CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Man on the Moon
The Wages of Harold Barrington, 1965
Tatiana and Alexander are watching Anthony. It’s just the three of them in their kitchen this morning, just like before, when there were just the three of them. The babies are still asleep. The morning is Tatiana’s favorite time of the day in her favorite room of the house. The kitchen—just as they had dreamed it—is sparkling white, with off-white limestone floors, white glazed cabinets, white appliances, pale yellow curtains, and every morning sunlight rises in the kitchen and moves through the house room by room. In the mornings they gather here to make their cereal and their coffee, to eat the croissants and the jam she’s made.
But early this morning, at seven thirty, only Anthony is eating, sitting on a high stool at the island while his mother and father stand at attention, across from him. Alexander, like a pillar, just stands. Tatiana clutches the back of the bar stool. As if oblivious to them, Anthony drinks his coffee and picks up his second croissant.
“Guys, at ease,” he says. “My food is getting stuck in my throat.”
They don’t move.
“Mom, the jam is unbelievable. What is it, blueberry/raspberry?”
Anthony! Tatiana wants to cry. Anthony. She is speechless before her firstborn son. Twenty-two in three weeks! Tatiana has a twenty-month-old baby girl, still in diapers, whom she is still nursing; she has two primary-school-age boys. And two days ago Anthony graduated from West Point.
The whole family flew out east to see him throw his white cap in the air. A frail Aunt Esther came down with Rosa from Barrington and cried through nearly the entire ceremony. Sam Gulotta and his wife came up from Washington. Tom Richter and Vikki came, estranged yet together. Richter gave the commencement address. Richter, in full military dress with bars and stripes and a lieutenant-colonel’s insignia, standing tall at the podium, speaking to five hundred men and their families, all in oppressive, melting June heat on the open fields, speaking loud and clear to Tatiana and Alexander, speaking to Anthony Barrington.
“You walk in the footsteps of Eisenhower and MacArthur, Patton and Bradley, the commanders that saved a civilization. The eyes of the world are upon you.”
Richter has been in Southeast Asia since 1959, an officer in a military advisory group, training the South Vietnamese to fight the North, but he is a big wig now in MACV—Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—the brain that controls the entire body that is American involvement in Southeast Asia. Rosa was so impressed by him, she asked to be seated next to him at dinner. The boys demanded to sit next to their cadet brother, but so did Aunt Esther. They wouldn’t budge. Neither would she. They ended up, sulkily, sitting between their parents, while Anthony was flanked by Aunt Esther on one side and Vikki and Richter on the other.
Tatiana and Alexander rented the Pool Terrace Room at the modern and opulent Four Seasons restaurant in New York City, where they spent a raucous evening. Even Aunt Esther was raucous. At eighty-six, nearly deaf, sitting very close to Anthony—ostensibly to hear him better—all she wanted to hear was his cadet stories. Anthony tried to stay circumspect just like his father had taught him. He behaved well, he said; played football, Army against Navy, won finally, Army’s first win in six years. He played pick-up basketball games on the open courts—“Basketball,” Anthony told his aunt, “that was more like rugby.” He played tennis, and his coach was Lieutenant Arthur Ashe, and Esther said, “Who’s Arthur Ashe?” and, before Ant could reply, stated firmly that she wasn’t in the least interested in Anthony’s athletic escapades (and this is where Tatiana wanted to concur) but was “most interested” in his romantic ones. Anthony smiled and said nothing (the good boy), but Richter, always ready to stir some trouble, said, “Lieutenant, why don’t you tell your great-aunt about your two demerits in Chicago.” And when Anthony flat-out refused, Richter happily regaled Aunt Esther with the story of how, when the West Point Firsties came to Chicago, Mayor Daley’s wife arranged for all the cadets to have dates with the good local girls from fine families. “Some great times for the cadets,” Richter said with a grin.
“Yes, and a mess for the Daleys,” Anthony added dryly.
“Details, Anthony, details!” cried Aunt Esther.
