In fact, I did not want to be a journalist like Barbara Walters; I wanted to write stories. I have no idea why I said that, except perhaps that teachers and guidance counselors and relatives always laughed when I said I wanted to be a writer, to make up stories and publish books. A journalist like Barbara Walters seemed more practical somehow. And the man looked impressed.
By dinnertime the phone rang again. I was a Marsha Jordan Girl.
ALL THESE YEARS later, I spend a good amount of my time knitting. I do it to calm myself, to soothe my confused and broken heart, to keep sadness at bay. I do it so that I won’t lose my mind. That long-ago summer, when I felt like I was a giant nerve ending exposed to the harsh world, I didn’t realize that stringing those long strands of beads in my hot backyard was accomplishing the same thing. That, and reading The Bell Jar. The novel was a warning. A possibility. An alternate version of the self I might become. It made me understand that young women did go to New York City and write. It made me glimpse a world of stylish clothes and new hairstyles and independence. It also made me tremble as I glimpsed the other side of a creative soul. How scary our talents and desires can be! How close to the edge we actually live.
Lesson 3: How to Ask Why
? Johnny Got His Gun BY DALTON TRUMBO ?
“TODAY IN THE WAR,” WALTER CRONKITE SAID TO ME every evening from our black-and-white Zenith. Behind him, a map of Southeast Asia, Vietnam divided into north and south, Cambodia and Laos snuggled into it. I barely looked at that map, or the images of soldiers that followed Cronkite’s introduction. I played with my favorite doll, Little Miss No Name, an orphan in a burlap patched dress, scraggly blond hair, and one big plastic teardrop on her cheek. Or I cut paper dolls or drew intricate series of stairs on my Etch A Sketch. By junior high, I talked on our heavy black telephone, sitting in front of the television as Cronkite announced the number of dead that day. Artillery fire flashed across the scene. I did my homework, dunked chocolate-covered graham crackers into a glass of milk, wrote haiku in purple ink in my poetry notebook. It had silhouettes of a boy and girl holding hands on a beach. Walter Cronkite said, “Tet Offensive.” He said, “Viet Cong. Saigon. Hanoi.”
I didn’t know why we were fighting in Vietnam. In fact, it was many years later that I learned it all began in 1949, when Mao and communism came to power in China (where my father as a young man in the navy was sent). I knew only the simplest things: Ho Chi Minh was bad, Hanoi was north and Saigon was south, and we had been sending soldiers to fight over there . . . well, to me, forever. The shifting allegiances of the United States, Russia, and France were unknown to me, as was the fact that France had ruled Vietnam—Indochina—and was driven out in 1949. Although I knew that north and Hanoi was communist, I didn’t know that the Geneva Accords had established the Seventeenth Parallel as the boundary between Vietnam’s Communist north and non-Communist south in 1954, or that the Hanoi regime then resumed war by means of infiltration and southern insurgents. Even though I’m sure Walter Cronkite told me about the assassination of South Vietnam’s dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1963 that led to the bombings and large-scale ground forces under President Johnson, I don’t remember these historical details. I just remember watching it: the bombings, the soldiers fighting, the war.
The war ended in 1975, the year after I graduated from high school. I had no childhood without the Vietnam War in it. The draft loomed over everyone’s head. At first, there were college deferments. Even so, around the kitchen table my aunts and uncles talked about writing to congressmen or someone—anyone—important. Our family did not know anyone important. But my father had a certain amount of cachet in our relatives’ eyes. He had worked for Admiral Rickover at the Pentagon, though only as his driver and assistant. When he retired from the navy after twenty years, he took a job at a company called RMK that shipped goods to Vietnam. The job had required a high security clearance. His boss, Mr. Carothers, adored him. Surely he knew somebody who could keep my cousins Stephen, Michael, David, Alfred, and Chip out of the army, out of Vietnam, home and safe.
Stephen enlisted before he could get drafted and spent his time in the army in Walla Walla, Washington. Michael and Alfred got college deferments. But David got drafted and was shipped to Vietnam almost immediately, leaving his fiancée Claudette behind to plan their wedding alone. In my house, Mama Rose lit candles at the feet of statues of saints in the small shrines she kept around—the Virgin Mary, Saint Anthony, Saint Christopher. Novenas were made. I watched the war on TV, emotionless, not once thinking of Cousin David or any of the boys fighting on the screen right in front of me. This was my generation: immune to the horrors of war because it had been playing out in our living room our entire lives. One day our dog barked and growled like crazy outside and we all ran to see what was the matter. Cousin David was making his way up the sidewalk, home again.
Had one year passed? Or two? I have no idea. But the wedding was waiting for him. The bridesmaids had their shoes dyed to match their gowns. The groomsmen rented tuxedos with shirts the same color. At the bridal shower David and Claudette received electric knives and electric can openers and electric toothbrushes. As a girl, I loved weddings, and although I don’t remember where this one was to be held, to me then weddings meant those fancy whiskey-sour fountains and string beans amandine and the hard, pale candies the women wrapped in tulle and tied with a ribbon. But just like that, the wedding was called off. David couldn’t go through with it. And it seemed to have something to do with what happened in Vietnam. At night great debates roared around the kitchen table. Did they have to return the wedding presents? Did she have to return the engagement ring? Were they breaking up? Or just postponing the wedding?