Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  “Look how small the bush beside the door is!” Danny exclaimed, over a photo of Mike and Liz three months into their marriage, embracing on the porch of this same house.

  “I had just planted it,” Mike Senior said. “That was the day your parents told us they were going to have you.”

  Danny, awed, bent over the photo with redeepened interest. Liz could see him trying to come to terms with the entwinement of his own life with that blue juniper’s, the bafflingly twinned paths of growth. It blew her own mind too, actually. That bush was over eight feet tall now and had the aura of the eternal, of having always stood sentry beside the entrance. Liz wondered how she would feel about the pictures Mike Senior had taken today, when she looked back on them in ten years with her fifth child beside her, and she felt, for the first time, the flicker of sweet anticipation.

  Across the living room, Deb-Deb sat happily with her grandmother at the coffee table, the two of them absorbed in the surviving Cork City figurines. Kathie and her Aunt Theresa were in the dining room, trying to rig a nun’s habit for Kathie’s Barbie from one of the blue cloth napkins. On the television screen, the muted nightly news flickered in black-and-white, some Vietnam footage, mercifully ignored by everyone.

  “Danny’s in Mom’s stomach in that picture?” Angus asked.

  “Yup,” his grandfather said, amused. “Just like your new brother or sister is in her stomach right now.”

  Angus gave Liz’s abdomen a frankly skeptical glance. Danny flipped the album pages back and found another photo of Mike and Liz on the porch, as newlyweds, pre-bush. He studied it intently, then flipped back to the photo with the bush, still trying to grasp a world in which he did not yet exist.

  All those years ago, Liz thought, looking over her son’s shoulder at her own bright, heartbreakingly fresh, young face, and Mike’s, seeing again how they had loved each other. She felt a wave of gratitude to her difficult father-in-law for this gift of their shared history; she wanted her own grandchildren looking at these pictures someday. With Mike sitting beside her, God willing, their aged faces testifying to the mysteries of time and love, of what changed and what stayed the same. She was glad, as she always was in the end, that they had made the long trip north.

  CHAPTER 9

  OCTOBER 1967

  from: Capt. M. F. O’Reilly

  H Co., 2nd Bn., 29th Marines, 6th Mar Div FMF

  c/o FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96602

  Mon 2 Oct 1967

  Dong Ha, RVN

  My Dearest Lizzie,

  Well, here I am in Dong Ha, at the crossroads of scenic Highway Nine and the Street Without Joy, the truck stop garden spot of Southeast Asia. It seems like the lap of luxury after Gio Linh; the rats in the bunkers are much better fed, for instance, and so are not as aggressive. I usually keep them at bay with my .45, but I am cautious with them, as word has it they charge when they are wounded. So I only shoot when I can see the whites of their eyes.

  We have settled in here, apparently for a while, after our adventures circa Gio Linh, and have managed to stagger through a few Rough Riders convoy escort hops up to Con Thien and several truly futile patrols in various hinterlands without anyone getting killed, which definitely helps morale. The men call me “Lucky Mike,” though that can’t last and will no doubt come around to bite me on the ass at some point.

  In fact, one of the main problems right now is that we’ve been too damned lucky. The company hasn’t been shot at enough recently, and humping day after day along mud roads and up and down mountains with sixty or seventy pounds of equipment on your back, without ever having to fire your weapon, it’s easy to lose the sense of ammunition as anything but dead weight. We’ve hit booby traps and been mortared, taken artillery fire, and had a few guys get bit by snakes; but there haven’t been many opportunities to shoot back. Inevitably, the troops begin to cut corners and lighten up. But it only seems like good luck, to be so bored in a combat zone that you forget why you are carrying so many bullets.

  Fortunately, we’ve also had some time to train, and I’ve been running all the platoons through Immediate Action drills and throwing good old-fashioned kick-shit-everywhere act-all-pissed inspections. My first sergeant, Ike Tibbetts, is a great help in this. He is very Old Corps, a huge black man with the Marine Corps motto tattooed across both his biceps. It is spelled wrong on his left arm, but if anyone points this out, Tibbetts bruises them severely. His teaching style is very simple: He goes around grabbing screwups and malingerers by the stacking-swivel and hollering, “YOU ARE FUCKING UP MY MARINE CORPS!” which has a pronounced motivational effect. In this gentle fashion, he has been schooling the men in such fundamental truths of military life as “Ambushes are murder, and murder is fun.” (Don’t tell Danny and Angus this, as I suspect it would not play well at school.)