Tatiana smiled while feeding Janie sweet potatoes, glancing at Alexander, who was also smiling, though tensely, while telling Pasha and Harry to pipe down and stop flicking their peas and shooting bread balls out of their straws. Vikki wanted to know if there was more drink. Aunt Esther asked Anthony if he was going to follow the honored West Point cadet tradition and get married right after graduation at the academy chapel, and Rosa said only if it was a Catholic chapel, and Richter said only if he got married “to a good local Chicago girl,” and Anthony deadpan replied that he couldn’t find one. “Despite his best efforts,” piped up Richter, and oh, how everyone laughed, and Vikki said where is that wine already, and Tatiana said, “Harry, you fire one more bread ball at Anthony…” And Harry said, “Mom, they’re not bread balls, they’re buckshot.” And Alexander said, “Tom, how are the South Vietnamese holding up—Harry, what did your mother tell you!”
They talked about everything and anything, except the one thing they needed and had to talk about—Anthony’s future. That was the burning question on everyone’s mind, and has been the only thing on the minds of Tatiana and Alexander since August 1964 when the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed by Congress, authorizing the use of any and all appropriate force to keep South Vietnam free from North Vietnam, the way South Korea had been kept and was still being kept free from North Korea. Tom Richter had been with MacArthur in Bataan and in the dense jungles of New Guinea during WWII, he’d been with MacArthur in Japan after the war, and then leading MacArthur’s men from Port Inchon to the Yalu River in Korea, and now MacArthur had heard the bugle call and crossed his own river, and Richter was with Westmoreland (West Point, ’36) in Vietnam. He didn’t speak much about what went on there, but Tatiana knew from Alexander that Richter ran clandestine special ops units. Obviously letting the South Vietnamese defend themselves with only a small U.S. presence had not done the trick. They were not holding up. They were getting run over. The North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, the Viet Cong Self-Defense Forces, the Viet Cong Secret Self-Defense Forces were better supplied.
Something more was needed.
“You think you are entering a world far different from the one your fathers entered, but you’re not. I graduated in June 1941, and six months later, on December 7th, our Naval officers saw something so out of line on their radar screens that they ignored it. It must be friendly planes, they said. And thirty minutes later, nearly our entire Naval fleet was destroyed. I’m telling you now, in the face of imperial communism, our greatest threat is complacency. During the American Civil War, Union General Sedgwick looked over a parapet toward Confederate lines and said that they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance. Those were his last words. At that moment a sharpshooter took his life. For the last twenty years, the East and West have engaged in stand-offs, in proxy wars, all against a backdrop of a nuclear Armageddon. Soon the time for pretend will be over. That is the world you are entering as West Point men.”
This bright Arizona morning Tatiana and Alexander are waiting for Anthony to tell them how he intends to enter that world. Tatiana feels Alexander so tense behind her that she backs away from the island, squeezes his arm, looks up into his stone-like face and whispers, “Shh,” and then says, “Darling, do you hear Harry in the front yard? Why is he up already?”
“He’s convinced he can catch a Gila monster in the early morning,” says Alexander, not taking his eyes off Anthony. “He thinks it’s like fishing.” He pulls his arm away from Tatiana. “Ant, do you want to talk later? I have to save Harry from himself.”
“If you have to go, then go, Dad,” says Anthony, not looking up from the paper. “I have a reception at Luke Air Force base at ten.”
“I don’t have to go, but once the kids come in, talking as you know will become impossible,” Alexander says. The kids are noisy, especially the boys. Like wild dogs, they never stop moving. The girl is marginally quieter—but attention must be on her at all times. Once they get her up, there will be no adult conversation until her nap time.
Anthony! Do you see what you’re doing to your father’s heart, to your mother’s heart? We can’t speak, our throats are so full of our pride, of our love, of our fears for you.
“Let’s talk later then,” Anthony says, his head in the paper. “I just got here. My first morning back. I’ll be here two months. Can we just please ease up…”
“Anthony.” That’s Tatiana. Finally she speaks. His name is all she says.
He sighs, wipes his mouth, closes the paper. And then he too stands up. So now, Anthony is standing at one side of the island, Tatiana and Alexander at another. All are stiff as boards.
“You’re about to man the walls of democracy and freedom. We hope to see a world transformed by your presence in it.”
In full white military dress, Anthony picks up his white cap off the black granite and puts it on. He is a West Point graduate, a commissioned lieutenant. In return for a first class education at the most prestigious military training academy in the United States, Anthony owes the U.S. government four more years of active service. He knows it. His mother and father know it.
