“YOU CAN CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES.” That was the birth of the code. He didn’t listen. Not at first. None of us did the first time we heard it. And I’m not sure I can interpret it now. Isn’t that the way it is with codes and canons, principles and plans? They’re okay until you hit an extreme, then it’s a matter of figuring out how they apply, how to decode them, what’s relevant.
The raccoons haven’t come. For a week there’s been no lights in the house. None in the barns. It is cool, cold. My body is stiff, chilled, and I can barely bend my right leg. The fire hardly warms me. Three days ago I dug the pit and chimney. Nothing much, really—a small one-man kitchen with a flat stone over the fire pit, an entrance flue downhill, a six-inch-deep exit tunnel-chimney, a covered trench, snaking back up into the pines there, maybe thirty feet away. The tunnel-chimney controls smoke. Moisture and particulants cool, condense, fall out. What comes out the far end is pretty minimal—a crude scrubber, the kind the VC used in old Nam Bo when they didn’t want us to know where they were.
This morning, at first light, I got off my duff, descended to the pond, washed my stinko bod, my pits. Shaved. Dove in with my clothes on and used the soap to wash them before I took em off and washed me. Could hardly believe yesterday. Of all people! I’d slipped back into the pines to watch. Thought maybe she’d notice the firepit, start snoopin around—maybe freak out, split, notify the authorities, send somebody up here to evict me. I didn’t realize it was Joanne, Wap’s sister, till she parked behind the house and got out of the car. I’d already sanitized my camp as much as I could. There wasn’t much I could do with the firepit except cover the opening with the dirt I’d dug out making it. Still, I’m pretty sure she didn’t notice. Of all people she woulda been the last I’d of expected to come up and plant flowers. It blew my mind. Couldn’t rest, couldn’t meditate. Felt like shit at first light. That’s why I went down below, cleaned up, filled my water blivet, changed my duds, came back up and hung the wet ones on a line I’d stretched at the back of the pine break. Controlling circumstances.
While I was in Philly there was always something in the pipeline—something from the rumor mill about drops—early-out programs tied to Nixon’s reduction in force. It was really a matter of laying guys off, of firing them, because Viet Namization was going to turn the war over the ARVN. No severance pay. No bonus. Just get out. I was discharged 123 days early—discharged not with a bang, barely a whimper. Crocco, Williams and Lambert went out and got drunk for me, then they disassembled Lieutenant Mulhaney’s car—doors, wheels, hood, wires, even the windshield—and left it there for him to put back together. The rumor mill said I did it but I was in Boston and Mulhaney never laid that rap on me. Still, I say, thanks guys. Mulhaney deserved it. I left without a whimper. Just collected my pay, signed the papers, caught a bus to Scranton and one to La Porte where my mom came and got me and drove me home and all I could think of was leaving for Boston and the most wonderful woman in the world. But first there had to be another family party! I hung around for a respectable bit until I figured I could go to Boston to “visit.” Oh God, how I missed her.
In Mill Creek Ma’d say, “Tony, you decide yet what you’re goina do?” She really liked having me home but the nicer she was the more I wanted to go. I felt like I was caught in a niceness trap and bein mushed to death like when I was seven and she’d make me sit on her lap and hug me against her big plump motherness while she’d be talking to Aunt Isabella who’d be doing the same thing to Jimmy. “I think I’m goina go to school,” I’d tell her. “Maybe become a doctor like Joey.” She believed me. “Ma, I’m going to be a college kid.” She believed me and that meant it was okay for me to believe it too. “Where are you going to go to school?” Mark asked. “I don’t know,” I lied. I’d already applied and gotten the conditional answer. “Maybe BU, you know, in Boston.”
Jo would never of understood if I’d said, “I’m going to Boston to be with Linda.” At least that’s what I thought. I mean, her boys didn’t set their life’s course by following girls to far-off cities. Go to Budapest or Timbuktu to go to school, or to Guantanamo Bay or Dong Ha to shoot people, that’d be respectable ... but to Boston to get laid!!!
Jimmy came back from his second tour more gung-ho than ever but that’s not surprising. He spent the entire time with 4th CAG doing combined action duty. They kept moving him, letting him help set up CAP units in five or six different villages. He was becoming a real papa-san to a lot of people. He loved it, they loved him. And he was great for Marine morale. Sixty percent of the enlisted men in CAPs extended for at least six months. That’s how much they believed in the program. But he came home to completely different circumstances than the first time. This country was different. Our family was different.
And I was up in Boston with Linda, in an apartment she’d found just off Commonwealth Ave., in Allston, the cheap side of the Ave. with lots of students, versus the swank side, which is Brookline. Linda was studying really hard and working hard too, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I got a job almost right away—driving an ambulance. Anything, I reasoned, to be near her. She was so damned focused at that time. I was anything but focused—except on her. But she had the drive for both of us. It was Linda who’d gotten the applications, who’d gotten me to enroll at BU where I started classes in September ’69. I was a “conditional” student and had to take a study-habits course that summer—but Linda was really all I could think about.
“You can control circumstances.” But we didn’t know, hadn’t developed the code, had left previous codes behind. The new code would need to be tempered in the ovens of alienation, estrangement, self-imposed exile, expatriation. Where once we believed in everything and our beliefs were supplanted, suppressed, or shattered, in the void we lost all beliefs or came to believe in someone else’s beliefs. When we lost our beliefs we lost too the adjunct discipline and were without discipline. When we gave our minds to someone else, we adopted disciplines attached to their interests. We wallowed, unfocused, numbed out, wide-eyed, movin ’n’ groovin without thought. We floated, without production, without achievement, without direction, without ideals, without ends. There was no one, no thing, to follow—no leadership of ideas, no models of service, no rituals, no codes.