Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  There’s a lovely breeze blowing at the moment. It keeps the dust nice and fresh. And mere yards away, Boom, Boom, go the howitzers, shooting yet another H&I mission. (Harassment and Interdiction, just to keep them on their toes out there—our artillerymen’s way of saying Hi.)

  Speaking of laundry, you’d appreciate the system here. You have two choices: you can go to an approved Vietnamese-run laundry, where they will lose your dirty clothes so that you can buy clean ones, or you can use the patented USMC self-laundry system. I prefer the latter. It works thusly: you take your dirty dungarees, throw them in a bucket, add Cold Power Cold-Water All, water (of course), and let soak for a few hours. You then slosh vigorously for thirty seconds, rinse, and hang out to dry. In a couple of hours you’ve got spotless, sweet-scented clothes with a brand-new, fresh coat of dust. Unless they get hit by a rocket, of course.

  I’m on “temporary duty” here at the moment, getting “oriented,” which translates into reading a lot of idiotic memos on venereal disease and the various local fevers, sweating, sweating some more, and walking down to Battalion Headquarters three times a day to pound on a desk and demand action. But I’ve been promised a company, so I can’t really complain. No doubt they’ll send me out to do something entirely futile. The big buzz in I Corps at the moment is SecDef McNamara’s latest brilliant idea: In order to discourage the infiltration of large NVA units across the DMZ, we’re going to put up a big fence with little electronic jingles on it and big signs that say Keep Out. We’ve got about ten thousand Marine bulldozers clearing a quarter-mile-wide no-man’s land along the Ben Hai River, under constant mortar fire, and an equal or greater number of Marines getting shot at while protecting them. The damned thing’s called the Trace, possibly because there isn’t a trace of common sense in the whole idea. Scuttlebutt has it that some major in division operations at 3rd MarDiv drew a line on a map, more or less at random; it went up through channels, and lo and behold, we’re implementing the Trace. An exquisitely conceived project.

  Meanwhile, we’re in the lap of luxury here at Phu Bai. We even have our own shower set up, a nifty fifty-five-gallon diesel drum full of greasy water, with holes punched in the bottom and a pull string control. If you want hot water, you shower in the afternoon; for cool water you wait ’til later at night.

  I don’t know where all the wind came from, but it’s threatening to blow my hootch away. Visibility is down to a few inches, so I’ll secure for now. Give my regards to all hands, and tell them Daddy’s fine, just dusty. I’ll write again as soon as I excavate my writing gear.

  Your

  Mike

  P.S. Armed Forces Radio mentioned that there was a bit of a ruckus in Detroit last week, apparently while you were there at your parents’. But I figured you had sense enough to stay clear of the downtown.

  P.P.S. Larry Petroski, unfortunately, got himself killed last week. Right before I got here. It seems that he and his radioman were the beneficiaries of a command-detonated mine somewhere near Con Thien. The usual unpretty sight, by all accounts: nothing but hair, teeth, and eyeballs. Another happy casualty of Mr. McNamara’s Wall. Victor Charlie loves to blow up unit commanders, of course. Larry wasn’t wearing his bars—we never do in the field—but it’s kind of hard to hide a guy with a radio on his back, dogging your every step. C’est la guerre, as they used to say hereabouts, circa 1954. He still had that goddamned rabbit’s foot he won at the Prince William County Fair while we were in Basic School. The one he said would make him bulletproof. You might want to give Maria a buzz.

  P.P.P.S. While I’m thinking of it, in the unlikely event that I should be standing around in front of something and get shot myself, I told them to notify you but not Mother and Dad directly. I figured it might shake the old folks up to have some clod amble in and say I’d been slightly injured when a 60-ton tank ran over my big toe or something equally silly. Like being in my best fatigues when the next rocket fills them full of holes.

