SIX-IN TEEN-OUT. SEVEN-IN TEEN-OUT.
Counting breaths. Trying to meditate through it.
I’m just over the west ridge at the edge of the sugarbush, out of sight of the house, the big barn, the outbuildings. A short crawl to the ridge in the light would reveal the high meadow, the vineyard, pond, all that rests in the arms of the ridges. But I will not go, will not look, in the dark.
Night descends with a vengeance. It is very dark. There is no moon, no stars. There is a wind. Cutting. Raw. Sometimes I can read the wind but I cannot read this wind. Heat lightning flashes to the west. I hunker down. At fields’ and orchard’s edge weeds and brush grow quickly, thick, to armpit height. Like a buck on his day bed, I’ve crushed a small area, left a thin trail, a single field of fire to me; me, low, hugging the earth, camouflaged beneath a poncho, beneath wild brushweed, beneath darkness. Wind swirls the weed tops. Rain begins. Droplets lash my face. I close my eyes, let the rivulets run awash on my skin. Lightning moves closer. I lie perfectly still. My heart is racing. My eyes are closed yet I see flashes—not just the lightning but thousands of overlapping flashes taking up random quarters or thirds of my eye-frame. Interspersed are a million pinpoint flashes. My brain is speeding out of control. Forty-in two-out. Forty-in three-out. Forty-in four-out. Thunder rumbles.
I cannot describe how angry I was during this period. I cannot come close. Even now when I think back to that time I am enraged, livid, pissed beyond words. Damn, shit piss damn. That doesn’t even begin ... That’s surface anger. That’s what splashes from the spout of a boiling teakettle, the splattering mist of mad agitation, symptomatic of what’s within except what’s within you can only guess at. You can’t see it. You can’t see the numb volcanic rage feeding itself without sensing itself; a self-consumptive fury that the VA’s perverted therapists labeled guilt-ridden, depressive, schizo-psychotic; that commentators deemed deserved purgatorial flame—that is, blame the victim—until later when they recognized the victimization (without recognizing their role as assailant) and assuaged themselves by pitying us only to rob us of any vestige of pride, of humanity. And when they decided to heal the national gash, they identified it as its veterans and not themselves, decided to heal us, as if we’d started the entire affair and somewhere had taken an aberrant route. If only they could design a program ... If only they could figure us out ... Fuck em! They couldn’t and can’t figure themselves out—don’t realize that they have an effect on every man who is not an island. Perhaps this is what drove us to High Meadow, but that is much later—which is perhaps what has driven me here, now, an island in the weeds, a renegade on the rural edge of civilization practicing evade, avoid, escape. Their sickness, their unwillingness to recognize it, their scapegoating or displacing it, was the trigger of rage, was the very heart of the out-of-controlledness that has held sway over America for fifteen years and that shows no indication now, in August 1984, of self-correction BECAUSE there is no recognition of the source problem, of the depth and breadth and scope of this 3-D mosaic problem. The rage they cause, the overwhelming fury they describe as being set off by trivial events—which is the definition of neurological impairment or psychosis—because they do not recognize their provocation of us, do not recognize the great frustration that would redefine our rage as ordinary, justifiable anger. Rage, justified or not, causes further problems, more rage—unjustifiable rage—because rage damages the brain, imbalances frontal lobe chemistry, and fosters “disinhibited” dementia. More simply: some of you motherfuckers drove us crazy.
Nearly every Viet Nam returnee I know split. Bobby called it expatriation. From east they went west; from north, south. Or some, like me, went no place and every place—the road, the open, unending, ever-shifting road. As near as I can tell, virtually every one of us at some point or another moved because of restlessness, alienation, an itch within; moved, got the fuck out, beat feet, skyed. Some hid it in corporate transfers, like Tashkor and Rasmuellen, who later became our attorneys at High Meadow; some hid it in numbed-out self-medication; some in their own planned “accidental” permanent checking out.
One problem was the seemingly amorphous shades-of-gray conflicts in everyday life. Enemies were indefinable, indistinguishable—CONTRARY to popular myth, UNLIKE Nam where the enemy was definable and distinguishable, just elusive, excellent at self-camouflage, able to leap uncrossable borders to unassailable sanctuaries. But back in the World, there seemed to be only gnawing, ungraspable problems eroding strength, integrity, resolve. Bobby called them Gumption Suckers. Spirit usurpers. Like being in thick pea soup, like Nam mountaintop fog so thick your eyes played tricks on you and when they told you there was something out there, you saw things that were not really there—and when they told you there was nothing, something unseen would emerge and grab your rickety ass. Who was the enemy? Certainly it varied man to man, woman to woman, vet to vet. Demons: the absence of full-blown Post Traumatic Stress Disorder does not mean one is not continually attempting to cope with his combat experience. More ambiguous, insidious enemies: The System, drugs, agent orange, crime, money, the Me Generation, bad marriages, the VA, prison, filmdom, and the media. But again I am far ahead of myself. I still did not know Bobby Wapinski. And he too had a row to hoe.