someone I’d met before we left Benning. He would show up full of Buddhist enthusiasm every month to bring me to chapter meetings down in Charlotte. Amazingly, Lewis let me go, but was barely tolerant; on one occasion as we departed for a meeting, he glared at Mitch while smacking his fist slowly into his palm. We were a couple of fairies, he must have thought.

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At the chapter meetings there was incessant chanting. It was ungodly boring, and yet I liked the feeling of the collective sound like a canopy over our heads. I liked the lingering incense and the prayer book they gave me, and the beads, which I semi-discreetly flashed on the bus to school – a good reason why, I admit, that girl cried Help when I sat down beside her. Likewise the Jesus girl who’d threatened me with hellfire might have taken my beads and sutrabook for Satan’s accessories. The rest of my spiritual life was derived from Carlos Castaneda, Alan Watts, Tolkien, and ample Albert Camus. Spirituality was mainly about flight. Nightly departures were music on a cheap phonograph and from the radio, which I listened to before sleep, prog rock wafting out from the college at Wake Forest, reaching that far at night on the thin air. Not spirit, but attenuations of Now: projecting so much of myself into an uncertain future that my real existence was threadbare and starved. Even masturbation was a feverish effort at finding the future: pumping a bicycle tire on a desolate dirt road, but it never filled. Doubles haunted me. It was also the effect, climaxing at that point in my life, of the many moves, the many streets, neighborhoods, schools, and circles of friends. Something in me felt the world was both bigger and smaller than it seemed; that the number of faces passing me by was infinite, but that some were the same, and kept coming back around; and that I frequently missed my own figure turning a corner up ahead, hiding behind a tree nearby, a me a little older, who could clear some present-day confusion if he would just turn around and speak. One night I woke to rustling sounds. I got out of bed and looked out the window, and someone was near the well. Concentrating for a moment, I was sure I heard breathing. Reservedly I woke Lewis, who grabbed a pistol and went out and around toward the woods behind the house. Something had clicked inside his head and he was back in patrol mode,

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charged and alive. He came back to report nobody there, gave me that skeptical look I knew so well, and sent everyone back to bed. But the dark pushed in for several minutes on my window, and I felt the lurker still there. I was nearly grown, but this was, I think now, the last phantom of my childhood. They were always there, but like most people I’d block them by not believing in them. There’s always suffering or hatred somewhere near, and if you concentrate you can catch a little of the malice or misery; and your brain squeezes out a golem, and he bears your face. Sometimes it’s a future self: in my case, that night, it was the older self who would not be welcome back into that home even if it still existed; not evil, but far from innocent, soiled by the score of cities and countries of my later passages. I was tempter and savior, composite of everyone whose friendship I would crave or whose contempt would burn me. Lewis, the Missing Man, stealthily moves between my sleeping and waking, tracks the apparition, and keeps it at bay: not yet, not yet for this one.

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9 Jan 70 Dearest Patsy: Hello, Sweet Darling! How are you doing? Did you receive my letter asking you to tell the owner that we’re leaving on or about the 15th of Feb? I’m really looking forward to getting home, “home is any place that you’re at.” What is Debbie going to do? I knew that Bob couldn’t get his orders changed, because he has had too much S.F. [Special Forces] time; it’s nice, but he should have pulled other types of duties along the way. Anyhow, she had best make a decision now, because I want her to go with us, but you and I are the family leaders; in other words, she will knock off the Bullshit! Every one of the boys needs a haircut. Bangs are for Fat Little Girls, not Boys! Honey, start checking around for a lady to keep the kids for the period 2 through 6 Feb; I think it will take about that long to finish all business in D.C., and I want to be alone with my darling. Do you go along with that? Do you think we will have any problem finding someone who is trustworthy? Make sure that you have winter clothes, cocktail dress, etc. If you need anything, then go buy it! Put my clothes in the cleaners – also trench coat. I need the sport coat, dinner (blue) jacket, white shirts, socks, etc. Nothing much to write about over here. I stay busy as hell, but the time is really dragging by. The C.O. is really outstanding, and I would have liked to work longer under his command, but I’m finished with this place, for a while anyhow! Baby, tell everyone I said hello! Tell the kids I love them, and to Be Good! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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IN THE LATE SUMMER of 1982 I went home for the first time in four years. Lewis had just retired, and it felt as if we had all left the Army; or the Army had left us. What Lewis felt about retiring, I don’t know: maybe a combination of relief, regret, and worry about his future, which he’d not planned before going civilian. I’d been off on another of my quixotic efforts, trying this time to find work on a fishing boat in Oregon. Before returning home I’d spent less than a week on a boat with a Mad Man, a young captain who’d spent his whole life on the sea, and sang Beatles songs in the most menacing way the entire time we were out. I’ve never been so intimidated by “Love Me Do.” My total ineptitude as a deckhand offended the Mad Man so much I was sure during the voyage that he would kill me, perhaps by bashing my head with the handle of the gaffe hook, as he did to the salmon. How easy it would have been to drop my carcass into the Pacific Ocean and claim that I’d fallen overboard, as a few times I almost did. Such morbid, paranoid thoughts helped me pass the time while I stood manning the lines in the pit, sunup to sundown for several days: my own private boot camp. So, despite having traveled Trailways not once but twice from New York to the West Coast in search of an ocean adventure, my sea legs collapsed and I returned East. Having no money, I fell back for the first and last time as a nominal grown-up on my folks. I, too, didn’t have a plan to speak of. Once I got there, it might have been a return to childhood and one more long slog out of it toward independence. But I was tired, and Home for the first time in years sounded good. They’d recently bought a house on the outskirts of Ft. Bragg just the other side of one of the post’s wild areas used for training. Occasional artillery fire in the distance rattled the

