THE DREAM RETURNED. HE shifted. Josh lay against his legs. There was mud. Mud everywhere—slick, yet sticky. Above, in rain-sky, came two double-rotored Chinooks, huge cargo helicopters. But not normal Chinooks. The ships’ bodies were vertical, not horizontal, and the overlapping rotors were one on each end making the machine look like a giant spool. One passed over. He hunkered down, hugged the mud, waiting in ambush to look up the trail, the road, across to the stone wall. The second chopper passed. The rotor wash ripped the brush, whipped up the debris of previously exploded trees. He covered his head. In the wake of the second passing was a single disk of whirling light, a nebula spinning low toward the ground, searching. It found him. Lifted him. Exposed him. Thud! Hit! It began carrying him away. His face contorted. He tried to scream but words choked in his throat. The forces on his body were tremendous, racking him, twisting him, pulling him apart. He tensed, brought his knees to his chest, grasped his arms over his legs. He brought all his energy to bear on his cry. Still it came garbled. “Pleeeazzz ...” He screamed, sounding in his own ears as if he were yelling into a huge fan. “Pleeeazzz. Help us.”
Then cool. The small room. The masked people. “Next!” The voice urgent. “Next. No. Not him.” Pleeeazzz. The smell of fresh blood, of freshly lacerated entrails. There, on the slab below him, the body, brains flowing out. I’m ... I’m ... I’m still alive. I’m alive ... Oh, damn you ... The body convulsed as the masked figure probed the brain. Back-arch spasm. Tears. Pleeeazzz “Not him! Damn you.” pleeazz “Put him ...” don’t “in the corner and ...” leave “let him ...” me “... cool.”
They had not had sex in the eight days since Jimmy’s visit. Red passed off Bobby’s somber moods to her leaving, to her inattentiveness toward him as she bustled around preparing for the move. Then it occurred to her that it was over, that he’d made up his mind to remain on the farm but hadn’t the courage to tell her. He hadn’t told her of Jimmy’s visit but she’d heard through a friend of Jimmy’s sister, Annalisa, that they—her two men—had met and had agreed upon the swap. The SWAP! She did not mention it to him but it angered her that “her two men” felt they could trade her as if she were a baseball mitt or whatever men traded when they traded. Still she wanted him, wanted him to come to California, to help her, be with her.
They climbed the back trail, crossed the crags, meandered past the little shack, then through the woods over the ridge and into the sugarbush. “I’m going to miss our walks,” Red said. Bobby only grunted, still she felt pleased she’d said it. Under her jacket, under her wool shirt, she wore a silk camisole and below her corduroy pants were her laciest panties. The lingerie felt smooth and comfortable and it made her feel confident—sex or no sex—just to have it on. “I’m going to miss the smell of this place as much as the beauty.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Me too. But we’ll come back to visit my grandfather.”
“He’ll be all right, won’t he?”
“Yeah. He’s lived here, you know, without anybody.”
“I’ll miss him, too,” Red said. She turned and looked into Bobby’s eyes expecting to see hardness, withdrawnness, but instead saw questioning, hurt, warmth.
“There’s a place I haven’t shown you before,” he said. “It’s my private place where no one goes but I’d like to show it to you.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. That’s why I wanted to leave Josh in your car. He can’t make the climb. But—” Bobby laughed, “maybe you can.”
“I bet I can,” Red said surely.
“Come on, then.” Bobby led Red to the far edge of the sugarbush, through a narrow stand of mixed scrub pines, ash and beech, over thirty feet of bare rock, to the cliff edge of the gap. “Be careful.”
“Oh! This is pretty! I didn’t know ...”
“Ssshh.” He put his finger to his lips. His eyes lit with excitement. “We don’t talk at the gap.” Before them was a three-story-deep chasm eighty to one hundred feet wide. The sides were vertical as if God had descended with a giant dado blade that he’d run semicircularly through the Endless Mountains for a mile, isolating one island of old forest.
“Oh, Bobby,” Red whispered, “it’s beautiful.”
“It’s only the start. Wait till we get there.” He indicated the far side.
“How?”
“Follow me.” He sat, dropped his feet over the cliff edge.
“Ah ...” Red backed a few steps away. It flashed through her mind that this was a lover’s leap, that Bobby would grasp her legs and jump.
“It’s like a ladder. I found it when I was eight.”
“Found what?” She approached cautiously.
“It’s the only way down without ropes. I think the Lenape must have carved it hundreds of years ago.” Bob cleaned several handhold crevices on the upper lip, then rolled and slipped his waist over the edge until his toes found the first indentation.
“I’m not going down there.” The words flew from Red’s mouth.
“It’s easy. I just told you I did it when I was eight. It’s a ladder.”
“I don’t like ladders.”
“I’ll be under you. I’ll put your feet in the holes.”
“Oh God!”
