Message from Nam

To the love of my life,
John,
who makes every moment
worth living.

And to our beloved boys,
Trevor, Todd,
Nicholas, Maxx,
may you never, ever
have to fight a war,
like this one.

With all my heart
and love,

d.s.

“
The torch has been passed
to a new generation.
”

From John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s
inaugural address.

THE BOYS WHO FOUGHT IN NAM

Passed hand to hand,
      the wishes,
        the dreams,
the hopes
   of an entire generation,
     an entire nation
       sent to war,
    a score
        of old men
       leading all our boys
   to die,
        while we watched
        in horror,
        in pain,
          in grief,
     the disbelief
    that we had to lose
      so many of our boys,
   their toys
    barely left behind,
their eyes
       so young,
         so bright,
   so full of hope,
     the fight
        so long,
          so sad,
   the pain
       so bad,
    the wounds
        so deep
   until at last
   our young men sleep
  in their maker’s arms again,
their names carved
          in stone,
never to come home,
never to touch our tears
           again.…
  lest we forget,
   lest we grow old,
    our hearts must never
      be so cold,
we must not run and hide,
we must remember them,
   the boys who
died …
  let it not be in vain,
let us not forget,
       the pain,
         the cries,
    the agonies,
          the braveries,
   the heroes,
    and the smiles,
     the time that was
     so long ago,
     across so many miles
     in a land so bright
       so green
  caught in a place
        just in between
  hope and lies,
we must remember still,
   must promise that
    we always will
    touch their hearts
    while still
    we can,
remember, friends.…
       remember.…
the boys who died,
         who lived,
           who cried,
         the boys
           who fought
        in Nam.

United States:
SAVANNAH …
BERKELEY …
November 1963–June 1968

C
HAPTER
1

I
t was a chill gray day in Savannah, and there was a brisk breeze blowing in from the ocean. There were leaves on the ground in Forsyth Park and a few couples were wandering hand in hand, some women were chatting and smoking a last cigarette before they went back to work. And in Savannah High School, the hallways were deserted. The bell had rung at one o’clock, and the students were all in their classrooms. There was laughter coming from one room, and silence from several others. The squeak of chalk, the looks of bored despair on the faces of sophomores ill prepared for a surprise quiz in civics. The senior class was being talked to about College Boards they were going to take the following week, just before Thanksgiving. And as they listened, far away, in Dallas, gunfire erupted. A man in a motorcade catapulted into his wife’s arms, his head exploding horrifyingly behind him. No one understood what had happened yet, and as the voice in Savannah droned on about the College Boards, Paxton Andrews tried to fight the sleepy waves of warm boredom. And all of a sudden in the still room, she felt as though she couldn’t keep her eyes open a moment longer.

Mercifully, at one-fifty the bell rang, all doors opened and waves of high school students poured into the halls, freed from quizzes, lectures, French literature, and the pharaohs of Egypt. Everyone moved on to their next rooms, with an occasional stop at a locker for a change of books, a quick joke, a burst of laughter. And then suddenly, a scream. A long anguished wail, a sound that pierced the air like an arrow shot from a great distance. A thundering of footsteps, a rush toward a corner room normally used only by teachers, the television set flicked on, and hundreds of young worried faces pressing through the doorway, and people saying “No!” and shouting and calling and talking, and no one could hear what was being said on the television, as still others shouted at them to be quiet.

“Hush up, you guys! We can’t hear what they’re saying!”

“Is he hurt?… is he …” No one dared to say the words, and through the crowd again and again, the same words … “What’s happening?… what happened?… President Kennedy’s been shot … the President … I don’t know … in Dallas … what happened?… President Kennedy … he isn’t …” No one quite believing it at first. Everyone wanting to think it was a bad joke. “Did you hear that President Kennedy’s been shot?” “Yeah …
then what
? What’s the rest of the joke, man?” There was no rest of the joke. There was only frantic talking, and endless questions, and no answers.

There were confused images on the screen with replays of the motorcade breaking up and speeding away. Walter Cronkite was on the air, looking ashen. “The President has been seriously wounded.” A murmur went through the Savannah crowd, and it seemed as though every student and teacher at Savannah High School were pressed into that one tiny room, and crowding in from the hallways.

“What’d he say?… what did he
say
?” a voice from the distance asked.

“He said the President is seriously wounded,” a voice from the front started back to the others, and three freshmen girls started to cry, as Paxton stood somberly in a corner in the press of bodies around her, and watched them. There was suddenly an eerie stillness in the room, as though no one wanted to move, as though they were afraid to disturb some delicate balance in the air, as though even the tiniest motion might change the course his life would take … and Paxton found herself thinking back to another day, six years before, when she was only eleven.… Daddy’s been hurt, Pax.… Her brother George had told her the news. Her mother had been at the hospital with her father. He liked to fly his own plane to go to meetings around the state, and he’d had to bring it down in a sudden thunderstorm near Atlanta.