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windows of the new home, and it was comforting. Fayetteville is on a broad sand hill, making it just a few degrees hotter than the rest of the Piedmont region. The yard of this latest family home was another competition between grass and white sand. The house was new and comfortable, very suburban: just what my parents wanted. There was a big back yard with a high cedar fence, and in the living room a raised fireplace with a rock chimney: the hearth I’d always dreamed of. So Lewis must have dreamed of it, too. His La-Z-Boy armchair, third or fourth in a line of mechanical thrones, anchored the house there in its place before the TV, true hearth, which was always on. Sometimes my mother would ask one of us to wake him for dinner or to get up and go to bed. It was a dicey project: Lewis’s sleep was in a very deep place, and you could shove him from all directions before he’d come within miles of this world. But then, when he was just about back, he’d throw a quick, wide punch at what specter was haunting him; and if you didn’t step back fast enough, you’d get tagged. It made me think of propping a plane, pushing down the big blade that could fan on and cut you to slaw if you weren’t alert. Lewis said quite seriously that he’d retired because our dog, Duffy, was getting too old for another big move. If he’d stayed in the service he would have made Lt. Colonel, but they’d probably have received orders for Ft. Lewis, Washington – as far from Fayetteville as they’d ever been, short of going overseas. So he hung it up after a quarter century of service and bought a house within earshot of the guns. Mother complied as always, but was happy to be done. My brother Don was just finishing high school, and took some tests predicting he’d do well as a dental assistant in the Air Force. As I arrived he was leaving for Basic in Texas, but came back to Carolina to serve his four years at an air base a few hours away.

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I arrived home rather sheepishly, but was warmly welcomed. My mother was glad to see me, for we’d always gotten along well; Lewis was congenial. It was odd to see so much of him: he didn’t go out much after retirement, and spent a good bit of time in his armchair, cigarette smoke curling from the ashtray, remote control firmly in hand, a stack of flying magazines open nearby and creased to particular pages. I took over Don’s recently-vacated room, and after a few days of nothing but chats with the folks or trips with my mother to the supermarket, I thought about my eventual escape. In New York I’d done nothing but clerk in bookstores, so after buying a necktie I got in at the B. Daltons down at the mall. With no rent or groceries to pay for, I could save my just-aboveminimum wages to bus it back to Manhattan, in replay of my first escape six years earlier. It wasn’t a step backward, so much. Lewis was older and perhaps calmer due to his retirement, though he was only 42; he met me more or less equally. We talked some, more than we ever had when I was a kid, and I tried to be as agreeable as possible. It was early in the Reagan-era; Lewis seemed comfortable. However, I didn’t warm to his career plans for me: when Reagan had the air traffic controllers fired, Lewis encouraged me to apply. I didn’t do well on the exam, though I honestly tried. But they never called me to duty. Although I’d shown my mettle years earlier and tried skydiving, Lewis didn’t mention actually flying planes instead of directing them; but he did, after a month or so, bring home some recruiting brochures for two or three of the armed forces. It was broadminded of him to include the Air Force and Navy as well as the Army. The Marines must have seemed a bit of a stretch. Four years at Sarah Lawrence were adequate preparation for a career as an Infantry officer. And how could it be worse than being an Army brat? But I stayed on at the bookshop,

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saving money for my return to Manhattan and a sub-sublet in Alphabet City; though in the early eighties, that was more dangerous than a military career. Meanwhile, Lewis grew stale in his retirement. He was not entirely stagnant, because he went out four or five days a week to the airfield owned by a friend to fly for the skydivers, many of them retirees, often ex-Green Berets and Rangers like himself. I had no interest in jumping at the time, but Kevin went out with his dad when he wasn’t in school. Kevin was jumping and learning to fly as well – a good early start, like father like son. My baby brother was more like Lewis in temperament and direction, and it was good to see him get on fairly well with his Dad. But Lewis was still Lewis. Every once in a while, if Kevin spoke pertly to his mother or committed some other infraction, his father would bully him up and down the hallway, smack him enough to make him scared and humiliated. He had knocked all the boys around, but this extended bullying and taunting was peculiar to his treatment of Kevin: my brother’s special warrant, I suppose, as the blood son, or at least as the youngest and most salvageable male. In a way, it meant Lewis respected Kevin more. He believed he could take it and be tempered by the rougher treatment. But it was not a pretty sight. So I worked at the mall bookstore selling romances, westerns, soldier pulp, puzzle books. The soldiers, mostly away from home for the first time, arrived in haughty, huddled, closecropped groups, generally with black tee shirts espousing how much blood and gore of a generic enemy they were prepared to spill. They wore this sixties protest irony, appropriated in the eighties as a pro-war slogan, the irony removed, or perhaps doubled on itself:

JOIN THE ARMY

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go to distant, beautiful, exotic places, meet interesting people, and kill them.

