Resistance (4 page)

The police will have a talk with the boy, Gileathal explained, get some idea of who he is, what his family situation is. Then they will find a place for him until they determine what to do. It could be that jail is the right place, so then there would have to be a trial. But perhaps some other course will be found.

“You’re right,” Gileathal said to me, “he’s sick. And it’s the sickness we must treat. Once you have experienced such insults and wounds,” he warned, gesturing at my hand, “if you’re not careful, your original position here—to condemn him—will become your only position.”

I fell in easily with his thoughts.

The thumb healed up well enough after a couple of months. “Aiyee,” Gileathal would occasionally exclaim in mock despair over the quality of my finish work in the shop. “Let us hope he’ll one day be a skilled cabinetmaker again, not a fellow continuing to borrow against our impeccable reputation here.”

The older boy was a short time in prison and afterward went to see a healer. One morning he pulled up to the shop with a load of salvaged teak boards on a motorcycle truck. He unloaded it wordlessly and putt-putted away.

Something I never discussed with Gileathal afterward was how in those months after the incident I was able to reduce the height of the protective wall I had always kept around myself. I can only understand it this way: a fear of never fitting in, which I had carried all my life but which I had not been aware of, began to dry up. In its place came a sense that I had finished with something. When Belinda hugged me at night, I didn’t any longer move quickly to free myself from her embrace. I no longer made light of her impulse.

When I went over these changes in myself, lying in bed at night, I would sometimes recall a woman named Kauko Hirai. She lived near Abashiri in northern Hokkaido. Like her father, a university professor there, she had never married. For many years she had run a commercial nursery on several hectares of land they owned together. In the past we had enjoyed each other’s company with more than ordinary intensity. She was a discerning collector of folktales, especially among the Ainu, the traditional people of Hokkaido, nearly wiped out by militant Japanese during the Meiji Restoration in the nineteenth century. It was from her that I first learned of the ability of a brown bear, their
eper,
the dominant animal in Ainu culture, to heal itself. I had long held on to this image, a bear choosing among many small roots the one that would promote the healing of a wound.

I had to tell Belinda the story one day.

I wrote Kauko. She wrote back immediately to say that, yes, there was some work for me to do at their home and to please come if I could. Also, another old friend of ours, Naoki Kurasama, had developed some problems that were forcing him to close his furniture shop. Maybe I could talk with him about the shop, she wrote.

So in 1982 I got ready to leave again, to say good-bye at the age of thirty-six to Gileathal and his family and fly to Delhi, and then on to Narita, where I would take the train to Haneda and catch a flight to Abashiri. It was a risk, to consider making a home in Japan, but less than many I’d taken. And what I was now able to put to work, I had not possessed before.

Gary Sinclair, cabinetmaker, land
activist, editor,
Indigenous Culture:
An International Journal of Folklore,
on leaving Kitami, Hokkaido

Traveling with Bo Ling

Innocence is a theme of mine. I could begin with Vietnam, myself, though you might well have in mind another place. The scene: rape, pillage, murder, torture, and humiliation beyond anybody’s law. A theater of depravity, hypocrisy, self-delusion, and violent compulsions of every sort. I learned two things in Vietnam: suffer harm, take risks, even commit murder to protect the people around you. Let the reporters elucidate the meaning of “freedom” back home in the slo-mo heartland. Let them parse
democracy
over cracked crab and a good Chardonnay. And I learned this: police your own people. If you don’t, what they do, or attempt to do, will harm or diminish you all.

No one is around to see, understand, and a man swerves to hit a dog. The dog lies dead in the road. If the dog were a problem, say an old girlfriend, the problem would be over. On another day the man swerves toward another dog, but he must chase after this one a little, running up over the sidewalk to get it. A witness, a man his age, gives him a sly smile. Is it out of envy? Is it out of admiration, out of fear? The man has a meaning now, a mission: to hunt down dogs.

He wonders why they run.

Many who lost their innocence in Vietnam didn’t want to. They thought they did, until they got up close. The loss of innocence, in such killing fields as I saw, was compelled. It could not be avoided. This is not the same as making an informed decision to step into mayhem, or simply stumbling into carnage, once, unprepared. The sudden hum in the spine and scrotum, the turgid-ness of the forebrain, the looseness of the bowels that come with such exposure are, for some, not warning enough. The loss of innocence becomes an appetite to experience the loss again. For others, being suddenly stripped, the collapse of the façade of one’s gentility, brings with it a peculiar feeling of debt, and the maddeningly elliptical question of who pays for someone else’s loss of innocence.

Or consider a loss of sexual innocence, whether by force or choice. Remembered as a loss, it can contribute to a life of grief, a life of anger or numbness. What comes of the choice to no longer be innocent is different for every pilgrim; but to choose is to risk a region of the soul.

