As Nicky’s tour of duty lengthened, his letters from Vietnam became more reflective, even philosophical. This was, for me, an unfamiliar aspect of my brother, who had never seemed terribly inward or prone to self-scrutiny. At home, he was too busy defending himself against all comers, on guard most of the time, striking attitudes, ready to parry each blow that came with an equally strong countermeasure. That I had dismissed him as dumb or crude, even to his face, upset me. I should have realized that brothers, as the old Neapolitan saying goes, are versions of each other.
But I had reasons for behaving badly. Nicky could resort, when threatened, to violence as a way of showing me who was in control. From an early age, he knocked me around, often “accidentally” inflicting a bruise. (I still bore a scar above my right eye, just below the hairline, where a rock opened a slice that required several stitches. Nicky, of course, swore he’d aimed well over my head, but similar incidents happened again and again.) By posing a physical threat, he attempted to control me, and it worked fairly well for most of our years together. If he wanted something, he took it, and all I could do was call him names, complain to my parents, or take subversive, retaliatory measures. By my early teens, I’d become practiced in the terrible art of passive aggression.
Apart from occasional attacks, Nicky was not typically mean or selfish; his generosity was even surprising, given the position he’d been stuffed into by my mother. I suspect he considered himself unwanted, except by the unwashed, pimpled, foul-mouthed creeps from Wilkes-Barre and Nanticoke whom he considered his friends. What held them together was devotion to six-packs of beer and harsh, unfiltered cigarettes, which they often wore in the sleeves of their T-shirts. If the rest of us wore scented aftershaves, Nicky and Company, as I called them, appeared to bathe in the mechanical fluids that kept their various engines purring.
“That son of mine, Nicky, he can’t do anything right,” my mother was often overheard to say on the telephone. (She spent a good portion of each day on the phone with her friends from the St. Ann’s Circle, a group of parish women who met once a month for bingo and traveled in a group to Scranton every summer to make a Novena.)
“Nicky’s gonna be fine,” my father would counter, flashing a shy smile that revealed a gold tooth in front—a peculiar deformity that always embarrassed me in public. (Why did no one else have a father with a gold tooth? Where, I used to wonder, did one even get a gold tooth?)
Around our house, it had been Cain and Abel to the hilt. I only began to view Nicky in a different light when, in his letters from Vietnam, I heard an unexpected note of clarity and grace, a kind of hip articulateness that must have been buried there all the time, waiting to emerge. In the moral forcing house of war, my brother matured at breakneck speed, and could hardly contain himself in writing to me, putting on a self-performance that surprised and dazzled me. There was still the edge of superiority that all older brothers have, although in Nicky’s case he felt so inferior to me, intellectually, that it dulled that edge. I found in those letters a brother I hadn’t known, a friend and confidant, and looked forward to his return from the war, believing we could repair the damage done before; I felt sure that a long and fruitful brotherhood lay before us.
One letter, in particular, changed my sense of him definitively. It was written from a camp near Quang Tri, the area where he spent the last three months of his life, mostly on recognizance missions, although he was also involved in Search and Destroy—a tactic peculiarly suited to the madness of Vietnam. “You just walk through the jungle looking for trouble, waiting to be ambushed,” as Nicky said. “It’s maybe the scariest damn thing that any human being can do. Every snap, crackle, and pop in the jungle drives you nutty. And what is a jungle except snap, crackle, and pop?” The wonder is that anyone came back alive from those excursions.
Dear Asshole,
Here I am, deep in shit, and not even worried. Isn’t that a bitch? I mean, if I didn’t know there was somebody waiting to blow my head away, I’d say I was on vacation—a tourist, taking in the sights, on some fucking safari.
Nam is many things to many people, but it’s also a place for philosophy, let me tell you. I spent some pretty intense nights talking with Eddie and the guys, and we got farther than Friar Makowski ever got in that class I took at King’s: Philosophy 101. What is True? he used to ask us. In Vietnam, you don’t ask that question. Nothing is true in Southeast Asia. It’s made up, start to finish. The reasons for the war are not true reasons. Maybe there are no true reasons. And the politicians from Nixon on down are lying to the public. That’s what politicians do. They lie to the public and to the generals who lie to the lieutenants who lie to the sergeants who lie to us: that’s the real Domino Effect.