  I’m using that great waterproof pen you sent, which does in fact write wonderfully under monsoon conditions. Please send waterproof paper next.

  Weird incident as we came in from our last patrol. Just outside this village, a little girl came toward the column. It is not unheard of here for a child to be booby-trapped, but this kid penetrated our perimeter pretty effortlessly and walked right up to me. Sweetest little face you ever saw, huge black eyes, bangs cut straight across. Maybe five years old, walking around on her own in a war zone. I thought of Deb-Deb, of course. I gave her all the candy I had, and all of Stinson’s candy too, and then she said, “You got cig-ahrettes?” I did in fact have two packs of those Korean War–vintage C-ration Lucky Strikes, which I trade for Cold War–vintage C-ration pound cake, and I gave them to her. I assume she will trade them for the Vietnamese equivalent of pound cake. I hope she wasn’t going to smoke them herself.

  After she’d cleaned us out of all our sweets and cigarettes, she tottered off to wherever she had come from. I looked at Stinson and he looked at me, and I said, “Cute kid,” and he resafed his rifle and said, “Skipper, I’m just glad she wasn’t wired with grenades.”

  Your U.S. armed forces, building trust and goodwill one civilian at a time.

  Give my love to Deb-Deb and the rest of the fearsome foursome, and tell them Daddy says they can have all the cig-ahrettes they want.

  It’s getting towards shower time. That means I trot down, turn today’s dust into mud, mop off the mud, and pick up a fresh coat of dust en route to my cozy abode. I miss you so, my darling liz. I think of your skin, so clean and smooth. Thanks for sending that picture of Kathie in your wedding dress. She looks as beautiful in it as you did. Marrying you was the best thing I ever did.

  Love, your

  Mike

  P.S. It doesn’t sound like you, to let that Girl Scout shit pass; I assume you’ll be going in soon to kick ass and take names. I don’t know what the hell I’m fighting for over here, if Kathie’s friend can’t join the goddamn Bluebirds.

  “THIS ONE?…Or this one?”

  The lens before Danny’s eyes rotated with a click, blurring the lettered chart. The eye exam had the flavor of a test, but the answers were so obvious it seemed like cheating. It was too easy: clear, not clear. He wondered if he was doing something wrong, if there was a catch.

  He said, “The first one.”

  “Good,” the optometrist said. “Now…This one? Or this one?”

  “The second one.”

  “Good.” He changed the settings. “This one?…Or this one?”

  “The—I don’t know, they’re both blurry.”

  “Ah.” The doctor made a note. “Well, which is less blurry?”

  Danny felt a surge of anxiety. Perhaps his eyes were hopelessly flawed and no lenses would be able to correct them completely. The world would be blurry forever. He would have to stay in the front row, to which he’d recently been moved at school. He hated sitting up there like a sore thumb with all the teacher’s pets. All his friends sat in the back.

  “Could you show them to me again?” he asked.

  “Sure. This one?…Or this one?”

 
Danny studied the alternating charts intently. Both images were terrible; it seemed a choice between greater and lesser evils. He hesitated, then conceded, “The first one.” Maybe he could still get away with a seat somewhere in the middle, if he squinted.

  “Good.” The doctor changed the setting and the chart clicked suddenly into perfect focus. “This one?…Or this one?”

  “The first one!” Danny exclaimed. “That’s the clearest one yet.”

  “Good.” The doctor turned the machine off and made another note on his clipboard. “You have a slight astigmatism.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s correctable.”

  “Can I sit in the back row again at school?”

  The doctor smiled. “Absolutely.”

  “I hate the front row.”

  “Yeah, the front row sucks,” the doctor said.

  ON THE DRIVE home, Danny could see the leaves on the trees. They were so beautiful. He’d never realized such intricacy existed, had lived with masses of indeterminate green. He wondered what else he’d been missing.

  “I can see the leaves on the trees,” he told Liz.

  “Wonderful.”

  “I’ll bet I can see a baseball way better too. Dad’s going to be so surprised, how good I’ll be hitting by the time he gets home.”

