Authors: Tobias Wolff
To be out of the barracks and the uniform. To be young and in love, surrounded by friends, free in a great city. To have my own time, to read, to loaf, to see plays, to hit jazz bars with Geoffrey and stay up until dawn talking about books and writing—all this was to forget for hours, even days at a time, that I had a bill coming due. But I found reasons to remember.
This was late ’66, early ’67. The news kept getting worse. More troops going over, more getting killed, some of them boys I’d known. I was afraid of the war, but I had never questioned its necessity. Among the soldiers I’d served with that question didn’t even get raised. We took the official explanations on faith and did not ask for details. Faith carried no weight in Washington. My brother and most of my friends believed that the war was an atrocious mistake and ridiculed the government’s attempts to justify it. I argued with them, furiously at times, but I didn’t have command of the subject and my ignorance got me in trouble, never more than when I locked horns with I. F. Stone one night at Geoffrey’s house. With exquisite gentleness, Stone peeled my bluster like an onion until there was nothing left but silence.
I began to attend Professor Carroll Quigley’s Vietnam lectures at Georgetown. I went to a teach-in, but left after the first couple of speakers. They were operating out of their own faith system; faith in the sanctity of Ho Chi Minh and his cause, faith in the perfidy of those who were unconvinced. Mostly I read: Bernard Fall, Jules Roy, Lucien Bodard, Graham Greene.
The Quiet American
affected me disagreeably. I liked to think that good intentions had value. In this book good intentions accomplished nothing but harm. Cynicism and accommodation appeared, by comparison, almost virtuous. I didn’t like that idea. It seemed decadent, like the opium-addicted narrator and the weary atmosphere of the novel. What really bothered me was Greene’s portrayal of Pyle, the earnest, blundering American. I did not fail to hear certain tones of my own voice in his, and this was irritating, even insulting. Yet I read the book again, and again.
In time I lost whatever certitudes I’d had, but I didn’t replace them with new ones. The war was something I had to get through. Where was the profit in developing convictions that would make it even harder? I dabbled in unauthorized ideas, and at the point where they began to demand a response from me I drew back, closed my mind as if it were a floodgate, as if I could control the influx of doubt. But I was already up to my neck in it.
My mother lived within walking distance. We had dinner together at least once a week. She liked making a fuss over me, and I liked letting her do it. One night I was sitting in her living room while she cooked up some spaghetti. Her husband, Frank, was out somewhere. She moved around the kitchen, humming along to the radio—101 Strings, Mantovani. Easy listening. The apartment was warm and smelled good. She had filled it with mementos of her travels: Spanish dolls and Brazilian puppets, posters, goat-hair rugs, a camel saddle from Morocco, where she’d spent two weeks driving through the Atlas Mountains with a friend. I sat on the sofa with my legs crossed, drinking a beer
and reading the newspaper. While I was in this state of contentment I saw Hugh Pierce’s name among those of the dead.
It was no mistake. His name, rank, and unit were all there. I kept reading the words, and each time they floated farther away from my comprehension. I understood only one thing: This shouldn’t have happened. It was wrong. I knew it at that moment as well as I know it now.
I called out to my mother. She came to the kitchen doorway and stood there looking at me. She was on guard, she knew something was up. I told her Hugh had been killed. I said it reproachfully, and my mother frowned and pushed her lips together like a girl who’d been scolded. Then she crossed the room and sat beside me and touched my wrist doubtfully. “Oh, Toby,” she said.
I knew there was something I should do, but I didn’t know what. I began to walk back and forth while my mother watched me. She told me to go on home if I wanted to be alone, we could have our dinner another time. But I discovered that I was hungry. Famished. I sat down and cleaned my plate and let my mother fill it again. I didn’t talk and neither did she. Afterward I sat there and tried to form an intention. I couldn’t think at all. I felt weightless. My hands were on the table as if I were about to push myself up decisively, but I stayed where I was. My mother looked on, stricken and afraid. For her sake I knew I had to get out of there. I said maybe I’d better go home after all.
I didn’t remember Yancy’s letter until late that night. I got out of bed and opened the top drawer of the dresser, where I kept my correspondence and receipts.
