THE WAR YEARS

I spent most of the war preoccupied with the study of ballet and the habit of watching on the Nightly News soldiers drag body bags out of the jungle, heave them onto helicopters. Then I’d settle into bed humming, with my transistor radio and Marvin Gaye singing What’s Going On?  The answer was to escalate, and my boyfriend registered with the Selective Service, a lottery that chose more and more men to go to war. I began to study the laws of probability and the cartography of Canada. Vivid to me was the blood stain of a Marine’s suicide on my college library floor. Vivid to me were the stories of enlisted men, who stood randomly on the right side of a room and went to Ankara or Ramstein while their buddies were sent to Da Nang or Camranh Bay. I should have studied the cartography of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. When I was small I studied Germany, that half a country my war-weary father helped to liberate. Now I touch the shoulder of my husband’s flight suit at the back of the closet, listen to his stories of how the supply of tetracycline for STDs would always run out, how he stitched up Viet Cong prisoners only for them to be sent back across the perimeter. His voice hesitates as he recalls recording fairy tales on cassette tapes for his children. His eyes tear like my father’s.

Open Door Magazine August 2021