“C’mon. I want you to see the Indian ring.”
“You mean we’ve got to go up ...”
“I found the ladder there, too. Come on. It’s safer than driving across country.”
Slowly they descended the cliff, Bobby guiding Red’s feet. The floor of the gap was rock ledge. Scattered trees were trying to survive in debris pockets of humus and till. In spots, water was trapped in stagnant puddles that supported toads, newts, and insects. They crossed quickly then climbed the vertical wall of the far side and entered the last of the virgin eastern hemlock forest. In less than one hundred yards they hit the old Lenape trail, an eighteen-inch-wide track worn a foot deep into the forest floor by generations of moccasined travelers, a small section still well preserved after 500 years, even after more than a century of abuse to the surrounding land. In his youth Bob had shown his grandfather the ladders and the two had silently walked the trail on dozens of Sunday mornings. It had always struck awe into him, the stillness, the trees towering to 150 feet. It still did. But now, Red, exhilarated by the climbs, shifted to high-chatter mode.
“Ssshh,” Bobby hissed.
“But this is amazing. Amazing. I’m going to really miss this. I’m still not sure if I should drive or if I should sell my Vee-doub and fly. What do you think?”
“Red, we’re in a cathedral. You’ve got to keep your voice down.”
“But Bobby, this is important. We keep acting like I’m not going. I’m going in eight days! I love this place. Really! But we’ve got to talk. I ... you’ve ... we ...” She chattered nonstop as they hiked. He tuned her out. The trail twisted, turned, stayed almost perfectly level as it meandered between hills and gorges. At one point they passed the small spur that led to the Indian fire ring. Finally they circled out toward the back of the north ridge behind the upper meadow. There the trail, the hemlocks, stopped. Again there was the gap, but here not so deep, not so steep. The virgin forest on the other side had been cut on the last logging day some fifty years earlier.
They picked up a new path just north of the ridge. Bobby led the still-gabbing Red down the east arm, across the ridge toward the small family cemetery. “If you come out,” Red was saying, “maybe you could drive the Vee-doub for me and I could fly. That’d work for us both.”
Bob was disgusted. He had been looking for a cleansing ritual, a near-religious experience like he’d had the first time he found the Indian trail, a communion with the past and with the land that he and Red could share. But the chattering! He was offended. He had taken her to his most sacred site and she’d treated it like McDonald’s. Again he was quiet, sullen, unresponsive. Red scampered to keep up, yakked to fill the space of his silence. Quietly Bobby parted the orderly pine break and walked into the cemetery. His grandfather was there, kneeling before his grandmother’s stone, planting flowers. He looked up, smiled an awkward smile, looked back down, wiped his eyes. Again he looked up, this time with a real smile.
“Well,” he said to Bobby, “are you gonna make that little lady drive that little car out or not? She must a asked you a dozen times. Answer her, won’t ya?”
“I’m ... I haven’t yet decided if I’m going anyplace, Granpa.” He turned. Red was behind, silent. “You drive it out, okay? Or sell it. Get something better.”
Late that night they made frantic love, and for the first time in weeks, as Bobby held her, as he studied her face, her eyes, he felt in love with Bea Hollands. Over the next week they made love every night, desperate, clinging love, despite all his earlier trepidations. Then on the 31st, the eve of Red’s departure, Bobby did something he had not anticipated. For three years he’d worn a silver Jumping Mary medallion, a portrait of the Virgin Mary with a parachute behind her, on a string about his neck. He was not that religious but he’d gotten the medal the day he’d earned his jump wings and had seldom removed it. He’d intended giving it to Stacy. Then, after the first time with Red, he’d decided to give it to her, but he’d held out, intending the gift for a special occasion. He had intended giving it to her at dinner earlier that evening but had decided to wait until they were in bed. After loving he decided to wait until just before she left. And when she left he decided against giving it away at all.
Turmoil. Constant, unrelenting turmoil. The morning Red left, Bobby and Josh walked the trail around the pond. While holding Josh close, Bobby cried. Whether he cried for Red or for himself he did not know, or if it was because one more person had left his life. He felt miserable at the crags, nauseated at the old shack, despondent in the high meadow. By the time he’d worked his way to the big barn he was cried out. By evening he was relieved. Within a day he was happy, within two, elated to be free, to have a thousand options open.
On the evening of the third of November 1969 he sat down before the television set in the living room of the old farmhouse and he and Grandpa watched Richard Nixon deliver to the American people his first major policy speech on Viet Nam. In the speech the president ruled out a quick withdrawal; pledged eventual withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops; emphasized Viet Namization; and stated that the U.S. would respond with strong measures if Hanoi increased battlefield activity.
“What do you think of that?” Pewel Wapinski asked his grandson at the network break.
“I don’t know,” Bobby said.
“Well, ha! I don’t know either but then I never been there.”