You couldn’t buy those shirts in the mall; you had to go to the surplus stores on Bragg Boulevard. I walked our dog, Duffy, helped my mother around the house as I’d done in high school, and wandered the woods. In a small clearing off one of the trails, I found a gravestone for a Confederate sergeant: one stone, and no trace of the homestead that must once have been near. Lewis didn’t get paid at his friend’s airfield; all he got out of the deal was flight time. He thought it was great, but he already had countless hours, ample training, examinations, licenses; he was commercial-rated, had flown a variety of crafts, privately and as an officer, and crashed once that we knew of, expertly, in Lake Waco. Flying was his love, and he’d fly every chance, pay or no pay. But from somewhere he needed more income, and it burdened him. Several months after retirement it seemed time to find a steady job, and Lewis looked around for aviation work. It wasn’t a good time to be job-hunting for a man his age and with less than ten years’ flying. A few days before he left, Lewis told my mother he was driving to Vero Beach, down Florida’s Atlantic coast, to interview for a job ferrying Piper aircraft for a dealer. He didn’t tell us much else. In his white Ford Fiesta he drove off the morning of October 3, 1982, waving his bare arm goodbye. He’d been gone before: on TDY, temporary duty; mainly Germany he said, while serving with the 82nd Airborne before retiring. He drove off, and if things had been normal he would

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have called on arrival; he always drove fast, and would have reached south Florida in eight hours. Lewis wasn’t the sort of person to neglect things. From the letters a dozen years earlier we see his methods. Somebody capable of managing a home half a world away while fighting a war could keep in touch while gone for a few days on a road trip. But after he left the house that day, we never heard from him again. The first day passed and no phone call; the second day, and again no word. There’s no event to describe: no one died, no one did anything that we ever found out about. Somebody didn’t come back – when didn’t he come back? Not in a few days, not in a week, not in a month, not in a year – not ever. You can’t mark “not ever” on a calendar; you can’t solemnly observe the anniversary for a non-event. The little white car, the Ford Fiesta – an unlikely choice of vehicle for the man – backed out of the garage and drove down the street. We waved goodbye from the open garage, or maybe the porch; or my mother did. The car turned the corner, right at the stop sign; he waved one last time, turned left onto the larger road that led out of the housing area and out of sight toward the interstate. If that’s what happened, it wasn’t worth watching or remembering: it was what he did all the time, this time for a few days’ absence. I’d have thought nothing of it: a little breathing room for the rest of us, his large, dark, centripetal presence out of the house for a while. The last image my mother had of him was that wave goodbye. She wouldn’t have seen much of his face. What had he looked like before leaving? What look to tell the truth of things? We too easily project back on the scene our later feelings: that he had a deeper seriousness, taciturnity, rigidity of body; that he uttered words slightly differently from usual,

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something coded, involuntarily expressive of a more permanent goodbye. Or was he just too good at the game? Coldly abandoning his family, out the door and driving away, releasing all our futures blithely with the backward wave of a hand momentarily released from the wheel. There are several variant stories to tell, because none of them has much of fact to recommend it. We’ve thought them, talked them, dreamt them, and then undone them all; and after so long a time, it’s hard to sort the different stories: as if that one man, so clearly an individual, a “Jim,” a “Lewis,” of distinctive voice and face, were really several blurring, blending, and ultimately dispersing presences. Death, too, a certain death, can cause the personality to crumble: posthumous evidence can reveal the flaws, weaknesses, indiscretions; or a survivor’s memory and imagination simply outstrip the seemingly static, fragmented images of the dead, who inhabit some corner in our psyches, where they rot away. What remains of him in me? How he would scowl, sneer, or pound his fist upon the table – enough! Once, when I lay on the living-room floor in front of the old Phillips stereo we’d carried back from Mainz, listening to some sort of moody jazz or early-seventies alternative rock with my head in my hands and the lights out, he walked in from a day at the training field, fatigued; and as if I were engaged in a subversive action, he flicked on the light with a quick violence and growled: “THERE IS no ‘deep truth,’ Flipdick!” – followed by a pause, while he breathed like a bull. My heart leaped, as it hadn’t in a couple of years, and I reached to cancel the record. Then the finish: “Keep the goddam light on and pull yer HEAD outta yer ASS!” I heard that so many times my neck hurt from imagining it.

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Condemning my selfishness: that’s why it’s hard to believe he went AWOL himself. Maybe it’s more just to call him MIA: he went toward Vero Beach, or somewhere, and got caught by the enemy. Let’s lay out some possibilities: (1a) Lewis knew all along that he’d never come back. He met a younger woman, and they went off together to live in a tropical paradise; though given his three-pack a day habit, he’s long since died of lung cancer. (1b), The new wife reformed him, he became a health nut and is living slim, sinewy and clean-lunged on a crystalline beach. (2 a), Lewis knew all along that he’d never come back, but went off by himself: (2aa) to fight the good fight against Contras, communists, fascists, drug dealers, or other assorted bad guys; or, (2bb) to pick up and deliver some drugs himself, making a quick killing and then (2aaa) returning to us refreshed and debt-free or (2bbb) carrying on in his new life as a drug runner/freedom fighter, having long since died or (2aaaa) ended up in a South American prison or (2bbbb) something like (1b) above, but after the aforesaid adventures. (3a) Lewis got clobbered on the head and caught amnesia. In that case any of the above might apply, but also any other sort of life one can imagine for him, short of the one we know he didn’t have, a return to us. Possibly I should separate out (2bb) as a new number: he went somewhere (maybe not Vero Beach or maybe not to work for a small-aircraft dealer) to make some legitimate or slightly less-than-legitimate money and then come home in quick order, his wife never knowing the worst of it; but misfortune occurred, and he couldn’t return as he’d intended.

