Grace: Homecoming

40

Si monumentum requiris circumspice

(If you wish to see his monument, look about you) 

It signifies that those who desire to behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And, Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they call damns, nor the little fruit-trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is like the desert here — or my hand — or my heart. Empty, Sahib — all empty!

Rudyard Kipling, A Sahib’s War

1973

At the end of my second tour I left Sóc Trăng and traveled to the out-processing center outside Saigon. On the morning of January 31, 1973 I was lying on a steel-framed cot under an olive green mosquito net. There were a couple hundred other men like me staying in one-story buildings inside the fenced compound. Giving up on trying to sleep, I grabbed my shaving kit, slipped on my flip-flops and walked to the latrine to shave and shower and get dressed for my trip back to The World.

Through sheer happenstance, or a very odd kharma, my DEROS — date of reassignment from overseas, 365 days from the moment I’d been ordered to be in country — was also the official date of the cease fire agreed to by the United States, the Republic of South Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. I felt oddly detached from this coincidence of history, except that it did have some small effect on me: As I’d left my team I had had no one to whom I could transfer my duties. I was just leaving, in fact, I was one of the last to leave.

Back from the latrine, I stuffed my shaving kit into the top of my duffle bag that was filled with bits and pieces of the preceding year. On the floor beside my bunk were the shoes that only a few days earlier had been covered with mildew. Now they had a high polish thanks to one of the Vietnamese hooch maids back in Sóc Trăng that would soon be out of a job. A cotton khaki uniform was hanging from the mosquito bar, freshly laundered and stiffly starched. Light glinted from the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and polished jump wings pinned to the shirt. All around me men like myself were finishing their packing or sitting on their cots, stunned to numbness by the reality that they were going home, back to The World. They did not reflect on why they were going home.

I felt uneasy about what I would not be putting on that morning, by what I was not wearing. I would feel that uneasiness for weeks, months. There was no .45 and knife to strap to my belt. The .45 had been turned in and the knife was deep inside the duffel bag. I’d thrown away most of my jungle fatigues and all except one pair of my jungle boots. Most of the green underwear was also gone. 

I put on a clean white t-shirt and white boxer shorts, put on my new sunglasses and strolled outdoors still wearing my shower shoes to smoke a cigarette. It felt odd to stand in the sun without either a helmet or my jungle hat on my head. The heat beat down on packed earth, but I didn’t notice it. My hands were free. I had no M-16 to carry or hang from my shoulder. My ears — trained to filter messages from the whispering hiss of radios, alert to the metallic click of a rifle bolt, the snap of a branch breaking, the slithering snick of a booby trap, the distant whop whop whop of helicopters — could make no sense of the normality of flight announcements, rock and roll radio, howling jet engines.

I went back inside and put on my uniform. It would be very rumpled before this day was done. In a pile on my cot was a pile of crumpled paper money, Military Payment Certificates, fake dollars in lurid colors, and Vietnamese đong. They had no meaning for me. They were currencies for an economy that no longer existed, except in my mind.

As an infantryman, in this place I could not stand. Whatever small victories I and the men I’d worked with had won; whatever small hamlet I had once walked through like a king, safe and secure; whatever we had earned was now spent and was as worthless as these torn and frayed scraps of paper. I had filled up my foxhole and moved on. And now I was without even my team. These men around me, even though they were in the same uniform, were not my brothers. They were just waiting for the ride home.

The loudspeaker announced my flight. I hoisted my duffel bag and left.

Victory in battle ultimately comes down to a small group of men, usually an infantry squad, possessing a place on the earth. What is extraordinary is how men responsible for the conduct of war, who once may have known this truth, seem to lose sight of it. At the end of December 1944, little squads of men owned the dirt in the Ardennes. When the truce was declared in Korea, each point in the irregular line across the peninsula was owned by infantry squads. After its great sweep across southern Iraq in 1991, the tanks of VII Corps idled their engines. The Bradley fighting vehicles drew up alongside, dropped their ramps, and infantry squads rushed out. Those men stood on the ground not far from the banks of the Euphrates and declared by their presence that they owned the land. In every case they knew, or would come to know, that they would eventually leave. But they could all, each of them, remember that moment and know that they had done their jobs, accomplished the mission. Almost twenty years later it would happen again.

Hours and hours and hours later I stepped out of the hatch of the chartered jet airliner and was stunned by the bright California sunlight. Near the bottom of the metal stairs was a cluster of television cameras recording this first flight of soldiers coming home after the cease fire. My ears cleared from the depressurization and the reporters’ shouted questions seemed to bounce off the concrete and slap me in the face. Behind the chain link fence at the terminal were men and women, boys and girls, waving signs scrawled with obscenities and symbols. I stumbled slightly on the last step down to the concrete and it disoriented me. My head went skyward and I momentarily felt as if I had just hit the ground and was looking for fellow paratroopers. I felt a shivering fear that I must have jumped out all alone. I was on the ground and I could not see my squad, my platoon, or my company. My men were not gathering about me. We were not coming together on the ground to protect each other. I turned and turned and looked for them, but they were not there. 

I pushed past the reporters and went into the terminal where I found my duffel bag and got a shuttle to San Francisco International. As I had been advised, the first thing I did at the airport was find a men’s room and change out of my uniform into civilian clothes. 

I have never quite forgiven them, my country, even elements of my Army, for that day. I wondered later when I finally visited the memorial if anyone understood that it was, at least for me, anger and resentment that motivated me to donate my money and effort to its creation. I wanted the memorial to tell those television crews and demonstrators, and those bastards who’d called my wife in the middle of the night while I was gone, and the sonofabitch who’d bragged to her about how much money he was making on the war as she flew to meet me in Hawaii in the middle of one of my tours, to go to Hell — we will remember our comrades.

At that moment, however, it was more important that I was going home. I flew to my family and took them with me back to the infantry.