My mother was in the hospital while I wrote most of this book.
On August 29, 1990, Patience and Jack and I, along with my sister, Susan; her husband, Bruce; my nephew, Sean; and my niece, Bevan, took a boat out into the Gulf of Mexico and sprinkled her ashes on the waves. My father refused to come. None of her brothers or sisters attended or even came to see her in the hospital. There was no love in her family, a sad thing to see.
We drank a toast of dry martinis, a drink she asked for as she lay dying, unable to drink anything. I tossed a full glass, with olive, into the water for her.
My mother, despite having a heart condition most of her life, was an energetic woman. She grew up believing the woman’s place was in the home, but had worked as a grocery checkout clerk when we first moved to Florida in 1945. Once, when my parents were struggling to make ends meet, she suggested that she go to school and become a nurse, but my father refused to allow it. He believed he should be able to provide for us himself. From 1951 to 1958, my mother did physical work on the chicken farm my dad started west of Delray Beach. We had a hundred thousand chickens on this farm, and we—my mother and father, my sister and I—did most of the work. After my dad sold the farm in 1958, moved us to Delray Beach, and became a real-estate broker, they were sufficiently well off that she could become the ideal of her culture—the wife of a successful businessman. She fulfilled her role by keeping our house as neat as a museum display and giving a cocktail party almost every Friday night.
At the age of sixty-four, a disease called lupus, and the drugs used to treat it, destroyed one of her hip joints. After spending nearly a year in a wheelchair, she decided to have the operation for an artificial hip joint. She was frail; the operation nearly killed her.
She called one day, a few weeks after the operation, said to come over, she had a surprise. When we got there, I saw her standing in the living room wearing a brand-new dress, beaming. After a year in a wheelchair, it was a miracle.
Two days later, she suffered a blood clot in her arm and had to have another operation.
She came home for a week, then went back in for other complications. She never left. I see her standing in the living room, smiling, happy just to stand up. I see her in the hospital, withered, in pain, dying. I see a cardboard box of granular ashes and dust.
My father, who had had another stroke, was now an invalid. With his caretaker gone—my mother had actually cooked for him as a cripple—he made conflicting demands of me and my sister. Depending on the whims of his depression, he wanted a new apartment, he wanted to go to a nursing home, he wanted a companion to live with him, he wanted to move in with us.
I had already started drinking scotch, drank more while my mother suffered, but I noticed with alarm that I was now drinking at least a bottle a week and increasing. I’d thought that drinking was a habit of the past, something I’d grown through.
As the date to leave for Vietnam drew near, I began to have more and more symptoms of distress. I refused to acknowledge them. I had made a commitment and I would stick by it. I called Larry Heinemann, told him I was having problems. He told me to try to hang in there.
The symptoms got worse. I began to have chest pains, dizziness, irregular heartbeats. I couldn’t sleep. I really believed that I had overcome all this bullshit, yet here it was, a monster from the past, revisiting. I drank more. If I drank enough, I slept, but I also remembered where that had once led. I was retreating down an unfortunate path. This could not be.
Two weeks before our scheduled departure, I called David Hunt. I told him I wasn’t going with them.
“What? Why?”
“I’m having real problems,” I said. “Stuff is happening to me that hasn’t happened for years. I’m a mess. I don’t want to go over there and be a drag to the others.”
“You know, Bob, this might be an opportunity to face your fears, overcome them.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Or go completely nuts. You don’t know how bad I feel right now, David, and I’m not there yet. I don’t think I harbor any resentment toward the Vietnamese. I might, but I think the idea of just seeing that country—remembering the waste—I think I’m not ready yet. I will go, when I’m ready. Not now.”
“A lot of people are going to be disappointed, Bob. Your book is being translated into Vietnamese. You know who’s going. Everyone’s a respected writer. This is a historical trip. Even Larry Heinemann is coming; he’s your friend, right?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry, David. Please tell everyone that I’m sorry. I’ve got to go with my gut feelings now. I’ve ignored them in the past, and I was wrong.”
I slept that night through.
The next day I felt better. In a week—though I felt badly about missing the trip—I felt the tension subside, I became calmer, more comfortable. While the writers made their tour, I stayed home and wrote.
Someday I will return to Vietnam, find Nguyen Quang Sang—the man who shot down Hueys—and take him for a ride.
I drink, not as heavily. I don’t smoke cigarettes except when I forget at a party or during the holidays. When things are going well in my life, I feel pretty good. Stress brings on the symptoms I’ve lived with since Vietnam.
I have come to realize that Vietnam did affect me, that I’m not crazy.
The effects are losses, mostly.
I lost my career as a pilot.
I lost the children Patience and I wanted when we were first married, brothers and sisters for Jack. Jack lost a normal childhood and adolescence.
I lost a feeling of fellowship. I am different from people who have not seen combat, especially combat in which people died for a politician’s ego.
I lost the belief that I could trust my government.
I very nearly lost Patience. And by staying with me, Patience has become a veteran of another kind of war.
Finally, I have come to realize that the most significant thing I lost in that war was peace.
When Polynesian sailors sail their canoes for weeks at a time on boundless seas without charts or compasses, they believe that they are sitting still, on a vacant earth, and that by moving their paddles correctly, by setting their sails properly, an island, their destination, will arrive on the horizon and come to them.
I move my body carefully and watch the ground pass beneath me and hedges and fences move by me until the steps of my house come to me and touch my feet. I experience the sensation that I am at the center of the universe, focused on what I’m doing, now.
I am looking for peace to arrive.
Copyright
Chickenhawk: Back in the World: Life After Vietnam
Published by Patience Press eBook
©2013 Robert Mason
eISBN: 9781483511481
Publishing history:
First published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Copyright © Robert C. Mason, 1993 All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Mason, Robert
Chickenhawk: Back in the World / Robert Mason, p. cm.
ISBN 0 670 84835 2
1. Mason, Robert, 1942-. 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975—Veterans—United States. 3. Veterans—United States—Biography.