“This happened in January.”
“And we’re being told now?”
Michael shrugged and sighed. “Apparently some kind of negotiations were under way, to try to determine if Mike and some other boys had been taken prisoner. To ascertain, at least, that they were alive... or...”
“No,” she said bitterly. “I’ll tell you what this is about — god-damnit! This is something secret, isn’t it? And they didn’t want it getting out! Because of the cease-fire and...”
Her anger choked off the words.
Michael said, “Do you want me to tell you about it? Or do you want to read what the staff sergeant left us...?”
She swallowed thickly; she felt numb. She shook her head. “Tell me, Michael. Just tell me.”
“Well, putting it simply, Mike’s position was attacked by communist forces — troops and tanks, they were invaded, literally. This was in a place called Tanh Canh Base Camp, Kontum Province... South Vietnam. He was in a water tower observation post and got the warning out, saved a lot of lives. Right away they started what are called E & E operations — evacuate and evade — and a group of perhaps fifty men tried to get away from hundreds.”
“Is this... this where Mike was company clerk?”
Michael hesitated. Then he said, “Darling... that’s something Mike told you, to put your mind at ease. He’s been in combat more or less since he got there.”
“Oh God. Oh Jesus. And you knew?”
“I knew. Be mad if you like, but he made me promise not to tell you.”
She felt her chin quiver, but willpower — and the sedative — allowed her to maintain her composure long enough to hear the rest of it.
“Go on,” she said. “Go on.”
“Helicopters came in to rescue these boys, and Mike was among those staving off the onslaught of enemy troops. I guess he had a... a machine gun, and was just facing them as they came.”
“Mike and... and how many other boys?”
“At the end it was just Mike. They were coming down a hill, the enemy, and he... he was going up. That’s what he was doing when the last helicopter left.”
“They... they left him there? Just left—”
“They had to get away while they could, and...”
“And no one thought he had a chance?”
Michael nodded gravely.
“Did he have a chance?”
Michael’s eyes tightened. “Yes. With a machine gun? He had a chance, all right. He was using a Thompson.”
“A what?”
“It wasn’t government issue. These kids use whatever they can get their hands on — it was a tommy gun.”
“What... like in the old gangster pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Where would he get such a thing?”
Michael said nothing.
Over the years, another of the rare things they had fought about was Michael’s weird insistence that his two children learn how to handle firearms. Since Michael was not a hunter, Pat always thought this was ridiculous. Stupid. Barbaric. And yet, since grade school, both Mike and Anna had been members of the Crystal Bay Gun Club, with their father — a bonding exercise the mother had never condoned.
She glared at him. “You? You? You sent that weapon to him?”
“If he’s alive,” Michael said, “that’s the reason. You can kill a lot of people with a machine gun.”
She let out what was only technically a laugh. “Well, I guess you would know.”
“Baby...”
She got up and poured herself more coffee; she was filled with rage and disgust and grief, but it was all just bubbling, like the coffeepot.
“If he’s alive,” she said, sitting, “where is he?”
“A camp somewhere.”
“A camp somewhere. You make it sound like where we used to send him and Anna in the summer. Prison camp, you mean.”
“Prison camp... He’d be a POW. But with the war over, the Cong won’t be as rough on those kids. We’ll make deals; we’ll negotiate.”
“We?”
“The government.”
“What, fucking Nixon?”
“Patsy Ann — don’t make this something political.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t politics killing our kids? Haven’t these bastards killed Mike?”
He shook his head. “We don’t know that. We can hope.”
“You hope. I think I’ll settle for despair. It’s easier.”
“Something the sergeant said...” Michael’s voice was strange, strained.
“What?” She looked carefully at her husband. “What?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you.”
“What, Michael?”
“They say he’s being put up for the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
She didn’t say it. She didn’t have to. Just like his father...
“If he gets it, Mike’ll be the last Medal of Honor winner of the Vietnam War.” Michael laughed. “How about that? Like father like son?”
And Michael collapsed onto the table, weeping, tears streaming over the yellow-and-white daisy design.
She scooched her chair over near him, and patted his back, and soothed him. They would take turns, over the coming days, weeks, and months, knowing that if they both succumbed at the same time, they could not bear it.
Three
A week passed in a blur of tears, recriminations from Pat, apologies from Michael, anger from Anna, and constant phone calls from well-meaning friends, relatives, and business associates who put Michael (he protected his wife from these) through the painful procedure of filling them in about Mike and his MIA status.
Pat was doing better, now — she was on Valium, and she clung to a quiet, almost religious belief that Mike was after all only missing, and would be back in the family’s bosom when all the POWs were returned in the aftermath of “that terrible war.” She never used the word “Vietnam,” or for that matter “war,” without preceding it with “that terrible.” She had no anger in her voice — perhaps that was the Valium — reflecting an acceptance of the difficulty of life, but despite this seeming fatalism, nowhere in her was there room for the possibility that Mike might be dead.
Michael, however, knew that the odds for their son’s survival were poor. He wondered — deep in sleepless nights, particularly — whether it was wrong of him to withhold from his wife the complete truth. He had thought that the eventual news (if it ever came) that Mike had been killed would be better handled by Pat after she had at least adjusted to the MIA status. That the process of letting go of her son would be better if a gradual one...
Now she was so deep in denial, caught up in (what was probably) the illusion, even the delusion, that Mike would certainly return to them (“any day now”), that her husband wondered if he might have done her more harm than good.
Perhaps only harm...
That first afternoon — when the young staff sergeant had come around, Pat passing out, Michael rushing home to her side — their physician (and country club friend) Dr. Keenan, who was home just a block away, had hurried over to give Pat a sedative.
And Michael had ushered the young staff sergeant into the living room, where the boy had stood in stiff respect and — with the faintest tremor in his voice — delivered to the father the dreadful news.
“Mr. Satariano, as a representative of the president of the United States and the United States Army, it is my duty to inform you that your son, Lieutenant Michael P. Satariano, Jr., was declared missing in action after a military action on January 7, 1973, in the Republic of South Vietnam in the defense of the United States of America.”