I riffled through the pile. She had loopy, girlish handwriting, and she’d used a pencil. I could recognize the envelope at a glance and often did, with a pang, when I was looking for something else. I knew it was there, but I didn’t come up with it the first time through, nor the second.
I slid the drawer out and put it on the floor and knelt beside it. One by one I lifted every letter, turned it over, set it aside. When the drawer was empty I still hadn’t found it. I was close to panic. I sat back and imposed calm on myself. The letter had to be somewhere in the room.
Taking care not to hurry, I searched the other drawers. I looked under the dresser, then pulled it away from the wall and looked behind it. I emptied my duffel bag, went through the pockets of my civvies and even my uniforms. I ran my hands over the shelves in the closet. When I heard myself panting I sat on the edge of my bed and forced myself to think back to when I’d last seen the letter. I couldn’t. I got up again, took stock. Quietly, so I wouldn’t wake the house, I began to tear my room to pieces. I left no inch of it unexamined. Nothing. Yancy’s letter was gone. Had I thrown it away? Could I have done that—just thrown it away?
I couldn’t even remember her last name.
A few days later I thought of calling her friend, the girl I’d taken out, but the number had been disconnected and her name wasn’t listed in the directory. I called the bar where they’d both worked. No one knew any girls named Trace or Yancy.
I don’t know exactly what I would have done if I’d found Yancy. Given her the news, of course. Tried to
find out if she’d had the baby. I wanted to ask her about the baby—lots of questions there. And I would have said I was sorry for sitting on her letter, because I was sorry, I am still sorry, God knows I am sorry.
V
ERA AND
I fought more riotously every week. She took offense at something during a party and hewed out great clumps of her hair with pinking shears. One night she climbed the tree outside my bedroom window with a rope around her neck and threatened to hang herself. The outlandishness of our quarrels isolated us, and made reconciliation harder. We had to keep upping the ante, promising more of ourselves, to put the last one behind. Just before I finished language school we got engaged.
And then my year of grace ended. At the end of it, scared, short-winded, forgetful of all martial skills and disciplines, I was promoted to first lieutenant and posted back to Fort Bragg to await orders.
Just after I got there I was assigned to a training exercise being played out in the mountains of Pisgah National Forest. I didn’t know any of the men whose temporary commander I became; I was filling in for their regular team leader, who had other business to attend to. Our job was to parachute in and link up with another team and make a show of our expertise.
It was over a year since I’d been in the field. In that time I had done almost no exercise, nor had I worn a uniform, carried a rifle and pack, or given an order. I hadn’t read a compass or used a map except on drives into the countryside. On the day before the drop I
locked myself up with plenty of coffee and every field manual I could get my hands on, like a student boning up for a chemistry final.
We gathered on the airstrip well before dawn. I tagged along with the first sergeant while he made the equipment check, looking on as if I knew what he was doing. It was still dark when we boarded the plane. I sat with the others until we entered the forest, then I hooked up my parachute and stood in the open doorway, trying to follow our position on the map. There was light breaking on the tops of the hills but the land below was still in darkness and the map kept flapping in my hand. Our pilot was supposed to flash a green warning light when he saw the smoke marking the drop zone, but I knew better than to rely on him. We were moving fast. If out of distraction or malice he was even a little slow giving us the signal we could end up in impossible terrain, miles from the drop zone and the men we were supposed to meet.
We were flying up a long valley. The slopes were awash in light, the plain was turning gray. We passed a cluster of houses. I tried to find the village on the map; it was unmarked, or I was looking in the wrong place. In fact I had no idea where we were. As the valley began to narrow, the plane descended and slowed. This was the usual prelude to the jump, but the green light still hadn’t come on. I braced myself in the doorway and looked out. Smoke was rising off the valley floor a mile or so ahead of us. Our smoke was supposed to be yellow, and this was black, but it was the only smoke out there. I turned to the first sergeant. His eyes were closed. I looked back out the
door and confirmed what I’d seen. Smoke. But still no green light.
A decision was required. It was my duty to make it. I gave the order to hook up, and as the first man came to the door I smacked him on the rump like a quarterback breaking the huddle and shouted “Go!” Then the next man, and the next, until everyone was out but me, and then I jumped.
