What it is Like to Go to War (23 page)

I didn’t want to reject her—far from it. But I didn’t want to mislead. There was too much past between us, too much linkage, and perhaps yearning and loneliness. To be sixteen with a baby and no husband, on your own, then seventeen, and then eighteen, must be one of the loneliest situations life can hand us. And here comes the hero back from the war and he doesn’t want to make love and maybe tells her he’s got NSU, even though he’s also afraid of telling her that he’s afraid of the emotional consequences. My God, how we waste our lives hurting each other.

Maree Ann didn’t know what to do any more than I did, but she showed up. She was the only other person, besides my parents, who’d kept the linkage with my past, with my little town, my tribe, as it were.

It was clear that the others of the tribe, “my fellow Americans,” as the politicians say, had worse than abandoned me. Imagine the damage to young Aborigine boys returning from their frightening and mind-altering initiation only to have the villagers pelt them with garbage.

I needed desperately to be accepted back in. I think I ended up assuming unconsciously that I must have done something wrong to have received all this rejection. To be sure, I had been engaged in dirty business. Somebody, usually the man, empties the garbage and turns the compost. But when he’s done, he comes back in the house, he washes his hands, and someone says thank you. War is society’s dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults. What I needed upon returning, but didn’t know it, was a bath.

What I needed was for Maree Ann to sit down with me in a tub of water and run her hands over my body and squeeze out the wrong feelings and confusion, soothe the pain, inside and out, and rub the skin back to life. I needed her to Dutch-rub my
skull with soap until the tears came, and I needed her to dry the tears, and laugh with me, and cry with me, and bring my body back from the dead.

That body had suffered. It was covered with scars from jungle rot. It had had dysentery, diarrhea, and possibly a mild case of malaria. It had gone without fresh food for months at a time. It had lived on the knife edge of fear, constantly jerked from an aching need for sleep with all the cruel refinement of the best secret police torturer. It had pumped adrenaline until it had become addicted to it. There were scars where hot metal had gone in, searing and surprising in its pain, and scars where a corpsman had dug most of it out. There were bits of metal still in it, some pushing against the skin, itching to get out. The eyeballs were scarred where tiny bits of hand grenade had embedded themselves. The inner ears rang with a constant high-pitched whine that ceased only in sleep, when the nightmares started.

That body was shut down against pain as far as I could get it shut. Shut down to where it would not feel a thing, while my mind was still seven thousand miles away, unattached, floating, watching.

I needed a woman to get me back on the earth, get me down in the water, get me down
under
the water, get my body to feel again, to slough off old skin, old scars, old scabs, to come again into her world, the world that I’d left, and which sometimes I think I’ve never returned to. But I kissed her and went home.

When my mother shook me awake late the next morning, she tells me I reached out and tried to choke her. I don’t remember this. At least I didn’t try and choke Maree Ann.

I do remember the careful way my bedroom had been restored with my old letter jacket, pictures, trophies. This care I remember and this a mother can do to welcome someone home—make it feel like a home, not just a house.

We left the next day for Cortes Island, which lies between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland, a favorite place of mine. On the Victoria–Port Angeles ferry I fell asleep. A woman tripped over my feet, startling me. Again I reared up, reaching out to choke her. There was great embarrassment all around, my mother trying to explain to this middle-aged Canadian who was trying to explain how she hadn’t meant to step on me and me explaining how I hadn’t meant to... and how she understood and... In any case, this kid was not ready to go on a public ferryboat ride. This kid was still in the jungle.

My body was trying to tell me I was choking the feminine, but I didn’t get it. Twenty years later I had a dream in which I was going to a wedding. The bride was waiting. A friend asked where the groom was. I had to explain to him that the wedding wouldn’t occur until the groom came home from Vietnam. I had been reading a lot of women writers. This time I got it. The hypermasculine warrior energy has to be balanced by feminine energy, but it must come home to do this.