And the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been unanimously passed. U.S. troops, little by little, are filling the planes that are heading en masse for Southeast Asia.
For the last nine months, Alexander has been talking to every person he knows in Military Intelligence and in the newly formed Defense Intelligence Agency, trying to get Anthony a position that would be equal to his talents, that would satisfy his active duty requirement, and that—most importantly—would be stateside. Finally, four weeks ago, the Director of DIA said he would hire Anthony to work on his Special Staff. He would be reporting directly to the head of the department that is the primary producer of foreign military intelligence for the United States. The formal written offer had gone out to Anthony two weeks ago.
“Duty, Honor, Country—those are the words you walk with. Douglas MacArthur, the liberator of the Philippines, of Japan, the man who in one night reversed the course of the Korean War and saved South Korea, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, stood before you three years ago at this very lectern and told you that all his adult life he listened for the witching melody of faint bugles, of far drums beating the long roll, but when he crossed the river, his last thought would be the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps. Duty, Honor, Country. Let that be your first thought as well as your last.”
Anthony stands so tall, so wide, so black-haired and dark-eyed. He is his father’s son in every physical way but one: he has his mother’s mouth. Men do not need full mouths like hers to draw the bees to the nectar—but Anthony has it. He is young, idealistic, beautiful. He is heartbreaking.
Both Tatiana and Alexander lower their heads. Though the child is now nearly the size of her outsized husband, her larger-than-life Alexander, what Tatiana sees in front of her is fifteen-month-old Anthony, a chubby dark little boy, sitting in their New York apartment, eating her croissants, his pudgy little hands covered with crumbs and glistening with butter. He is smiling at her with his four milk teeth, sitting in their lonely apartment without his daddy, who is in the mud and blood of the River Vistula with his penal battalion. She wonders what Alexander sees.
Alexander says, “Ant, so what have you decided?”
Anthony looks only at his warily blinking mother. “It’s a great offer from the DIA, Dad,” he says. “I know you’re trying to help. I appreciate it. But I’m not going to take it.”
“In 1903, the Secretary of War told the West Point graduating class, of which Douglas MacArthur was first, ‘Before you leave the Army, you will be engaged in another war. Prepare your country.’ And that is what I am saying to you today.”
Taking a breath, Anthony stops looking at either of his parents. “I’m going to Vietnam.”
“Today in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato—Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
Silence drips through the white kitchen. Somewhere on the other side of the house a door slams. Two children are running, running. Tatiana can hear the thump of their creature feet.
Tatiana says nothing, Alexander says nothing, but she can feel him behind her, coiling up.
“Come on, guys,” says Anthony. “After surviving Beast Barracks cadet training and my drill sergeant, the King of Beasts, did you really think I was going to sit behind a desk at DIA?” He is so blasé, so casual. He can be. He is only twenty-one. They were twenty-one once, too.
“Anthony, don’t be ridiculous,” says Alexander. “You won’t be sitting behind a desk. It’s Military Intelligence, for God’s sake. It’s active combat support.”
“That’s just the thing, Dad—I don’t want combat support. I want combat.”
“Don’t be”—Alexander stops to keep his voice low—“Don’t be stupid, Anthony—”
“Look, it’s decided. I talked to Tom Richter. It’s done.”
“Oh, to Richter you talked about this!” No keeping voice low.
“He’s going to recommend me for the 2nd Airborne Division in Company A,” Anthony says. “One tour with them, and he might be able to get me a Special Forces spot with him for the next round.”
“The next round?” Tatiana repeats incredulously.
No one moves.
“Mom, Dad, you do know we’re at war, right?”
Tatiana sinks into a chair, puts her arms out on the kitchen table, palms down. Alexander’s arm goes on her back, on her shoulder.
“Mom, come on,” says Anthony.
“Too f*cking late to comfort your mother now,” says Alexander. “Why the theater, Ant? Why not just tell us at graduation, at Four Seasons? Obviously Richter already knew—why not tell us, too?” Alexander’s voice is distraught, but he places his steady hands on Tatiana. She knows she needs to get up to calm him down, but she can’t calm herself down. She needs his hands.