  “He sure is,” Liz said.

  LIZ WONDERED, as she often did, where the time went. Running a couple loads of laundry and peeking out the living room window every fifteen minutes to make sure a Marine Corps green sedan wasn’t pulling into the driveway hardly qualified as productivity, but that often seemed the sum of her accomplishments by late afternoon.

  She had spent an hour on the phone that morning with Maria Petroski, inevitably a good way to leave a day feeling gutted. Maria was at the stage of frankly wishing she was dead. Lately they had been getting deeper and deeper into their conversations before Maria conceded that she couldn’t kill herself, of course, there were the boys to think of. But she was scarily lucid about the varying capacities of her relatives and friends to raise Chevy, Lejeune, and Ramada. Maria had been setting aside five pills from every bottle of what she called her “widow chokers,” the generous sedatives the doctors had been prescribing to help her sleep; and this morning she had announced cheerfully that she had enough now to kill a rhinoceros. She’d hastened to add that there was no way she’d take them until she had enough to kill an elephant, and she was apparently far enough gone to believe that Liz would find this reassuring.

  What did you say to a friend who was squirreling away lethal-to-a-large-mammal-sized overdoses for a rainy day? It was like watching a child play on railroad tracks and being unable to tell her to get off. Liz understood Maria’s feelings perfectly; sometimes she wished she was dead too, even with a husband who was still alive and a baby on the way, but she never got further than the vision of the kids finding her body. Maria was well past the funeral, in her own mind, happily entombed beside Larry at Quantico National Cemetery, while her three boys languished in her sister’s—disqualifyingly inept, thank God, in Maria’s still-realistic judgment—care or Liz’s own overloaded home or even, in certain completely morbid scenarios, in the custody of the state.

  After a conversation like that, it was a little hard to worry about dusting the china shelves and the rest of the day’s domestic to-do list. Liz had taken the vacuum cleaner out but never plugged it in, and it looked vaguely reproachful standing beside the dining room table with the uncoiled cord lying slack. They hadn’t eaten in the dining room anyway, since Mike had left; Liz hadn’t had the heart to set the formal table and leave the place at the head empty, and so they had taken to bolting down their meals from stools at the kitchen counter or eating off TV trays in the family room, accompanied by Walter Cronkite’s lugubrious take on the war. The boys lived for the Vietnam reports and were always trying to spot Mike in the footage of Marines slogging chest-deep through rice paddies with small-arms fire plucking at the water, ducking incoming mortar rounds, or jamming the sodden heaps of the wounded into medevac choppers. Liz didn’t know how to tell them that if they saw Daddy on the CBS evening news, it was almost certainly a very bad thing.

  The little tin ship’s clock given to Mike by his First Platoon in Okinawa tolled six bells on the afternoon watch: three o’clock. The kids would all be home by four, even with their various after-school activities. Dinner was going to be a problem, as it was too late, yet again, to get to the commissary, and everyone was sick of hamburger, canned peas, and macaroni and cheese. Liz had a sudden urge to call Miranda Simmons to babysit, leave a casserole in the oven, and drive up to Dumfries to hold Maria’s hand and possibly take away some of the pills, leaving her with only enough to kill a chipmunk.

  Instead, she went into the dining room, relooped the vacuum cleaner’s cord around its handle, then put the machine back into the closet. It was an odd sort of non-accomplishment, granted, but it seemed better than doing nothing.

  DANNY SLIPPED self-consciously among the trees, doing the heel-to-toe “Indian roll” step that Mike had taught him to advance quietly over the fallen leaves. He carried his BB gun in the ready position, safety off. The “island,” as the kids called it, was actually a peninsula, a finger of soggy, wooded near-marsh that joined the suburban mainland not far from the elementary school. But it was big enough to feel like Indian country to a ten-year-old. Danny had rowed over, in lieu of being choppered in. Recon.

  The new eyeglasses felt heavy on his nose, and he freed a hand briefly from the rifle to thumb them back into place. The leaves on the trees still seemed miraculously distinct to his freshly corrected vision, crisp edged and vivid now in autumn yellows, reds, and browns. He had chosen the heaviest black-rimmed frames, over Liz’s objections that they were ugly and awkward. Danny thought they were ugly too; of course they were ugly, that was practically the point. And they did keep slipping down. But they were durable, made for combat; they were, he knew, the kind of frames the Marines wore in the field.

