Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  2

  An her grief and panic Ms. Robin Glenn was nothing less than majestic. Leaping naked from bed, her hair in disarray, she ran out onto the porch shrieking, “Hannibal, Hannibal, Frederick’s dying!” Surprisingly, that oaf Hannibal wasn’t much more composed than Ms. Robin Glenn, though he was of course considerably more utilitarian. For whatever reason, probably nothing other than his constant proximity to me, Hannibal has in his groping inarticulate way become fond of me and while Robin grew more hysterical Hannibal began weeping, running his incredible hands through his hair, and saying, “Eese bad, eese bad, Frederick bad boy.” Both Robin and Hannibal knew, however, that I hadn’t had a drink in two days. Hannibal then reached down and as though I were a hundred-pound sack of cement—my weight, Alissa, is 180!—picked me up, the three of us exited to the porch, went down the steps, and started across the lawn toward the hospital, with Hannibal’s abominable snowman feet crunching the cones beneath the towering Norfolk pines. As we hurried, Hannibal continued his “Frederick bad boy, Frederick bad boy,” while Robin, having donned a blue terry cloth robe and not to be outdone, kept patting her lovely tum-tum and crying, “Oh, Frederick, don’t die and leave your son fatherless. Not fatherless! I only got pregnant to give you a son!” It was all rather like Ophelia’s marvelous burial scene in Hamlet, the players absolutely determined to upstage one another in their grief. Here I might add, Alissa, that Robin is the only pregnant woman I’ve known who still has her monthly periods.

  Dr. Jim, in his pajamas, his mustaches twitching as they do in dismay, pissed off at being roused from sleep at 5 A.M., twice took my blood pressure in both arms, angrily shaking his head. He then asked the two night nurses to do the same. They did so, forbiddingly. Afterward the three of them walked to the far end of the emergency room and went into one of those grave handwringing whispering consultation. When Dr. Jim came back to us, I could see he was furious. “What a pain in the ass you are, Exley.” “Frederick’s dying,” Robin shrieked. ‘The father of my son is dying!” “His blood pressure is 140 over 90, goddamn good for him.” When he asked how much I’d been drinking, I indignantly replied that I hadn’t had a drink for two whole days. “Two whole days,” Robin reiterated. With equal indignation Dr. Jim snapped, “Well, you’re suffering delirium tremens, that’s what you’re suffering.”

  “I’ve never had the shakes in my goddamn life!”

  “Never!” Robin cried.

  “Now look, Exley, let me practice the medicine around here, will yuh? I spent half my internship in an alcoholic ward and can tell without even a blood test, which I will of course take anyway, that all the potassium is gone from your body, causing your legs to give out. I’ve warned you repeatedly about taking those diuretics with alcohol. Alcohol is a diuretic, too.” Dr. Jim then told Hannibal to pick me up, to throw me on the bed in Room 12, asked one of the nurses to draw some blood, and said he was going to feed me some potassium intravenously. It would, he said, take most of the day and half the night. He would give me something to help me sleep the next few nights. When he released me in the morning, after having given me a couple massive doses of Vitamin B12, he wanted Hannibal and me to walk leisurely around Lanai City’s village square, or do so until my legs tired. The following day, which was of course today, Dr. Jim recommended we go down to White Manele Beach and do the same. He also gave me a photocopied sheet listing foods high in potassium content. Personally he recommended I bake up a half dozen potatoes at a crack, scoop out the pulp, and eat the skins with a salt substitute.