“Anthony, please,” Tatiana whispers. “You don’t have to prove anything to anybody.”
He is so tall with his brown sparkling eyes, with his thick black hair. So full of impossible youth. “I’m not proving anything to anybody,” he says. “This is about me.”
Tatiana and Alexander stare blackly at their son, and he, unable to take their dual agonized gaze, looks away.
“I graduated from West Point,” Anthony says. “Eisenhower, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Patton—MacArthur, for God’s sake! I graduated from the school that makes warriors. What do you want me to do? What did you think I was going to a military academy for?”
“To get a first-rate education,” Alexander returns to Anthony’s rhetorical question. “Military intel for strategy and planning, for weapons acquisition in Southeast Asia. You speak fluent Russian. Bilingual backing for Soviet documents outlining the extent of their massive support for the NVA, for Pathet Lao. You’d be working for the director of Command Central for all U.S. military intelligence. It’s an incredible opportunity.”
“They already have you for that,” rejoins Anthony. “Take the spot since one is available. I’m not going to sit and analyze data.”
“You are f*cking unbelievable, you know that.”
“Shh!” Tatiana says. And Alexander’s hands come off her shoulders.
“I’m not going to argue with you again,” Anthony says to Alexander. “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to spend the next two months in this house fighting with you. I’ll leave right now and go back to New York if that’s what my life is going to be like around here.”
“Anthony!” Tatiana yells.
“So go!” yells Alexander. “Get the f*ck out of here! Who’s keeping you?”
“Alexander!” Tatiana yells. “Both of you, please!” They’re panting, she’s panting. “This is insane,” she says. “Ant, you have a great opportunity to stay in the U.S. Why won’t you take it?”
“Because I don’t want it!”
“How can you say that when you know how hard your father worked to help you?”
“Did I ask him to help me? Who asked for his help?”
“That’s exactly right,” says Alexander. “That’s exactly f*cking right. So go, Ant, what are you waiting for? A ride?”
“Alexander, no!” yells Tatiana, whirling to him.
“Tania, stay out of it!”
Anthony lowers his head.
Suddenly Tatiana is facing Alexander’s tormented eyes, and she realizes, falling mute, this is how many of these arguments have been going the last seven years. She cajoles one man, then the other, she gets between them, she tries to make it better, they stand their ground, one argues thick-headed, the other argues thick-headed, Anthony raises his voice, Alexander loses his temper, and suddenly it’s Tatiana whirling on her husband, asking him to have reason, and suddenly what was between father and son is between husband and wife. Since Anthony was fourteen this has been so.
Alexander is right. Contrite in her face and body, she puts her palms on his forearms. Sorry, she mouths but stands her ground. Because this one is different. This isn’t just between father and son. This is for the life of her family. This is the Sonoran Desert artillery fire.
Before another harsh word is spoken, two white-blond boys roll like shrieking tumbleweeds into the kitchen. Gordon Pasha is six, Harry is five. Joyously slapping Anthony, they run past him to their father; one hangs on one arm, one on the other. Tatiana steps away as Alexander jacks them up into the air and holds them both. Alexander wore Pasha for the first sixteen months of the boy’s life, first on his chest, then on his back. And then he wore Harry. He barely surrendered them to their mother for nursings. They may be blond like her, but they stride and swagger like their dad, they talk like him, they hold their plastic hammers and drive their plastic trucks like him, they wear their hair short, they bang the table, and sometimes, when they need to get their mother’s attention, they say, “Ta-TIA-na!” in their father’s tone. They roll and play over him fearlessly, they worship him unconditionally and without any baggage.
“Antman,” says Harry, “why are you wearing your ice cream man clothes again?”
“Going to an air force base in a little while, bud.”
“Can I come?”
“Can I come?”
Not replying to his brothers, Anthony says to Alexander, pointing to the older boy, “When you name my brother Charles Gordon, what do you think he is going to grow up to be?”
And Pasha replies, “A doctor, Ant. So I can heal people like Mommy. And my name is Pasha.”
And Harry says, his arm around Alexander’s neck, “And I’m gonna make weapons like Daddy, Ant. You should see the spear I caught a lizard with.”
Tatiana nearly cries, seeing Anthony chasing lizards on their empty land when he was four.
