The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. It was a humid afternoon, I remember, cloudy and very quite, and I’d just come in from a round of golf. My mother and father were having lunch out in the kitchen. I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick in my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn’t thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once—I was too good for this war.
…
War was for the supporters and those too stupid to grasp its full meaning. I could not mindlessly follow the orders of a drill sergeant; I could not come home in a flag covered coffin. My parents didn’t support the war. But, we did support America. I was torn in half. Part of my body seemed already there: firing on the enemy, holding my base, maybe even screaming in pain. But there was another part of me that longed to run to the north, it wouldn’t be far. A little drive and a swim and I would be there. In Canada.
Alive.
That thought was merely a dream though. I couldn’t leave my family to never return. I couldn’t be the one coward in hundreds of heroes.
A dense fog seemed to carry me through that summer. Then suddenly, as if in a dream, we were in the jungle taking fire. When men are in a platoon together, that is the closest they will ever be to another soul. Those boys, they saved my life and I saved theirs. For fun my friend, Rat, and I would play a deranged version of the game “chicken”. Rat Kiley would toss a smoke grenade at me and I would toss it back until one of us would miss or chicken out. The loser was called a yellow mother. It wasn’t clever, it wasn’t even incredibly fun, but it passed the time. And that was really the goal, pass the time, stay alive. After a while the game got too boring to play anymore. I headed over to play with Mitchell’s yo-yo but I never made it.
In retrospect, my death seems very non-climatic. Almost like killing off a secondary character in some cheap novel just to get the reader’s attention.
When they flew my body home I was surrounded by the corpses of others. Many others. The funeral was on a rainy day and my mother cried. She cried after too. In fact she never stopped crying. After a while she did run out of tears, but she was still crying. The smile that was there when my sister and brother needed it wasn’t there anymore. Soon people forgot that my mom ever did smile. My mother had never supported the war. She had never voted for any of those presidents. She had never agreed to lose her child.
My father cried some, but mainly he sat quietly, his gaze would sometimes sit on an inanimate object while the minutes past and he would stop moving. My sister later told my brother that he almost stopped living in those periods. Sometimes she said she could see the past replaying in him mind, a past when I was there. Or maybe he was gazing into a happier dimension. I was alive in that dimension. I had come home an honored and unscathed veteran. Or maybe I never even left; not when he looked into that dimension. He buried himself in work. His little clinic in Maple Grove, Minnesota boomed with business. He died a very sad and very wealthy man.
***
The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. It was a humid afternoon, I remember, cloudy and very quite, and I’d just come in from a round of golf. My mother and father were having lunch out in the kitchen. I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick in my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn’t thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once—I was too good for this war.
…
War was for the supporters and those too stupid to grasp its full meaning. I could not mindlessly follow the orders of a drill sergeant; I could not come home in a flag covered coffin. My parents didn’t support the war. But, we did support America. I was torn in half. Part of my body seemed already there: firing on the enemy, holding my base, maybe even screaming in pain. But there was another part of me that longed to run to the north, it wouldn’t be far. A little drive and a swim and I would be there. In Canada.
Alive.
That thought was merely a dream though. I couldn’t leave my family to never return. I couldn’t be the one coward in hundreds of heroes.
…
It seemed like I was shipped out to Vietnam the same day. The summer flew by and swept me along with. I was a medic, which was kind of almost perfect. I was going to school to be a doctor when I got back home anyway, so this was great experience. I saw some terrible things. But I also saw great things. I saw my two hands pull out bullets. I saw my medical kit on the ground next to me. I saw my fingers stitching, cutting, and healing. But I also did terrible things. I killed unnecessarily. I got sad. I got distraught. I became someone who I was never supposed to be, and I tortured creatures.
After a while we were put on the Night Life. At first it was okay, but then the darkness started to creep in. It wasn’t as bad for the other guys because they hadn’t be forced to see it all. But I was the doctor, if someone got shot, I saw it. If someone blew up a little, I saw it. I had seen the look on many people’s faces right before death. And it came back in the darkness. It would creep in, it would show me all the things I tried to block in the sunlight. It would bring me back to that village with the baby water buffalo. And I saw it all from a third person view. Floating just behind myself, I saw all my actions. It made me sick. I wanted to tear off my skin. I wanted to crawl outside of myself. I wanted to be the same person I used to be. I wanted to be the person who had received straight A’s through high school. I wanted the kid back who didn’t regret any of their actions.
