Authors: Tobias Wolff
I once confessed this dreary notion to someone, who, meaning well, told me it was caveman talk.
“I know,” I said. “But still.”
But still. In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don’t look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries. You encourage yourself with charms, omens, rites of propitiation. Without your knowledge or permission the bottom-line caveman belief in blood sacrifice, one life buying another, begins to steal into your bones. How could it not? All around you people are killed: soldiers on both sides, farmers, teachers, mothers, fathers, schoolgirls, nurses, your friends—but not you. They have been killed instead of you. This observation is unavoidable. So, in time, is the corollary, implicit in the word
instead:
in place of. They have been killed in place of you—in your place. You don’t think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can’t help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It’s the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own
life. It’s the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason, and probe its justice.
I didn’t really know Keith Young. We saw each other in My Tho now and then, exchanged a few friendly words, but we didn’t take it any farther than that. He was too quiet for me, too careful. He struck me, I have to admit, as a company man, and it was pretty clear that I’d made no better impression on him. We never spent any time together until by chance we ran into each other while boarding the Kowloon ferry in Hong Kong. I’d been on R and R for four or five days already and Keith had just arrived. He was on his way to a tailor he’d heard about, and invited me to join him. This tailor was incredible, he said. For thirty dollars he could copy any suit; all you had to do was show him a picture of it. Keith had several pictures, advertisements he’d cut out of
Esquire
. You could pick up the suits in twenty-four hours.
I didn’t have anything better to do so I went along with Keith and watched him being fitted for his wardrobe. At first I found the whole thing comical, especially a sign in the window of the shop: “Guaranteed by the Royal Navy.” I liked the idea of the Royal Navy taking an interest in my duds. And then I began to think it wasn’t that bad a deal, thirty bucks, and that it wouldn’t hurt to have a few good suits and the odd sport coat hanging around. Before leaving the shop that day I placed some orders of my own, for clothes that did not in fact resemble the ones in
Esquire
—“You look like a Chinaman,” a friend told me when I got home—and which quickly began to fall apart because of inferior thread. One of my suit sleeves actually came
off inside my overcoat as I was arriving at a house for a dinner party some years later. I considered sending a letter of complaint to the First Lord of the Admiralty, but never did.
My haul was modest compared to Keith’s. He ordered six or seven suits, tweed jackets, camel and blue blazers, slacks, button-down shirts of every acceptable color, formal wear, and two overcoats—also in camel and blue. He seemed bent on getting the whole clothes problem out of the way forever, right then and there. We hit a few clubs that night and he couldn’t stop talking about what a great deal he’d gotten. And that was the first thought I had when I heard he’d been killed: What about all those clothes? It was a gasp of a thought, completely instinctual, without malice or irony. All those clothes waiting for him—they seemed somehow an irrefutable argument for his survival. Maybe they’d seemed that way to him too, a kind of guarantee, like the wives and fiancées some of us accumulated just before leaving home. They gave us a picture of ourselves in time to come, a promise of future existence to use as a safe-conduct pass through the present.
I sometimes tried to imagine other men wearing Keith’s suits, but I couldn’t bring the images to life. What I see instead is a dark closet with all his clothes hanging in a row. Someone opens the closet door, looks at them for a time, and closes the door again.
O
NE OF THE
local medical volunteers was a sour, livid Canadian named Macleod. He was full of absurd Scottish affectations that nobody had the nerve to call him on because his tongue was so sharp. Doc Macleod believed that at all times and in all places he was surrounded by fools. I never saw him laugh. Once in a blue moon, when hilarity got the better of him, he’d point his finger and say, “Funny.” Doc Macleod had joined a church-sponsored medical team bound for Vietnam right after his residency in Toronto, because he planned to be a surgeon and thought that the misery here would give him a great chance to perform operations.
“Laddy,” he told me, “without war we’d still be swinging in the fucking trees. It’s God’s own university and anyone who says different is a self-deluding fairy.”