“You fool,” says Pasha, reaching across Alexander and pulling his brother’s hair. “You absolute fool. Daddy doesn’t make weapons. Except wood spears, but they don’t count.”
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” wails Harry.
“Me, too, Mommy,” says Pasha.
From a distant place in the house, they hear the demanding squeal of a small girl.
“You know what, Ant?” Alexander says loudly. “This is not about Pasha, or even about you and me. This is just about you.”
“You got that right,” Anthony says loudly.
Pasha and Harry stare with surprise at their father, at their brother, and then at their mother, who mouths to them, Get down and get on out of here. Now.
A grim Alexander, still holding his sons, says, trying to soften his voice, “Guys, hear Jane yell? Hear Jane call? Go see your sister, will you. I’m right behind you. We’ll get her ready, and then Mommy will feed us.”
They leap down, their palms knocking into Anthony on their way out.
“Ant,” says Harry, “come swimming with us. I want to show you my forward pike.”
“Later, bud. And I’ll show you my reverse pike.” His hand goes over Harry’s head.
“Ant,” says Pasha, “you promised you would play ‘Do Wah Diddy.’”
“Absolutely. When I come back from Luke.”
They roll out of the kitchen and bound down the gallery, singing Do Wah Diddy…
“You think you’re so smart doing what you want?” Alexander says to Anthony as soon as they’ve gone. Tatiana wants to touch him but can’t. “You didn’t talk to us before you took the spot at West Point, you know how upset your mother was—”
“I thought you would try to talk me out of it,” Anthony retorts, “and I was right, wasn’t I? Look at you now.”
“And now you don’t talk to us before you volunteer for combat? For f*ck’s sake, Anthony! You think it’s just you doing the opposite of what I want, of what your mother wants? You’re not fifteen any more, coming home too late. This isn’t you trying to mouth off to me. This is about the irreversible path of your life.” Alexander takes a deep breath. “Why don’t you think of yourself first for once, instead of thinking first of upsetting me?”
“Oh God, this isn’t about you!” Anthony yells.
Tatiana bites her lip and closes her eyes because next—
“Don’t raise your f*cking voice to me in my house,” says Alexander, stepping forward.
Anthony steps back. Not another word comes out of him.
“Why tell us at all?” asks Alexander. “Why not just send a letter from Kontum? Guess where I am, folks. That’s what you’re doing now anyway. Why even come here?” Alexander flings his arm out. “Go—train at Yuma. Your mother promises she’ll send you a care package. She’ll send you one to Yuma, she’ll send you one to Saigon.” He turns, taking Tatiana by the arm. “Let’s go.”
Glaring at Anthony and trying to peel Alexander’s fingers off her, Tatiana says, “I’ll be right there, darling. Give me a minute.”
Alexander pulls her. “No, Tania. Let’s go. No more talking to him. Can’t you see it’s useless?”
She looks up at him, placing her hand on his chest. “Just…one minute, Shura. Please.”
He lets go of her arm, storms out, and no sooner does he disappear than Tatiana whirls on Anthony. “What is with you?” she says furiously.
She can see that her being upset with him is more than he can take. Funny how he can take his father’s anger, but from her—one cross word, and he falls quiet and uncertain. “Mom, this country is at war. I know they’re not calling it war; conflict, disagreement, whatnot. But it’s war! There will be a draft any minute. If I don’t put in a request for a spot now, Richter soon won’t be able to get me into 2nd Airborne.”
She comes close to him. He is a head and a half taller than she, twice as wide, but when she comes near, he sinks into a chair, so she can stand over him. “Anthony, please,” she says. “You are not going to be drafted if you’re working for the Director of DIA. Dad promised you that.”
“Mom, I went to West Point, not Harvard. My future is in the U.S. Army. I go where they need me. They don’t need me in MI. They need me in Vietnam.”
She grabs his hands and presses them to her, propping herself on the edge of the kitchen table. “Ant, you know what your father went through, you know better than anyone, you of all people! You know where your mom and dad have been. War, Anthony. We didn’t read about the war. We lived through it, and you did, too. You do know that boys die in war, no? And those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones come back like Nick Moore. Remember him? Or they come back somewhere in between, like your father. You do remember your father, no? Is that what you want?”
