Although they still weren’t able to talk about Katie openly
without the anger and the pain resurfacing, other topics were safer ground, and
they explored their emotions with a depth that was sometimes unsettling. Even
after thirteen years, she was still captivated by Danny, still drawn to his dry
wit, to the vulnerability he tried so hard to hide. Their love had matured,
had mellowed into something more tranquil than the obsession they’d experienced
in previous years. At times she felt so close to him it brought tears to her
eyes. At other times, she felt something very near to indifference.
“It’s normal,” her sister-in-law Trish said when she confided her
misgivings. “Every marriage goes through dry spells. You’ve been together for
thirteen years. Be grateful you’re still speaking to each other.”
“Is it like this for you and Bill?”
“Honey, I love the man more than life itself, but there are times
when I wish he’d go away for about a year. Trust me, there’s nothing wrong
with your marriage. It’ll pass.”
But she wasn’t convinced. Trish didn’t know about the incident
with Rob. Casey still wasn’t sure precisely what had happened on the grassy
roadside that August morning. She wasn’t even certain that anything actually
had happened. Perhaps it had been all in her mind. Perhaps she’d imagined
being caught with Rob MacKenzie in a moment of sexual awareness so crystalline
that she had only to close her eyes to recall every detail: the warmth of his
breath on her face, the laugh lines around those green eyes, the damp patterns
of perspiration on his sweatshirt, and her own inability to draw breath.
No, she hadn’t imagined the incident. It had been real. But its
meaning was obscured in a morass of jumbled emotions too risky to explore.
They’d been on the verge of—what? She would probably never know, for their
relationship could survive only if she tamped down these offensive emotions and
locked them away in a safe place. All Casey knew with any certainty was that
she had come very near the jagged edge of a dangerous precipice, and had
somehow managed to escape without tumbling into the abyss.
She didn’t understand it, for she still loved Danny. The sight of
him still made her go warm all over. She still slept in his arms at night,
still thrilled to his lovemaking. If their marriage was in a slump, it was for
the reasons Trish had said, and was perfectly normal for a couple who’d been
together as long as they had. The problem, if there was one, sprang from
internal conflict, not from any outside influences. She and Danny were
learning to handle these emotions, and with time, the situation was bound to
improve.
It was in counseling that they first started talking about
visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “You’re both seeking some kind of
healing,” Kevin Johanson, their counselor, said. “I’ve been there, and I have
to say that even though I never served in Vietnam, visiting the Wall was a
tremendously cleansing experience.”
Danny had mentioned the idea to her once or twice over the years,
but until now, he hadn’t been ready. He’d been too afraid it would stir up the
turmoil he’d left behind in Vietnam. But Casey knew there was still a piece of
his life missing, the piece of himself that he’d left behind in Southeast
Asia. And Southeast Asia was clearly still inside him, shifting and swirling
like the colored patterns of a kaleidoscope, distorting his every emotion, his
every action. She was afraid that he would live in emotional tumult for the
rest of his life if he didn’t purge himself of some of that violent emotion and
try to put his experience into some kind of meaningful perspective. So it was
with immense relief that she agreed, that first weekend in December, to drive
down to DC with him.
Early morning shadows lay long and heavy on pale winter grass
whose tips were touched with frost. The sky had that whitish look that
precedes full blueness, and when she exhaled, she could see the faint
cloudiness of her breath. Beside her, Danny was silent, tense, and in the
distance, the bare branches of the trees along Constitution Avenue reached
skyward. The Wall stretched out to their right, long and low and glossy black,
deserted except for a lone man who knelt near the apex, his fingers following
the words etched into the stone. Together they paused to absorb the power, the
magnitude of it. Danny turned to her, blue eyes guarded, and she realized that
she had no business going any farther. She took his face between her hands and
kissed him. “Go,” she whispered.
His eyes questioned hers. “Are you sure?” he said.
“I’m sure, sweetheart. Go.”