Doc Macleod looked on me as a fool in the making, starved for instruction that I was too far gone in folly to profit by but which it was his thankless duty to provide. In this spirit he sometimes took me along
when he paid his calls on militia outposts in the backwaters of the province.
These were mostly villages, never meant to serve as forts, that had the bad luck to be close to roads and rivers and canals. From these villages, the theory went, a communist-hating peasantry could maul the Vietcong as they moved through the area. It didn’t work out that way. These people weren’t belligerent mountain tribesmen or Nung mercenaries; they were farmers, and after they got home from training camp they took off their boots and tried to stay out of trouble. Their villages were easy prey. The Vietcong regularly attacked them to pick up weapons and show their strength.
I was under no obligation to go along on these trips, Medcaps as they were called, but they made me feel useful. That was why I kept going out. It was like being a missionary; even a god. A couple of us big white guys would drop out of the sky and spend the day surrounded by astonished rustics who fully expected us to perform miracles. Some of what they lined up to show us—blisters, boils, pyorrhea—Doc Macleod had me treat with first aid. He took care of the rest. The work kept me busy for a few hours, and did no harm. It wasn’t even very dangerous; we descended in broad daylight and left before nightfall.
In one of these outposts I met an American sergeant named Fisher. He had been stationed there with a lieutenant who’d gotten killed a couple weeks back. Now Fisher was on his own until the lieutenant’s replacement arrived. And what a place to be alone in. Every wall had holes in it. Most of the stucco had been blasted off the cinder-block community hall that Fisher and
his lieutenant had helped build when they first arrived. The earthen wall around the perimeter still hadn’t been properly filled in where mortar fire had blown gaps in it.
Fisher was young, twenty or twenty-one, and with his jungle hat on he looked even younger. His skin was completely smooth. But when he took his hat off he aged fifty years. His hair was white. Not silver, not the lustrous thatch of the hale, deep-sleeping burgher, but dry wispy white. It was the hair of a used-up old man.
He blinked constantly. His voice was high and he talked a blue streak, stammering often. That was when he spoke to Doc Macleod and me. When he spoke to the Vietnamese he sounded calm and sure of himself. In the village there was a young child, a girl, with a cleft palate. Doc Macleod wanted to take her back with us and send her on to Saigon for corrective surgery. The mother went into hysterics. I tried to explain that she could go along with her daughter and stay with her in the hospital, but she refused to listen. Fisher went over to Doc Macleod and asked how important the operation was.
“She’ll never get laid without it.”
“Being beautiful isn’t all that important here.”
“She’ll look like a fucking crocodile. Is that ugly enough for you?”
Fisher put his arm around the woman and walked her outside. I could hear how serenely he reasoned with her. She simply couldn’t argue, Fisher was so quiet and certain of her submission. She went away and came back with a bundle and sat with her daughter until it was time to go.
After we finished up, Fisher invited me back to his quarters to wait for the helicopter. He and his lieutenant had fashioned a room for themselves in the back of the hall by hanging blankets on a rod. Fisher pulled them together to give us some privacy and offered me one of the Cokes we’d brought him, which I tried to refuse because I didn’t want to deplete his store. He insisted. I took it and sat on the lieutenant’s bunk and let Fisher bend my ear. Some kids gathered at the open window and watched us. They didn’t say anything. A few of them had had their heads shaved that morning for parasites and were possibly worried about the consequences of drawing our attention again. Behind them I could see long strings of pig guts hanging between two poles; they were covered with flies whose furious buzzing never left my ears.
Fisher was telling me about the lieutenant who’d been killed. He was, by coincidence, from the same part of Illinois as Fisher himself, and their fathers were both high school teachers. They had become close friends in their isolation here. Fisher told me that he was in touch with the lieutenant’s parents, that his own parents had driven over to see them and share the letters Fisher had written before the lieutenant got killed, in which he described his friend’s courage and devotion to the villagers.