  But I am yet being so very evasive, Alissa. As you above all must know, I have always had this dream of the two of us ending together, married, and in the hope you’d have the son you’ve always professed to have wanted, despite having turned down at least three guys I feel would have been perfectly suitable. Like most writers, I had this sappy vision of finishing the third volume of my trilogy, having it come out to great acclaim, realizing that this in turn would send the readers, in droves, back to the first two volumes. Oh, Alissa, it was a fantasy of nothing less than millions. I’d persuade you to give up your practice (I mean, you’d have quite enough on your hands with me!) and we’d spend half the year in London and the other half on Belgravia Island. Let’s face it, Alissa, by your own admission most of your patients are Wealthy matronly broads who are into six whole martinis a day (big fucking deal!), have let themselves get too wide in the arse, and have husbands who are mucking about with younger chicks. Still, and I must remind you that you yourself told me this, these women actually believe they have problems of monumental gravitas, when in fact the solution is nothing other than accepting the normal aging process and working reverently to keep themselves in shape. I mean, what would there have been for you to give up, Alissa?

  Still, I have put aside this fantasy once and for all. And, as I’ve said, I very much doubt that this letter shall reach you in any event and I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I shall never finish my trilogy, least of all shall I finish it to acclaim and the inevitable millions that necessarily accrue to that acclaim. But I still zig and zag, Alissa, play the elusive phantom, so let me at last come to the point and confess to you that I have married Ms. Robin Glenn and that I wanted to be sober when explaining my reasons. It is a long, complex, guilt-ridden, doubtless unintentionally funny tale and I ask you, dear, dearest Alissa, to bear with me through this.

  3

  An the early morning hours of March 16, 1968, to the everlasting shame and discomfort of the American people, units of the Americal Division’s Eleventh Light Infantry Brigade had been set down by helicopter outside the villages of My Lai 1 and My Lai 4 where, they had been told, they would encounter the Vietcong’s elite and lethally capable Forty-eighth Battalion. After a five-minute artillery barrage or “prepping” of both villages, a Charlie Company platoon, commanded in the field by twenty-six-year-old 1st Lt. William L. Calley, Jr., was put down near My Lai 4, platoons of Bravo Company, commanded eventually (after the quick death of Lt. Roy B. Cochran) by Lt. Thomas K. Willingham, set down outside My Lai 1. Encountering heavily hedgerowed, booby-trapped, and mined fields in the approaches to My Lai 1, and immediately beginning to sustain casualties, including the aforementioned Lieutenant Cochran, the Bravo Company platoons were ordered to abandon their part of the operation and proceed south to a shantytown of mud and straw hutches or “hootches.” They there killed between fifty and a hundred women, children, and old men.

  Walking unimpeded into My Lai 4, Lieutenant Calley’s Charlie Company platoon, using their M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns, with a kind of workaday blood lunacy, slaughtered approximately 130 women, children, and old men. On that day the artillery barrages, the gunships (helicopters armed to the gunwales with heavy-caliber machine guns and rockets), and the ground troops or “grunts” accounted for the deaths of 500 (the real count will never be known) civilians, for which they would claim the capture of at most three enemy rifles. At a debriefing the next day at the Americal Division headquarters at Chu Lai, called to pass on the stunning news of Task Force Barker’s grandiose success, a number of officers were heard to sneer and laugh derisively at the ratio of the number of the enemy claimed killed in action (KIAs) as against the absurdity of a mere three weapons captured.

  Although the scandal would ultimately reach all the way to Maj. Gen. Samuel W. Koster, the superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, who on March 16, 1968, had been the Americal Division’s top honcho, and would involve scores of lesser officers and enlisted men, only five soldiers eventually stood trial, four being acquitted and Lieutenant Calley being convicted. If there was anything more senseless than the slaughter of these innocents, it had been the incompetence and lack of communication in army intelligence. The dreaded Vietcong Forty-eighth Battalion comprised 400 men. Employing hit-and-run tactics, they had inflicted heavy casualties upon and severely demoralized units of the Americal Division. It was therefore no tactical accident that platoons of the Americal
were selected to go into My Lais 1 and 4 to wreak vengeance on the Cong’s Forty-eighth, Americans chosen precisely because they had lost so many friends to that deadly battalion. On the very day the men of Task Force Barker began their sanguinary work, however, it was known at our intelligence headquarters at Quang Ngai that the Cong’s feared and loathed Forty-eighth Battalion was an astonishing nine miles from either My Lai I or My Lai 4.