  THE 122MM ROCKET killed two second lieutenants who hadn’t even been assigned to anything yet. They were sleeping on cots in a shallow bunker when the rogue rocket landed in the doorway, which they had left open to the cooler night air. One of the guys was using his nice new flak jacket as a pillow, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had been wearing it, as the blast blew his entire face away. The other guy also suffered massive head wounds; he too had been sleeping with his head pointed toward the door. The bunker had no blast wall and only plywood and a single layer of sandbags for overhead cover. A sentry said he had noticed the glow of two unshielded cigarettes through the open entryway, about an hour earlier, and one of the lieutenants had a tape deck playing, against every noise reg and rule of common sense. The tape was still limping along when they dug the guys out, playing The Yardbirds super slow.

  All in all, the two men had made just about every mistake you could make in the absolute minimum amount of time necessary to die. No one could even remember their names, they had to look them up, and there was some squabbling over who was going to write the necessary letters to their families. As temporary duty officers, they were technically under the command of the battalion, but the CO said he was damned if he was going to write letters to the families of two fucking new guys who hadn’t even had the sense to close their bunker door. In the end, they had Mike write them, since he was a captain and probably would have been stuck with the guys as platoon commanders anyway.

  He wrote two scrupulous, respectful, sympathetic letters, making what he could of the marginally heroic material at hand; but all he could really think was that now some poor bastard on Okinawa was going to have to go through these guys’ seabags. He wondered if that made him heartless. Everyone at Phu Bai was mad at those two idiots for dying so easily and so fast.

  “SO, YOUNG MAN, what are you going to be when you grow up?”

  “A Marine, Father,” Danny O’Reilly said.

  Father Winters smiled benignly. But the old priest smiled benignly at everything, and Danny couldn’t really tell what it meant in this particular case. Danny had come to the introductory meeting for the new crop of altar boys prepared to be awed, but there was little that was awesome about Father Winters. The man was round, soft, and petulant, with a smile as phony as his hair, which looked like Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap minus the striped tail, mashed a little flat. It was hard to take someone with a wig like that seriously, even if he was a man of God. The polyester aloha shirt only made it worse; Father Winters’s complacent belly heaped the tropical fruit design into a compost of overripe mangoes and lurid plums. He wasn’t even wearing his collar, and he wore white golf shoes with the spikes removed, which made a spectacular clicking, like a herd of tap dancers, on the marble-tiled floor in front of the altar rail.

  There were five new altar-boy candidates sitting in the front row of St. Jude’s church. Military kids, mostly, erect and well scrubbed, with haircuts that made their ears stand out like radio dishes: the suburban Virginia Beach parish was largely Navy families. The boys all looked intimidated and suitably grave, even Danny’s best friend, Percy Killebrew, who sat beside him with his clip-on tie askew, maintaining an uncharacteristic silence. With Father Winters’s attention on him, Danny didn’t dare glance to his right for fear that Percy would lift an eyebrow and send him into spasms of laughter. Percy had already told Father Winters he was going to be a rodeo clown when he grew up, a put-on so brazen that it had been all Danny could do to stifle his guffaw. But Father Winters just smiled benignly and let the flippancy pass. It was clear he wanted to get to his golf game without undue controversy.

  “A Marine,” Father Winters repeated now, his tone suggesting that a rodeo clown might have been easier to digest. He floundered for something salutary to add, then brightened. “Weren’t you a Marine, Father Germaine?”

  “A Navy chaplain, Father,” Father Germaine answered, with a trace of stressed patience that suggested he had corrected the misimpression before. He stood behind Father Winters and to his ri
ght, slumping unmilitarily in basic black. A strong-jawed man in his midthirties, with wiry hair like a chunk of unrefined coal and eyes of Vandyke brown, Germaine really needed to shave more often. On days that he said morning mass, his five o’clock shadow arrived by early afternoon. “I did spend some time in the field with Marines, though.”

  “Of course, of course.” Father Winters regathered himself. “Well, the warrior’s calling is a noble one. In this imperfect world, we will always need dedicated men willing to risk their lives to keep our country safe and strong. And to replace the, ah, casualties we are suffering at present, of course.”