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve never been there, either. Like he’s talking about a different place than the place I knew. Like they all are.”
“You still angry over that ‘not take responsibility’ thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounded pretty responsible to me tonight.”
“Sounded good. But will he follow through? Or next time the NVA attack in force and some battalion stops em, is he going to say, ‘Hey, that’s not my responsibility’?”
“Eh? Let’s see what these commentators have to say.” Again they turned their attention to the television. The lead-in to the commentary was followed by another set of commercials, then a recapitulation of a story from earlier in the day about the South Viet Namese treatment of captured enemy soldiers—including the stabbing of a POW.
“Geez!” Bobby snapped.
The comments were mixed. Senators J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Mike Mansfield of Montana were irate. They accused Nixon of adopting the policies of the Johnson Administration and said they would sponsor Senate hearings “to educate” the American people “to the real facts of the war.” Only a brief mention was made of the NVA and VC shelling of forty-five bases and towns in South Viet Nam and their launching of a series of attacks on outposts along the Cambodian border.
“I can’t watch this.” Bobby stood. “Let’s see what the papers say tomorrow. They tend to make more sense.”
“Yep. Course this is easier,” Grandpa said.
“Yep,” Bobby echoed him. “Course, like you taught me, the easiest way usually isn’t the right way.”
“Yep,” Grandpa said. He rose and turned the set off. “Glad you was listening.”
On the eighth, the day Red arrived in California, Bobby turned to the recent newspapers he’d stacked but hadn’t read. The stories irritated him. Gallup polls showed 77 percent of those who had heard Nixon’s speech approved of his planned de-escalation. Only 6 percent were opposed. President Thieu of South Viet Nam hailed the speech as important, and Nixon, clutching a stack of telegrams, claimed the support of the Great Silent Majority. But Fulbright and Mansfield, along with a growing number of senators and representatives, denounced the president’s plan—Fulbright stating that Mr. Nixon has “taken full as his own the Johnson war, based on [the] fundamental error” that the war was being fought against an international communist conspiracy. A coalition of antiwar groups was planning a massive march on Washington for the fifteenth.
Wapinski could feel the divisiveness, the polarization of the anti- and pro-war elements digging in for battle, but he could not cope with the feeling. Though he read the lines he did not fully absorb the details or the implications. Nor did he project between the lines using information he possessed as an ex-infantry captain.
On the eleventh, a letter:
My dearest Bob,
There was no doubt in my mind that I would miss you but I didn’t realize just how much. As soon as I find someplace to settle I’m going to start the greatest public relations campaign San Martin has ever seen in hopes of luring you away from your grandfather and High Meadow and to me.
I’m rooming with another girl from work and her boyfriend and his sister. You won’t believe how much they get for rent here. Timmy jokes that I’ve joined his harem and that he needed a redhead. Where I work the people are nice too, even if the job isn’t exciting. But I think there is great room for promotion and growth. The man I work for is a real businessman and he runs a tight ship. I’m learning a lot and actually used my shorthand for the first time since high school. I miss Mill Creek Falls sometimes. There’s 50 times the construction going on here. Things are hopping all around. Why don’t you come, even if it’s just for a visit.
Please come. It’s raining now. They say this is the rainy season, but it’s not as bad as winter back there. If you’ll come and help me get out of these doldrums I’ll let you play with me. Oh, I don’t believe I wrote it like that. I think I’m a little homesick but mostly I miss you.
If this job doesn’t pick up, I might look for another one. I told Suzie that I was getting $10,000 to start and she said, “How come you started at less than everybody else?” Did I ever tell you it excites me when a guy talks dirty?
Love you a whole bunch,
Red
For several days Bob Wapinski savored the letter. It tickled him every time he read her sexual references. He continued rising early, watching the sunrise, walking the woods with Josh. The house was in presentable shape. There were major repairs needed, new roof, new furnace, updated wiring and plumbing. The long drive needed grading. The high meadow could be turned, planted with winter wheat. But there were problems with all those projects. Roof, furnace, wiring, plumbing, all were adequate, and to upgrade them was to make a commitment. Grandpa spent most of his time in the barn office, so it mattered little to him what happened to the house. If his grandfather had asked, Bob would immediately have set to task but the only thing the old man requested was that Bob split and stack firewood for the small potbellied stove in the barn office. Bob took the tractor and wagon up the overgrown road through the high meadow to the sugarbush, pruned the trees and cleared the deadfall. In three days he had three cords worth of branches, logs and trunks stacked near the barn, all needing to be reduced to a foot long and no more than four inches in diameter. All the while he thought about Red and her letter. At night he worked on his car, finally pulling the engine, dismantling the bottom end to assess the damage, disassembling the axles and drive train.
Suddenly a place called My Lai was in the news. First in a few newspapers, then on the TV evening reports. Policy was no longer debated, no longer newsworthy, only atrocities.
Red wrote again.