He looked relieved. Kissed her gently, squared his shoulders and
turned away. Hands in his pockets, he walked slowly along the Wall’s length,
his form a faint reflection in its glassy surface. The kneeling man looked up
at his approach and they exchanged nods as he passed. Danny turned the corner
and disappeared, and Casey tucked her hands into the pockets of her jacket.
Time passed. He reappeared, crossed the grassy verge and began reading the
names inscribed in the stone. After a time he paused, shoulders tensed, then
he lay both palms flat against the smooth stone. With one finger, he followed
a line of print, knelt and continued reading, stopping every now and then when
he reached a familiar name. He bowed his head at one point, resting his
forehead against the stone, and Casey felt like a voyeur, driven to watch, yet
repelled by the pain of watching.
The sun was high in the sky when at last he stood up and dusted
off his knees and came back for her. She was still waiting where he’d left her
hours before. He took her in his arms and held her shuddering form until they
both warmed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“No,” she said, and brushed the hair back from his face. “Don’t
ever be sorry.”
“You’re freezing.”
“So are you.” She took his icy hand in hers and rubbed it until
the warmth returned. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I can’t,” he said. “Not yet.”
“I’ll wait. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
He stroked her face with his thumb, gazed tenderly into her eyes.
“After all these years,” he said, “after everything I’ve put you through, you
still love me. Why?”
She warmed her freezing hands in the layer of air between his coat
and his body. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do.”
That evening, they returned, and together they walked down the
path and crossed the grass to the place where the names of fifty-eight thousand
men were inscribed. Together, they read the names of his fallen comrades:
Kenny Bailey and Chuck Silverstein, Tico Ramirez and John Duquesne, Bill Taylor
and Jack Cooke and Ramsay Brown. Beneath her fingers, the stone was hard and
cold; at her back, Danny was warm and gloriously alive. Casey shivered and
leaned back into his reassuring warmth, and he wrapped an arm around her.
“There’s nobody here I even know,” she said. “Why do I feel so much like
crying?”
Danny rested his cheek against hers. “They say it has that effect
on everybody.” He reached into his pocket and removed something and held it up
to the light, and she recognized the dog tags he kept tucked away in his
underwear drawer. He studied the tarnished military I.D., then kissed it
lightly. “This one’s for you, buddy,” he said softly, and placed it on the
ground beneath Kenny Bailey’s name.
That night, in his arms, she rediscovered the commitment she’d
doubted for so long. For better or for worse, she had bound herself to this
man, had chosen him out of all the men in the world. Together, they had
weathered pain and tragedy, and had not only survived, but had become
stronger. Nothing could hurt them now.
In the sweet aftermath of passion, he pulled her close. He
smoothed back her hair and said, “For a while there, I wasn’t sure we were
going to make it.”
She wrapped her arms around him. He was big and solid, sticky and
warm. “Neither was I,” she said.
“I suppose,” he said, “I should feel honored.”
It was an odd choice of words. “Honored,” she said. “Why?”
“Because he’s a good man.”
It took her a moment to understand, and then she went stiff in his
arms. “It’s not like that,” she said.
“Christ, Casey, give me credit for having a few brains. I didn’t
just fall off the turnip truck. What I’m trying to tell you is that it doesn’t
matter. Whatever went on between the two of you, it doesn’t matter to me. What
matters is that you’re here, with me, and we’re okay.” He paused, then said,
“We are okay, aren’t we?”
She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Yes,” she said.
“We’re okay.”
***
“You grow up with rules,” he said. “Some of them are drummed into
your head. Others are implicit. Either way, you know what they are. Your
boundaries are clearly defined. You understand what is and isn’t acceptable.
But over there, the rules didn’t apply. There was only one rule, and that was
survival.”
He stared blindly into the darkened room. “After the first couple
of times I caught the clap,” he said, “I learned to stay away from the brothels
and the Saigon street whores. The teenage peasant girls were usually clean, at
least if you got there ahead of everybody else. There we were, a hundred
thousand horny twenty-year-olds, raping and pillaging our way across the
country, all in the name of democracy. We took whatever we wanted. We thought
we were entitled. We took turns gang-banging thirteen-year-old girls. We set
old men on fire, just to watch them dance. We’d march into a village, and
they’d be hiding from us, because they knew why we were there. To steal their
food, to kill their animals, to burn their crops.” His face hardened. “To
rape their daughters.”