  The priest’s vague blue gaze wandered once more over Danny; finding nothing of further interest, he turned his attention back to the group.

  “As aspiring acolytes, you are entering a sacred tradition, one that has endured for millennia. Like Father Germaine and myself, you are now servants of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is a grave and weighty responsibility, and not to be taken lightly. You will have the privilege of assisting at the celebration of the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, a ritual that has survived virtually unchanged since the Last Supper.” He eyed them sternly. “Two…thousand…years.”

  The words rang in the empty church. Winters let the silence stretch on. The boys sat rigid, even breathless, motionless under the weight of millennia.

  “Two thousand years,” Father Winters repeated at last. “And for most of those two thousand years, the Mass has been conducted in Latin. Our Holy Father has recently seen fit to allow Mass to be said in English, but make no mistake: the Latin Mass will be back.” He chuckled, indicating humor. “Remember, you heard it here first. Save your Latin lectionaries. The vernacular service is a fad.”

  Father Germaine grimaced, approximating a smile. The boys uncertainly followed suit.

  “We will therefore be requiring you altar boys to learn the Liturgy of the Word not just in its English version, but in the Latin as well. It will be a bit more work for you, but you will be grateful for the effort in the long run. And it will save us untold time when the Church corrects Her course. Some things simply do not change. In principio verbum erat, eh, Father Germaine?”

  “Sic,” the other priest agreed, deadpan. “Atque multorum stultitiam perpessum esse.”

  Father Winters blinked: too much of a good thing. “Yes. Well.” He glanced at his watch and brightened. “Unfortunately, I have another engagement this afternoon, but Father Germaine will be walking you boys through the rest of your orientation. Unless there are any questions at this point?”

  He surveyed the group magnificently; but no one stirred. The boys’ stoic faces suggested that they were prepared to die before conceiving a question.

  “Good, good,” Father Winters said. “Then I’ll leave you in Father Germaine’s most capable hands. I look forward to serving with you all in the near future.”

  And, with a hand motion somewhere between a wave and half a benediction, he was gone, his golf shoes clattering on the marble. The church’s side door whooshed and thumped behind him. Father Germaine studied the floor at his feet, letting the echoes settle before he glanced up and met the boys’ expectant gazes. His look was sober and a little weary, but something in his eyes suggested that they had shared a joke.

  The boys relaxed, a palpable loosening as everyone began to breathe again. Danny was conscious suddenly of the quality of silence in the deserted church. It really was an awesome thing to be in the sanctuary without the usual Sunday crowd. The empty pews stretched behind him into dimness like receding centuries. A life-sized Christ, lurid with pre–Vatican II blood, hung by savage iron spikes from a cross as raw as railroad ties. To the left of the altar, in an arched niche lined with chunks of irregular stone, the Virgin Mary lifted an ivory hand over a bank of glittering candles. The quiet was so deep, it seemed to Danny he could hear the whisper of the flames.

  “Two thousand years is really not such a very long time,” Father Germaine confided, before he got on with the business of teaching them the intricate choreography of the mass. It was hard to tell whether the thought made him happy or not.

  ONE OF THE EIGHT THINGS to which a property owner was entitled under the old King’s Grant in Virginia real estate law was “the promise of quiet enjoyment.” Fat chance, Liz thought, listening to Danny trying to start the lawn mower. It was a sound as painful as a child’s racking cough at night. Mike had invariably gotten the thing going only after fifteen minutes of furious labor and volumes of the sort of inspired swearing only a Marine could manage. Perhaps the profanity was some kind of crucial element. She ached to go help Danny, but her older son had insisted on doing the job himself. It was all very Mike-like.