The mission is everything, they tell us. But I’m no missionary, and that’s a problem here. I don’t see that I’ve got a mission to kill some poor skinny bastards who think it’s cool to run around in black pajamas or live in rat-infested tunnels for months on end. It’s their country, isn’t it? I mean, they are free to kill each other if they like. But even they don’t seem to know what the people of Vietnam really want. I can’t even keep the gooks straight in my head: VC, Minh, NVR, Chinks. South or North Vietnam, they say, makes about as much sense as South Rhode Island and North Rhode Island. Truth begins with the line between North and South, somebody in Washington, D.C., said. But who drew that line? Who is making up stories to justify their actions?
It’s not that I’m against stories. Around here, we tell stories all the time, invent them and pretend they’re true. If they make us feel good, they are called True. If they scare the shit out of us, we yell Liar!
Some true things are pretty obvious. Like the finale of Buzz Baxter, a nice dumb fucker who went to take a piss in the shade of a palm tree and stepped on a booby trap, then bang, and that’s it for Buzz—an arm here, a foot there. The ground was so thick with vines and shit, it took us two hours to cut an LZ for the chopper. We should have planted him there, the bits and pieces we could find. When the chopper was gone, taking most of him to Paradise, we found a glob of something dangling from another tree. That’s his fucking nuts, Mickey Donato said. His nuts are hanging on the tree. A nut tree, he called it. A funny guy, Mickey. But I think it really was the bastard’s nuts in a little bag of skin, bloody and mushy, a million sperm probably still alive and swimming around and wondering what the fuck hit them. Fink, the medic, shimmied up and scraped the glob into a plastic bag, and we buried it. “Nuts to nuts, ashes to ashes,” Mickey said, crossing himself. Now that made sense. Was too fucking true. The truest thing I’d heard in a long time around here.
Now the question of Good—another Biggie that Friar Makowski liked to rumble—is maybe harder than the question of True, if you want my opinion (which you don’t but will get anyway, since I’ve got all afternoon to sit here and can’t think of anything better to do but write this stuff). True is just the flipside of False; they are Siamese twins playing Ring Around the Rosie. But it doesn’t work quite so easy with Good. Or maybe it does. Come to think of it, it does. You probably can’t have good without bad. Or peace without war. I have seen both of these famous opposites here, and they are the same when you dig deeper. Good and Evil. Peace and War. Nicky and Alex.
After Buzz got blown away, it was so damn quiet. I swear it had been raining, but the rain seemed to catch midway between the clouds and the ground. Even the jungle noises stopped—the click of bamboo, and the billion trillion bugs who run their little machines at the same time, night and day. It was so god-awful still. And the expression on the dead bastard’s face, now that was true. His eyes wide open, looking at or maybe through the disaster, the complete fucking ruins around him. But what am I trying to say about the Good? A dead young man is not good. You can’t say that and continue to make sense. But why would it matter in the long run? Is death so different from life that we have to make such a fuss about the distinction?
In war, you have life and death rubbed under your nose in a way that doesn’t happen so much in civilian life. Everything is set up to make us believe we’re gonna live forever. But the fact is sooner or later, we’re all gonna die. Buzz Baxter was sooner. I’m at least gonna die later than him. Now that’s true, and it’s beyond repudiation, though whether it’s good or bad I can’t say.
For weird reasons—hey, maybe you don’t find them so weird, who knows?—I don’t want to die before I figure out some of this stuff. It would be nice to get a few answers to the Big Questions, just in case. Maybe I’d rather sit in the sun with a bottle of beer between my knees. But what choice do I got? When you see guys go down every day, you scratch your head and wonder what the point is.
Any suggestions, professor, and you know where to reach me. You don’t get me here, try c/o Ho Chi Minh.
Your very own,
Socrates