  On March 16, 1968, Lt. Col. William R. Exley, of the 500th Military Intelligence Group, was stationed at the airport or what in Saigon was called Pentagon East. It was the Brigadier’s job to “isolate targets.” Like most lay people I at one time assumed that the Brigadier studied maps and enemy troop movements and passed this information on to field commanders, though of course I was assured that he did that, too. In intelligence jargon, however, and as all people interested in such things now know, isolating targets is a euphemism for isolating human beings as possible sources of information, the spies (Vietnamese in this case) who come in from the cold, buying information from them, then separating the wheat from the chaff by continuing to do business with only those agents who appear to be feeding accurate information. And though I have been assured by a number of Bill’s friends that the intelligence that placed the Cong’s Forty-eighth Battalion at My Lai 4 would have emanated from the Americal Division’s brigade or divisional level, I have never been entirely certain that Lt. Col. Oran K. Henderson would have ordered Lieutenant Calley to waste anything that moved at My Lai 4 (Henderson claims to have ordered no such thing) without those orders coming directly from Saigon.

  At the Brigadier’s wake, for example, his widow Judy told me Bill hadn’t really died of cancer. She said he’d hardly slept in the last years of the Vietnamese farce and it was the information that continued to pass over his desk that killed him. At least once a week, a man who’d served with him told me, Bill came down from upstairs, dressed in his combat boots and fatigues, and went through the same awesomely furious ritual, kicking the side of his desk, so that he not only had his desk scuffed up but the guy was surprised he hadn’t caved in the side of it. On the pretext that he didn’t always have “a need to know” (I’ll bet), the man also told me he wasn’t sure what many of these tantrums were about. He also emphasized that he himself had not known about My Lai 4 until, some years later, he read about it in the newspapers at the time everyone else read about it. Still, I have over the years suffered myself this fantasy that Bill was trying through channels to make it understood that the Cong was never going to come out of the jungle, meet us on a West Point textbook front, and permit Westmoreland’s field commanders to pretend they were General Patton.

  4

  Several years ago, Alissa, after a story on the Brigadier’s death appeared in a national magazine, I abruptly received a letter from a friend of his, a high GS in the Department of Defense Intelligence. He told me how much he’d enjoyed the piece and went on to flatter Bill highly by saying he’d always found him one of the better, sharper types in the intelligence community. Then he astonished me by saying that anytime I wanted to come to Washington and meet Bill’s “friends,” he’d be more than pleased to make the introductions. I couldn’t pack a Gladstone quickly enough, and one can’t imagine how naive I was. I went armed with a tape recorder, as though I actually expected these spooks to talk into it and tell me everything they could about the Brigadier.

  They put me up in a motel across from the main officers’ club in Arlington. As Bill was one of their own, they treated me royally—couldn’t have been more gracious—and it wasn’t until the second day, my lunatic tape recorder running, that it came to me that they weren’t going to tell me a goddamn thing and doubtless were a good deal more interested in what the Brigadier had possibly told me over the years.

  As they were talking to a novelist, they pretended to believe I’d be more interested in Bill’s boozing and alleged wenching—the “Ex’d fuck a snake in the bush” notion—than in exactly what it was my only brother had done with his life. It must have been because of hearing this nonsense, Alissa, that I began to suspect these guys were feeding me pap, for not only did I know the Brigadier had dearly loved his wife Judy and his son Scott and though I was playing my drunken upstate New York rube role to the hilt, I was actually beginning to wonder if all this crap hadn’t been orchestrated.

  As you may or may not know, Alissa, these guys were a terribly embittered group, having taken no small part of the blame for our failure in Vietnam. The quack scientists had convinced the spook community that there was no longer any need for human intelligence (HUMINT), that it was too unreliable, that there was too much room for double-dealing, and that they had now perfected satellites capable of looking down the front of Dolly Parton’s dress and defining the aurora borealis around her right nipple. One guy had gone all the way back with the Brigadier and I began to understand, by the very nature of the things he revealed, that, like Judy, he too was sure it was those documents crossing my brother’s desk that had killed Bill.