Bob, you’re such an idealist. I love that in you. This is a great place for an idealist. I’ve been exploring the hill right behind the house. I can hardly believe I’m so winded. My goal is to get my legs back in shape before you get here. I hope that leaves me only a few weeks.
The hills are beautiful. I’ve already found five places for picnics and two of them are so secluded we could do anything. Even in broad daylight! I can hardly wait for you to get here. I hope I can live up to your ideal. And I hope you get here before the rains really start.
The job market here is really good. I know you’ll be able to get a job. With your background there’s no telling how much money you could make. It’ll be so rewarding being with you again.
Suzie and Tim are thinking of moving to LA. We could keep this house but it’s a wreck. The rent’s only $325 and it has a large yard and three bedrooms. Suzie wants to leave her cats. I could say I’d take the house and then we could have Josh come and frighten the cats away. If Josh comes it’ll either cost more or take longer to find a nice place. I miss you so much I think about you touching me all the time.
Red
Soon, he thought. He thought about her legs, about her thighs, about her delicate feet. He thought about “Tim” who he did not know, about “Tim’s Harem,” about her meeting others at work. And Bobby asked himself, what if she finds someone else? If I do go ... I can’t offer her much ... Do I have the right to ask her to wait? Could I really leave Granpa? In his room he wrote a letter.
To the Loveliest Red in the World,
I have been keeping quite busy since your departure, trying to keep from reminiscing. Keeping busy helps little. Images of pretty curls getting tangled in the car door handle are driving me crazy. Images of green eyes, images of firm thighs.
I’m a bit surprised. This ol’ head feels more emptiness than it knew it could. Your leaving never really was realized until the moment you left. I’ve reread your letters dozens of times. Please keep writing.
I’m goina say it. I feel terrible. I can hardly believe how hard it hit me when I saw you drive off. I watched the VW all the way down the drive and out as far as it was visible. I never realized how much you have come to mean to me. I’ve discovered that I think you are the most delightful, prettiest and wonderful person I’ve ever met. That is I’m falling in love with you more and more each day.
You don’t have to sell me on California. I’m sold on you. If you truly want me to come out, say so. I’ll be there. I want you back. Not back here, just back with me. You’ve been gone for twenty days. That’s a terrible long time. I don’t know what to say. I think I should move out there and I think we should get married.
All My Love,
Bob
Robert Wapinski stared at the page before him. He meant it. He meant it as he was writing it but he wasn’t so sure he meant it on rereading it. Still he sealed it, and the next morning he drove to town and mailed it at the post office.
Several days passed. Brian called, told Bobby that Cheryl had miscarried. Bobby didn’t know what to think. The news about My Lai, about a guy named William Calley and a newsman named Seymour Hersh, had become an uproar. The Cleveland Plain Dealer published graphic photos of the April 1968 massacre. The Army announced Calley would be tried at general court-martial for the premeditated murder of 109 Viet Namese civilians. At first ex-Captain Robert Wapinski was defensive, explaining to his grandfather that a unit in the lowlands might have gone berserk in a village if they had been hitting booby traps and ambushes, and had been losing soldiers to snipers—AND if they found evidence that the villagers were participants.
“You watch a buddy get killed, you get angry,” Bobby said. “You watch a lot of them get wounded or wasted, you want revenge. That’s probably what happened. A good commander, though, would of reeled in his men. He’d have controlled it.”
“Good men,” Grandpa had agreed, “don’t always exhibit good judgment.”
But soon—based solely on TV news, for he was still clipping, saving but not reading the newspaper—Bobby came to think they should convict Calley and execute him, if the charges had any substantiation.
That day marked the beginning and the end, the resolution and the commencement. It marked the end of Wapinski’s questioning, the end of investigation, the end of his concern over Viet Nam, for five years, years in which other concerns would be paramount.
The barn office was silent except for an occasional muffled crackle from the old potbellied stove. The quietness invaded Wapinski, oozed into his mind, seeped into his heart. For an hour he read his clippings, ordered them, made a few notes, a few underlines. If his ire rose over the story of a university professor’s home being bombed because he did not teach the left’s perspective on the war, it quickly diffused as he plodded on, pushed ever deeper into not only what the news said, but what it was. After an hour he began jotting notes about his own experiences and about himself.
I grew up on Grandpa’s farm—until I was 8—and later spent many summers and weekends there. I fished, hunted, trapped, and spent many days by myself in the woods. I would have been a great point man—I think I was a passable company commander.
He stopped to think, think back to himself at Go Dau Ha, at Cu Chi, at Trung Lap, to picture himself at Quang Tri, at Evans and Eagle and on various firebases, in various NDPs. It surprised him, in his calm, that he could actually see himself as if he were someone else, see himself talking to Quay, to Thompson, to Billings, to any of a score of his troops. He could see the vegetation, taste the water from the mountain streams, hear and fear the crinkle of dry leaves as he stepped cautiously along a trail in the defoliated regions. He could not see the firefights. He could not hear the cracking of small arms or the booming of artillery. He could imagine them, force them, but he could not, at will, recreate them as if they were happening in the here and now, as they sometimes happened in his dreams. That did not bother him.
