Sleeping on the Perimeter

Gaynell Gavin

Most U.S. soldiers had left Vietnam by the spring of 1973. The war continues, however,  in the psyches and bodies of not only those who were there but also of those who love them.

            My cousin’s legs, chest, and hands were blown up, requiring more than thirty general anesthesia surgeries, but we did get him back alive. It was the end of 1968; he was a twenty-one year old infantry sergeant, and I was a high school sophomore.

            My ex-husband’s brother, who was in military intelligence, agrees with my cousin’s view that the war was about profit, “about food contracts, building contracts, weapons contracts – about keeping all that going.” He and my cousin have never met and know virtually nothing about each other. My cousin is a rather brawny, rural Midwesterner of Irish Catholic descent. My brother-in-law is a tall, skinny African-American from urban Massachusetts. Although from very different backgrounds, they share similar conclusions about Vietnam.

            I do not recall how my brother-in-law and I came to be alone in his mother’s Roxbury kitchen one Sunday afternoon in early 1972 when her house was full of people. But he sat across the Formica table from me and said of his Vietnamese wife, who was expecting their first child, “My home is where she is. She is my home.” His wife is smart, energetic, pretty – a former U.S. embassy secretary with a pale scar on one cheek, cut by a plate glass window when the embassy was blown up. By the end of 1993, they have worn wedding rings inscribed with their marriage date for over twenty-five years. For over twenty-five years, my brother-in-law has also worn a bracelet made from spent casings and given to him by Montagnards who worked with him.  He holds his wrist out so that I can see the brass circling it more closely. “A gift to me,” he says, “from the black people of Vietnam.” Despite the sadness in his voice, it seems to me now that, for a moment, I felt the surge of contentment which surely must have been happiness to have him here, alive.

            In late 1998, while visiting Colorado, I ride from Golden to Boulder with a friend – a tall, rangy former infantryman who has lots of gray in his dark hair. He alternates between obliterating himself with alcohol and fighting to save himself. An engineer for thirty years, he “crashed and burned,” as he put it, after his children were raised.

            The war, he says, was about fear, “about being so scared you shit all over yourself, about having your buddy standing next to you one second and pieces of what used to be him all over you the next. You’re trying to pick these little pieces of him out of your teeth, thinking, Why him and not me?”

            The man is chain-smoking, while driving his ‘Cowboy Cadillac,’ a very large and old white pickup. “The part I couldn’t take of what the Army crammed down my throat was demonizing the enemy, dehumanizing them. I understood it was our job to kill them and theirs to kill us, but pretending they weren’t human, that it wasn’t human beings we were killing – that was the part I couldn’t do.

            “Vietnam was beautiful. You’d look out across the land; you’d see some little girl leading a huge water buffalo. It was beautiful. And green. A peaceful picture. Then the picture would blow up. Literally. It happened to me within twenty-four hours of the time I got there. And I realized, Holy shit, there are people all over the place here who are trying to kill me. I mean these people are seriously trying to kill me.”

            I do not know whether this man will win or lose his long fight, but of course, I hope he will win. He appears in and disappears from my life intermittently. He apologized to me once for his alcohol and unreliability. I was visiting his sister while he, too, was staying there, making repairs to her house. No matter how late into the night he drank, by dawn he was working, and every morning he fixed coffee for me. So, when he handed me a cup of coffee while apologizing for drinking and talking about Vietnam the previous night, I said, “Don’t apologize. You’re still standing, and in my book, you get about ten thousand extra points for that. I doubt you could ever do anything that would use up all those points.” And I meant it.

            He has disappeared, and I do not know if I will see him or hear from him again.

            It was also in 1998 that “an overweight, broken-down soldier,” to use his own description, told me that he didn’t know what I could possibly see in him. We had been introduced at a party several months earlier.  With gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard, he was not unattractive, but neither was he a man I would have otherwise noticed in a crowd. As I chatted with him, our conversation struck me as mildly pleasant but unremarkable. Eventually, it was the way he spoke, as a single parent, of his son and daughter, and his animals – a houseful of rescued stray cats and a dog – that caught my attention.

