A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  Back in Eugene, I switched to carrying around Virginia Woolf, who claimed every woman needs a room of her own. To write. I certainly wanted a room alone where I could be whomever I wanted to be. I felt pulled, this way and that, by too many cults, too many people with answers for me. I wanted to know what other women had done, how they got out of this. After my friend Virginia Woolf, I turned to Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous, who wrote, “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.” That was what I was trying to do, find the live, breathing woman. Cixous also wrote about war, lamenting “what fierceness we have to work every day in order to reattach living importance to the very delicate things which we are constantly torn away from by the forces of war.” The first article I published was about Hélène Cixous in Cultural Critique.

  In turn, that article would help me land me a job, against all odds, as a tenure-track professor.

  War began to expose itself to me. In my Fascism class, we watched Nazi propaganda films and learned how Adolf Hitler mocked the free press until no one believed them anymore. Then he set up his own media and reality as he rose to power. There is a picture of him as a “gentleman” and nature lover at his country estate, laughing at a newspaper. The caption states he is amused by its “fables.” In reality, he was nothing more than a thug and barroom brawler who forced the world into a war. My dad’s war.

  In another class, we learned what happened after the war, when a secret U.S. program called Operation Paperclip brought Nazi scientists to the United States. Wernher von Braun, who headed the Apollo mission, came over that way, smuggled up from Tijuana, Mexico. In Germany, he had overseen labor at a concentration camp where one-third of the population of sixty thousand people had died building V-2 rockets. They worked in tunnels where they were methodically starved to death, one after another. After the moon landing, survivor Jean Michel said, “I could not watch the Apollo mission without remembering that that triumphant walk was made possible by our initiation to inconceivable horror.” Meanwhile, in von Braun’s Alabama home, residents carried him on their shoulders while church bells pealed and fireworks filled the sky. He had chosen to live in the South because, he said, plantation life appealed to him.

  After much digging, I later found out that China Lake had its own Nazis. According to the Rocketeer, Wolfgang Noeggerath was “brought to America in 1945 as part of ‘Operation Paperclip.’” We also had Hans Haussmann and others. It was not even a secret on the base, though their immigration files were classified for fifty years. Once they were not, I would send away for Noeggerath’s file, where he stated why he wanted to move to the United States. “To stop the communist threat,” he wrote, which is the same reason he gave for becoming a Nazi. He said he admired the Nazis due to their “extensive program of social reforms,” which could have meant Hitler’s weapons industry, credited with halting unemployment, or could have meant the concentration camps. In China Lake, he was just one of “the Germans,” part of a social club that made schnitzels and drank beer.

  It was Noeggerath and von Braun who inspired me to travel to the tunnels where the V-2 missiles were made. There are still the rusted remains of V-2s inside, but no one speaks highly of von Braun and his “wonder weapon” there. Yet Nazis spread like a virus, all over the world, after World War II. They’re still around.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Eugene, our last remaining war-free days were posted in big numbers on TV screens every night, under the heading “Countdown to Confrontation.” It was a bit unnerving. President George H. W. Bush said we would invade Iraq on January 15, 1991. CBS changed its eye logo to an image of planet Earth with a green radar detector flashing across it, making the world look like a target. Tick tock tick. No one I knew even had a TV, but the university bookstore put one in the window so we could watch. Bars pulled out old TVs from their back rooms. CBS kept us glued to the screen.

  Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and we were about to retaliate.

  In the middle of my Composition 101 class, a student poked his head through the open door and said simply, “It’s started.” Then he ran on like Paul Revere. It was eerily quiet. Then, one by one, my students stood up and walked out, looking shell-shocked. In the courtyard outside, a sea of zombies emerged from every building, interrupting the ultra-Frisbee players on the dazzling green grass. Blue-yellow-white grass. Students wandered around in a daze as if bombs were falling down the street and not on the other side of the world. Some hugged each other and cried.

  The crowd began to flow like a river toward the regular “march” route—from campus to the downtown Federal Building. It was a spontaneous, silent, mourning march to a building where a crowd was already gathered on the steps, waiting for something to happen. On the other side of the street, a handful of agitators had also showed up, shouting angry slurs across the street. One of them carried a sign that read “Kill Hippies.”

  I saw Sam standing on the street, holding a sign that was blank. I ran over, happy for a familiar face. “What the heck does your sign mean?” I asked.

  “Where is the media?” he said. “Why aren’t these protests on TV? No one sees us. No one hears us. The media is silent.” It was true: there were no cameras around.

  Suddenly, someone shouted from a megaphone, “What about taking over the interstate?” People cheered and then a chant started, at first only a few voices but soon almost everyone: “Take the I-5. Take the I-5.” There were at least a thousand people there.

  “Take the I-5. No more oil,” someone added to the chant. I turned back home, thinking, Fuck the war and getting killed for it on the I-5.

  Instead, I wanted to see the weapons. I headed to Max’s bar, one of many grimy all-wooden places of darkness near campus, where CNN was playing on an old TV. It was the first time anyone had seen war live, twenty-four-hour streaming, reported by terrified reporters holed up in a hotel in Baghdad. Bombs were dropping all around them. The world was mesmerized. A new thing took over the media that night: cable news. People wanted a twenty-four-hour view of war.