Two more days of that and it was too much. I doped myself up and shot myself in the foot. I didn’t care what the other guys said anymore. Nothing they were thinking could be as bad as what I thought of myself.
On the way home I tried to imagine explaining to my mother about the things I had done. But she would never understand that it wasn’t me. Or maybe she would understand, but I wouldn’t.
When I got home I saw the tears of joy on my parents’ faces. They both knew I had shot myself, but they didn’t care. Twenty years later I know I would have shot myself again. The only regret I have about that is not having done it sooner. Months sooner. I wasn’t me anymore. Yes, I felt guilty. Yes, now I acted normally. But that made it all the worst.
Ever since I came back I’ve never been to stay in one place. I kind of bounce around from job to job until I find the right fit.
Now I wake up in the night sweating. My wife knows that it’s only war dreams, but she thinks I’m fighting VC. What I really see in those dreams is myself. I’m lying on the ground with my kneecaps shot off, staring down the barrel of a gun at my own face.
***
The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. It was a humid afternoon, I remember, cloudy and very quite, and I’d just come in from a round of golf. My mother and father were having lunch out in the kitchen. I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick in my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn’t thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once—I was too good for this war.
War was for the supporters and those too stupid to grasp its full meaning. I could not mindlessly follow the orders of a drill sergeant; I could not come home in a flag covered coffin. My parents didn’t support the war. But, we did support America. I was torn in half. Part of my body seemed already there: firing on the enemy, holding my base, maybe even screaming in pain. But there was another part of me that longed to run to the north, it wouldn’t be far. A little drive and a swim and I would be there. In Canada.
Alive.
…
I had heard all of the arguments before: “fight for freedom”, “don’t embarrass your family”, “you can’t abandon the land of the free forever”. But the war wasn’t for freedom. It was for…hell who knows what it was for. And as for embarrassing my family, that was just silly. Neither of my parents agreed with the war. They were strictly against it. Embarrassing my family would have been dying in Vietnam for a causeless war. Embarrassing my family would have been coming home without a leg because I didn’t get out of the way while my comrades burned down a village.
My mother had lost a brother as a child. She barely remembers him and talking about it doesn’t bother her too much, but my grandmother died with him. My mother told me once that she could never bear to lose one of her children because she saw how stricken her mother had been. I was sure my family could cope with me living in the neighboring country that provided free health care as opposed to coping with my death.
I headed north the next month. My mother and father had come with me to say goodbye. They told me that they would visit as soon as they could. Around 3:00 a.m. I crossed the Rainy River and by 4:30 I was sitting in Canada trying to figure out how to build my new life.
It was hard at first reorganizing my life to fit a new culture. After Carter pardoned my crime I returned to my hometown. It felt different being back in my hometown, I had missed it for so long, but after about a year I returned to Canada to live there.
Sometimes I feel guilty for leaving my peers to go to war. But I know that I could not fight for a cause that I don’t agree with. I could not cope with what I would have become.
***
I decided to do this for an extended journal because I wanted to follow up on the class project we did. When I told Curt Lemon’s story I tried to at least partially simulate the reaction that my grandmother had to her son’s death. I have heard my mother talk several times about my grandmother’s reaction to John’s death. Ever since then, my mother has truly believed that there is no greater loss than the loss of your own child.
It took me a while to really try to get down Rat’s story properly the way I would have reacted to it. For Rat’s story and Curt’s story I tried to incorporate how I would react along with the character’s reactions.
For the third story I tried to just imagine would I do. My father was drafted for Vietnam but the draft rescinded because of his poor eyesight. I tried to incorporate his reaction to be drafted as well as how he would react if either of his sons were drafted. My mother told both of my brothers that if the Iraq war seemed to be turning towards a draft they were going to go to school in Canada before they were sent to war.
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