            Like my cousin, my brother-in-law, and my Colorado friend, this man had served in Vietnam. “Don’t hold it against me,” he said. “I was there three times.”

            “Why?” I asked. “Why were you there three times?”

            “The first two, I thought we were doing the right thing. By the third time I knew better.” He added that if we hadn’t tried to help France continue colonizing Vietnam, Communism would not have become an issue there. “By my third time, I knew we were in the right war, at the wrong time, on the wrong side. But I was a captain by then, a career officer, and I’d learned to take pretty good care of my people, to help keep as many of them alive as possible, as long as possible, against the odds. I didn’t want to leave them.”

            Later, I saw the scars: first the barely-visible one just above his mustache where the rifle sights pressed into his face as his helicopter was shot down, then gradually the other scars, far too many to keep track of which ones came from which battles. I also saw the pile of medals, gotten, he said, at the cost of too many lives.

            A long purple-red scar which runs the length of his sternum is the largest, and one night, lying next to him, my head pressed to the beat of his heart, I traced the scar with my fingers, as I’d done before. “Tell me how you got this one,” I said.

            They’d been fighting on a hill. After he was hit, he said, he was the only one left alive. He pulled a body over him and fell asleep, expecting never to wake up. When he did awaken, it was to the prodding of an enemy soldier’s bayonet cutting his chest, but the soldier either thought he was dead or decided he was close enough to death not to bother with, and went on to other bodies. Again, he drifted into sleep, expecting not to wake up, and again he was awakened, this time by rain, the following day. The rain felt good, he said, cool and cleansing. The third time he fell asleep he did not yet realize the rain had probably saved him and he still did not expect to wake up. For another day, he drifted in and out of consciousness as American reinforcements arrived, and fighting raged around him. On the third day, Americans took the hill and found him among the bodies piled there.

            When he has finished telling me, my head still pressed to his heart, my fingers still on the scar, I tell him it is a sign to me – this scar – a reminder to say thank you for his life, my brother-in-law’s and my cousin’s. But, however much I would like gratitude and love to be enough, they won’t be.

            His dreams are bad and getting worse, he says; he’s trained himself to wake up when he dreams. He awakens twice most nights to walk through the house. Securing his perimeter.

            A psychologist once told me that, no matter how tired they become, soldiers in a combat zone report an inability to sleep. Now, when I can sleep, my dreams are also mostly bad. In one, I stand grounded in a panic of sorrow, as my soldier flies away from me in a helicopter. It flies between telephone wires above me and becomes smaller with distance until it is a lonely black speck. Finally, when I can no longer see the helicopter at all, I wake up crying.

            We start to fight, infrequently at first. The soldier accuses me of looking down on him for having served in the military, of not supporting the war, of disloyalty.

            “How can you say that to me? You’re the same man who said that your medals cost too many lives, the man who said it was the right war, at the wrong time, on the wrong side.”

            I realize that, as I’ve become afraid of his anger, my own fear has begun turning to anger. And what is anger but alchemy: grief encoded and loss transformed?

            I hear the struggle in his voice as it starts to rise; he forces himself to lower it. “Those are only my personal opinions. But combat replaced everyday life for me. I like crisis, love it. In fact, it’s fun. Don’t even try to understand because you can’t and never will.

            “All that matters in a war is keeping the people with you alive. That’s the only thing worth fighting for. It was a better high than anything else I’ve ever experienced or can imagine, and it made me feel more alive than anything else ever has or ever will. Anyway, personal opinions don’t matter in a war.”

            “They matter to me,” I say. “How can you tell me it shouldn’t hurt me that you’ve been hurt? That I should make myself feel nothing about it? How can you even think that’s possible?”

            “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” he says, and I have to wonder if he’s intentionally trying to make me crazy. “People in this country want us when they need us, and then they want us out of sight, so they don’t have to think about us or look at our scars.”

            It is a Sunday afternoon, and we are sitting on the edge of his bed. “You’re talking in clichés and non sequiturs,” I say. “I’m not ‘people,’ and I’ve never flinched from looking at your scars.” I smear tears across my face with my fists. “I’m not the one in this relationship who’s too afraid to look at scars.”

