Resilience (2 page)

I always saw, I always said

If I were grown and free
,

I'd have a gown of reddest red

As fine as you could see
,

To wear out walking, sleek and slow
,

Upon a Summer day
,

And there'd be one to see me so

And flip the world away.

And he would be a gallant one
,

With stars behind his eyes
,

And hair like metal in the sun
,

And lips too warm for lies.

I always saw us, gay and good
,

High honored in the town.

Now I am grown to womanhood.…

I have the silly gown.

CHAPTER 3
1965

y father was wearing his greens, a foresty olive uniform with a sewn-down belt on the jacket. Like the music I loved, it was a throwback. In the Navy, only aviators wore the uniform. I loved the feel of it, and because it didn't wrinkle or stain like his dress whites, I could hug him hard and feel him. And this day, an early-fall day in 1965, I needed to touch him. I was sixteen years old and he was going to Vietnam. On the day he was to leave, he stood near the end of the low bleachers on the visitors' side of the Chofu High School football field, watching me cheer in my first game as a cheerleader.

And then his duffle bags were in the car, where my mother, my brother, and my sister waited for him. He would say good-bye to me at halftime, and they would drive him to Tachikawa Air Base, and he would fly to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam. The rest of us would go home to our house at Camp Zama, Japan, and wait until his tour of duty was over or until he was injured or until a chaplain knocked on our door and told us he had been killed. Then we could go back to the States, with him or without him. I was lucky; a year later, we went home with him.

He had been to war before—once, in World War II before he and my mother met, and again, in Korea when I was a youngster. I was in elementary school when he was a reconnaissance pilot during the Cold War, when his plane was shot at, likely by North Korean MiG fighter planes in a conflict a bit unreal for a nine-year-old. War was what the base children played to fill a summer—boys against girls—and the cold war cost some of those children their parents, but as real as the images are to me even today of the memorial services for lost pilots and crews, the real costs of that war were an abstraction.

But the Vietnam War wasn't an abstraction to me. We had no television in Japan, where Dad was stationed before Vietnam, but the ways we did get news—the
Stars and Stripes
military newspaper and Armed Forces Radio—were blanketed in this war. No detail was too small for the most interested of audiences. The base on which we lived was the home base for a military hospital nearby to which the Army first brought wounded soldiers from Vietnam, and we would see them at the hospital and, sometimes as they readied to return to war, on base. A quiet, handsome young man, not much older than I, maneuvering in a wheelchair, his one remaining leg in a cast. The war. The bandaged fellow walking with him, with features too large for his face and raw meaty scars across his neck, who never stopped talking. The war. The boy across the table who looked a little like my lab partner in chemistry but who could not look you in the eye. Rows of beds, and a seemingly endless line of casualties, most of whom looked like my brother, my friends.

We would see the wounded, at the Depot, the hospital at Sagami-Ono where the most physically able would sit with a teenage volunteer, or in my case a teenage cheerleader, intended to be a moment of normalcy in a life turned upside down. They might have talked to some of my classmates about what happened to them in the war, what they saw, but when I would see them across the table at the hospital, they all talked about the same thing: going home. Even if they knew they would be headed back to combat, all they wanted to talk about was home. And the home they talked about was the home they left—left when they had two legs, left without shrapnel scars across their chest and neck, left before the images of war that would scar the places where the doctors couldn't reach. That's the home they craved. The one before.

Men like my father have been going off to war for all of recorded time. And all of them have come back from war changed some, and some have come back almost different men. In the wars of early civilization it was called a trembling; later it was shell shock, then battle fatigue; finally, in the 1970s, we gave it a medical name—post-traumatic stress disorder. All were a form of war neuroses, but whatever the name, many of those men who went to war as courageous soldiers came home with the war still inside them. Courageous or cowardly, strong or weak, there was no predicting it. A solder blinded at the Battle of Marathon when he witnessed the warrior to his side struck dead. An infantryman who developed a facial tic after stabbing an enemy soldier in the face with a bayonet. Physical manifestations of a psychological wound. A Vietnam veteran awaking in a sweat with a half-remembered horror played out in the darkness. And it is repeated war after war. The Greatest Generation from World War II was not simply too humble to take credit for their accomplishments in battle (though they were often that), they were also good men too stunned that what they had seen was now part of their own life story. The son of a dairyman being asked to shoot young German boys, his own age, as they emerged wounded from a foxhole. They watched men with whom they had eaten dinner the night before be blown into unidentifiable pieces. Maybe if they never said it out loud, it would not be so. But it was so, and too many died years after the war with their stories silently eating at them from the inside.
Life
magazine described Tom Lea's painting of a tormented World War II marine as “the two thousand yard stare,” looking out at nothing at all, unable to focus on the world that was close enough to touch.

Some from Vietnam tried to quiet the war within with drugs or alcohol. They had left for war as young men who made Mother's Day cards and helped their grandfathers bring in firewood, who tried three times to call that girl in their biology class before getting the courage even to say hello. They had served because they were called or because they felt a duty or because they had nowhere else to go. They left as young men and came back as old men. They were, as are all soldiers from chess boards to desert battlefields, actors in a play gone awry, when all the ways in which we avoid unspeakable inhumanity to one another have failed. Only, it wasn't just knocking over someone's knight. It wasn't figurative at all. They witnessed and lived the worst horrors that man can perpetrate on man. It must be impossible to go back to the spirit of the boy making that Mother's Day card. And some did not, and the mothers and wives and brothers and fathers recognized only the physical man who returned from war.