  The guy and Bill had met when Castro and his bearded boys came out of the hills of Cuba and sent that tinhorn brutish tyrant Batista flying into exile. The Brigadier, then a captain, had recently been teaching at the intelligence center at Ft. Holabird and had been placed in charge of what in Pentagon jargon was called the Cuban Desk. The guy said the army then borrowed him from Langley and got him up in a master sergeant’s uniform and assigned him to our embassy in Havana as a military attaché. It was his job in Cuba to keep eyes and ears alert, as the agency so diligently trains its operatives to do, and do his best to determine how many men Castro had under arms, what weaponry was available to them, in other words where and where not the Cubans were vulnerable, what in military talk is called the Order of Battle.

  He then fed that information to Bill, who in turn wrote it up “in language that even generals can understand, as Bill used to say” (and I can just hear him saying it, Alissa!), and then sent the reports “upstairs.” After we severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, he said he went back to Langley and though he and the Brigadier’s paths crossed from time to time socially, they didn’t really work together until eight years later, at which time the Brigadier spotted his name on a list of men available to him and he was brought to Saigon, now dressed as a lieutenant colonel, and acted as an aide to Bill.

  Even after Bill had made full colonel, that is, so many years after Korea, there were days he was limping so badly from the jeep rolling over on him—not to mention the shrapnel scars on his back and leg from an earlier wound—that he seemed almost in need of a cane. Therefore I waited until the appropriate moment, then said to these guys that with Bill’s combat experience in Korea he would have appeared to be a natural to have been assigned a regimental field command. Had he been ordered to do so, I asked, in his physical condition would he have been expected to carry out those orders?

  “Certainly,” these guys assured me, hastening to add that he had been away from combat units so long and due to his particularly sensitive MOS in intelligence, it would have been a ridiculous bureaucratic screwup had the Brigadier drawn a field command.

  If my brother was going to continue the heavy drinking that had begun during his intelligence career, he had struck a bargain with his wife to start attending church again and together they’d gone to an Episcopal Church in Arlington. One Sunday, in his sermon, the Episcopal priest began a long adoring paen to Martin Luther King, Jr., whereupon the Brigadier abruptly stood from his aisle seat, in the military way pivoted, and to Judy’s redfaced embarrassment stormed from the church, his heels clacking in parade fashion. Some months later, en route to Florida, I stopped at Bill’s house in Springfield and asked the Brigadier what his problem with King was? Thereupon Bill was off on a furious tirade about King’s philandering and whore-mongering (this, mind you, Alissa, coming from my brother!), his depravity, his utter lack of morals, and so forth and so on. Without then having any confirmation, I was nonetheless certain that at that time some
one was tapping King’s phone, bugging his office, and conducting a surveillance of him and. mat for whatever reason Bill had access to these files. Bill sighed and spoke.

  “It doesn’t matter a hot damn anyway, Ex. Martin Luther King is a dead man”

  And it wasn’t three months later that I picked up The Palm Beach Post and discovered that King was indeed a dead man, felled by an assassin’s bullet as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. When I told his Washington friends what he had revealed to me, one of them, flustered, said I shouldn’t forget just how bright a dude Bill was, how extremely controversial King was at the time, that the Brigadier was merely perceptive enough to prognosticate such an end for King, nor should I further forget that for the last two years of his life King was predicting just such an end for himself. For all that, Alissa, King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, has maintained to this day that he was prompted into the act, as Brutus was by Cassius, by an army officer with a Spanish name and accent, and I couldn’t help believing if these dudes had a guy bright enough to quote, in old Finnish, from P. Cajander’s (1846-1913) translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which one of them had done for me, they’d hardly have trouble coming up with a guy who could cultivate a Spanish accent. Hence, Alissa, I’ve never felt comfortable with the notion that James Earl Ray was entirely into fantasy.