Sudden silence. Mountains all around. The eerie, lovely sight of the other canopies, the men swinging below. My men. I’d gotten them out in good order, and with no help from the pilot. If I could manage this, I could manage the next thing. That was the secret—not to think ahead too much, not to rehearse every single step in advance. Just do what was needed as the need arose.
Then the man closest to the ground gave a shout and I looked down and saw him hauling like crazy on his risers, trying to change the path of his fall. The others started doing the same thing, and a moment later, when I got a good look at what lay below us, so did I.
We were not, as I had supposed, drifting down upon a field marked with signal grenades, but over the expanse of a vast garbage dump where random fires smoldered, sending greasy coils of smoke high into the air. I caught my first whiff a couple of hundred feet up and the smell got worse the closer I came. I pulled hard to the left, making for a patch of ground not yet covered with junk. I was lucky; being last out, I was fairly close to the edge. Almost everyone else landed in the soup. I watched them go down as I drifted to port, and listened
to them bellow and swear, and heard the crunching sounds they made as they slammed into the dump.
We were several miles from the drop zone. To get there took us most of the day. No one spoke to me. It was as if I did not exist. We maintained this arrangement until our part in the exercise was over.
Two weeks later I was in Vietnam.
A
WEEK OR
so after Sergeant Benet and I made our Thanksgiving raid on Dong Tam, the division was ordered into the field. The plan called for our howitzers and men to be carried by helicopter to a position in the countryside. I was sent ahead with the security force responsible for preparing the ground and making sure it was safe to land. My job was to call in American gunships and medevacs if any were needed. I could even get F-4 Phantom jets if we ran into serious trouble, or trouble that I might consider serious, which would be any kind of trouble at all.
The designated position turned out to be a mud-field. We were ordered to secure another site some four or five kilometers away. Our march took us through a couple of deserted villages along a canal. This was a free-fire zone. The people who’d lived around here had been moved to a detention camp, and their home ground declared open to random shelling and bombing. Harassment and interdiction, it was called, H and I. The earth was churned up by artillery
and pocked with huge, water-filled craters from B-52 strikes. Pieces of shrapnel, iridescent with heat scars, glittered underfoot. The dikes had been breached. The paddies were full of brackish water covered by green, undulant slime, broken here and there by clumps of saw grass. The silence was unnatural, expectant. It magnified the sound of our voices, the clank of mess kits and weapons, the rushing static of the radio. Our progress was not stealthy.
The villes were empty, the hooches in shreds, but you could see that people had been in the area. We kept coming across their garbage and cooking fires. Cooking fires—just like a Western. In the second village we found a white puppy. Someone had left him a heap of vegetable slops with some meat and bones mixed in. It looked rotten, but he seemed to be doing okay, the little chub. One of the soldiers tied a rope around his neck and brought him along.
Because the paddies were flooded and most of the dikes broken or collapsed, we had only a few possible routes of march, unless we moved off the trail; but mucking through the paddies was a drag, and our boys wouldn’t dream of it. Though I knew better I didn’t blame them. Instead we kept to what little remained of dry land, which meant a good chance of booby traps and maybe a sniper. There were several troops ahead of me in the column and I figured they’d either discover or get blown up by anything left on the trail, but the idea of a sniper had me on edge. I was the tallest man out here by at least a head, and I had to stay right next to the radio operator, who had this big squawking box on his back and a long antenna whipping back and forth over his helmet. And of course
I was white. A perfect target. And that was how I saw myself, as a target, a long white face quartered by crosshairs.
I was dead sure somebody had me in his sights. I kept scanning the tree lines for his position, feeling him track me. I adopted an erratic walk, slowing down and speeding up, ducking my head, weaving from side to side. We were in pretty loose order anyway so nobody seemed to notice except the radio operator, who watched me curiously at first and then went back to his own thoughts. I prepared a face for the sniper to judge, not a brave or confident face but not a fearful one either. What I tried to do was look well-meaning and slightly apologetic, like a very nice person who has been swept up by forces beyond his control and set down in a place where he knows he doesn’t belong and that he intends to vacate the first chance he gets.