Ajax went off to the Trojan War and came back a still man, half-empty. Near the end of this terrible war, Ajax expected an honor befitting his heroics, but the honor went elsewhere, and Ajax went mad. Perhaps the honor, had it come, might have forestalled the madness; perhaps nothing would have warded it off. But Ajax's madness played out as he committed atrocities against animals as if they were human enemies. His story is tragic, but the universality of it is made very clear by Tecmessa, the wife to whom he returns in Sophocles' play. He is forever changed by war and by his recognition of what he is capable of doing. She begs for help for him, “He used to grieve but never wail aloud—just a deep moan, like from a lowing bull. But now, overwhelmed, he takes no food, no drink, sprawled in silence.” His body had returned to her. She wondered when the rest would return. The answer was never. Tecmessa begs for someone to lift this burden from her husband, but it does not happen, cannot happen. Ajax is someone else now, and despairing his new monstrous self, he eventually takes his own life.

Blame is not an issue here, except perhaps in some geopolitical sense. But in terms of these lives, Ajax has not failed, the marine with the two-thousand-yard stare is not too weak, and the son of the dairyman is not a monster. It is war—brutality beyond what we can reasonably absorb—that is to blame.

Wives from Tecmessa's day until now have wished that they could say the thing that would let their men go back to “before,” that would put everything back where it belonged, where the men they loved were not sprawled in silence or off someplace two thousand yards away. I know, as these wives know, that wishing will not return life to “before.” “Before” is forever gone.

When my son Wade died, I spent so many days or weeks or months trying to find a way to make it not so, to have him live. The American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay writes of this desire in her lovely poem “Interim”: “How easily could God, if He so willed, set back the world a little turn or two! Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!” That's all we want. A little turn or two. And Wade is alive, and the cancer is gone, and my husband turns away from the ludicrous words “You are so hot.” Just a turn and all these things can go away and we can go back to having a freckled son. Just a turn and the ninety-some years that my grandmothers lived will be mine, too. Just a turn and the misery of having your past and your future taken away by something so unpleasant as a woman with nothing but idle time to spend hanging around outside fancy hotels would be avoided.

But we cannot, they cannot turn back. This is the life we have now, and the only way to find peace, the only way to be resilient when these landmines explode beneath your foundation, is first to accept that there is a new reality. The life the army wife knew before her husband went to war, the life of the patient before the word “terminal” was said aloud, the life of the mother who sat reading by her son's bed and not his grave, these lives no longer exist and the more we cling to the hope that these old lives might come back, the more we set ourselves up for unending discontent.

Each time I fell into a chasm—my son's death or a tumor in my breast or an unwelcome woman in my life—I had to accept that the planet had taken a few turns and I could not turn it back. My life was and would always be different, and it would be less than I hoped it would be. Each time, there was a new life, a new story. And the less time I spent trying to pretend that Wade was alive or that my life would be just as long or that my marriage would be as magical, the longer I clung to the hope that my old life might come back, the more I set myself up for unending discontent. In time, I learned that I was starting a new story. I write these words as if that is the beginning and end of what I did, but it is only a small slice of the middle, a place that is hard to reach and, in reaching it, only a stepping-off place for finding or creating a new life with our new reality. Each time I got knocked down, it took me some time just to get to acceptance, and in each case, that was only part of the way home.

We all want a personal story line with a happy ending, understanding that in some abstract way it has to be punctuated periodically by some grief and heartache. Oh my goodness, did I want it. I was the heroine in every book; I was the poet; I was the singer or the one to whom every song was sung. I was, by any measure, ridiculous in the way I insisted that my life would be some idealized story, unachievable not only in life but in anything but the most saccharin of fiction. And in my story, the inevitable griefs could not be permanent and the unavoidable heartaches had to be curable by a corrected misunderstanding or by some perfect tenderness that thoroughly erases all pain. We so desperately want a map that lays out in serene pastels the paths our lives are supposed to take that we create them, we gravitate to them, we embrace and internalize them, all to no good end, for as my friend Gordon Livingston says, when the map does not comport with the ground, the map is wrong. In my life, the map has almost always been wrong.

We will each have hardships that are more difficult than we imagined we could ever face. I have cancer. It consumes my life in ways I cannot control. Long after my initial treatments, my hands and feet are still numb, the general numbness disturbed only by a tight and constant tingling. My hair, once perhaps the most reliable of my features, is thin and sparse, and I see no real prospect of that changing. My schedule is now and always will be determined by infusion appointments and MRIs. Every Christmas is my last well Christmas, or it could be.

When the Maytag plant closed in Newton, Iowa, in October 2007, the last of the four thousand workers who had once worked for Maytag in Newton, whose parents and grandparents had worked for Maytag, left the plant that had been the center of life in Newton for 114 years. The plant was known as a place where everyone was family. When there was a death or a divorce, they all shared the pain. When someone's son went off to war, all their sons were leaving and they grieved and worried as one. And when there were good days, they would play softball or have water fights in the summer or work all night when they were snowed in, as they were in the winter of 1973. So ingrained was their job with their community and their sense of being that they called themselves Maytagers. It was who they were, and then, because of global economic forces or because of the notion of an executive who did not know them or the willingness of someone half a world away to work for wages that could not feed you in Newton, Iowa, it all ended. Some of them could see it coming, like a malignancy, but they didn't know when it would kill the Maytager in them. All they knew is that one day it would and there was nothing they could do about it.