I think the American people tried to reestablish balance by shaming the masculine principle and leaving a huge chunk of it in the jungle so it wouldn’t bother us at home. This had profound influences on men’s very identity, with profound influences on society. Trying to bring about balance by squelching the masculine won’t work any more than squelching the feminine. Pushing Mars into the jungle of our unconscious results in the frightening energy that fuels gangs, drug wars, and increased violence in general. When the Jesse James gang rode into North-field, Minnesota, to rob the bank, they thought that the town would fall prey to terror just as did all the other small towns they’d raided earlier. They were met by the men, all Civil War veterans, and the gang was destroyed. If drug dealers had shown
up at the school in my 1950s logging town, the men would have been down there with rifles. I am not advocating vigilante justice. I’m talking about a basic attitude about a traditional male role: protecting the community. I’m worried that somewhere between the women’s movement and the nation’s reaction to the Vietnam War, this traditional role came to be viewed as obsolete, even déclassé. Too many men abandoned it. Today we expect the police to do everything. We’ve hired out community protection just as we’ve hired out military service. Unfortunately, there are never enough police, nor will there ever be.

* * *

Many of my compatriots are still not back from the war. Some are still in the bush, in places like Alaska or Montana. I am not. This is because some things were done right. Recall my recurring nightmare of slashing and being slashed in the muddy Ben Hai. There was always a corpsman who pulled me from the water and got an IV tube into my arm before I died. The corpsman is a combination of warrior and healer. Without my being aware of it, this corpsman was constantly at work when I came back and got into that self-destructive, and other-destructive, round of drugs, alcohol, and empty coupling.

My usual pattern when somebody hurts me—and I was hurt badly coming home to America—is to put out the antiaircraft guns, set up the land mines and claymores, string the barbed wire, and just let the sons of bitches try to hurt me again.

The first break in my defenses was made by an old friend from my secret society at Yale. Biggs was working for a senator at the time. He’s now a lawyer in New England. He would call
me several times a week and just talk to me. He got me to rent a little house at the beach with him. He’d pick me up, every weekend, no matter how messed up I was, and we’d drive over to the Maryland shore, and the first thing he’d do upon arriving would be to fix a truly sensuous hamburger—lovingly “moojied up,” as he called the process, with unexpected ingredients, including substantial amounts of hash. This didn’t help my drug problem any, but Biggs wasn’t into therapy. He was into friendship. He pumped blood back into me, weekend by weekend, by the simple act of being with me.

Ben was an older friend, a political commentator and writer. He’d have me over to his house in Maryland and just let me spend time with his family. He’d explain Jewish holidays to me and talk politics. One day I went with him to buy groceries and I tried to buy some beer. The man wouldn’t sell any to me because he thought my identification was faked. Ben lit into him. “This guy’s just come back from Vietnam. He’s been old enough to kill people for us and you don’t think he’s old enough to buy a beer. Sell him the goddamned beer.” The man did. It wasn’t the beer. It was the first public support. In fact it remained the only public support I ever got until the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a very welcome change in the public’s attitude toward returning veterans.

We have grown, and to be fair, the majority of people in the peace movement did not treat the returning veterans badly. Small towns in the Midwest and South welcomed their veterans home. I experienced kindness as well.

There was the sister of a Marine friend who was still in Vietnam when I was at Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington, D.C. He had written to her saying I was probably finding it hard to meet girls. This was true. The phrase “politically incorrect”
hadn’t been invented yet, but I was a living prototype. She invited me to her house several times. There I could talk to her and her friends. One of them became my first wife, Gisèle.

There was a friend from another small town next to my hometown who was stationed in Washington with the Navy. He and his wife let me sleep in their living room while I searched for a hard-to-find apartment. I was there several months.

There was a group of girls who worked at the CIA who decorated my guitar case for me. I still keep it.

Salley was the sister of another Marine friend. He’d also asked her to call. One day, when she was in town for a peace rally, she did. She was a senior at Mary Washington College and lived in an isolated farmhouse near the Wilderness west of Fredericksburg with several other girls. I’d get off duty late at night and drive down, hoping someone was still up, anticipating and then receiving the joy of seeing their mellow light from the farmhouse window in the winter-bare forest. The girls were still awake. My welcome would be warm.