“Man, did he love these people,” Fisher said. “You should’ve heard him speak the language. It was unbelievable.”
“You’re doing pretty well yourself.”
“Not like him.”
“How did he get killed?”
Fisher was sitting on the other bunk. He shook his
head and stared at the dirt floor between his feet. “Not like him. He really worked at it. Wherever he went he was always pointing at stuff and saying, What’s that? What’s that? He was a Christian, you know? Everyone was family to him, everyone, that’s just the kind of person he was.”
“What happened to him?”
Fisher examined me as if trying to remember what I was doing there. “You a believer, sir?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes. Sometimes not.”
“I used to be. I’m not so sure, anymore. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, when you really think about it. Like resurrection of the body, what’re they going to do if you get blown up—find every little part of you and stick it all back together? What if part of you is in one country and the rest of you is in some other country?”
I heard the helicopter coming in. Fisher ignored the sound and kept talking.
“When you actually see what bodies are made of, you know, inside, it’s kind of hard to think of all that stuff coming back together again ten thousand years later or whenever. I mean, how do they keep track? When you think of all the people that have died … that’s a lot of people. The other thing is, how do they figure out who gets resurrected? If you’re a saint or something, okay, sure, that’s easy, but what if you’re a Christian but you’ve killed people?”
Hesitantly, unsure of my right to speak on this subject, I said that God must understand how things like that happened. Fisher didn’t seem to hear. He kept talking.
Doc Macleod called out from the other end of the hall. It was time to leave.
Fisher walked with me toward the field where the helicopter was waiting. His words came faster and faster, as if to weave a net of sound by which to snare me and hold me there. He was like a safecracker madly spinning the dials as the clock runs out on him. I stopped and said, “Why don’t you come back with us?”
He didn’t answer.
“Just get on and go,” I said.
“I can’t,” he said, but I could see that he was thinking about it.
Doc Macleod was ahead of us, handing up the little girl to the crew chief. Her mother waited beside him, along with an older man who wore a chin beard. He was lean and bony. Ropy veins stood out on his neck and forearms.
“I’m not sure about this,” Fisher said.
I didn’t say anything. Now that I’d made the offer there was no taking it back, and who wouldn’t want to see him safely out of this place? But I was also beginning to understand that people were going to be
beaucoup
unhappy with me if Sergeant Fisher deserted his post at my invitation. I couldn’t begin to imagine where my troubles would end if he got on that helicopter.
It never came to that. While we were still at the edge of the field, some sort of dispute arose between the little girl’s mother and the bearded man. He’d been holding her bundle and now he would not let go. He didn’t jerk at it or try to wrestle it away from her, nor did he utter a sound, but he would not surrender it. She was weeping, quietly, without display. Fisher went
up to them and spoke to the man, who let go and stepped back with Fisher and watched as Doc Macleod helped the woman up and then climbed on board himself. I followed him and buckled myself in and waved to Fisher. He didn’t see me. He was busy making assurances, giving hope with his calm voice and the fact of his abiding presence. Duty had swallowed him whole, loneliness, fear, and all. His path was absolutely clear. I almost envied him.
Fisher looked up with the others but made no sign as the chopper lifted slowly off the field and climbed above the rooftops. The pilot passed over the village with a lumbering restraint that might have been courtesy, until we were clear of the perimeter. Then he hit the gas.
D
OC
M
ACLEOD AND
I went into My Tho for some fish soup that evening. As we drove in from the airfield it started to mist up and by the time we finished eating rain was falling in sheets and the sky was black. The hot soup, together with the rain pounding on the roof, made me heavy-limbed and thoughtful. I stared out the window while Doc Macleod worked on a model plane he’d produced from his bag. He always had a model going; he said it kept his hands steady. A column of Vietnamese soldiers walked down the street, rifles slung upside down beneath their glistening ponchos.
I said, “I wonder what made his hair turn white like that?”
“What unbearable experience, you mean? What terror too great for mortal man?”