  The washing machine’s buzzer sounded, but Liz ignored it. The signal always went off halfway through the rinse cycle, and she had long since adjusted to waiting ten minutes after it sounded. It was a Cleaning Monday, and the other children were engaged in chores of their own. Kathie was sweeping the dining room with her pink Suzy Homemaker broom, blowing kisses as she worked and announcing from time to time, apropos of nothing, “I love you all.” She was a remarkably cheerful housekeeper. Angus, meanwhile, sat a bit sullenly at the dining room table, refusing to lift his feet for the broom, ostensibly engaged in polishing the silverware. He was still on his first spoon, however. Deb-Deb was in the living room, “dusting” with a big yellow feather duster, an operation that looked more like an Isadora Duncan dance, with much waving and theatrical flourishes.

  None of the kids was accomplishing much, but Liz was not overly interested in actual effect. The institution of Cleaning Monday had been a spasm of sorts on her part, a summer program she had imposed during an uncharacteristically fervent attempt to order their lives immediately after Mike’s departure in July. It was enough at this point that the kids were going through the motions; she seldom did more, in her own housekeeping efforts.

  The lawn mower engine caught at last, sputtered, then settled in to a heartening roar. Liz relaxed as Danny pushed the machine off on an arc toward the lake. With a moment to herself, she considered throwing up. Her morning sickness always unnerved the kids; Deb-Deb was afraid Liz might puke up the baby and refused to be comforted by attempts to explain the mechanics of the process. In any case, Liz was actually feeling relatively good today—her nausea had been easier with every pregnancy and was already tapering off. The downside of being such a seasoned baby machine was that even with a uterus the size of a mere orange, she was already showing; her stomach muscles had long since been savaged into slackness. She was going to have to start telling people soon, which she dreaded. It was hard to imagine accepting the inevitable congratulations with sufficient cheer.

  She finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes, then went into the utility room just as the washer was rattling to a stop. She transferred the mass of wet laundry to the dryer, culled a load of whites from the Sisyphean resources of the dirty pile, and set the machine to Hot-Warm. She would add bleach if she could remember to when the machine had filled, but it didn’t really matter. The boys’ socks and underwear devolved inevitably toward gray.

  “Mom, Kathie’s not working,” Angus complained from the dining room.

  Liz glanced into the dining room, and, sure enough, Kathie had parked her pink broom by the window and disappeared. Desertion was a constant problem on Cleaning Mondays, though it was usually the younger kids who went AWOL first.

  “Do you want me to go find her?” Angus offered hopefully.

  “You just keep your butt in the chair, mister. Why don’t you do another piece now? That spoon is shiny enough.”

  Angus set the very bright spoon aside and grudgingly fingered a salad fork. “Do Marines even use silverware?”

  “Of course they do. On, uh, the Marine Corps birthday.”

  To her astonishment, this actually seemed to motivate her younger son. Angus turned back to his polishing with renewed vigor. At his present rate, Liz thought, he might even have a place setting or two
finished by the time the Marine Corps birthday came around in mid-November. Her son stuck his tongue out slightly when he concentrated, just like Mike.

  Liz made a quick circuit of the house in search of Kathie and finally found her daughter upstairs in the master bedroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door, posing in Liz’s wedding dress.

  Liz paused in the doorway, surprised by the sudden constriction in her chest. She didn’t want to cry. But she was close. Kathie was so radiant, so innocent and happy. What hurt her heart most, Liz realized, was that the main thing she felt at the sight of that long-forgotten white dress was an unexpectedly savage depth of irony. She’d been radiant, innocent, and happy once herself; but apparently she was no more. She and Mike had married in the chapel at Catholic University six months after she’d met him. She’d been eighteen, a drama major, an actress. She’d just played Rosalind in As You Like It, and she’d been dazzled and in love. The Old Testament reading at the wedding mass had been from Ruth—Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge—and it had all been lovely and moving. Certainly Liz hadn’t foreseen eventually lodging in the ramshackle Quonset huts and cardboard tenements that passed for officer housing at a series of obscure Marine Corps bases throughout the South. She and Mike had been going to go to New York, and Paris. She’d thought she was marrying a deep, literate veteran who wanted to write novels, who would send flowers backstage after her performances, who would lie around in bed with her on Sunday mornings with the Arts & Culture section of the New York Times spread across the quilt, discussing Ibsen.