It was like an American flag had exploded in the room. The civilians were wearing red skirts and blue dinner jackets, and Stars and Stripes ties and earrings. Balloons and banners festooned the ceiling and chairs and tables. Red, white, and blue confetti wafted across the cement floor and drifted against table legs every time someone opened a door.
Walter and Peter walked through people, because there was no room to walk around them and Walter could feel the volatile emotions at work underneath the dancing and the small talk. Vietnam wasn’t over and even the most patriotic were feeling duped. It was a room full of sad and scared people. But there was nothing the VFW took as seriously as their annual Fourth of July dinner dance.
The high school jazz band was in full swing, wearing Uncle Sam hats and sweating through their navy-blue shirts. The trumpet player had obviously been hitting the spiked punch. The kid was three sheets to the wind and missed half his notes.
But the offbeat trumpet player didn’t seem to bother most of the dancers. And thanks to Rick Ames and his mickey of hooch there were more dancers than usual. Mr. Hernandez, principal at the high school, attempted a waltz with his secretary but they kept stepping on each other’s toes and laughing, while her husband got drunk with the rest of the vets from Korea.
“Looks like quite a party!” Peter yelled over the noise.
Walter nodded. Quite a party.
“We need something good,” Jack Miller, secretary of the VFW said to two other men standing in line at the bar to get whiskey sours for their wives. “We need to have some fun this year.”
The three men all cast sideways looks over at the table shrouded in smoke in the corner.
Ah, Walter thought, both proud and somehow resigned, there are my people.
He walked through Jack Miller to join them and Jack’s agitation and pity for the guys in the corner clung to Walter like spiderwebs.
The Vietnam vets sat together—a pack of wild dogs, their voices like gunfire in the cheerful room. Their grief and terror paraded across their faces and echoed in their desperate and manic laughter. And so everyone stayed away, and the brilliant festivities faded to gray in that corner.
The air was choked with blue smoke. Thick curls of it drifted toward the scattered red, white, and blue balloons that hovered at the ceiling.
The table of men wore uniforms that had been defiled in a million ways that the World War Two vets always looked down on. Walter glanced back at the old-timers who sat along the wall watching the dancers. The old boys had managed, for the special occasion, to squeeze into their dress uniforms. Brass buttons strained across beer bellies and barrel chests.
But the boys from Vietnam were gaunt, worn down to sharp edges, and their motley uniforms hung off their bodies like crepe paper the day after a party. One of the only black men in the room turned and Walter staggered for a moment. Oscar Jenkins. Walter had gone through basic training with Oscar and they’d both landed stateside after their second tours around the same time.
Oscar had a marijuana leaf drawn on the back of his camouflage jacket and make love, not war printed on the front. He would move to Milwaukee, stop drinking, and find God in about two years. Marry a pretty girl and start some kind of outreach program for homeless vets in the city. Tonight he was in high form, telling the stories Walter had heard a dozen times about the Saigon whore with no legs.
The ladies of the auxiliary picked up their dirty dinner dishes in a hurry and moved off quickly to the quieter men who’d served in Korea.
Walter sat in an empty chair next to the guys and concentrated on the way he remembered cigarettes smelling, and after a while, like a frozen tap thawing, the smell came back to him. Acrid and sharp.
This was familiar. While the basketball game had been a dream, something long ago forgotten, these moments, these landscapes of drink and despair and his exact location in them, were easily recognizable. He was moored here. Any place he got in his life, any distance from this was only measured from this perspective. He was only as happy other places as he’d been unhappy here.
When Jennifer was a little girl and he and Rosie would take her into Milwaukee for the Fourth of July fireworks on the lake, Rosie would tie one end of a piece of red yarn around Jennifer’s wrist and then tie the other end around her own. Despite all of their warnings and dire instructions to not wander too far, as soon as he or Rosie let go of her hand, Jennifer would take off running among the crowds. But that stretch of red yarn always brought her up short.
He and Rosie used to laugh, but when he got brought up short after Rosie died he’d known there was a strand of red yarn tied from his wrist back to these years.
He breathed deep, as if going underwater, and the air in this corner of the VFW hall tasted sour, tainted by jungle rot and gangrene. Pieces of these men were dying even as they sat here picking Gloria Poticus’s dry pot roast out of their teeth.
“If everyone will take their seats, we will get the program…” Someone up front, Walter couldn’t see, tried to clear the dance floor, but nobody listened much.
The president of the Beaverton VFW, Biford Vogler, stood up and made his way to the small stage in the corner. He had a bad hip from a Japanese sniper bullet, but he was one of those soldiers who had not left part of himself on the battlefield, or so it seemed.
There were two kinds of vets, Walter had learned. There was the kind that war added to, made better in some unseen and unknown way. The kind their families and neighbors were proud of and could look in the eye. The other was the kind that war only took away from. Biting out chunks and pieces until there was nothing left but holes.
“Hey, glad you’re having a good time. But I need folks to take their seats,” Biford said and the crowd on the floor scattered to any available folding chair. “The Ladies’ Auxiliary is bringing by some dessert and we got some work to do here tonight.”
Peter, whom Walter had actually forgotten about, arrived next to him, consulting his list.
“Why are we here?” Walter asked, watching the white star confetti swirl like a tornado in the draft from the opening door.
His mother stepped into the room and Walter shut his eyes, wishing himself away from this place. This moment.
“This day is on your list. You received a special citation from the VFW for your Purple Heart and Silver Star.” Walter opened his eyes and watched Peter scan the crowd, wondering when the kid would catch on. “But I don’t see you here.”
Biford Vogler took a pair of glasses out of the pocket of his dress blues, unfolded a piece of paper, and spread it out on the podium, rubbing the flat of his hand across the wrinkles.
The crowd was silent, waiting for whatever he might say, prepared to clap and cheer and break into “God Bless America” should Biford require it.
“You’re supposed to be here,” Peter said.
“I’m here.”
“But I don’t…”
“I’m out back, getting drunk.”
Walter turned, wanting to leave. But he faltered and drifted sideways, like the drunk he had been, into his place in this particular landscape.