For another hour Bob Wapinski chronologically organized his military records, wrote brief descriptions of various places he’d been, various actions he’d seen. Then he came to May 1969, Hill 937, Dong Ap Bia, Hamburger. Still he maintained his calm but it now was more difficult. He had not written to Blackwell and that unfinished task ate at him.
NVA from across the border, in Laos, registering their rocket launchers and guns—122s, 130s, and heavy mortars—in anticipation of our move into the A Shau. When our troops first air-assaulted to the valley the NVA were ready, waiting, with reinforcements, open supply lines and on-call supporting fire. How did they know, before we launched even our first helicopter, where we were headed? What would they have done if we had not stumbled across 937? Would they have attacked us in force or only have sniped at us? Mortared our NDPs but not have engaged us fully? Waited until we’d reported “The A Shau has been cleared,” let us leave, and then carry the war forward into the populated lowlands—attacking our bases, Viet Namese towns and cities on their own schedule? By Day 2 our units were catching sporadic mortar fire. By 3, 300 rounds of mortar and rockets! By the time I arrived I knew we’d be hit again. It was only a question of when. We monitored radio traffic of all the allied companies—listened to some being mauled. Still, as good as the NVA were, with the advantage of being dug in, of being nearer to their supply lines and sanctuaries, of having on-call artillery and numerical advantages, AND with weather and terrain on their side—we did finally overrun them—sheer stubborn persistence called Airborne Spirit by some, stupidity by others. How else could the battle have been fought? Generate alternatives. Was it worth it?
Wapinski wrote on, listed the corps, division, brigade and battalion commanders, their radio call signs and even frequencies if he recalled them, summoning far more detail than he realized he’d retained. He listed every company, every commander he could recall, the name or nickname of every troop he could remember under his own brief stint as leader of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry, 3d Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile). Then he stopped. There were images of Dong Ap Bia he was not certain he wished to explore. If Blackwell was Bro Black of the Sugar Shack, Wapinski could indeed send him a positive response. But was he? It then occurred to Wapinski that there were no slackers at Dong Ap Bia. Perhaps there were men who had been afraid. Fear was an appropriate reaction. Half the company was either wounded or killed. Images, feelings, physical sensations flooded back, deluged his mind—lost there, left on the hill when they withdrew under intense enemy kill-zone fire. Were they KIA, MIA, or POW? On the next assault they could not find even a trace—not a piece of uniform, not a traumatically amputated limb.
Wapinski wrote to Blackwell, wrote to all levels of command, to the adjutant’s office. He had nothing but praise for every soldier who’d served in the A Shau. He suggested the defense lawyer obtain affidavits from Thompson, from Quay Le, from Billy Smith and Johnson and Edwards, the medic who treated Blackwell in the field. If Tyrone Blackwell refused to return to the field, Wapinski wrote, it was likely because of rational and justifiable fear based on self-preservation—which the man had earned. Before he finished the last letter he realized his eyes were clouding; he was choking. There was before him a loaded chopper, the smell stuck in his nose, a chopper full of dead Americans.
He breathed heavily, ran the back of his wrist across his cheeks. Could we have lured them into ambushes in the valley? Could we have cordoned off 937? Waited them out? Bombed them out? He did not answer the questions but instead flipped to a news story of accusations made by Senator Ted Kennedy. His concentration faltered. He skimmed the article, whispered with little conviction, “He doesn’t understand. He just doesn’t fuckin understand.”
More hours passed. Bob Wapinski read the file his grandfather had assembled on the 101st. Then he read the stories his grandfather had collected for his father from ’42 to ’45. As he read, it again hit him that news was something more than what it reported—something much more. And that answering the question, What is today’s news? with a recap of the stories was like answering the question, What is God? by saying the Our Father.
Bobby Wapinski opened the manila envelope, opened the first letter. There was no date of writing, but on the envelope, Miriam, in her efficient manner, had noted “Received: 11 Oct. ’42.” The penmanship—pencilmanship—was crude. Bobby had not recognized that in 1959 when he’d last read those pages. Nor had he recognized how simply the letters were written, as if his father were a young boy who’d grown up poor on a farm in the mountainous outback of the Alleghenys. Letter after letter repeated the same phrases, made the same grammatical and spelling errors. Bobby almost began correcting them. Letter after letter asked about Brian, asked for a photograph of their baby and a photo of mother and child. There were no mentions of having received one. And all the letters from the Pacific ended with “I pray for you. Pray for me. I’m a melancholy baby until we meet again.”