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These possibilities fan out further than I’m allowing here. If you start from any random fact or element of the man’s life and character, pondering all the possibilities your mind is open to, innumerable lives grow like algae on a pond; but somewhere, the real man, still clinging in our memories, starts to lose any sort of human face. He becomes a collage of American error, promise, comedy, or tragedy. I’ve never been to Vero Beach, and don’t know much about Florida. We did see references in the early 80’s to cocaine shenanigans in that town, but that’s probably because we were looking for such news. The white powder was everywhere, after all. When we tried to track down anyone who sold airplanes in the vicinity, we found no one who’d heard of Lewis, much less offered him a job. Maybe we didn’t search carefully enough, but it supports the likelihood of his having lied. Days turned into weeks. My mother called a couple of his friends, but they knew nothing. At some point within that limbo of waiting, we called the local police. But a grown man, they told us, can up and leave; there was little they could, or would, do about it. We found out years later that the Fayetteville police never made a report. I could sense a bit of mockery, even, in the voices I spoke to on the other end of the phone: men have affairs, go off with other women; why should Lewis be any different? We had our deep sense, after a lifetime, of just how and why he was different; but there was no proving it. Most people feel that way about the ones they love. Without trust, who are we? The medals, the citations, the photographs, the memories proved nothing. All we could prove was that he’d existed. We couldn’t prove he still existed; we couldn’t prove he was living, and we couldn’t prove he was dead. We couldn’t prove he wanted to be found or that he didn’t

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want to be found. Officially, for a long time, it was a non-issue, and even for us, it was an act of imagination each day to keep believing something was wrong. Ditto the FBI: I went down to their local office and an agent was kind enough to speak with me (like most of them, an ex-soldier himself – Fayetteville the stopping-off place for so many in that former career). He took some notes, told me why he couldn’t do anything, and saw me to the door. I was relieved that he didn’t wear a smirk while we talked. Ah, we thought of this and that – as we slowly realized that something called for action, though we could barely put our finger on what that something was. Maybe we were out of line: a man had gone away; so what? Didn’t we have our own lives? Get on with it! HEADS out of our ASSES. There was no clearance between past and present; the problem was not localized, except in that empty La-Z-Boy and the fading smell of cigarette smoke. I gave a photograph to a private investigator and never got it back. That was unfortunate, because we had few photos of Lewis that really showed what he looked like around the time he left. The PI was, like the FBI man, reasonably polite, took his notes, made a file, and told us he’d let us know if he thought there was anything he could do. He was honest: he never got back to us, never charged a fee. We asked around, but an eerie silence quarantined us. Lewis had numerous friends; many had already died, but if he’d had a funeral there would have been a decent attendance. We’ll never know. My mother called some of his flying pals, some of his Army buddies, and they knew nothing and offered nothing: no help, no consolation, no hand-holding. Maybe those men also accepted that it was his due to leave as he saw fit: his freedom, what he’d been aiming for, why

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he learned to fly. Maybe they envied him, or were cheering him on, as in Philip Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures”:

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, As epitaph: He chucked up everything And just cleared off, And always the voice will sound Certain you approve This audacious, purifying, Elemental move.

But it would be like envying someone his sainthood. Larkin seems to undo the sentiment:

... Surely I can, if he did? And that helps me to stay Sober and industrious. But I’d go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads, Crouch in the fo’c’sle Stubbly with goodness, if

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It weren’t so artificial, Such a deliberate step backwards To create an object: Books; china; a life Reprehensibly perfect.

Does knowing you can go prevent you from going? The poet stays cleanly enough inside his poem and we know where to find him. In fact, Larkin doesn’t end the poem so much as turn around and walk back into it, in those last few lines. And the china! Lewis knew about that. Most of the Army buddies walked back into life and stayed put to the end. We prefer what we know even when we know it’s going to kill us. Maybe the strangeness of Lewis’s departure precluded what help or consolation the old soldiers could have offered my mother. A funeral offers release, but vanishing takes on its own life. When Lunday had died in ’77, the friend Lewis had flown for went over with his wife to sit with my mother in mourning. She’d gotten over loathing my first father, but wasn’t exactly grieving; the consolatory gesture made her uncomfortable. A few years later she called the same friend to tell him of Lewis’s disappearance, but he said simply: “Patsy, I wish you’d told me sooner.” Beyond that cryptic comment, nothing from then to now. There were no codified steps for us to take. My mother called people; I could hear the embarrassed phone-silence across the room. Sometimes the men asked a few analytical

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questions; sometimes the women made tisking sounds: “Patsy, Patsy,” as if measuring the blankness of their own imaginations. Police, FBI, private dick: what other officials might lend an ear? We sent letters to the DEA to see if Lewis had either worked for them covertly or been under investigation; Social Security, to see if they could forward a letter; credit card companies, to see if they could reveal activity on his cards; the FAA, to see if they had anything in flight records; the State Department, to see if they could query embassies to query governments about arrested or hospitalized foreigners; the VA, to see if they had record of recently-admitted patients; our congressman, to see if he could do whatever congressmen do: we got a letter of sympathy. We tried to interest the local news people in the story, but it lacked something, evidently: the town newspaper squeezed out one feature article, many years after. And of course, the Army: Mother approached the JAG’s office at Bragg and some former superiors, but all begged off. It seems a bit pathetic now, all the things we didn’t do: we never made fliers to distribute anywhere: at airports, skydiving clubs, bars where retired soldiers hung out. We didn’t raise money to pay for a serious search effort. We didn’t try to make media darlings of ourselves, which wasn’t yet a common practice, anyway; and we didn’t track down everyone who ever knew him, didn’t write every U.S. embassy and consulate in countries with conflicts, didn’t offer a reward for information. We didn’t petition law enforcement very hard, but took their nonchalance passively, with frustration but no rage. It’s a weakness of some people who spend their lives inside a government institution to submit too easily to authority. If your father is the Army, and the Army is the Government, then you can trust the Government – right? We ransacked our memories, and – uncommon in our family – talked to each other: with