Here is an anomaly: a man pausing to reload a weapon glances sideways into a room where another man in his platoon is raping a girl. He holds her up with one hand against a wall by her throat. The witness may feel indelibly stained. The moral combustion may direct his fury into some defilement of his own. Or the scene may end forever his curiosity, his taste, for inflicting harm. Or consider this: during dinner a young woman decides she will make love for the first time, with this boy sitting across from her. He, too, is innocent, their sex is clumsy, and the union lasts a lifetime. Or his sex is mechanical, sophisticated, and when he departs he is gone forever. He leaves her with something she won’t forget.

Until our final day, no matter how adventure-some, we are destined to remain innocent of experience—innocent of certain musics and exotic dishes, this or that climate, of the sensation of parachuting from a plane or breathing underwater from a tank of air. I mean innocent here, not ignorant. Ignorance suggests a cut of willfulness. Innocence implies lack of opportunity. The bigot is ignorant. The man in remotest Congo who has never seen a white is conceivably innocent of the white race.

We didn’t know what we were getting into in Vietnam; the innocent as well as the ignorant came home wounded. And we’ve been trained to the belief that innocence can never be recovered. You can’t not have murdered if you have. You can’t choose not to have seen what you regret, not to have been aroused by what you later condemned.

Who is the enemy? we fully trained soldiers asked ourselves in Vietnam. The corrupt Diem family? Francophobes among the Chinese? The lieutenant’s West Point professors? The phatic orators in Congress? The corporate carney men? Us? An argument no one ever settled. The question itself was a luxury, a needling distraction. Five minutes before he stepped out of an armored personnel carrier and took a rocket-propelled grenade through his abdomen, a corporal in my platoon said, “Evil—it’s in the DNA, man. We dig it.” As witness, perpetrator, and victim, he was then complete in his knowledge of death. And my innocence, of what it meant to become a blind man by virtue of those very same fragments, a man without a scrotum or a penis, ended. In the flash oven of the APC behind me, the other six were incinerated.

When I returned from Vietnam, my father told me I was now no longer ignorant (he meant innocent) of the world, the world of real politics, of the ideology and economic investment that compel war, as it had been personally inflected for me at Dak Phong Lu, a three-minute firefight that left forty-six of seventy alive, some barely, after a volcano of light and heat so unremitting glass dripped from the vehicles like syrup and of some of us nothing was found.

He was sorry for all that had happened. I could have told him that some of what I had learned, certain twists of logic and desire within human nature about which I was no longer uninformed, I did not actually have to experience in order to imagine. Isn’t this one reason, I wanted to say, why men wrote war books,
Paco’s Story, Dispatches, The
Things They Carried, A Rumor of War
? Must each man kill in order to truly abjure the killing? Did men have to brutalize in order to understand the capacity?

It would have been cruel to confront him, a veteran of Omaha Beach and St.-Lô. I asked, “What
is
the lesson of war, Dad?” He said to be vigilant.

After a period of adjustment, a time of confusing and turbid bitterness, during which I made a nuisance of myself at social gatherings by drawing in innocent people—innocent of war, unaware of my intentions—with a recital of my grievances, seducing them through the pity they felt for me, then bombarding them with an annotated list of the murderous regimes our country has always supported, because their economies were good for American business, after those years of violence and fury, of serving the human compulsion to blame, I gave up attacking the innocent. (I couldn’t abide the ignorant from the beginning.) After twelve years of this, with much help—the best of the therapists, no surprise, was another vet—I edged myself out into the pool of life again. My own loss of innocence had kept me a prisoner of my wounds during those years. By opening the door and walking out of that room, I regained a measure of that same innocence.

Twenty-two years after I came home from the war I married a North Vietnamese woman. She, too, was blind. We met in Santa Cruz, California, the town I’d grown up in and where she’d lived with the man who brought her there, who blinded her with lye for looking at another man. Few who pitied—or lamented—our circumstances knew I had not the means to help make a child, nor that there were many nights when we barely got ourselves across the minefields of each other’s bitterness and rage. The latter was too private for us to reveal, the former a crude bulwark of our dark humor.

It was Bo Ling who suggested, after we had been married two years and gotten a small house north of Santa Cruz, near Pigeon Point, that we go back to Vietnam.

We flew to Ho Chi Minh and then up to Da Nang, Tourane to the French. From there someone drove us up to Hué, then through Quang Tri, the country of my other baptism. Another fifty miles up the coast was Long Dai, a small city on a river where once Bo Ling had lived and where, in fact, I had killed some people.

We tilted our heads back in the rush of air passing over the open car as we drove, like dogs ranging with keen noses, our hands brushing over each other’s and clasping as we took in the countryside life we had known so differently. For each of us, sightless, the experience was like not quite being there but moving instead through a vivid recollection. What was lost on us, the shape and color of the fields, the hesitant wave of a stranger, was a gentle reminder of the fallibility of even the most earnest memory.