  Goodbye, Tom Brokaw and the evening news.

  I asked for a shot of vodka, hoping to see my mom’s Tomahawk emerge from its shipboard chute. At a cost of $1.3 million each, the Tomahawk had been advertised as “One Bomb, One Target.”

  Suddenly, CNN cut to George Bush. “While the world waited,” he said, “Saddam sought to add to the chemical weapons arsenal he now possesses, an infinitely more dangerous weapon of mass destruction—a nuclear weapon.” Rumors flew that the Iraqi military was bigger than we had expected. Some said we would get bogged down in a “quagmire” we could never escape. But Bush was reassuring. “I’ve told the American people before that this will not be another Vietnam,” he said, “and I repeat this here tonight. Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world, and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back.” I drank another shot and went home.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, I picked up a copy of What’s Happening? (now the Eugene Weekly) and found there was already a name for the I-5 incident. The “Northwest Shutdown,” it was called. One woman said, “All I remembered was running down an embankment toward the interstate and hearing one of the local anti-war leaders cry, ‘Lay down!’ ‘Lay your bodies down!’” So she did. She continued, “I can recall the smell of oil, the exhaust from the trucks that we had stopped, the feel of rough pavement against my cheek and some strange hippie’s hand being way too close to my butt.” For those few moments on the freeway, she said, it felt as if life had stopped. Afterward, she said, “I could not get that man’s voice out of my head. It made me want to scream at random people in random places just to see if they’d do as I asked.”

  Lay Your Bodies Down. Die.

  “War makes its stupidity reign over the world,” Cixous had written.

  Soon afterward, my
girlfriend BethAnn, Sam, and I went to a “Women and War” conference, where we put balloons around our panel’s room and labeled them “Clean,” “Strike,” “New, “World,” “Order,” “Nuclear,” and other things Bush was saying on TV. One of us planned to read their paper on Shakespeare (BethAnn) or Marguerite Duras (me) while the other went around the room and popped the balloons. The point was to scare the audience out of complacency. BethAnn said it was a “happening.” Finally I understood what “Abbie Hoffman” was asking for when I was rolling rocks around the Westmont lawn.

  After the conference, we took mushrooms in the hotel room and, in the middle of the night, climbed the hotel marquee and changed the letters to “STOP BLOOD GORE NOW.” BethAnn, the woman who finished all her PACEs by age nine, was also a Scrabble genius and had figured it out. She probably remembers what it originally said. If not, I’m sure she could reverse engineer the original wording. Today, she works on Wall Street and is known for her predictive stock market skills. Twiggy, redheaded BethAnn, who wore tight velvet red pants and a T-shirt that said “Sexism Kills” in dripping red blood. The next morning, when the manager knocked on our hotel room door and told us to change the sign back, we were grateful that he did not have us arrested. We dutifully climbed up the sign once more.

  Back at school, I burned an American flag in my Composition 101 class. It seemed like something interesting to write about since the U. S. Supreme Court had recently declared it a form of free speech. Even Antonin Scalia agreed.

  Not surprisingly, a student complained to the department chair, who called me into his office one day. “I just want to know what to tell his dad,” he said to me. “He’s a lawyer. Do you have any ideas?”

  “Tell him it’s legal,” I replied.

  The war lasted six long weeks.

  * * *

  —

  On my birthday, BethAnn wrote “GET LAID AT 25!” in red lipstick on my apartment door. We had become fast friends after we found out we both shared ACE. Her school was started by her father at his commune in Washington State, and she had to wear long braids and denim dresses like the kind they wore on The Beverly Hillbillies. Her dad was the guru ACE leader of a place that sounded strangely Amish.

  Now she liked to dominate the men she dated.

  I looked up to her, and when I saw her lipstick message on my front door, I realized I could no longer think of a reason not to. Get laid. In my Composition 101 class, my student Reber had been writing me notes bordering on romantic for his “journaling” assignment. He taped in pictures of his home in Sitka, Alaska, wrote lyrical paragraphs about sea otters and Sitka spruce, and said he wanted to take me there.

  Now that class had ended, I decided to give him a call. “I don’t know about your boyfriend, Reefer,” my landlady would later say. “He looks like a hippie.” I tried not to laugh.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I replied. “He’s just from Alaska.”

  I remember seeing waterfalls flowing upside down when we first had sex, made of rainbow-hued colors. I thought sex was transcendental, better than LSD. I assumed he thought so too, and that we would bond forever in our shared ecstasy. I did not know a thing about the world.

  He did take me to Alaska with him, for two consecutive summers, which is where I met his other girlfriends. While I was working the “slime line” with Filipinos at the fish plant, he was banging one of them in the mudroom. Back in Eugene, I went to therapy and peeked at the book my therapist was scribbling in. I saw, “She is growing up.” Was that all it was and would it ever end?