Not pulling his hands away from her, Anthony says, “First and foremost, I’m not him.”
Pushing him away, Tatiana steps away. “You know what?” she says coldly. “You would do well to aspire to be half the man your father is. Why don’t you learn to walk with grace and valor?”
“Ah, yes, of course,” Anthony says, nodding. “How could I forget? If only I could live up to his impossible standards.” He glares pointedly at his mother. “And he certainly has some high ones.”
“Well, surely that’s not why you enlisted in Vietnam, is it?” she cries. “What is that going to prove?”
“I know you’re finding it hard to believe, Mom,” Anthony says, shaking his head, “but this really does have nothing to do with you. Or him.”
Tatiana just stares at him with bleak eyes.
Shaking his head, he says, “It doesn’t! Can’t you see, this is my life I’m living!”
“What kind of a rebellion is that?” she snaps. “Following your father’s footsteps?”
“Clearly in your eyes no one can ever follow his footsteps.”
“Not like this, no.” She comes to him, to touch him, to embrace him; she is so sad for him, and he puts up his hands against her, almost as if protecting himself.
“He has always said to me, you choose what you want to be. Well, this is what I choose. This is what I want.” Anthony blinks.
“Your father,” Tatiana whispers, “didn’t want to go to war. He had no choice. You think he went through what he went through, to save us, to save himself, so his firstborn son could go fight the Viet Cong?” She is so upset, she can’t stand in front of him anymore; she turns to leave her kitchen. She doesn’t want Anthony to see her cry for him.
Taking her hand, Anthony doesn’t let her leave. Bringing her back, he looks at her contritely. “I’m sorry, Mom. Don’t be upset with me, please,” he says. “West Point was my choice, that’s true, but this isn’t. Now I have to go. Just like he had to, I have to. I don’t know why Dad is wasting his time fighting the inevitable.”
“Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. You are this nation’s gladiators in the arena of battle.”
Somewhere in her house, three small children are shrieking. Even Alexander can’t get the two boys to quieten down for long. One time he yelled at Harry in a booming voice, “Calm down!” And Harry, in the same booming voice, yelled right back at Alexander, “I’ll calm down when I’m dead!” Though he has never since raised his voice to his father, he also hasn’t calmed down.
Tatiana bends to Anthony, her hand on his cropped head. “Don’t be upset with your father, darling,” she whispers, kissing his hair. “He is just trying to save his son, any way he knows how.” She rushes out of the kitchen, unable to tell Anthony why his father always fights the inevitable.
“Let others debate the issues that divide men’s minds. Not you. May you, West Point soldiers, always be worthy of the long gray line that stretches two centuries before you.”
She cannot show Anthony how afraid she is, seeing nothing but flocks of ravens flying over the heads of all the people in her lovely desert house.
The Long Gray Line
Anthony spent the summer at home, playing wild, out-of-control war and pool games with his siblings, and left for Vietnam in August 1965. Pasha, Harry and Janie missed him when he went.
Every day when Alexander came home, the first thing he said after kissing Tatiana was, “Any news?” Meaning, any letters? Any phone calls?
He’d call during the day and say, “Did the mail come?”
And if the mail did come and bring tidings from La Chu, from Laos, from Dakto, from Quang Tri, Alexander took his smokes to the garden outside their bedroom and sat by himself and read his son’s letters.
Alexander was slightly graying. The fierce Arizona sun had darkened his face. Lines came to his eyes. But the genes were good from his Italian mother and his Pilgrim father. Though he had gained a little weight, Alexander worked too hard and trained too hard at Yuma to feel the years. Upright, wide-shouldered, watchful like always, he carried his large frame with the unspoken but clear, don’t even think of messing with me air. No one could mistake him for anything but a military man.
As they had during the Korean War, his combat support duties increased. He often spent more than seventeen active duty days a year at Yuma—still the largest weapons testing facility in the world. In the late fifties and early sixties, when the boys were infants and toddlers, and Anthony came to help, Tatiana still went with Alexander once a month, and their baby carriages were arrayed in a row with the others outside the married barracks. But once the boys got too big for carriages, and Anthony went to West Point, and Janie was born, vast Yuma became too small for her two untamed sons and their baby sister who thought she was a male cub herself. It was either rein themselves in or stay home with Mom, while their father went alone, translating volumes of raw data coming in from Russian services and conducting extensive training drills and weapons tests.