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my sister and my brothers by phone, and the two or three of us there at home on rare occasions, until late at night. We studied every scrap of paper, every notebook, flying journal and financial record Lewis had left behind. We compared notes with his mother and sister in Texas while they were alive. My Aunt Pam, as ever, was keen on conspiracy theories, claiming that her big brother had confessed a few years earlier to an involvement in the failed Delta Force effort to free the hostages in Iran. If Lewis ever said anything of the sort, he might have been pulling his baby sister’s leg, as he loved to do. When I made inquiries a few years later – to remove all stray threads of possibility – an associate of Colonel Beckwith, the former Delta Force commander, claimed never to have heard of MAJ Lewis. I try to stay away from the more farfetched notions; but the whole thing is farfetched. I mean that I’m inclined to consider the possibilities further away from public legend: not to insert Lewis’s face so easily into the ready-made news and broader flashes of history, but to let his ghost find a legend of its own. 1982 became 1983. A few months after the disappearance, after we’d run out of ideas and people to contact, we got a call from the parking-lot attendant at the Fayetteville Airport. Lewis’s Fiesta had been parked there since three days after he’d left our house. The attendant had gotten our information by tracking the license-plate number, and called us mainly because the car had racked up a large parking fee by that time. I drove down myself and looked through the car; not too thoroughly, because I still had hopes the police would do their job. One officer came by the parking lot and talked to me, shrugged at the car and suggested I file a report down at the station. Before I could go much further, the finance company, which hadn’t been receiving monthly payments on the car, drove

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the Fiesta away. That was another bill my mother had been advised to stop paying: why write monthly checks for a car that was, we thought, lost somewhere in the world? I imagine the company cleaned it well, sprayed some new-car aerosol and sold it fast. Whatever evidence there’d been was gone. I’d noted a few flight maps on the passenger seat, all for the Southeastern US, no marks; not much else. Before leaving the airport, I inquired at various counters and windows: had a man by this name flown anywhere at around that date? Had a man by this name chartered a small plane? Filed a flight plan? Did you see a man who looked like this, a few months back? Nothing, as always. Finding the car had given us little new information. Someone, not necessarily Lewis, had put the car into the long-term lot three days after he left. Who parked the car and where he or she went – on a plane, in another car, on foot – we had no idea. It was a bit of color or shading to the mystery; but the mystery itself was, if anything, more mysterious, or rather, more of a blank. Too much mystery makes the mind shut down. At what point did we get on with our lives? I’d been at the mall bookstore several months. I don’t know now where Kevin was: at home, going to school, doing what he did, maybe going a little wild, in several ways, without the threat of fisted discipline over him; too young, still, to know his role. Mother had gone into Womack Army Hospital for a hysterectomy: same place where she’d given birth to two of her four children. She lay recuperating one evening in her darkened room, dazed and dry-mouthed, trying not to retch, as the nurses in their camouflage fatigues rushed by in the brightly lit hall (Wednesday: “Camo Day” for post personnel). I held her hand, then looked out the window at the winter parking lot, near-empty, one car circling for some reason, as if deciding which of the many empty spots to choose. I half-expected Lewis to drive

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into the lot, get out, come up the elevator, and do his husband’s duty. There was room enough, tonight, in the parking lot; he had to be circling somewhere. A few years after the disappearance, she clipped a news account from the Fayetteville paper reporting that the friend with the airfield had been cleared of drug-related charges. It had been alleged that he’d let a cocaine-laden plane make a drop-off at his field. The indictment had come from a Florida-based investigation, but the friend went free, named cleared. We heard nothing more of it. For a while my dreams were feverish and repetitive. I called my mother often from New York, did my duty listening to her repeat the spare litany of facts, believing it helped her. I took a certain aura from the whole thing: as if something had happened to me. Searching for a place to live I made my way out to Park Slope, Brooklyn and a boarding house. The landlady was clairvoyant, maternal, and attractive. My story came out while I was looking at the room, and I let it work along the line of acquaintance between us, just to see where it would go. She brought me to an apartment somewhere in Manhattan where another, supposedly more-psychic psychic listened to my story and worked his magic. It involved a few strange things, including listening to a tape – a blank tape – through which the voice of St. Germain spoke oracular messages regarding my problem. Then the psychic asked some questions and gave his interpretation of the voice we’d heard on the cassette. It must have seemed right to offer a little hope, or what they took for hope, and tell me that the man I sought (was I seeking him?) was still alive, though hospitalized somewhere in South America.

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Since I’d mentioned Lunday and my grandfather, and their deaths in the glider, the psychic attributed this intelligence about Lewis to my grandfather. Wrong branch of the family; but I kept that to myself. We bade farewell to the high priest of St. Germain, and the Boarding-House Lady took me aside near the elevators, where she placed a magic stone under my shirt, pressing firmly and at length. What divinations did she expect from there? She drew a blank, but I had the pleasure of her hand on me. I found a Manhattan rat hole instead of rooms in Brooklyn, and no more sybil, as she must have foreseen.

Sometime in the early nineties, my mother read in the news of some remains found in a Carolina swamp: a swatch of denim and a wristwatch along with bones. She contacted the detective in charge of the case and forwarded Lewis’s dental records. The detective informed my mother that there was no record of Lewis’s disappearance in the Police Information Network, and then entered the data; he had the dental records compared, and although those bones turned out to be someone else’s, we felt at least that someone of authority had acknowledged that our problem was a real: that it was worth acknowledging Jim Lewis as missing, even if it wasn’t worth looking for him any longer. Someone suggested she contact Unsolved Mysteries or some other such TV program, but my mother feared notoriety. Ten years after the disappearance she saw a lawyer and started paperwork to make the man dead. The whole thing took about a year, like a lingering illness. Something was said in

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court, some documents were stamped and mailed, copies put in a drawer somewhere, and a death filed away to bookend the birth. No explanation as to the death itself; no funeral and no grave.

