A few days later, the Warlords were flown up near the demilitarized zone, beyond an area known as the Rock Pile, near Khe Sanh, where earlier that year a Marine base had been pinned down for 122 days by enemy fire. They dropped as usual, but this time it was right at the edge of a major Vietcong encampment. Every Warlords mission had two gunships and a spotter helicopter for support, but when hundreds of guns opened up, the sky cleared in a hurry. The first gunship went down; the pilot of the second was shot through the heel of his foot. He managed to pull out of the spin and limp home, but the men on the ground were left behind. It took the 196th Infantry Brigade to extract them. By then, the Warlords had taken wounded, and Bill Bezanson had lost his best friend, Lurch (Richard Larrick, rest in peace), to a North Vietnamese bullet. He flew back to base, buried the whole month in his head, and went on with the war.
By the time he came home in November 1968, Bill Bezanson didn’t want to have anything more to do with the United States Army or the war in Vietnam. He didn’t want to be a veterinarian or a forest ranger. The big banner on the Michigan farmhouse said WELCOME HOME, SON, but he didn’t feel like he was home. He and his father went out bass fishing in the eight-foot pram the old man had built by hand. They had always talked on the lake. It was their sanctuary. But this time, they didn’t have much to say.
Bill wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t know where he fit in. On the way home from a relative’s house, where he had gone to show them his dress uniform and medals, a cop pulled him over, looked at his uniform, and snarled, “So you’re one of those baby killers.” He was asked to speak at his high school, the hero returned, and gave an impassioned antiwar speech. When his mother found out, she was mortified. She was such a strict Catholic that she hand washed the church’s altar cloths. She loved her son, but he had changed. He was moody. He was sullen. He was drinking. And now he was antiwar. The war was for God and country and everything else America stood for and believed in, at least for his mother and the “silent majority” of American people who stood by their government on principle. After months of tension, Bill’s mother literally closed the door in her son’s face.
He hit the bottle hard for a while, then he hit the road. As an active member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he gave speeches at PTA meetings and churches, anywhere a group would welcome him. The stories of massacres by American troops were piling up, and a large segment of the public was turning against the war. He didn’t know whether his audiences would be for the troops or against them, but he told them all the truth: Even while he was killing for his government, he lost his faith in the war. He had seen too many deaths, too much destruction, too many burned-out villages and hollowed-out souls. He told them how he had pointed his M16 at a fellow soldier who had taken a female prisoner and told him, “If you cut that woman, I will kill you.” You don’t put a gun to a comrade’s head. Not ever. But especially not in a war zone, surrounded by the enemy. His fellow soldiers thought the woman knew something important. They had no proof, but they believed torturing her for information might save lives. Bill believed they were losing, day by day, the values they were fighting for, and he refused to blur the line between right and wrong.
“It was easy to cross a line out there,” Bill told me. “Good people lost their way.” What had Bill lost? I think he lost his faith not just in the war, but in life. He didn’t know what it meant anymore. He couldn’t tell the good from the bad. He didn’t want that to happen to any other good young men. He didn’t want any more parents to send their boys to Vietnam.
But beyond a few speeches, what could he really do? He drifted. He drank. He’d get a job, work it for a while, and then one morning he’d light out, hitching mostly, not sure where he was going or why. Often, he didn’t even know he was leaving until he was standing on the corner with his thumb in the air. He made friends, but they didn’t last long. There were always people moving into and out of his life, mostly with bottles in their hands. Sometimes he moved because he didn’t like his new friends; sometimes he moved because he liked them too much. He didn’t want to get close to anyone. One summer he found himself in Alaska, so he bought a Harley-Davidson and rode it back to the Lower 48. That was the stupidest thing he ever did, he said, because it was twelve hundred miles of potholed, washboard, washout dirt roads, and his eyes didn’t stop bouncing for a month.
But what difference did it all make? Bill Bezanson was twenty-five years old and he was absolutely convinced that he wouldn’t live to see thirty. That feeling had started in the war. He had carried it home along with his scars and his medals, but he didn’t realize that at the time. It just became normal to feel doomed. A lot of young men came home that way. Set adrift from the normal world, they found each other. It was all they talked about back then, that they were living on borrowed time.
But Bill didn’t die. He just kept going through the motions, day after day, until he found himself in his thirties, with the 1970s winding down, and at almost the same place he’d started twelve years before. The war was over and his anger had cooled, or at least retreated somewhere else to hide. He had narrowed his travels mostly to the sprawling suburbs east of Los Angeles, but he was still working odd jobs, still leaving behind his old life every few months, still hitting the bottle or the road whenever the fear closed in. He’d somehow managed a degree in forestry from Chaffey College in Alta Loma, but beyond that, he was free: no friends, no possessions, no place to be. By June 1979, he was living in yet another Los Angeles suburb, working for a small company that manufactured travel trailers and truck beds and whose name he can’t even begin to recall. He was waiting at a stoplight on a nameless road on the edge of downtown San Bernardino, watching the early morning light burn off the haze of another California morning, when, out of nowhere, change came crashing into his life.
It hit like a concussion grenade, literally smashing down above his head. He heard the strike, then the echo, and instinctively he ducked. He waited, but the world around him was silent. He looked out over the dashboard. There were buildings along both sides of the street, but it was 5:30 in the morning and nothing moved. The alleys were quiet, the windows in the storefronts black. There wasn’t another car on the road. So Bill cracked his door and squeezed out to examine the top of his car. He figured teenagers had thrown something at him. Sure enough, there was a dent, with a black lump in the center. There were impact lines in the metal and liquid running out in several directions.
Then he realized the liquid was blood. And the lump wasn’t a bag. It was a kitten. Someone had thrown a kitten at his car. And from the looks of its broken body, it had been a long throw.
Bill scooped up the kitten and cradled it in his hands. It just lay in his palms, its eyes closed, its head collapsed to the side, its legs curled. The only sign of life was the desperate heave of its chest and a bubbling, rasping sound as it struggled for breath. Bill knew what that meant: a puncture through the rib cage and into the lung. He’d seen a lot of sucking chest wounds in Vietnam. The soldiers in his unit had stripped the plastic wrappers off their cigarette packs and kept them in their kits. Put the plastic wrapper over a sucking chest wound, cover it with a bandage, then a body wrap, and it might save a friend’s life. Bill Bezanson didn’t have a cigarette packet wrapper that morning in San Bernardino, California, so he did the next best thing. He put his thumb over the puncture to close the wound, swiped his other hand downward over the kitten’s face to clear the blood from its nose, and started looking for help.
There was a veterinarian’s office down the block. There were no lights on, but Bill was pretty sure he’d just seen someone enter the building. He left the car idling at the intersection and started running. When he reached the vet’s office, he started kicking the door. The kitten gurgled, covered with blood.