Vietnam--page 4

“Camp Zama.” I still had the images of the burned soldiers in my head, and was eager for him to move on. I wanted him to get through to the part where he came home, so he could stop thinking about the people in the hospital and the boy on the side of the road.

“Camp Zama . . . Oh, okay.”

I was at Camp Zama recuperating for 90 days. The rule was, if it took longer than 90 days to heal, they wouldn’t send you back to Vietnam. I probably could have been sent back by about 80 days, but the doctors didn’t send me. They were trained to save lives, you know? Not to send guys to their death. They were young guys, in their 20’s, and they knew we’d been drafted and that we’d already been through a lot. They would try not to send you back unless you wanted to go.

I learned later that a lot of the guys in my platoon were injured or killed in combat after I was Medivaced out. So, in a way, it was lucky that I was burned. If I had stayed I might have been killed, or worse, like those guys at the end of the room. I never wanted to be there in the first place. Some crazy guys at the hospital actually wanted to go back. Some even said they liked killing, they wanted to go back and “shoot some more gooks.” I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

After I was released from the hospital, I got sent to Fort Ord, California to recuperate before being sent down to Panama for the last nine and a half months of my service. I actually picked it from a list of places, I thought it would be nice. But guys there were just being trained in the jungle to get acclimated and then sent to over Vietnam. There was this one Sergeant there who found out I could paint, and he commissioned me to paint a big mural on the wall of his office. It was this ugly thing with a bunch of guys jumping out of helicopters with guns and stuff, but it took a long time to do and got me out of other duties. Most of the time I drove a truck and helped move around the trainees. They mostly kept us separated—trainees and experienced troops—because they probably didn’t want us to talk to them too much about what we’d seen and been through. If I did get a chance to talk to them, I’d just try to tell them to do what they could to not get sent to Vietnam. But mostly all of them got sent there, and they didn’t have any say in it.

I was only in Vietnam for three months, and Panama for nine and a half, but it feels like I was in Vietnam longer than Panama. It’s funny: I can remember every single day of my time in Vietnam clearly, as if it was yesterday, but Panama is more of a blur. I guess it’s because in Vietnam you were on pins and needles all the time, knowing you could get shot at or blown up or something at any minute. You were always on edge.

When my service time was almost up, they put me on a plane to South Carolina, because I didn’t have a say where they flew me. When I finally got out, they gave me a couple hundred dollars and that was it. I was stuck in South Carolina, and my family was in California. So I spent all my money buying a plane ticket home.

When I got there, one of the first things I did was drive out to the edge of town and kissed the ground. I know it sounds silly, but I really did that. And I made a fire and burned all my army clothes. I didn’t want them anymore. I was just so glad to be home, and happy to be alive . . . I had seen some terrible things. Horrible things that I still can’t stop thinking about. I was glad to be home.

Since I came back there have been many times that other vets have run into me, or looked me up, and wanted me to get together with them. They have groups, and they all get together a lot, but I never wanted to do that. I wanted to be an artist, to sell my pottery and have a family. I didn’t want to sit around with a bunch of vets and talk about the war all the time. A lot of them had problems when we got back, too: they had drug addictions that had started while they were overseas, or drinking problems. I didn’t want to hang out with them. I just wanted to forget about it.

He was pulling into the parking lot of the art show area, where he found a space and turned off the car. Other vendors were arriving in old pickups and vans and starting to unload and set up booths in the grass lot near the lake. He kept his hands on the wheel, making no motion to get out of the car. Then he wiped his eyes and adjusted his straw hat and looked at me for the first time since he’d stopped talking. The scar over his eye, from a teenage motorcycle crash into a barbed-wire fence, looked deeper than it had seemed before. His eyes looked tired, as if telling me about the war had worn him out. Neither of us said anything, but he gave me a hug before he opened the car door and went around to open the back of the station wagon, where the boxes were. I stepped out into the crisp Shaver air and started the long familiar process of unloading the pottery and setting up the booth. As I arranged the vases and bowls on the display shelves I rubbed my fingers over the grooves that had been left by his hands, and studied the swirls of cracked glaze that bled together in tangles of color. I decided not to ask him any more questions about the war for a long time.

Years later I went to go see the movie Saving Private Ryan with my boyfriend at the time. I’d seen all sorts of gory horror movies and was never really affected by it, so even though I knew the movie would be graphic I didn’t think twice about it. The opening scene of the film is a very realistic recreation of the carnage and confusion of D-Day. As the camera panned over fallen soldiers, wounded and bleeding, the theatre sound system blared the booming noises of exploding shells and ammunition. I began to feel a cold sweat move over my body. I tried to remain calm, but it just got worse. As the violence intensified, waves of nausea washed over me. Then I did something that I haven’t done at a movie before or since: I had to walk out of the theater and into the ladies’ room to compose myself. I sat in a stall, trying not to hyperventilate or throw up. I felt silly and embarrassed, but I was having a panic attack and couldn’t stop. My breathing finally slowed, and I splashed cold water on my face before re-entering the theater.

After the film was over, I couldn’t explain what had come over me. My reaction to the film shocked me almost as much as my boyfriend. Later that night, once I was alone, I realized what it was that had bothered me: it was my dad. Some part of me was thinking about my dad’s experiences, and what it might have been like for him to witness so much gore and be in constant danger. I don’t think he was ever in any sort of combat that even came close to that scene from Saving Private Ryan, but the movie had been real enough to catch me off guard and let loose a panic in me I hadn’t known was there. I have never been in a war, seen anyone get shot, or even held a gun, but knowing about just a part of my dad’s war experiences was enough for a movie about war to make me physically ill. It also made me understand to a small degree how some veterans must feel, the ones who are never able to readjust once they get back. How my dad ever got over it is a mystery to me.

Over time I got jobs of my own, moved out of my parents’ house, and stopped going to art shows with my dad. Sometimes if I wanted to talk to him I’d go out to his studio behind the house and he’d stop loading the kiln or mixing glazes to chat with me. I’ve always liked the earthy smell of his studio: of fresh clay, clay dust, fired clay. I like to look at the fresh pieces as he removes them from the kiln with gloved hands and lines them up on the metal racks where they make tinkling noises as they cool down. Sometimes I’d sneak in quietly without him seeing me, just to watch him at his potter’s wheel. I still do this.

Sitting at his potter’s wheel, he stares straight ahead, and I watch his hands, fingers cracked from the clay drawing all the moisture out of his skin as he shapes it. During the busy season around Christmas his hands get worn down where they rub against the clay turning on the wheel until they crack and bleed. He just keeps working, blood mixing with the clay.

As I watch him, he leans over the wheel studying the shape only he can see. He presses the edges, carefully lifting up, and I wonder what he is thinking about as he pushes the rising wetness into a form. What does he see, in the moments before he pushes the lump of clay, skillfully, into a perfectly symmetrical vase or bowl? Does look into the spinning clay and see jungle, a village? A dirt road? Or maybe he sees the boy, with a halo of singed hair, who stumbles alone, arms held out from his burned sides as he bites his own skin, trying to keep himself from falling out. Trying to keep himself in.

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