Grace: Last Day

Roger Blum, 1966

44

Only take heed,

and keep your soul diligently,

lest you forget the things

which your eyes have seen,

and lest they depart from your heart

all the days of your life;

make them known to your children

and your children’s children.

Deuteronomy 4:9

1990

Glancing out of my window, I saw the color detail assembling. This was my last day. My inbox was empty, my outbox was full. There was a cardboard box of with memorabilia on a chair. I stood, picked up my hat, and walked out my office door.

“I’m going to step out for a minute,” I said to my team.

I went outside and stood on the steps of the building, yet another wooden structure built for World War II and scheduled for demolition soon. The uniform of the day was BDUs. I had the sleeves rolled up and was wearing polished black boots. Above the right pocket my name was embroidered. Above the left pocket U.S. Army was embroidered and above that were cloth black jump wings and a black Combat Infantryman’s Badge. My rank, a black oak leaf, was on my right collar and my branch, the crossed rifles on the Infantry, was on the left collar. I put my soft hat on.

I stood looking out over Monterey Bay. The flag pole was at the top of a parade ground that swept down towards the waterfront. A softball game was about to begin on one edge of the field. The setting sun was to my left and shards of light glinted on the water’s surface far below me. In the distance I could hear the barking of sea lions. I heard the electronic click of the public address system being switched on up in the Headquarters building behind me and the soft static as someone, probably the duty NCO, waited for it to be exactly 1700 hours. The color detail was positioned by the flag pole across the street from my office. At the first note of the bugle I heard a sergeant on the street bark, “Colors!” at other soldiers walking by. They, and the softball players, and I, faced the flagpole and stood at parade rest.

At the end of Retreat there was a pause of perhaps five seconds, then the bugle began to play To the Colors. I snapped to attention, my body erect and still, and brought my right hand up to the brim of my hat in a salute. The color detail began to lower the flag.

By staying in the Army so long, twenty-five years, I had become more of the infantry than in the infantry. Eventually all I did was write plans and orders, make analyses, and wait in places very far away listening to radios as other men and women were put at risk. I worked in offices most of the time and had to use my imagination to visualize the men that might be out there on point somewhere else in the world.

No one knew better than I that the operations in the Crow’s Foot, over the Wagon Wheel, and others like it, were, in the end, not very important. Nevertheless, over the years I invested significance into them if only because I was there and I was a witness to them. What we, all of us, did was simply what infantrymen do, what they have always done. We went for a walk, heavily armed, and tried to kill other men while keeping from being killed, and owned, for however brief a moment, a piece of dirt.

If I traced back all my life the only morally significant choice I could find on the path that led me to those places, and from there to other bloody places, was the choice to put myself at risk. But I had done it so many times before that it didn’t seem particularly important that I had done it again. More than that, I found it very hard to tease out along the braided chain of causality just why I had made that choice in the first place.

Of course, I had not been alone out on my walk. On this day, as I watched the flag whip in the wind as it was drawn down the pole, all of my fellow infantrymen were volunteers. But it had not always been so. For much of my service most infantrymen were conscripts with ideas of their own about life and the military. In fact, many of my generation had subscribed to the idea that war, all war, did not make sense, and because war did not make sense, wars should not be fought. We were the first, and possibly the last, generation to think so. Nevertheless, once I, and those few of my generation who fought, began to dig foxholes, sweat pouring off our bodies, fear dilating the pupils of our eyes, we would agree that, for the moment, that particular idea was irrelevant.

Of this much I could be sure. We went where we went because we had been told to go. We were ensnared in a web of mutual obligations. This was both our curse and our comfort. By virtue of what I had become, I made choices not only for myself, but choices that brought death to those who were my enemy and to my own men. Just as I was being put at risk by those above me, I risked the lives of the men below me and with me. All I could do to resolve this paradox was to — not resolve it. The best I could do was simply know the paradox was there — accomplish the mission, take care of the troops.

So what would I, or they, have at the end of the day? Well, if nothing else, if we lived, we would have our stories. And that would have to be enough.

A member of the color detail stepped forward and grasped the flag at the exact moment that the last note of the bugle sounded. I dropped my salute and watched him unsnap the flag from its halyard. The rest of the detail dropped their salutes and stepped forward to fold the flag. And then they marched away.