Bob Wapinski paused. Ah Pa, he thought. Pa! Pa! Why? He closed his eyes. In his hands he still held the new letters, letters written after Paul Wapinski abandoned his family, abandoned his son Robert who so wished he’d not. Pa! he thought again. His face sagged. Pa, I wanted to come home to you. You know that? Sometimes I thought, sometimes over there I thought maybe when I came home, you know, maybe I could bring you home, too. I would have told you all about it. You could have held me. Once you did. I know you once did. With you Pa ... why do I have to think patient inquiry? Obligations? Responsibilities? I wanted you to be here ... to hold me ... to tell me it ... it was ... What drives this thing, ME? What steers it? I—I feel like a damn raft on some damn river. Pa, we could have come home together!
January 14, 1948
Dear Miriam,
Cleveland is a big city. Bigger then I like. I got a factory job. The pay isn’t much but I don’t need much. I’m sending you everything I can. Don’t try to get to me. I got things to work out and I can’t do it with you harpin on me. I guess I’m not enough man for you and you deserve more then me. Buy Brian a baseball glove and some crackerjacks. There’s extra money here for it. And something for the baby. I pray for you.
Paul
Bobby stared at the letter. Again he’d expected more. How badly he wanted his father to be more, wanted to see in those letters the man his grandfather described. The second and third letters were similar, each mentioning money sent, requesting she spend some on the boys. The fourth acknowledged Joanne’s birth. The fifth was postmarked St. Louis, December 1952. It too mentioned money sent, indicating Paul Wapinski had been mailing cash to his wife every month for four years, that there was trouble at work and he’d been laid off. Finally there was only one more; the postmark was but half-printed, the date barely legible. Bobby deciphered 53 and Texas. Miriam had not receipted it.
Dear Miriam.
I’m working again. The boys here drink a lot. They are good friends. Everyone of them went through the same stuff I did and I finally have found a place where I can talk and not be crazy. Tell Pop and Mom where I am. I’ll get a letter to them too. I’m really sorry that circumstances have forced this on us. I pray it would be different. Tell Brian to help his brother and sister more. Sometimes I recall that littlest guy and I even miss him spitting up on me. I’m not a very good man for what I put you through. I know that. I’m makin a lot of money right now with the oil coming in and I’ll be able to send you a lot.
The letter stopped in the middle of the second sheet. It was unsigned. In the envelope there was a simple blank card scribed by a different hand. It said: “We’re sorry about Paul. He was a fine, fine friend.” There were four signatures: Tom. Jack. Omeed. Jimmy.
Bobby Wapinski was stunned, stunned beyond shaking, beyond anger, beyond belief. Why had no one shown him this letter? Had they contacted this Tom, this Jack, Omeed, Jimmy? What did his ma, his grandfather, know that they hadn’t told him? Had Miriam written back? “Has he,” he’d written in one letter, “settled down for you?” He knew. He knew I needed him. She must have written. What else had they known for sixteen years? Since he was seven! He felt tears well to his eyes but they did not fall. He felt injustice, anger—anger, anger—but it would not focus and he felt helpless, empty. He pushed the letter out of reach, stared at the desk. He wanted to get up, run to the house, shake the letter, the card, in his grandfather’s face. But he was spent, exhausted, numb. He lay his head on the desk, looked at the letter, the envelope, a foreshortened plane with illegible pencil smears. It was late afternoon. Bobby Wapinski fell to sleep; fell not asleep, but into a semiconsciousness similar to the half sleeps he’d had for nearly a year in Asia, an infantryman’s sleep.
Now they are shooting. They had come from the mountain, a human wave. Behind them, unseen, there is the vibration, the trembling, the roar of tracks, tanks, self-propelled howitzers, unseen. He is low, crawling, positioning himself. The crack of small arms comes from the far side, from the lead element of his ambush, comes premature setting off a torrent of return fire that isolates the lead element from the long base. The enemy spreads out, continues advancing. The mud surface is slick. He slips as he crawls forward into the midst of his men. The mud is thick, deep, grabbing, sucking him down. He strains to move forward but is mired. Overhead a new roar, a beating mixing with the downpour, and now mortar explosions mixing with thunder and the trembling ooze of the earth. Bam. Thud. He is hit. He doesn’t feel it. He crawls on. They advance. Behind him men move up, before him they fall back. All know the lead is isolated, lost, out of contact. Still the enemy advances. Now they return fire. Friend, foe, locked in face-to-face slugfest. Across the trail, behind a hummock, his unit retreats. BamThudHitAgainPain. Now they are sliding away. He is sliding away from himself left in the mud, left on the hillside. “I pray for you. Pray for me.” Sliding away. BamThudBamThudBamThud. There is no pain, only the smell of blood and shit and blood and flesh and blood. There is no sight except the last view of himself in the mud as he, they, slide back, last glimpse of himself, on the mud floor eating mud, trying to hide, to eat mud so quietly. Then there is the room, the masks, the hustle bustle, “NEXT.” Get up! He lies there. Get up! It is not a busy day after all. There are nurses leaving, going to the club, corpsmen chatting softly, betting on a ballgame, smoking. They’ve decided not to treat him because they are tired. It has become habit because of the worst days of mass casualties, the busy days, to let the goners go—but today is a slow day—s l o w d a y. He can see it. See into their minds, see how tired they are, see how they think about him, how they see his glassy eyes, how they don’t think of him. “Covered with mud! Dirty. Like a pig. Sounds like a pig. When you learn to eat like a human being we’ll—Jesus! I can’t stand it anymore! Put him in the corner to cool ... in the corner to cool, inthecornertocool.”