The children reined themselves in.
In 1966, after his widely read translation of the criticism the Soviets were heaping on the first generation of the M-16—the U.S. version of the Kalashnikov rifle—which tended to jam if you didn’t clean it, Alexander was finally promoted to major, having served twenty years as captain. Richter telegraphed him congratulations from Saigon with the words—“YOU INSUFFERABLE BASTARD. STILL, I’M A LIEUTENANT-COLONEL.”
Alexander telegraphed him back. “YOU INSUFFERABLE BASTARD. WHEN IS MY SON COMING HOME?”
After a successful twelve-month tour with the 2nd Airborne, Anthony signed on for a second tour and moved over to train under Richter, who ran the Special Forces central command post out of Kontum under a quaint and harmless moniker of Studies and Observation Group. Anthony joined an unconventional warfare special ops ground unit. He led a recon team, he led a Search, Locate, Annihilate Mission (SLAM) team, he led a Hatchet force. He became a Green Beret. He re-upped for a third tour and lived through a bloody 1968, through Tet, and re-upped again, and lived through the 1969 Viet Cong spring offensive. During one of his recon missions in early July 1969, he captured Viet Cong documents that showed that the enemy was much larger and better equipped than the U.S. high command pretended, and that the NVA were wildly inflating the numbers of the American casualties, claiming 45,000 armed U.S. troops had been killed in the spring offensive when the actual number was 1718, against 24,361 enemy dead. He was promoted to captain.
Copies of Anthony’s seven citations came home. Two Purple Hearts for a shoulder wound and a leg shrapnel, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, and a Distinguished Service Cross for heroism during an assault in Laos on his long-range recon platoon. After he was promoted to captain, the letter from Richter said, “RHIP—RANK HAS ITS PRIVILEGES: AT LEAST NOW OUR BOY IS SUPERVISING GROUND STUDIES GROUPS, NOT LEADING AMBUSHES DOWN THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL.”
What was amazing to Alexander during those years was that his life went on. His three blond children grew like saplings, Christmas trees were bought, large custom homes kept going up, new people were hired. Johnny-boy left, got married—twice. Amanda abandoned Shannon and her three kids for a migrant construction worker from Wyoming, and disappeared across state lines. The Barringtons went on vacation to Coconut Grove, and to Vail, Colorado so that the children could see something called “snow.”
They went out with friends, they played cards, they went dancing, they swam. They celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1967 with a seven-hour mule ride to Phantom Ranch by the Colorado River, celebrated with advanced married love, and his whispering words and her tears.
Every night when he came home, the house smelled of warm bread and dinner, and Tania was nicely dressed and smiling, and walking to the door to greet him, to kiss him, with her hallowed hair down her shoulders, and he would say, “Tania, I’m home!” and she would laugh, just like she had when she was seventeen in Leningrad, on Fifth Soviet. She took care of him, of his children, of his house, of his life, like she had in Coconut Grove, like she had on Bethel Island.
They lived—while their firstborn son was in the mountains of Dakto in the mud. They lived while he was in Cambodia and Khammouan and forcing the Viet Cong from Khe Sahn. They lived while he fought on the Perfume River in Hué. They lived and felt guilty, they sent care packages and felt better, they heard from him and felt better still. During these years, he never did come back stateside, but he would call Christmas Day and talk to his mother, and at the end say quietly, “Say hi to Dad,” and Dad was on the other extension listening in, and he would say quietly, “I’m here, son.” And they would chat for a few brief minutes.
“So how’s it going over there?”
“Oh, fine, fine. A lot of hurry up and wait.”
“Yes, sometimes it’s like that.”
“I hate it.”
“Yeah. I did too.”
“No fields of Verdun here, no tank battle of Kursk. We’re always in the jungle. And it’s damnably wet. Must be what Holy Cross, Swietocryzt, was like for you.”
“Swietocryzt was ice cold,” says Alexander. “Well, watch your back.”
“I will, Dad. I am, Dad.”
Gordon Pasha was nearly 11, Harry was 9, Janie almost 6. Tatiana was 45. Alexander was 50.