Long ago, helping to clean out boxes before a move, I came across papers from Lewis’s two years as a “bootstrap” student at Omaha. In one of the folders I found a small poem, haikulike, composed for a writing course he’d taken. I don’t remember it verbatim, but the poem was a quick, vivid description of moving through the jungle. The writing conveyed vulnerability uncharacteristic of the man. But it shone with an emerald light: as evidence of what he had seen and experienced, the poem was better than a photograph. Now it, too, has disappeared. The night before he left in 1982, Lewis talked to me more intently about himself than he ever had. We stayed up late, the TV off; I forgot I was his son, became a visitor in his life, and listened. He did not, as a rule, tell war stories. When he did, they were meant to be funny: the time he was leading a LRRP through the jungle, and each man stepped over a log on the trail, until the last man, the biggest, stepped on the log rather than over it. The log moved, because the log was an iguana, and the big man ran screaming, heedless of any VC down the trail. That last night his story was of another man. Again they’re on a trail, but there are no comedic logs or iguanas. Instead the man is walking up ahead and trips a mine. In the seconds he has, he looks back at Lewis and locks eyes; then he balls up to take the blast. It was the look back that bothered Lewis: it did no good. In fact, it took away time from the one slim chance the man had, which was to dive to the ground as soon as he heard the click.

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It wasn’t a judgment he was making. Lewis could knock you when you were already hurt if he thought it might save you from something worse: thus his violence to me when I was six and had cut my forehead open horsing around, and thus his threats to the soldier, all those letters ago, who had shot himself in the foot. But this man on the trail was already dead: a click, then a few seconds’ delay. What can you do when you hear the click? What had the immediacies of my stepfather’s life come to resemble? Lewis had no enemies that we knew of. Did he assess the list of friends and find it wanting? There must have been a life outside the home that had its own rules, its own cast of characters. No sightings; Jim Lewis, as far as we know, was never seen in a crowd. No one but us seemed to be looking for him, and what does that mean, anyway: “looking” for him? We could have stood outside the front door, walked down the driveway, peered down the road out of the subdivision: there was nothing there; he never drove back. Once you go down the road, there are further roads in all directions, and he might have taken any of them. In imagination, he took all of them. Kevin has spent his adult life in Florida, hoping to see his father someday walking past, driving through an intersection. I never went to Vero Beach any more than I went to Timbuktu, Shangri-La, Casablanca, or Oz. We might have called a press conference; might have offered a reward, but had no money, and no wherewithal to raise it. To find him would be satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. I felt so early on: it was an extension of the love-hate-fear I’d always felt toward Lewis, wishing deep down that he would not return from war, that he would go away and not be married to my mother anymore. In the first weeks of his disappearance it felt like a game, and a part of me wanted it to continue. But after a few months, his absence was more frightening than his presence had ever been, and I

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realized that the man who’d left was not the stepfather of my childhood, the ogre whose shadow I’d dreaded, but the gray, somewhat tired-looking man who cared for my mother and loved me like a father. There in the last house, the big chair empty and the standing ashtray cleaned and cold, the magazines unread: a sinkhole had opened, and a cold air breathed out.

In a 1933 movie called Bureau of Missing Persons, vanishing is a phenomenon of daily urban life. In the opening shot, crowds of seekers push against the receptionist’s desk, clamoring for an audience; the Captain is a kindly old gray-hair in a dapper suit who makes firm but sensitive judgments. There’s something specifically moral about every disappearance, and common sense always solves the problem. The seeker must somewhat adjust her sight; the missing, once found, must accept his lot and celebrate it. The film is a slightly atypical screwball comedy, centering on a young Bette Davis and Pat O’Brien. It’s based on a nonfiction book of the previous year by one Captain John H. Ayers of the New York City Police Department, Bureau of Missing Persons. In his co-written work, he comes out very much like the avuncular gentleman of the film, describing himself as “psychologist, analyst, humanitarian and policeman.” The center of his humane craft is the “diagnosis” – a reading of what ails the missing person, and the couple or family involved. At the end, following scores of small tales classified according to type (missing men, women, children; amnesia cases, frauds, fake suicides, real suicides, murders, “miscellaneous”), Captain Ayers tells us: “there is no deeper satisfaction I know of than to bring a person who has lost his moorings back to his proper place in society.”

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In the film, everyone has disappeared or is looking. The police receptionist, who directs character and sub-plot traffic in the movie, is herself a missing person – married to one of the bureau detectives, who threatens now and then throughout the film to smack his errant wife when he finds her. Somehow they keep from crossing paths until the end, when he chases her out the station door. We don’t see him catch her. Give a man credit, you might say, for all the days of his life he doesn’t disappear. It’s a mistake we can come back from, after all; the ones who love us will forgive. The only people we should have in our lives are the ones we know would want us back. “The space they occupy lies somewhere between what we know about the ways of being alive and what we hear about the ways of being dead” says Andrew O’Hagan, another connoisseur of the missing. But isn’t that everywhere in the world, besides right here? Maybe the missing have their own place on the map: behind a fold, a smudge, or a printing error. Can’t the spy satellites catch anyone, anywhere? GPS, traffic cameras, surveillance systems, night vision, radar, infrared, X ray: we should have it covered. Children abducted by a parent or stranger; schizophrenics who wander, con artists and endangered witnesses; hikers and climbers and round-the globe sailors, people fallen down ravines or dragged to the bottom of the ocean, leaving no trace: take the map and shake it, see who falls out. Going missing as a sport: Extreme Leaving. A man who died a few years back disappeared twice, and was found twice. Julian Carsey, community-college president, walked away from a wife, job, and friends in Maryland to start a new life. A few years later he resurfaced in Texas and got a proper divorce from the first wife. Several more years and he did it again, ending up in Florida.