Grace: Holding On

43

Amparo

Amparo,
sitting alone at home,
dressed in white!
(Halfway between the jasmine and the
spikenard.) 

You hear the wonderful water
gushing in the garden,
and the feeble yellow trill
of the canary. 

You see the cypresses, in the afternoon,
trembling with the birds,
while slowly embroidering
letters upon the cloth. 

Amparo,
sitting alone at home,
dressed in white!
Amparo,
how difficult to say:
I love you!

Federico Garcia Lorca

1990

Late at night the fog drifted up from the bay shrouding the twisted cypress and stunted oaks. I let the dogs out for their evening piss and stood at the door as they disappeared into the mist. This night I didn’t really care if they dug up the flower beds, which, like all those I’d planted in so many places, weren’t very successful. I had never stayed any place long enough to get a sense of the soil and the seasons. I whistled and the dogs came back with their coats dampened from the fog. They followed me through the stacks of packing boxes and sprawled on the floor beside me as I sat at my desk and polished my boots. The fog muffled the night sounds and it was so quiet I could hear the faint ticking of my grandfather’s pocket watch. It was probably 80 or 90 years old and was hanging from a brass pin on the wall. It kept pretty good time as long as I remembered to wind it. Every ten years or so I found a watchmaker to clean it. From time to time I took it down off the wall and put it in the watch pocket of one of my few pairs of trousers that had a watch pocket, or sometimes just let it ride along with keys and change in a regular pocket. It seemed to add something to my day. Tomorrow morning I will take it down and carry it with me.

On my desk I had one hell of a letter opener. It was a Randall fighting knife and more than 20 years old. Owning the knife was the result of deep study of the Randall catalog with my fellow lieutenants in Germany. We all knew that we were liable to be sent to a war and we all wanted a good knife, perhaps one of the storied Randalls. I ordered one not long before my orders to Vietnam came through and I was told that it would be a six-month wait. I called Randall while I was in a school at the Special Warfare Center and they put my knife to the head of the list. I picked it up at the same time I was settling my wife in an apartment near Orlando, Florida. The knife had a seven inch blade of very hard, hand-forged steel. The steel was not stainless. Years later as I was swimming across a river in Panama I tasted the water and discovered it was salty. I spent much of the next couple of days using the oil I carried in the butt of my rifle to wipe the blade, but on this day almost 20 years later, the pits in the steel seem to give it character. The top of the blade was sharpened from the tip back about three inches. The knife had a brass double hilt that I polished once every four or five years and it shined back up very nicely. My name was engraved into the blade. The handle was made of a synthetic material called Micarta and had finger grooves for a right-handed person. The knife had never been used for anything more challenging than opening a beer can, whacking bush to make a comfortable place to sleep, or opening a letter. Since I don’t trust the movers, the knife would go in the car with me when I left California.

Above my desk I had a delicate ink drawing. It was maybe sixty years old and was created by a young Cambodian-Chinese boy studying calligraphy in the Cholon part of Saigon. It was essentially an illustrated poem. I had never been able to get a precise translation of the poem, but the calligrapher, by the time I met him an older man living in the Delta village of Lịch Hội Thượng, told me, in French, that the poem had to do with a rock, bamboo, and grass (or maybe orchid) and how a man had to have within himself the qualities of all three. When I first saw the painting in Lịch Hội Thượng I told the artist that the poem reminded me of the children’s game of paper-rock-scissors and I showed him and my interpreter the game. They already knew the game from their own childhoods and we played it a bit, the three of us. There were two of the paintings in the man’s home. Both with the same poem on the right-hand side of the sheet of rice paper, both with quickly drawn hints of rock, grass, and bamboo on the left. In the subtle way such things were done, later in the day I found one of the paintings wrapped in newspaper in the back of my jeep. I was never able to think of an appropriate gift to make in return. I could not think of one years later. There were open boxes for all of the paintings in the house that the packers would fill up the next day. The ink painting would come down and be packed in one of them.

Out in a storage shed next to the carport was a workbench made out of inch and a half thick ash planks. The wood came from a lumber yard in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I and my new wife needed a table for our little student apartment and I thought I could make one. I misjudged the hardness of ash and, instead of hours, it was days of sanding and finishing before I could fit the table together. I attached short legs to the planks and we bought pillows to sit on. I was very proud of that table. 