“Oh, Danny.”
“None of it bothered us, because we dehumanized them. They
weren’t people, they were gooks, and everybody knew that the only good gook was
a dead one. You couldn’t trust any of them, because even in the South, the
Cong had infiltrated everywhere, and if you turned your back you’d end up with
your throat slit. All the fear, all the frustration, all the anger, we had to
convert into something, so we turned it into rage. Do you know that Dylan
Thomas poem, the one about not going gentle into that good night?”
She took his hand. “Yes,” she said.
“That’s what we were doing. We were raging against the dying of
the light. On the outside, we were killing machines, doing what we’d been
trained to do. On the inside, we were a bunch of scared kids who didn’t want
to die, and we needed a way to handle the fear. There weren’t many options.
You could stay stoned all the time. Some guys did that. Everything from grass
to smack. It was their way of escaping, and who the hell could blame them?
Some of us dealt with it by screwing anything that moved, because we were so
desperate to feel something, anything, that would prove to us we were still
human.”
He got up from the bed and began moving restlessly around the
room. “If you managed to survive long enough,” he said, “sooner or later
they’d send you to Singapore for a few days of R&R. You’d get a hotel room
and a whore, and you’d stay drunk the whole time. Then, when you got back,
you’d go straight to the medic for a penicillin shot.”
He leaned against the dresser and lit a cigarette. “You learned
to sleep flat on your back in the mud with your gun in your hands. You learned
to watch for the tiniest deviation from the norm: a broken blade of grass, the
snapping of a twig. A flock of birds squawking. Or silence.” He took a deep
drag on the cigarette and slowly exhaled the smoke. “Silence was the worst,
because you never knew what it meant. The Cong were born knowing the tactics
of guerrilla warfare. They knew how to make themselves invisible, how to hang
like monkeys from the trees. We were just a bunch of kids from Boston and
Boise who grew up on Lucy and Ricky and Good Humor bars. These guys were out
of our league.”
He looked around for an ashtray, found one, flicked the ash from
his cigarette and tossed the hair back from his face. “So you spent thirteen
months in a state of hyper-vigilance, because the piddliest little thing could
mean instant death. And then they shipped you stateside and expected you to
fit right back into society and play by the rules again. Except that the rules
no longer made sense.” He drew on the cigarette, exhaled, stared into and
through the cloud of smoke. “After consorting with death, twenty-four hours a
day for a year, it was impossible to live with the pettiness and the hypocrisy,
the canonization of the trivial that was the basis of everyday life back
home.” He paused, lost in thought. “Sometimes,” he said, “it would get so
unbearable that you’d want to go back, because at least in Nam things made
sense. Life, death, the good guys, the bad guys. Simple, gut-level survival.
Some guys kept going back, kept signing up for one tour of duty after another,
because they found they couldn’t function any longer in the outside world. The
rest of us,” he said, “learned to pretend.”
Cigarette in hand, he began pacing like a caged tiger. “Kenny
Bailey and I met in basic. He was a farm kid from Omaha. Red hair, freckles,
braces. After basic, we were given the dubious honor of spending the longest
year of our lives together in hell. We were part of a ground unit, and we’d
broken up into patrols. Usually there were five or six men in each patrol, but
on this particular occasion, half the unit was laid low with dysentery, so
there were just three of us. Kenny, me, and Chuck Silverstein. We’d
walked—Christ, it must have been fifteen or twenty miles that day. It was
raining. Not a heavy monsoon rain, the kind that sounded like thunder hitting
the ground.” He paused in front of the window and looked out, but she knew it
wasn’t the city of Washington he was seeing. “No,” he said, “this was more the
type of noxious drizzle that grew fungus between your toes and slowly drove you
crazy.”