Vietnam--page 2

my two weeks off duty in Washington before I was supposed to leave I decided to drive all the way down to see my parents in California before I left. I had a 1958 Triumph TR3 sports car—it was red--that could only fit one passenger, so my friends at the base who had family in California drew straws to see who got to come with me. The one who drew the short straw was Jack Walters. We borrowed money from some of our friends for gas, and squeezed into my car and drove straight from Washington to Modesto, where he lived, and then I drove to my parent’s house in North Fork. I just wanted to see them one last time, you know, in case I didn’t make it back. My dad had been in World War II and wasn’t too happy about me going to war. He talked to me about it a little bit, and I could tell that my parents wished I could just stay home. Two weeks later I drove all the way back up to Washington with Jack, and they shipped us off to Vietnam.

They told me I would be in the 82^nd Airborne, but we hadn’t had any airborne training. They said “you’ll get it when you get there”, and I did: jumping out of helicopters. I was in the Army for two years (I got out in ’71), but I was only in Vietnam for three months. All of those days except two were spent out in the jungle, out in the rice paddies. Every night we went on patrol with a platoon—that’s eight or nine guys—and we’d go out in a rice paddy and line up on a dike or something and set up trip wires that would set off Claymore mines. Anyone who tripped the wire would set off a bunch of ammunition and lights. But that really didn’t happen that often, because anyone around could see us out there setting up the wires since the land in that area was flat for miles around. The whole thing was crazy, and I didn’t like it. Sometimes we were shot at, and I could hear the bullets whizzing by. It was tense. I mean, I had been an art student. I didn’t want to be out in a rice paddy setting up trip wires that could kill someone. I had two things on my helmet: a sticker that said “California”, and one that had the Emerson quote: “An unexamined life is not worth living”. I really missed my parents, and North Fork, and wrote a lot of letters to them. I addressed them as just “Home Vaughn.” I think some of the other guys thought I was crazy.

One time we were out in an area we called “the pineapples”—this was because there were rows of pineapple growing, like the cotton is around here—and we got shot at by our own guys. It was early in the morning, still dark, and we could tell it was our own troops shooting at us because of the tracers. There were these colored lights—tracer rounds—that you could see when the guns were firing: every tenth round was a tracer. The Viet Cong used red tracers, and we used green. That morning we were walking along the rice paddies and all of a sudden there were green tracer rounds—our own—all around us. I mean, the air was full of them, flashing bright green all around us, and they only show up every tenth round. So we dove into the paddies and laid low in the water while one of the guys radioed in to try to get them to stop shooting at us. No one knew what the hell was going on over there. That was just how it was. Troops shooting at troops, people bombing places where they thought the enemy was, only to find out they’d napalmed a village of women and little kids . . . no one knew what the hell was going on. I saw so many terrible things . . .

His voice had begun to crack. He rolled down his window and the cool air from outside came into the car, scented of pine and fir trees. I hadn’t spoken the whole time he’d been talking, but now I was curious.

“What did you see?”

As soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t. His hands tensed up a little on the steering wheel, and a tear spilled out of his eye and slid down his cheek, disappearing into his dark beard. It was the first time I’d seen a tear on his face since my grandmother’s funeral.

“There was one time, I saw a boy . . . this little boy . . .”

I watched him cry, feeling my own throat begin to tighten. I looked out the window so I wouldn’t have to see him, and he told me about the boy.

I was on a military convoy, somewhere south of Saigon. We were on a dirt road of another nameless village, just another place that had been blown up and burned down. I saw him there on the side of the road as we passed by. He was all by himself, walking in a daze, not even blinking. His hair was burned off. He must have been in an explosion or something, because his stomach had been blown open. And—I don’t know how he did it, someone must have helped him—but the hanging flap of skin from his belly was stretched all the way up . . . between his teeth so he could bite it, and hold his intestines in. He was holding his arms kind of away from his body—he was all burned—and he was just walking along, biting his own skin. He was alone and I rode past him in the back of a truck with a bunch of guys, and we couldn’t help him. This wasn’t the worst thing I saw, I can’t even tell you about the worst things, I won’t, but this is the boy I always remember.

He stopped then, and just drove in silence for a while, blinking back tears. I looked at him and could see tears dripping down his chin. He reached into the little ice chest that was sitting between us on the front seat and took out a paper napkin to wipe his eyes. He had said that the boy wasn’t the worst thing he saw, but I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I didn’t want to. I wished I hadn’t even been given this image, this boy that would haunt my dreams, who still haunts me, even though I wasn’t the one who saw him.

“Look,” he said, motioning to the road and stepping on the brake. A doe was standing at the edge of the highway. She looked up at us, paused for a moment, and then bounded gracefully up the embankment and disappeared into the trees. I turned to him and he smiled and put his hand on my shoulder.

“You know I love you a lot, don’t you, Emily?”

“Yeah, dad . . .” I answered quietly, slightly embarrassed at his question, and his tears.

“I really love you, and your mom and your brother and sister, a lot.”

“I know.”

Our family photo albums flashed through my mind: my parents’ wedding photos, both of them slim and tanned, with long dark hair parted in the middle. In one, my dad is grinning and looking at my mom, who looks back from under her floppy wedding sunhat. They look absolutely happy. And then there are the photos of my parents wearing bell-bottom jeans with my brother, Daniel, as a curly-haired baby, my dad holding him up with one arm, the other around my mom’s tiny waist. Then there I am, sitting naked in a

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