The Army moved us to Fort Benning, Georgia and we took the table with us. Then we were sent to Worms, Germany, and Aschaffenburg, Germany and on to Wurzburg, Germany. We came back to the U.S. and I moved my wife to Maitland, Florida while I went to Vietnam. Then it was Fort Carson, Colorado where our daughter was born. From there we went to Fort Knox, Kentucky and El Paso, Texas. I drove my family back to Maitland, Florida and went to Vietnam again. Then it was Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We put the table into storage while we went to Quetta, Pakistan and took it back out when we arrived in Detroit, Michigan. We went back to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and then to McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida before we ended up in Monterey, California. Along the way my daughter went to schools in all those places, except for the year in Pakistan where her mother home schooled her. She finished high school in Florida and went off to college in Kansas. Her parents ripped her idea of home away from her and moved to California (and lived in two different houses there). Along the way the table stopped being used as a dining table. First I put it up on taller, much sturdier legs and it was used in various kitchens as a work table. But eventually, after being refinished a couple of times it became a workshop bench. It was now out in the storage shed, from where it will be carried to the moving van.

I once heard a story of a hiker on the Appalachian Trail who proudly showed off a toothbrush he was carrying in his pack. The hiker had drilled holes in it to save weight. Some infantrymen treated their lives like that, doing anything to save weight, keeping their personal belongings to the bare minimum needed to survive the next mission. I wasn’t able, and did not want, to do that. I had, instead, drawn into my life someone who would roam the world with me and by so doing keep me connected with the world. I had the pleasure of raising a daughter who, by her circumstances, did not see the differences in the color of a person’s skin until it was pointed out to her in her late teens. By then it simply could not make a difference. I always had a place to which I could return, not escaping from the infantry, but a place that was almost a part of the infantry, a place that had the whole world between me and the outside.

Very few of our possessions survived all those travels. On that fog-bound night we had set our table with the stainless steel flatware we were given as a wedding present. There was a book or two from the beginning (translations of Spanish poets given for a Valentine’s Day, a ragged copy of The Joy of Cooking) among the hundreds we had accumulated since. In a cedar chest that I made along the way was a wedding dress and a black suit that was hopelessly out of style, but I still thought I could wear. All the rest of our possessions were going into those boxes scattered around the house. Much more had been left behind, put on the street to be picked up, given to our daughter after her marriage, or otherwise simply disappeared. 

We sat at a dining room table bought in Kansas, on German and Danish chairs, ate from German china and drank from Austrian wineglasses. There was a Chitrali rug on the floor and an old Pathan sword hanging on the wall. Also on a wall were pieces of Champa cloth woven in Vietnam and a batik piece from Indonesia. The furnishings of the house were very like those of the other houses in our neighborhood.

The dogs stirred as I finished my boots and got up to wash the polish from my hands. My wedding ring tapped the side of the sink. It had an unusual design and was matched by the one on the left hand of the woman asleep in the room just down the hall. I undressed and slipped into the bed beside her. The dogs took their places at the foot of the bed and settled down with loud, snuffling sighs.

She had shared the pain of my departures and the joy of my returns. I cannot entirely know, except through her letters, what it had been like for her all this time. I knew that throughout we had been together and she was a part of it. And because she was with me she also became separated from the rest of the world around her. In the time that we lived in the high desert of Pakistan, when I was a student at their staff college, we found that we had more to share with the German, British, Ghanaian, Egyptian, Australian, Canadian, and Pakistani military families than we did with those back in a more conventional life. She and my daughter were more at home at a Thanksgiving dinner in the mess hall than a family gathering in North Carolina. I could only guess at the ripples of fear and dread that spread through housing areas as men packed up rucksacks and disappeared into the early morning or the different perspective of one who is on the ground watching instead of being in an airborne drop.

Here in the night, in the warmth of our bed, what mattered was that we were together, had been together, will be together. I reached out to put my arms around her to hold her and she, in turn, reached out and held me.

Grace: Crepe Myrtle

42

Gravedigger

His name is Otis Cox

and the graves he digs with a spade are acts of love.