These simple contacts, even if I wouldn’t allow them to go very deep, made it possible to avoid another self-inflicted wound. The CIA needed people to train hill tribesmen in Laos. I was approached—flattered. “Lieutenant Marlantes, we’re very impressed with your war record. You might know So-and-So from Yale. We get some of our best men from Yale.” It appealed to me. More bloody transcendence? No, just escape, from pain, from the feeling of being wrong. I had all the skills. They’d put my salary in a tax-free 10 percent savings account. Although this was not part of the official pitch, it was clear there would be all the dope and girls I’d ever want. It would be the parties without the telephone call from the angry and hurt husband the next day. And there would be the biggest drug of all, and one I still miss,
the passionate intensity of life on the edge. It was perfect heroic self-destruction.

Had it not been for these few who showed me what I needed, and a timely letter from E. T. Williams, the warden of Rhodes House, inviting me to retake my scholarship at Oxford, which I thought I’d given up by going off to the war, I might have gone for the brass ring instead of the gold one. I might have taken the short-term jolt of adrenaline and power and probably never reintegrated into society.

The warden’s offer took me out of the country, away from the anger, pain, and humiliation. It took me away from drugs, because Oxford was, and still is, for all its pretensions otherwise, a pretty middle-class sort of place. Most important, of all the right things about my homecoming it connected me with a group of women at Oxford whose ability to feel had not been politicized away.

They healed me simply by letting me sit in their rooms, drink their tea, and listen to them talk, which I did nearly every afternoon for two years. One of them took me home with her for Christmas. Another invited me to her home in Switzerland over spring break. Another asked me to her twenty-first birthday party, where she played the piano for us. One invited me to her wedding. They accepted me. I wasn’t wrong. They brought me back to life, pouring tea and life back into me by the orange glow of their electric coil heaters. I’ll never cease to love them for it.

It is primarily women who reintegrate the warrior back into society, the energy of the queen, not the king. Women carry this queen for most young men. Joking about men getting in touch with their inner woman aside, this is healthy, but it usually doesn’t happen until they’re quite mature, at least in their forties. When a young man comes home from war, he’s all testosterone and he’s scary.

When Cúchulainn, the warrior hero of the
Táin
, returned to the walls of Emain Macha from combat, the three heads of Nechta Scéne’s sons with him, a swan flock he’d captured fluttering above him, a wild stag behind his chariot, he turned the left chariot board toward Emain in insult,
⁷⁸
and he said: “I swear by the oath of Ulster’s people that if a man isn’t found to fight me, I’ll spill the blood of everyone in this court.”
⁷⁹

“Naked women to him!” Conchobar mac Nessa (the king) said.

The women of Emain went forth, with Mugain (the queen), the wife of Conchobar, at their head, and they stripped and showed their breasts to him.

“These are the warriors you must struggle with today,” Mugain said.

Cúchulainn “hid his countenance” and immediately was thrown by the warriors into a cold bath, which began to boil from his heat and burst the vat. They threw him into another vat and that boiled with bubbles “the size of fists” and then they threw him into a third vat and he warmed it to the point where its heat and his own were equal. At this point Mugain clothed him in a blue cloak with a silver brooch. He at last has shed his warrior garments and is ready to be part of the community again. Then he “sat on Conchobar’s knee” (the king’s knee, not the throne, and certainly not on the floor) and “that was his seat ever after.”

Can you imagine how much raw courage it must take for a woman to stand naked and defenseless in front of a raging boiling warrior like this? See yourself, on the empty plain, a cold damp
wind blowing in from the sea, chilling your naked legs, making goose bumps on your back, stirring the hair on your head and vulva, tightening your exposed nipples. There you stand, naked in front of rude wooden walls, the mud beneath your feet, your king powerless to resist this onrushing force, a man who can kill anyone who stands in his way, a man boiling with battle rage, the very air above him captive to him, vibrating with the spirit power of wings and the wild stag of all the hunts that ever were tied captive to his chariot. And you stand there, small and straight, or maybe fat and a little foolish looking, but you stand your ground, totally vulnerable. And you stun him like a bird from a slung stone.