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“It wasn’t that I was leaving something,” he said of his vanishings; “I always felt I was going to something, but I didn’t know what it was.” Every front porch is a Bermuda Triangle. Tens of thousands go missing each year. Urban legends tell of those who vanish absolutely: you’re walking up a hill, your partner gets ahead of you, and when you reach the top, she’s gone. You’re parking the car, you get out and go around to open the passenger-side door, and the seat is vacant. You go to bed early, and your spouse stays in the den to watch TV; from bed you hear the laugh track as you fade to sleep, waking to an empty house. The cushion sags where he was sitting, but the front door’s wide open and the road stretches out in both directions.

Gypsies, fairies, or kelpies kidnapped babies: scapegoats for infant mortality, or wolves beyond the pale. Among the disappeared, children are the greater in number: custodial drama, runaways who never return. Women leave, starting new lives; women get raped, killed, dismembered, and burned, and no one ever finds them. A city of the disappeared would be a megalopolis, most of it subterranean. Some who go missing are never reported. Tens of thousands are as obscure in their vanishing as they were in their lives. Short-term vanishings are not vanishings as such; the subjects have been misplaced, you might say, or have been in hiding, sequestered, incognito, in transit. Some people get famous, at least temporarily, for disappearing: Judge Crater, whose vanishing lived for decades in the popular imagination, as did the official case maintained by the New York Police; West Point Cadet Richard Cox, who made the pages of Life by vanishing from

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the Academy and into a dozen fruitless theories, including abduction by the Soviets, murder by a male lover, and enlistment by the CIA; or the above-mentioned Jay Carsey, who rated a New York Times obituary when he died. But obits require habeas corpus: if he’d gone away a third time and not returned before dying, he’d have forfeit his notice. Search for the missing in their photographs, or if you’re lucky, the home movies that keep them eerily alive and young. The photographs never seem to say enough. They’re flat, still and silent, and stuck on an arbitrary instant: a bad smile, a half-shut eye. That unseen final act, whatever was chosen before the disappearance, can flash back over everything else. Weldon Kees parked his Plymouth on the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped, or went to Mexico, or something else. The three possibilities triangulate the whole life, if you’re willing to enter the territory yourself. You could continue crossing the bridge, fly or drive to Tijuana, but could you drop from the bridge in pursuit? It’s not a path; it’s only an act. Sit behind the wheel of that Plymouth, adjust the rearview mirror: you might see the whole long chain of Missing Persons winding its purgatorial path through the mists. Some say Jimmy Hoffa’s in Brazil with a dancer he loved. The South is often where we disappear: the outlaws always ride or drive that way, and the border is a place of climax and resolution. But where do the people already South go? In Argentina, for years, you could be disappeared: it was a transitive verb. The state disappeared you, your wife, your husband, your son or daughter. A photograph was slight evidence you had existed, but memory and witness were a slow-moving revolution. The disappeared are a silent army. Whole communities disappear: Roanoke and Atlantis, Pompeii for a brief 1700 years. People disappear at sea; ships like the Mary Celeste are found deserted or never found at all. Theodosia Burr, Aaron’s only daughter, sailed on the Patriot and foundered somewhere off the

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Carolina coast. Donald Crowhurst, amateur yachtsman and struggling entrepreneur, got in over his head in the race to sail the world. He faked his position for months, hiding out near Brazil while he radioed back positions toward Cape Hope and beyond. His trimaran in the Atlantic was found with two sets of logs, a fake document and the true, too-true and strangely poetic one; and film and audio tape documenting his madness. The sea was sleep, and forgetfulness, and maybe forgiveness. He’d lived eight months alone and stepped ashore five hundred miles out. Go missing and your life forks or frays and you have many lives and many deaths. Perish in a fire, a storm, or other disaster, your remains obliterated, and you leave the smallest loophole of surviving in someone’s fancy. We need a body to prove death, and even then a thousand Elvises and Jim Morrisons persist, sighted in the unlikeliest of places. Xu Fu, on orders from his emperor, sailed in the year 219 BC in search of the elixir of life. The many ships, the thousands of sailors, sank to the bottom of the sea or settled in Japan. The Japanese tell stories of Xu Fu, that he sparked their coming enlightenment; so he was the elixir himself, something transcendent if not immortal: the finding, if not the found. Madoc the Welshman disappeared into legend, he and his band diffusing their blood and tongue into the American tribes. Later explorers reported the odd Welsh word from the mouths of Indians, but I think some words, Celtic words certainly, lilt across seas on their own. Ambrose Bierce rode to Mexico and disappeared into one of his better fictions. Men still disappear by going West. If you stare long enough that direction, you’re already gone. Explorers and spies disappear, but it’s an occupational hazard. The aristocrat Benjamin Bathurst, undercover during the wars with Napoleon, stepped behind a carriage in a town near Berlin and didn’t reappear on the other side. Lionel Crabb, expert diver and finder of Nazi mines, submerged himself near a Soviet cruiser and never resurfaced.