The red clay holds like concrete

still he makes it give up a place

for rich caskets and poor

working with sweat and sand

in the springing tightness of his hair

saying that machine digging

don’t seem right if you know

the dead person.

His pauses are slow as the digging

a foot always on the shovel.

Shaking a sad and wet face

drying his sorrow with a dust orange white handkerchief

he delivers a eulogy.

Miz Ruth always gimme a dipper of water

Then among the quail calls and blackeyed susans

Otis Cox shapes with grunt and sweat and shovel

a perfect work

a mystical place

a last connection with the living hand.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1974

My grandmother didn’t stay in the house on the hill after the passing of my grandfather, but moved to a smaller place not far from her son’s, my uncle’s, house. Her new house had a deep, narrow lot that ran back to a railroad embankment and she put her garden in. For most of the next twenty years she raised her corn, peas, okra, tomatoes, limas, and pole beans. She had a peach tree that, if there wasn’t a late frost, produced fruit as sweet as any I ever tasted.

I usually spent part of my summers with her. I didn’t stay as long or as often as when I was younger, but enough to get to know the neighborhood and accumulate a stash of comic books in a closet and toys in the garage. When I got older I discovered among my grandfather’s books an edition of Homer, B.A. Botkin’s collection of American folklore, and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I  was to wonder ever after how much of these I knew from my own reading and how much had simply seeped in sitting on porch swings on summer nights.

I was in school at the University of Arkansas up in Fayetteville when Kennedy was killed. With my new wife I drove down through the Boston Mountains and watched the funeral on my grandmother’s television. 

Siting with her that day in 1963 and remembering her age, I asked her if the event was anything like her memory of the McKinley assassination. She said that she’d just been a girl and she didn’t think it made much news at the time. She didn’t really remember it. They certainly didn’t hear about it quickly since they didn’t get a newspaper. And it was before radio. Maybe the news came out by train. What she did remember was the reaction to Roosevelt’s death. But she didn’t want to talk about that either.

The stately horses that pulled the caisson and the prancing black horse with reversed empty boots in the stirrups has stayed in my memory. Much of those days has stuck in my memory. King’s eloquence of the previous summer, the open-mouthed gasp of Oswald as Jack Ruby’s bullet tore through his gut, the rumors and realities of new substances spreading to the east from the west — LSD and peyote, freakish chord changes in guitar solos, the brave white civil rights activists suddenly encountering their own draft status and finding a new and different cause.

But I never had the occasion to ask my grandmother about those disorienting changes.

When my cousin called me to tell me my grandmother had died, I was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. With my wife and daughter I traveled to Arkansas. My older brother, in the Air Force, came up from a base in Texas. My younger brother, just out of the Navy, came up from Florida. My parents came from Florida. My cousins, in Fort Smith and Van Buren, met us at the airport. 

The funeral was much smaller than the one I remembered for my grandfather. The circle did not complete itself until I stood at the grave. The rectangular hole in the ground must have been blasted and then shoveled out. My infantryman’s eye saw the shards of stone and the loose dirt hidden by a tarp. My older brother and I had decided to wear our uniforms and the sunlight flashed off badges and ribbons as we listened to a preacher, who obviously didn’t know our grandmother at all, read from the books of Job and John.

Crepe myrtle is an interesting plant. It will grow as either a bush or a tree, depending on how it is pruned when young. It is an exotic, originally found only in Asia. These days it is common throughout the South. It begins to bloom near Easter time in Florida, but waits almost until mid-July in Arkansas before its red or white blossoms break out. Later in the year, each year, it will shed a layer of bark and will look, for several weeks, a lot like the mottled camouflage of an infantryman’s field uniform. In my youth my grandmother’s street was lined with them.

Next to the grave was a crepe myrtle tree. Probably the same one the bee had been visiting when my grandfather was buried. Now it was considerably larger and spread irregular shadows over the grave and the mourners. It was past blossoming time and the bark was beginning to slough away in loose strips that hung from the trunk. 

It was not part of the ritual for us to watch the casket into the grave. Instead the words were said, a benediction was pronounced, and we all walked away back to our cars. The empty rectangular hole was behind us, up under the crepe myrtle, waiting for the casket to be lowered.