            “I am a behaviorist,” he snaps. “I refuse to live in the past. I’ve put it behind me. I refuse to wallow in pain and self-pity with you.”

            I want to tell him, “If you don’t listen to the part of you that’s screaming, Take care of me, that part will scream louder and louder until it drowns out everything else in your life,” but I can’t get the words out. I want to tell this soldier he can stand down now, it’s his turn to stand down, but instead I manage to say something about having to leave before his children come home from their mother’s because I don’t want them to see me this way. He puts his arm around me, and I sob into his shoulder, crying too hard to speak, too hard to make him know that he is my country – and my war – the country inside of me, that civil war of love and fear.

            In the spring of 1999, my cousin visits. I have made the poor man listen to me rave, which he, accustomed to the women in our family, has done kindly and patiently. As he prepares to leave, do I let up? No, I do not. “How can an otherwise reasonably intelligent man say such a stupid thing to me as ‘personal opinions don’t matter in a war’?”

            “Trying to secure his perimeter, emotionally speaking,” my cousin says. “In a war you try not to let yourself love anyone, but he’s started to let you in, and now you’re too close for comfort. He’s closing the gate on you, reinforcing it with a row of concertina wire, and mining it. Did you hear what I said? Because this is important: He’s booby-trapping the gate.”

            I listen carefully, knowing these two soldiers have hit it off because the previous night, after dinner, they shared a codger bonding ritual: smoking cigars together in the garage, an occasion which lacked brandy only because my cousin had given it up for Lent. I look at him: finishing his coffee, putting on his leg brace, closing a suitcase, picking up the cane he hates using but needs more frequently these days. Then, as he stands beside his van with the purple heart license plates, my bearded and burly cousin pulls me to him, and in the moment that we hold each other tight, I tell him that I love him, and he tells me that he knows. He smoothes my hair and says, “I can try to help him get the help he needs. I talked to him about it. I’m yours by blood. But in a different way, I’m also his by blood. He’ll be all right.”

            I know my cousin wants to believe that. So do I.

            In 1971, when a neighbor died in Vietnam, I found his death shocking, not because he was a terribly close friend, but because of his irrevocable, sudden disappearance from among those individuals with whom the landscape of my childhood and adolescence had been peopled. Without giving it conscious thought, I’d wrongly assumed they’d always be there. My neighbor had become a medic and, like the medic who cared for my cousin, had died trying to help someone else.

            My soldier who lay on a hill during his third tour in Vietnam was – like my cousin when the land mine got him, like my neighbor about whose death I know little, like most of the boys among whose bodies he lay for three days, like most of the boys who fought in that war – considerably younger than my twenty-eight year old son is now.

                        It is with the memory of a close friend who died that In Pharaoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff’s memoir of his time in Vietnam, ends. “[Hugh] loved to jump...I always take the position behind him, hand on his back, according to the drill we’ve been taught. I do not love to jump, to tell the truth, but I feel better about it when I’m connected to Hugh. Men are disappearing out the door ahead of us, the sound of the engine is getting louder. Hugh is singing in falsetto, doing a goofy routine with his hands...He yells, Are we having fun? He laughs at the look on my face, then turns and takes his place in the door, and jumps, and is gone.”

            My soldier tells me he, too, loved to jump. I can hardly imagine jumping from a plane, and I certainly cannot imagine wanting to do it. Still, I wonder if I absolutely had to do it, could I? Maybe there are a few individuals in the world from whom, if connected to one of them, I could borrow the nerve. Maybe this soldier is among them.

            Sometimes, while my soldier, who has not slept deeply since Vietnam, stirs restlessly beside me, I cannot sleep at all. He is turned away from me and, afraid to disturb him by touching him, but more afraid not to, I put my hand on his back, which is thickly and solidly muscled. I lie awake wondering if he too will turn and jump and be gone.

            He does turn, toward me, but does not quite wake up. Instead, he reaches for me in sleep and pulls my hand to his chest. This is not one of the times when I pull him to me fiercely, into me as if he could keep me here, connected to the world. Instead, I rest my fingers gently against the scar – my sign, my reminder to say thank you. So, I say it silently. And then silently, knowing its implausibility, I ask one thing: that we be saved – that this war end at last.