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Glenn Miller, somewhere in the English Channel; Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, perished on an island or beneath the sea. Steve Fossett crashed in Nevada; searchers found eight other crash sites, but not his – until hikers stumbled on it a year after the crash. Some are taken, some are given back, but there’s no bargaining: oblivion plays by its own rules. Dan Cooper parachuted out the back of a jetliner with two hundred thousand dollars into the night, rain, and wilderness below. $5,800 turned up eight years later, but nothing since. Black Bart served his time for armed robbery, then checked into a hotel and didn’t check out. Don’t drop your other shoe and we’ll consider you disappeared. Soldiers go MIA: American GI’s in the gulags, in China and North Korea, in hidden jungle camps of Southeast Asia. Some were brainwashed, others deserted and stayed. For each war we build a Tomb of the Unknowns; DNA has shortened the lists, but not erased them. Errol Flynn’s son, Sean, fell into the hands of the Viet Cong. Michael Rockefeller fed cannibals or crocodiles in New Guinea. A. Carnegie Whitfield crashed in the wilds of Long Island, or Long Island Sound. In a film called “Devil’s Gate,” a young nurse returns to the small Scottish island of her birth, having been lured by a rejected lover who wrote that her father was dying. For years she’s been searching the British Isles for her mother. Back on the Scottish island, and finding her Pa less critical than she believed, she still tracks clues to her mother’s fate. The rejected lover wants her back. She’s in his truck, driving from the father’s house to the village, with the bleak North Sea behind. “There are hundreds of islands between here and the mainland,” the young man tells her. “Your mother could be on any one of them; if you stay, we could look for her together.”

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“What makes you think she’d leave here,” the woman asks, sharp-tongued and bitter, “for some place just like it?” One island, then another and another. Tennyson’s Enoch Arden disappears at sea, returning years after to find his wife remarried to his friend. He looks on despairingly from a distance, weakens from a breaking heart, and tells the village woman tending him not to divulge his name until he’s died. Orson Welles starred in a sentimental film loosely based on the poem: Tomorrow is Forever, with Claudette Colbert. The vanished man returns, years after, from a presumed death in the Great War; he’s an aged, broken stranger, and his wife doesn’t recognize him until the end. He sits right in front of her, in her own living room, her own comfortable life, and won’t admit to being found, and soon has the courtesy to die. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a sketch called “Wakefield” that seems the inverse of Tennyson’s tale. A London man leaves his home, takes up residence on the very next street, and spies on her for twenty years. They bump into each other in the street on one occasion, but she doesn’t recognize him. One night Wakefield is standing outside in the rain while his wife casts a grotesque, writhing shadow in the window: an eleventh-hour portent, perhaps. He goes inside, and with the same crooked smile as on the day he left two decades earlier, takes back his life. Hawthorne worked from a true if spare account of a late seventeenth-century Londoner who stayed away seventeen years, with a similar impulsiveness to his leave-taking. He, too, lived very near, and kept tabs on his wife; but his homecoming was due to the depletion of his savings. As in Hawthorne’s tale we get no contrition, forgiveness, or happily-ever-after. Each man returns

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to the same exact life he abandoned. That, of course, is the most fantastical element of both stories. “What vanished once keeps vanishing,” says Maria Flook, who lost and found a sister. There’s a beauty to it, the way one imagines the precise moment of leaving: a recursive blossoming, kaleidoscopic reproductions of the same last wave goodbye.

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22 Jan 69 Dearest Patsy: Hello, My Darling! I received your letter of 15 Jan, # 325, and I’ve received a letter just about every day for the past week. It really makes my day to hear from you. CPT Mike Davis left yesterday, & said that he would call & say hello! Things are starting to pick up again, but I knew it would as Tet draws nearer. Honey, keep writing, even if letters come after I leave, they will return to U.S. I’m staying busy, and guess I’ll stay busy until the day I leave RVN. I’m told that it will be 30 Jan. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to being with you, and the kids. I don’t really know what to tell you about Debbie that I haven’t said before. The last thing I want is to have you hurt in any way. I will not allow anything or anyone to destroy us. I’ve got a bad cold, and I can’t shake it, but no big thing. Honey, I’ll call you just as soon as I get to U.S. I’ll try to let you know when I’ll get to Fayetteville. I just hope that I can get a flight that goes straight through and not have any more lay-overs. The bad thing is that it will be a weekend and so tickets may be hard to come by. However, I will get them if I have to hire a plane & jump in. That might be fine anyhow! Take your pill, get your hair done, buy some clothes, take off your panties, & I’ll be there ASAP! I love you, Patsy! Jim

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IN EARLY FEBRUARY, 1970, Lewis came home. The long flights from the other side of the world had exhausted him. I was watching TV, sitting on the floor of the living room when he knocked on his own door. He wore dress greens and had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. It was bright outside, and he was backlit; but I could see his eyes, and they were dead with fatigue. I’ve dreamed of that doorway several times, seen his hulking shape with the haze behind it, and the eyes that seemed to stare back into themselves, all the way back to where he’d come from. For an instant, I thought that maybe he’d returned just to bring fear back into my life, to punish me for errors of the past twelve months. I wasn’t thinking of my mother, I wasn’t thinking of the family. He hesitates, because this, now, is the real battle: this is where the struggle really is, couched in the brief Welcome Home. The troubles and worries of the year just ended are all thrown forward without pause. You can decide to love someone, and it might be because you know they loved you first. At that moment, I understood that I loved Jim Lewis. It was a clear realization, maybe one of the first I ever had; but lacking words, I only stared back at him. Then I got up and took his duffel bag, and he entered our house.

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NOTE The selections from the original 145 letters used in this memoir are at times edited in various ways: truncated, excerpted, or combined. I have also standardized spelling and punctuation.