  I realized I was still caught between two worlds. I missed the idealism and even the redundancy of home, the little routines of my father’s, like throwing his keys in the air, and the way my mom’s smile could make the whole world forget its worries, if only because hers were buried so deep, locked away in secret boxes. I missed the twin language my sister and I spoke. But now I associated all those things with the DoD and I no longer believed in it, or in God—the two things that had supplied the stability and routines for my entire life. There seemed to be no place I could fit in. So I went back and forth, back and forth, searching the world and then coming back home—lost and confused, with books as my only constants. Books were faithful and reliable. You could pack them up and put them in a box, run your hands over their spines, flip through their pages full of memories. They always came with you, wherever you went.

  When I left Alaska for the last time, BethAnn only said, “What a schmuck.”

  Sam’s black Lab gave me a paw hug, which helped.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Death of a Salesman

  When the war started,” my dad said, “a TV was rolled into Mike Lab lobby so people could watch it on CNN.” He was sitting in the wooden rocking chair in the piano room, the place for serious talks. There were chairs to rock away your anxieties and a hummingbird feeder outside, which made it easy to change the subject. “And when CNN showed a hit, people started cheering,” he said. “After that, there was a big party for a week at Mike Lab. Everyone was watching CNN.”

  Surprised the Department of Defense turned on the TV like everyone else to see if their weapons worked, I said, “That’s funny.” Then added, “Like funny odd, I mean. Not funny ‘haha.’” I was home for the summer, once again, but this time had not applied to work on the base. I would make do somehow.

  “Then I noticed that CNN was showing the same missile strike over and over again. What does that tell you?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said quietly, looking out the window, knowing that eye contact or sudden movements might make him stop talking. A ruby-throated hummingbird was buzzing outside, its beak with perfect aim.

  “People cheered every time General Schwarzkopf showed that footage of a Tomahawk entering an air shaft,” my dad continued. “But it meant nothing.” He shook his head with a defeat I had not seen before. Though I was still watching the hummingbird, I could see my dad in my peripheral vision.

  “Those birds sure can fly.” I pointed out the window, watching two hummingbirds dive-bomb each other for air supremacy.

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” My dad seemed flustered, not looking at the birds. “Maybe I’m not thinking so clearly anymore. It’s become a business now. They want me to be a salesman, and I’m just not a salesman.” We sat in silence, powerless. “Sell, sell, sell,” he said, staring at his feet. “Our missiles are flying off the shelves now, thanks to CNN. But I don’t even know where they’re going.”

  After a fourteen-hour drive down the spine of the Cascades and Sierras, I sat with my father talking about missiles. That road had a way of clearing the cobwebs in my brain, taking me from wet to dry through every transition along the way. It pulled pieces back together again between here and there. Fir and lupine and sagebrush. Brittlebush and desert marigold. I stopped for petroglyphs along the way, the ever-present markers from here to there. What were they trying to tell me?

  For the first time, I noticed that my dad did not seem like himself. Something in the country was shifting, and Gulf War veterans were coming home with vague symptoms such as fatigue, joint pain, fever, respiratory problems, headaches, and memory loss. They could not get a diagnosis. People called them crazy. One professor argued it was “mass hysteria.” Others said they were crybabies. The DoD said they were fine. But their symptoms would not go away. It affected over one-third of returning vets, the highest number of people ever permanently disabled by a war. Eventually, doctors called it a “syndrome.” First, there was the Vietnam syndrome. Now there was the Gulf War syndrome. Even when a war went your way, when people celebrated in the Mike Lab lobby for a week, it seemed like war was always followed by a syndrome.

  What was my dad’s syndrome? I began to wonder, seeing something incalculably different.

  One evening, my dad stopped in front of the colonial-style Ethan Allen wooden mirror with an eagle carved at the top. He stared at
his face, then said, “Do I look the same to you?”

  “Yes, everything looks the same,” I said automatically. “You look normal,” wondering vaguely if he’d bumped his head or something.

  I was watching TV and did not want to be bothered, but then I took a second glance. His face reminded me of something, someone else.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m looking at someone else,” he said. “Sometimes it seems like I’m getting further away. I recognize myself, but I’m further away.” Then he shrugged his shoulders and turned away. “I must just be tired,” he said. “Like Old Man River, tired of living but scared of dying. You just keep flowing along.”

  Who was I to say what was normal and not normal? I barely recognized myself in the mirror, particularly that time on LSD. At home, I saw Eugene-Karen trapped in a lie, a pretend little-girl face meant to please. Back in Eugene, I saw China Lake–Karen in the mirror, hoping to get out, wanting to be a little girl again.

  * * *

  —

  Only later did I realize who my father had reminded me of: Ronald Reagan. On Reagan’s face, there was a certain blankness, an erasing, just around the corners of his eyes. I noticed it during the Iran-Contra scandal, when the media was obsessed with what he did or did not know about the Hawk missiles sent to Iran. Everyone watched his face closely for signs. Did he know Ollie North was secretly selling these missiles to Iran, an enemy nation, and laundering the proceeds so they could reach the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua? Iran was on the list of “terrorist” states. Congress had passed a law that forbid supporting the war in Nicaragua. “What did Reagan know?” was the common refrain. Reagan said he knew nothing about Ollie North’s money-laundering business. If he had, according to former national security adviser John Poindexter, “you would have a demand for impeachment proceedings.”