CHAPTER SEVEN
Living History
Several months slip by before I hear from Jimmy Murphy again. His time has gone to the deployment to Fort Lewis, to serving out his final weeks in uniform, to buying a car and driving cross-country with Lotte to Amherst, where (after a short stay with his mother in South Boston) they find a second-floor apartment into which to move in January. With time on their hands over the holidays, in Jimmy’s wish to show Lotte around, he drives her north to visit me in Bristol, where I’ve bought a house into which Bert and her daughter, Haley, have settled with me in a contented co-existence that has Haley living her life for the most part as a devoted undergraduate at Plymouth State.
All is well with us and with them, too. Jimmy and Lotte are a positive young couple on the adventure of their life, and it’s a treat to have them spend a day and a dinner with us. While I take them for an after-dinner drive around Newfound Lake, Squam Lake, and Lake Winnepausaukee, Jimmy mentions his journal, the master copy of which is securely in my possession.
“All on a disk and backed up,” I assure him, just as I assure him that I’ll transmit a copy to him as soon as he’s online with a computer of his own in Amherst. He has a quote he wants to use to tie it off, he tells me. Something from his ongoing reading, which he promises to post right away so it can join the main draft. No mention is made of ever trying to publish the journal or of making use of it in any other way. A personal journal. A personal history. A diary. Something–for reasons as yet unknown–that we assume he’ll be happy in time to have created.
To Lotte he jokes as we roll along: “If it weren’t for my mentor here, I’d never have kept a journal. Usually it was fun, but at times it was a pain in the ass. Hiking to the library. Trying to keep up on what was being said in newspapers and magazines. Always falling behind. Yeah, I got into it.”
Weeks and months slip by as Jimmy blazes through his first semester at UMass and Lotte lands a GS 8 position as a translator with the on-campus U.S. State Department branch at the University. Both prosper. Lotte is beyond well- prepared for her role, which has fresh challenges coming her way, while Jimmy, as a nose-to-the-grindstone student, discovers that adding slates of summer courses to his schedule will have him eligible for his degree not in nine semesters but in six or seven, not in four years but in two or two-and-a-half.
So it is, with funds yet available under the GI Bill, that he decides to undertake a master’s degree and to use his personal journal as the basis for his master’s thesis. The journal is a natural for the kind of thesis the UMass history department has in mind…an event or topic that can be supported and verified by both personal and academic research. By then he’s added a quote to the manuscript that ties off the event of the Gulf War and places it in historical perspective.
August 1993. On the leafy slopes of Arlington Cemetery, Bush gathered with the families of the 390 American men and women who died during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, of whom 148 had been killed in action. A sergeant sang “The Last Full Measure of Devotion,” and the doleful blare of “Taps” swept down the hill toward the river, echoing and re-echoing among the endless ranks of tombstones.
For what had they died, those 390 Americans? What cause was worthy of their sacrifice, or that of the 458 Americans wounded in action, or the 510 allied casualties? With the shooting now over, the reasons at last seemed clear: the conflict had been waged on behalf of cheap oil, friendly monarchies, and Washington’s strategic goal of preventing the emergence of a hegemonic power inimical to American interests in the Middle East.
The Persian Gulf War was neither the greatest moral challenge facing Americans since 1945, as Bush had declared, nor the pointless exercise in gunboat diplomacy portrayed by his severest critics. The truth lay somewhere on the high middle ground, awaiting discovery.
–Rick Atkinson, Crusade
As a minor hit in the history department, Jimmy’s thesis is taken in hand by his adviser, who hopes to place it for publication as a personal account of the Gulf War. Publication is a new hope for Jimmy, if not one in which he invests any distracting dreams or fantasies of fame and fortune. His dreams have been going to teaching, while the immediate benefit of his thesis is that it has him receiving offers from each of the three teaching positions for which he applies, a process that has him and Lotte remaining for the present time in Northampton, allowing her to retain her position in Amherst where she has gained two promotions in grade for the quality of her work.
It’s as they are planning a summer graduation trip to Germany to visit Lotte’s family that Jimmy finds himself stirred enough by his recurring memories to undertake a computer search for DeMarcus Owens, last known to him to be on his way to civilian life in Baltimore. Hoping to make contact via email, Jimmy cannot find an email address online, though he is able to identify a telephone number for a DeMarcus Owens in metropolitan Baltimore. The experience is one, prior to the visit to Bindlach with Lotte, that he adds as a postscript to a journal of military life and warfare he has entitled Coming of Age. His entry:
To a female voice answering the phone in Baltimore, I explain who I am and say, “A few years back, in the army, I was acquainted with a DeMarcus Owens from Baltimore? While we were in Germany.”
“You calling from Germany?” the woman who has answered wants to know.
“No, from Northampton, Mass. Dee and I… DeMarcus…we were buddies in Germany, and in Iraq. I’m calling to say hello…to see how he’s doing. I’m going back to Germany to visit some family. It’s had me thinking about old times.”
On a pause, the woman says, “This Dee’s wife. What is it you want with him?”
Finding her more suspicious than friendly (not unlike Dee), I try to soften my appeal by being more forthcoming. “We were friends in the army,” I say. “I lost track of him when I got out…at Fort Lewis. Remembered that he was from Baltimore. I was wondering how he’s doing. What he’s doing. That’s all. Thought I’d dial some numbers and give it a try.”
After another pause, in no way persuaded, the woman says, “Maybe he in the shed. What’s yo name again?”
“Jimmy Murphy,” I say. “2nd Armored Cav,” I add, in my ongoing attempt to tiptoe through an apparent racial mine field.
The minutes begin falling away. Three…five…as many as ten. Then the woman is on the line trying to tell me (I can tell she’s attempting to fabricate a reply) that DeMarcus wasn’t in the shed after all. That he must have left to go somewhere. That she doesn’t know when he’ll be back.
I get it, see in my disappointment that it is as it has always been. A white guy who talks like a white guy is not going to get through to a black guy on a call from the past. Dee knows who I am but has no wish to speak to me. Is apparently more irritated, embarrassed, resentful of my call than I imagined he would be. Has told his wife (or sister or mother) to say he isn’t there. A white guy from the army. A soldier who wasn’t his friend at all though he had said he wanted to be.
“Will he be back anytime soon?”
“You never know,” the woman says.
As in the beginning, I get it. Go away. Don’t be calling this number again.
Not knowing what else to do, I say, “Thank you,” and hang up the receiver.
So it is that my friendship with DeMarcus Owens concludes. Declining to be my best man, declining to say hello. If it’s white guilt or black guilt, a cultural chasm, or even shyness, I don’t know. I know only that he has no wish to be friends, not even after some years have passed and we should be able to put aside any differences we may have had and acknowledge our common past.
I get it.
And, of course, I don’t get it at all.
In Bindlach, going on a bus ride and a walk during our visit to Kirchenleibach, I find Christensen Barracks abandoned but for a caretaker living in a duplex that, in my day, was reserved for field grade officers near the main gate. No MPs are on duty checking IDs and motioning vehicles in and out. Weeds are growing in the cracks in the sidewalks, the grounds are no longer maintained, and young soldiers are no longer practicing into the night on simulators, shooting hoops at the base gym, bussing into Bindlach and Bayreuth with eyes out for native women to have and to hold.
It’s a feeling of odd regret and loss that has me seeing how meaningful this world was to my coming-of-age years. Striving for maturity. Experiencing friendship and love. Warfare and revulsion. Failure and rejection. And growth… never more apparent than on this visit, going out from Lotte’s parent’s home on a Saturday morning to have a look at where I opened my eyes as an innocent teenager a lifetime ago.