Despite our impairment, we got on all right. With infinite patience, Bo Ling’s mother, Xuân Nhung, managed to keep us both on the road as she led us from place to place on our large-wheeled tricycles, to visit friends, to describe for us, to let us recall. The smells of the jungle, the acrid odor of wood smoke, the distant bell clang of water buffalo, the sputter of small motorbikes, the febrile heat brought back to me first the place and not my bravado, not the tang of gore, the local labyrinth of corruption, our hopeless pursuit of victory. That once-upon-a-time gumbo of piss-fury and grief, though, of shitting fear in the Vietcong tunnels, was never far off. And a recollection of the fantasies of torture and humiliation we concocted, which we swapped with other grunts and did try to practice, settled over me in the dark on the floor mats like a night sweat.

I did not feel regret over the killing. Even as I got to know Bo Ling’s family, her brothers and their children, their neighbors around Long Dai, I regretted nothing. I felt instead some kind of affliction. I felt desolated. It was the desolation men who are drawn to sleek weapons and crisp uniforms feel, when they spill themselves for a cause not theirs, in that last ticking moment alone in Everyman’s no-man’s-land. During those days I’d tremble with the lessons of my innocence recalled, the years I’d given up, like a heroin addict, nursing the anger. Bo Ling’s acceptance was an embayment. My face could not get enough of her body. I could not get enough of our silence together.

We were there a month. As she served me so I understood I served her complex and nearly inscrutable recriminations. We came home washed of the whole thing, having redeemed the insult of our wounds.

We were comfortable in that house near Pigeon Point. But after the trip to Vietnam, cobbling one thing and another together—we were living on my veterans’ benefits, her alimony, and what the U.S. Navy was ordered to send of her former husband’s benefits—Bo Ling and I wanted to finance trips to the Caribbean and to Greece, places where we could depend on the experience of sunshine spilling over us. We continued to lose our innocence on these journeys—the innocence of the overprotected child—trying foods we could taste but not see, searching for music that got inside us so much we’d gyrate together in the privacy of our hotel room. We were working on the long pattern of our life, drawing out what lay buried deep in each other, things that wouldn’t have emerged, we believed, unless they expected to survive.

We heard a story on the radio one night in Morocco, about a blind man who had made himself a world authority on seashells. He did not need to know the color or the pattern. By touch alone, an intricate palpation, he separated one species of conch from another, each limpet, each cowrie, each chambered nautilus from its close relatives. An authority like that, I said to Bo Ling, that would become my goal.

With an intensity I was not capable of before marrying Bo Ling, I concentrated on the education of my fingers. I quickly chose a Japanese art, something that got my attention once in Kyoto, folding paper into the forms of animals and flowers. Origami. As I developed the dexterity that would lead to precision, and refined my touch so I could distinguish grain in my papers, I took an almost sexual pleasure in the work. The levels of perfection I was able to achieve, on occasion, were all I needed to once again feel comfortable in the world. I knew some people bought my creations solely because of the transcendent smile I could now produce without effort, which they saw in a burned-over face with no eyes.

Darkness none of us wishes to know well, just enough to make us wary, alert, educated. It’s light we want, the metaphor for God, as many would have it. The difficulty for me and Bo Ling as we worked, as we talked through our daily lives— making meals, making love—was that at the outset, in seeking an end to innocence, in deliberately seeking a certain measure of knowledge in foreign cities, one has no assurances. Will this be an encounter with darkness or the light, or something in between? Fearful of the dark, we might choose to stay innocent—to our detriment sometimes, sometimes to our benefit.

In my world of folded papers, which became as elaborate for me as childhood interpretations of the Bible, in Bo Ling’s gentle companionship, and in what sometimes felt like a life of trysts for the two of us as we flew to Dakar, to Istanbul, to Cairns, I understood that I had found the finished design of a postwar life, the sleep free of nightmare.

Nearly every day now, it seems, I hear on the radio the protestations of businessmen who have been exposed, tobacco and chemical executives, bankers and corporate tallymen. “We did not know!” they declare. “Had we only known!” they exclaim. “We were misled by others,” they testify, “and are ourselves the true victims of this breakdown in communications.”

They arrogate an innocence few can believe they possess, and the gutted victims of their plots and fiascos—financial, military, social—spiral into oblivion. How many times in one’s life, I would shout at Bo Ling, can a man claim innocence? Can a nation get away with saying “We had no idea how bad things were. Let us punish those responsible, and so preserve the innocent”? What depth of experience with evil does it take, I would demand, how much of the world’s history of goons needs to be taken in, before a person ceases to participate?