  The late afternoon light was rich and already fading; twilight came early since the shift from Daylight Savings Time. Danny skirted a patch of poison ivy and caught a glimpse of movement in the branches of a pine tree just ahead. A jay, vivid blue and white and black, crested with lapis lazuli. He’d been amazed, since getting his glasses, at the beauty of birds.

  Danny raised the BB gun instinctively. He already had a pellet chambered, and he snapped off a shot. He’d never hit anything before, firing into the blur, but this time the bird dropped instantly. Danny wavered, shocked at the effect, then moved forward uneasily and found the body beneath the tree. His shot had been perfect, to the heart: a single bead of bright blood stood out on the jay’s breast like a ruby.

  Danny safed his weapon and laid it on the ground, then knelt beside the dead jay, feeling the wet cold earth soaking through the knees of his jeans. The limp bird’s exquisite feathers were undamaged, as fine as anything he had ever seen, but the blue seemed muted already, as if the color had died as well. He had never killed anything before, and it was not what he had imagined it would be. His nerves were electric with horror, and his stomach seized abruptly into a queasy ball of dismay and heaved. The bitter acid of the vomit in his mouth was strangely satisfying, the first taste of an unimaginable penance; and when he had finished throwing up, as the twilight settled in the woods, Danny sat beside the dead bird on the boggy ground and began to sob in shame.

  CHAPTER 10

  OCTOBER 1967

  MIKE WOKE FROM a dream about Liz; she’d been running her hands through his hair. He loved his wife’s hands, an actress’s hands, elegant and expressive and eternally surprising. He could still remember slipping the wedding ring onto her slim tanned finger, the way the gold band transformed the wild bird of her hand into something infinitely richer, something still untamed but grounded, rooted and sacred, a precious trust that asked everything of him. He’d been so proud to be associated with a hand like that.

  In the dre
am, there had been some kind of complication, duty had called, and Liz had gone somewhere to put on a play, something Greek, or maybe he had, and somehow by the dream’s end the Parris Island barber was there, wielding his buzzing electric razor gleefully, handing Mike his sideburns in a little black heap.

  The bunker was pitch-black. Mike could hear Ed Perrone snoring across the dirt floor and, in the lulls, Doug Parker’s quieter breathing with its distinctive nasal whistle. Sometimes one of them woke up screaming. That was always unnerving, but it happened to almost everyone and no one made a big deal out of it. It was understood that you didn’t talk about it in the morning. But tonight everyone had slept straight through.

  By the green glow of Mike’s watch, the twin of the one he’d given Danny, it was 0343. He hadn’t bothered to set an alarm; his body’s internal clock was infallible in a combat zone. He’d been up past midnight the night before, planning the mission out and then getting his personal battle gear in order, recleaning the M-16 he wasn’t even supposed to be carrying, taping together ammo clips for easy changes after emptying one, finding some dry socks. Tucking the AK-47 round into his helmet band, per the Marine superstition that that was the bullet that wouldn’t kill you; and making sure Larry Petroski’s moldy rabbit’s foot was at the bottom of his map pocket.

  And, in case superstition didn’t work, checking his hasta la vista, the good-bye letter for Liz he always left under the Lincoln Memorial paperweight, a honeymoon souvenir, on the crate beside his cot. He’d added a few lines to the letter the night before by candlelight, just tender stuff. The thing got longer before every mission and was turning into a mushy mess.

  Mike lit the candle on the cot-side crate and swung his feet onto the bunker’s cool dirt floor, hearing the rats scurry away in the darkness. He was already dressed in his combat dungarees, and his boots were right where he had left them, beside the M-16 under the cot, laces loose, ready to go on. He’d been using his flak jacket for a pillow. As the other officers stirred and started rousing themselves, Mike poured half an inch of water into his helmet, soaped his face, and scraped the dull razor through his stubble briskly, a ritual on battle days. It was too late to die young and leave a pretty corpse, but if he died before his five o’clock shadow came in by early afternoon, he could at least leave a clean-shaven one. Liz hated that three-day beard look.