“Is he?… will he be okay?…”

“I …” There had been a strange catch in George’s voice, a terrible truth in his eyes that she had wanted to run and hide from. She had been eleven then, and George was twenty-five. They were fourteen years apart and several lifetimes. Paxton had been an “accident,” her mother still whispered to friends, an accident that Carlton Andrews had never ceased to be grateful for, and which still seemed to startle Paxton’s mother. Beatrice Andrews had been twenty-seven years old when their son George was born. It had taken her five years to get pregnant with him, and as far as she was concerned, her pregnancy was a nightmare. She was sick every day for nine months, and the delivery was a horror she knew she would always remember. George was born by cesarean section, finally, after forty-two hours of hard labor, and although he was a big beautiful ten-pound baby boy, Beatrice Andrews promised herself that she would never have another baby. It was an experience she wouldn’t have repeated for anything, and she saw to it with great care that she wouldn’t have to. Carlton was, as always, patient with her, and he was crazy about his boy. George was the kind of boy any father would have loved. He was a happy, easygoing, reasonably athletic boy, with a serious penchant for his studies, which also pleased his mother. Theirs was a quiet, happy life. Carlton had a healthy law practice, Beatrice had an important role with the Historical Society, the Junior League, and the Daughters of the Civil War. Her life was fulfilled. And she played bridge every Tuesday. It was there that she felt the first twinge, that for the first time she felt suddenly violently nauseous. She assumed she had eaten something off at the League breakfast that day, and went home to lie down right after her bridge game. And three weeks later she knew. At the age of forty-one, with a fourteen-year-old son about to enter high school, and a husband who wasn’t even gracious enough to hide his delight, she was pregnant. This pregnancy was easier for her than the first, but she didn’t even seem to care. She was so outraged by the indignity of it, the embarrassment of being pregnant again when other women were thinking about grandchildren. She didn’t want another baby, she had never wanted another child, and nothing her husband said seemed to appease her. Even the tiny, perfect, angelic-looking little blond baby girl they put in her arms when she awoke barely seemed to console her. All she could talk about for months was how foolish she felt, and she left the child constantly with the huge, purring black baby-nurse she had hired when she was pregnant. Elizabeth McQueen was her name, but everyone called her Queenie. And she wasn’t really a nurse by trade. She had borne eleven children of her own, only seven of whom lived, and she was that rarest of rare gifts of the South, the old beloved black mammy. She was filled with love for everyone, but most especially for children and babies, and she loved Paxton with a passion and a warmth that no mother could have surpassed had she given birth to her, and certainly, Beatrice Andrews didn’t. She remained uncomfortable around the little girl, and for reasons she herself couldn’t really explain, she always kept her distance. The child always seemed to have sticky hands, or she wanted to touch the delicate bottles of perfume on Beatrice’s table and she invariably spilled them, and somehow mother and child always seemed to make each other nervous. It was Queenie who comforted her when she cried, whose arms she ran to when she was hurt or afraid, Queenie who never left her, even for a moment.

There were no days off in Queenie’s life. There was nowhere she really wanted to go on a day off, her children had their own lives now, and she couldn’t imagine what would happen to Paxxie if she wasn’t there to help her. Her father was always good to her, and he loved that child so, but her mother was a different story. As Paxton grew older, the difference between them grew, and by the time she was ten, Paxton had already guessed that they had almost nothing in common. It was difficult to believe that they were even related. To her mother, her clubs were everything, her women friends, her auxiliaries, her bridge days, and benefits for the Daughters of the Civil War, her life with those women was what she lived for. She almost seemed uninterested when her husband came home, and she listened politely to what he said at the dinner table at night, but even Paxton noticed that her mother seemed almost bored by her husband. And Carlton noticed it too. Although he would never have admitted it to anyone, he felt the same chill emanating from his wife as Paxton had for years. Beatrice Andrews was dutiful, loyal, organized, well-dressed, pleasant, polite, perfectly bred, and she had never felt a single emotion for anyone in her entire lifetime. She simply didn’t have it in her. Queenie knew it, too, although she expressed it differently than Carlton would have, she’d long since said of her to her daughters that Beatrice Andrews’s heart was colder and smaller than peach pits in winter. The closest she ever came to loving anyone was what she felt for her son, George. They had a kind of rapport that she had never been able to allow herself with Paxton. She admired him, respected him, and he had long since affected a kind of cool, aloof, clinical way of looking at things that eventually led him into medicine, and she was impressed by that too. She liked the fact that her son was a doctor. He was even brighter than his father, she secretly told her friends, in fact, he reminded her a great deal of her own father who had been on the Georgia Supreme Court, and she felt certain that one day George would do great things. But what would Paxton ever do? She would go to school and graduate, and eventually get married and have children. It hardly seemed an impressive path to Beatrice, and yet it was the one that she herself had followed. At her father’s insistence, she had gone to Sweet Briar. And married Carlton two weeks after graduation. But in truth, although she enjoyed their company, and sought it out at every opportunity, she had no great respect for women. It was men who impressed her, who accomplished the great things. And there was no doubt in her mind that the pretty blond child who put her sticky little hands everywhere at every opportunity was certainly not destined for greatness.