Wapinski woke. His head snapped up. How much had been a dream, how much did he control, he did not know. “Fuck it!” he said aloud. “Fuck em all! Drive on!”
Winter arrived at High Meadow in mid-December. The temperature dropped thirty degrees on the night of the 10th and on the morning of the 11th it barely warmed at all. That night the temperature dropped to single digits. On the 13th a low front swept in and precipitation fell as frigid rain, then froze into a layer of ice. By noon the ice was half an inch thick.
It was transition time. At the back of Bobby’s mind were Viet Nam, his father’s letters, Red. Viet Nam, he thought, had become a hook to his past, a momentary identity penetrating into some deep layer of self-definition.
Grandpa had heated up a pan of chicken broth and the two of them sat, sipping the steaming broth. “Do you know what you asked me once when you were a little boy?” Grandpa asked Bob.
“Unt-uh,” Bob intoned.
“You once asked me if being truthful meant not telling a lie even when Pinocchio would tell a lie?”
“How old was I when I said that?”
“I don’t know. Five. Maybe six. Do you know what I told you?”
“No. I don’t remember.”
“I don’t remember either.” Grandpa laughed and Bob laughed too and Josh jumped up and slapped both his front paws on the table and seemed to want to laugh with them.
“G’down.” Bob pushed him, still laughing.
“I mighta said something like this,” Grandpa said. “I really can’t remember. But I mighta said, being truthful means doing what your heart tells you is right. That’s about the way one talks to a five-year-old, isn’t it?”
“What are you trying to tell me, Granpa?”
“I’m saying, don’t get hooked on values that aren’t valuable to you.”
“Um-hmm. You taught me that way back.”
“You like the farm, don’t you?”
“Of course. It’s always been my favorite place.”
“Mine too. But you aren’t much of a farmer.”
“Nope. I guess not. I, ah ...”
“Doesn’t make much difference. None of the farms around here produce enough income to keep a family anyway.”
“The Lutz farm makes money.”
“Adolph’d make money if his place was solid rock,” Pewel Wapinski said. “What I’m saying is, I don’t know if you’re being truthful with yourself. You’ve got that gal out in California and you’re over here. You could have a job in town, work up here. You could work the farm. You could run a business from up here like what’s his name two places beyond Adolph’s does. But Bob, I don’t want you attaching your life to this place if it’s not valuable to you.”
Bob Wapinski leaned his forearms on the table, grasped the soup bowl with both hands. “Why didn’t you tell me about my father?”
“Tell you what? Oh. Texas?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well ... well, tell you when?”
“When you knew.”
“Me an his ma went to Texas to search for him. You wouldn’t remember that. Put ads in all those papers. Figured that odd name’d get us some results. But we never come up with a single thing. I thought later, maybe, being that he was kind of hiding his exact whereabouts from Miriam, that maybe he was really in Oklahoma but sent that last letter from Texas ... or they did it for him.”
“She knew where he was. She must have written him.”
“We all wrote im. Always to general delivery. But he never had an address after Missoura.”
“I could have been told.”
“At seven or eight!”
“Yes.”
“Bob ... we still don’t know. Maybe he’s hiding. Sides, sometimes a man has to discover things in his own time. What could you of done at seven?”
Over the next month, through Christmas and New Year’s and into the coldest days of January, Bob Wapinski fantasized about Red. He wrote her almost every day and received a letter from her as frequently. Whatever their relationship might have lacked when they were together, whatever their trepidations, the voids were filled in their letters and in their minds. Their plans took shape. Bob asked Red to find out about residence requirements for California state schools. “I’d like to take some courses in engineering, in city planning, maybe a few art classes,” he wrote. “What would it cost if I were a resident? I can use the GI Bill for tuition.”
Red called, told him the addresses to write to for brochures. It was their first live communication since the day she’d driven off. He hadn’t expected the call. When it was over he felt odd, dissatisfied, yet he told himself it was because it had happened so suddenly and he had not been able to get his mind into the right gear. If anything, his move to California went from possible to certain, his letters became more amorous and her expressed apprehension dwindled.
