We accepted this level of completeness as complete enough and began to wonder what we would do when my severance ran out.
Now that Patience was writing, I’d been thinking about Bill Smith’s occupation a lot. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Bill and Knox at lunch one day. I told Knox I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to use my Vietnam experiences as the basis for a novel. Knox asked me to tell him what I did over there. I talked for an hour. When I’d finished, Knox said I should forget about writing a noveclass="underline" I should tell the story in my own words.
“A memoir?”
“Yes,” Knox said. Bill, sitting beside him, nodded.
“Shit,” I said. “Plenty of people had worse things happen to them in Vietnam. Why should anyone care what happened to me?”
“Sure, maybe that’s true,” Knox said. “But they aren’t writing about it. If you write it like you tell it, you might have something.”
I decided to write a memoir.
Did I have enough to say to make a book? I sat on the bench in my cabin and started listing the events that were still vivid to me. I labeled them with titles like “One Leg” (about trying to haul some wounded grunts to a hospital only to have them all die) and “The Rifle Range” (a sandy field near Bon Song where we were mortared). I scribbled furiously until I ran out of memories. I counted the list. Two hundred and forty distinct events. Plenty for a book. However, though I remembered the details very clearly, I really didn’t know, with any confidence, when they had happened. Vietnam was a confusing time, almost a dream to me. I’d flown thousands of sorties; I’d seen hundreds of firefights—everything blended together. I couldn’t recall, for certain, the order of things. I asked Patience if she had the letters I’d sent her from Vietnam.
“Yeah, asshole, I do,” she said, laughing.
I’d thrown her box of my Vietnam letters into the street on one of our moves in Gainesville a few years before. Patience saw me do it and told me to get them back. I said I wanted to forget about ever being in Vietnam; it was time to forget. “Fine, forget it. But they’re my letters.” She got the box and kept them.
I opened the envelopes and suddenly traveled back twelve years.
18 February 1966
Dear Patience—
Sometimes, the above greeting stops me cold! Dear, Dear Patience I love you so much!
I’ve flown so many CA’s [combat assaults] lately, that it’s getting to be commonplace. The rattle of our own machine guns don’t even make me start any longer. The return fire still makes me, shall we say, anxious. I haven’t taken any hits lately. Today, we went after some wounded troops at an LZ that was under VC mortar attack. They were zeroing-in on the landing pad as we approached, but we escaped (natch).
I’m so very tired of this rot! When we need R&R’s the most, they cancel the program for all officers! Gee whiz and heck! It makes me think black thoughts about the army!
This will be extra short tonight.
I love you.
p.s. Please send some more envelopes.
I felt my face flush. There was nothing literary about my letters to Patience. They were clumsy, flippant, and artless. I seldom talked about what I was doing in them. However, they were enough to fix past events in time for me. I put the 750 pages in chronological order and sorted my list of events to match.
When I got the chronology straight, I decided first to write a few of the scenes to see if anyone wanted to read them. It’s one thing to have a story; it’s another to put it on paper.
The memories came back as I typed. These weren’t my funny war stories. I wrote what I felt then, and the feelings still hurt. The guy in “One Leg” was a grunt whose testicles and a leg were blown off. I had to get him and his four buddies to an aid station fast. I wanted to get them back. I really tried. I felt like I was rushing over trees in the la Drang Valley, again; trying to make it to Pleiku, again; hearing my crew chief say the guy died, again. They all died, again. I saw a glint on One Leg’s wedding band as they dumped him on a stretcher. Tears came for the first time.
I showed my story to Patience and our friend, Rosemary, who was in the creative writing program at the university. They both cried, which I took to be a good sign. I wrote several more scenes, sixty or seventy pages worth, and discovered I had something to say. These were not smoothly written, publishable vignettes; they were stories with feeling and they affected people. I could smooth them out. What else do you need?
CHAPTER 9
February 1979—I decided I needed a break to put my memories in order. I’d read that there was going to be a total eclipse of the sun in February. The path of totality would cross several western states, one of them Montana. I remembered I had a friend out there, James Elliott, Patience’s old boyfriend and a guy I’d known as a kid. I called him up. We hadn’t talked for eighteen years, but, on the phone, it seemed that no time had passed; we got along just great. The only subject that still made Elliott’s voice change was Patience. Otherwise, things were fine. I told him I wanted to come out to see the eclipse. Was he up to an adventure? Yes, and he would pay my way.
I took the train from Waldo, Florida, to Sandpoint, Idaho.
Elliott met me at the station with his girlfriend, Eva. When we got to his place in the wilds of western Montana, I laughed. His house was virtually a copy of mine. It was four feet longer, but everything else was the same including the A-frame upstairs. We sat in his cabin drinking wine and swapping stories about our childhood that put a glaze on Eva’s eyes. Elliott and I took the bottle outside and stumbled around in a genuine Montana blizzard, fell down in the snow, laughed like idiots.
The next day, Elliott, Eva, and I set out in his truck across Montana to rendezvous with the shadow of the moon. We talked about the old days and what we’d done since we split up in New Orleans. I told him I was going to write a book about Vietnam. He smiled dubiously.
We stood on top of a small hill. The light was dim, but not as dim as you’d think with the sun almost completely occluded. I had a piece of exposed X-ray film I used to look at the sun. Even when there was just a sliver of sun left, the light seemed almost normal. Then we saw a shadow approaching from the west. It rushed, flowing over the hills, steady and relentless. It was breathtaking. The wave of darkness hit. Snap! the stars came out. The lights of a little nearby town blinked on. We felt the quiet of sudden darkness. You could only hear the cold breeze rustle among the three of us on that hill. The corona of the sun blazed out from a black disk, a ring of pure energy. I took some pictures of the way the world looked from where we stood. Five minutes later, off in the distance, we saw the light rushing over the mountains, beating back the night. It’s things like this that remind me I’m living on a planet, spinning around a star, somewhere in space.
Elliott took the train with me to Minneapolis. I was stopping there to visit Bill Willis. Elliott had known Bill when we were kids, too, and wanted to see him.
Bill had a proper job for his talents now. He worked at Bell and Howell as a technician and made a nice living. How many guys would still be friends with somebody who’d fired them? Bill was one. He took Elliott and me into his apartment, showed us around the Twin Cities, and even stuffed some cash into my pocket before I left, like a mother.
On the trip back, I remember talking to a woman who asked me what I did. I didn’t know, so I said “I’m a writer” and nearly choked.
I messed around getting my notes and courage together, and then I began writing my Vietnam memoir. The date was May 17, 1979. (I know this only because Patience keeps a journal.) I decided the book would have twelve chapters, one for each month of my tour (August 1965 through August 1966), and I chose to write the November chapter first—when I was in the battle of la Drang Valley in 1965. November was filled with action, and I figured that would be the one to show a publisher.