“This past week,” he wrote in January, “I’ve felt your absence the most. I cannot think of a thing better than being with someone you love—especially if that someone’s like you.”
In turn she answered, “When you get here, if we can afford it and I can take the time, let’s go to a big hotel in San Francisco and get reacquainted. I can’t wait to take you to North Bay Mall. It’s such a pleasure to be there, to walk in the open air down the esplanade between the stores and to look in all the windows, or just to sit on the benches and watch the people. They are much happier than people in Mill Creek and it shows. I’m so happy to be here—even if it rains so much. One of the jewelry shoppes has the most beautiful rings. I hope that we’ll be able to work out our differences and live happily ever after like in a goddamn fairytale. I say HURRAY for goddamn fairytales. At work, Pauline is getting a divorce. We went out last night and drank three bottles of wine.”
If Red’s January tone was relaxed, expectant, and Bobby’s was peaceful, transitional, Pewel Wapinski’s bordered on frantic. “Bob,” Pewel addressed his grandson at breakfast, “a man lives easier when he has a set of guidelines he lives by.”
“Makes sense,” Bobby answered.
“A code,” Grandpa said. “You know. That way you’re not having to figure out everything from scratch. You plant in the spring, you reap in the fall. You know that. You don’t have to waste time or energy or seed experimenting.”
“Yes Sir.” Bobby teased the old man, teased him politely, lovingly, thinking he knew what his grandfather was doing, thinking that his grandfather didn’t need to do it for there was plenty of time and California wasn’t permanent, wasn’t a disease.
At lunch Grandpa gave Bobby a photograph of himself and Brigita taken on February 22, 1947, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. At dinner Grandpa produced a photo of himself and Bobby and Josh, which Red had taken in September. With the second photograph he gave him a simple list.
- Lead others through your service to them.
- You are special, your family is special, your country is special. You and they are something sacred, something to be honored.
- You are here for a reason.
- A man must be able to make money and be able to keep some of the money he makes. Take care of business first—plant before you play. You’re not finished until you’re finished. Unfinished business has a way of haunting you.
- Don’t get hooked on values that aren’t valuable.
Each day from the moment it was acknowledged Bobby would move, Pewel gave him something. At one dinner Pewel handed Bobby an envelope with one hundred twenty-dollar bills. “I can’t take this,” Bobby said.
“Yes you can,” Pewel countered.
“No Granpa. It’s not right.”
“It’s seed money,” Pewel said. “I can do it and I want to do it.”
“I can’t do it,” Bobby said. “If I ever need it, I’ll ask you for it. Okay?”
“There’s a card in there. It’s something I remember from my father. The words mighta changed but the meaning’s the same. He said it was the oldest prayer of the Old Testament. Maybe older than Judaism itself. Keep God in your life Bob. Someplace. Not necessarily like they teach at St. Ignatius’, but someplace.”
“I think He’s in the land,” Bobby said.
Pewel Wapinski nodded. Then quietly he said, “Dear Lord, please bless us and watch over us; deliver us from evil; forgive us our trespasses; and give us the strength and guts to try hard and never give up.” He paused again. “That’s for your sons.”
“Sons! Granpa, I don’t have—”
“That’s for your sons when you have sons.”
Every day Pewel Wapinski gave his grandson something more, and every evening Bobby Wapinski packed the items in his footlocker. Still what grandfather wished to give to grandson was not physical or financial but spiritual—words, ideas, ideals that to the old man were poignant. “Civilized people ... civilization, Bob, this is a gift of God or of circumstance, and of five hundred generations that have gone before us. You’ve got the ability to control, to some extent, today’s circumstances. That’s a responsibility. Try hard. Never give up!”
“Granpa, I never knew you were such a philosopher!”
Pewel chuckled. “Only on midwinter nights like this when there’s not so much to do around here.” The old man lay back in his overstuffed chair in the dimly lit, dingy living room. “Take these with you, Bob,” he said. He did not move. Inside, dimly, he was thinking about his daughter-in-law, thinking vaguely, She drove my son away and now she’s driving away my grandson.
“What?” Bobby asked.
“These words,” Pewel said. His eyes were closed. “Integrity. These words are principles. Virtue. Pride. Confidence. Responsibility. A man must live not by expedience, not by quick gratification, but by principles. Liberty. Independence. Freedom. Faith. Family. Courage.”
During the last week of January 1970, after having rebuilt the Mustang, Bobby sold his car to John Lutz for $900, not even the price of the parts. He finished packing his footlocker, sent it via Greyhound to the depot in San Martin where Red said she’d pick it up if it arrived before he did. He heard from Red one more time. She was taking a real estate license course at Academy Schools and already had a test date of Saturday, February 14th, Valentine’s Day.
On January 27th Grandpa drove Bobby and Josh to Williamsport. He put them both on a flight, via Philadelphia, to SFO.