by Gil Hogg
“Is there room for forgiveness, Bob?”
“I forgive Jim for myself. I understand that he’s a warrior. I never had the guts to complain to him. I understand the pressures on him. But I don’t want him in my life. It’s the woman and the children that I can’t forget.”
The doctor frowned at the brightness. “You may be right. Forgiveness won’t do it.”
“What’s the answer, Doctor?”
The doctor’s expectant grin which had started the session had been replaced by the emotionless expression of the scientist. “Don’t misunderstand me. We’re talking now about the present. Your reaction to Gail and her brother today. If you believe there’s a barrier, there is a barrier, buttressed by a view of past events which may never change.” Dr Meadows looked at me steadily. “It’s a great pity.”
34
I was still in the breakfast room at the home at ten-thirty on a Sunday morning yarning with some of my fellow patients when one of the sisters told me I had guests: Colonel Blake and Captain Blake.
I was wearing tan slacks and a figured shirt which Gail had bought for me. I usually dressed on Sundays in smart clothes, ready for any visitors who might come. Occasionally officers from the Regiment or some I’d known in Saigon visited, as well as old college friends and family. It was awkward receiving guests in the home with its polished floors and well-peopled lounge areas; rather like trying to entertain people in a hotel lobby. I was often anxious for them to leave, to relieve the pressure on me, so that I could go upstairs and play cards or chess with my buddies.
Some of my visitors knew precisely how I got here, and they didn’t seem to hold anything against me – like weaseling out of the front line, or lying to a court martial. I hoped that any reservations they may have had were subsumed by the label of ‘damaged veteran’. With those friends who didn’t know precisely what had happened, I was less than forthright, and people are always too diffident to enquire deeply of somebody who has a mental problem.
By and large I could think that Amherst, by getting me referred for psychiatric examination, had saved me from being pitched into the street as a disgraced officer; that was a fate which made me shrivel inside. But there were also times when I wondered what that experience would be like. I would have had to work on my life to restore my own confidence; it wouldn’t be a clean fight with observable issues. There would be a cloud of rumour around me scarcely concealing prejudice. I would feel that I had been disloyal to my country and my fellow soldiers. Instinctively, I would want to hide from those who knew me. As it was, I was trying to cope with medical convolutions, and although that was sometimes like jousting with mist, it was an infinitely better state than disgrace. I was, publicly at least, a sick man rather than a discarded failure.
Jim Blake, now a lieutenant colonel, and Gail, a captain, made a patriotic couple in their beribboned walking-out uniforms. Jim had moved steadfastly and quickly upward in the military hierarchy. Gail had kept her promise to leave Vietnam but was anxious to stay in the nursing service until the war was over. She had, however, changed her own focus. She was working with physically and mentally damaged veterans in a hospital near Buffalo. As a result, she knew a great deal more about the medical implications of my condition than I did. I found I was in a dialogue with her which at times, as with Dr Meadows, became a quiet, unacknowledged duel.
I claimed a place for Gail and Jim in one of the small meeting alcoves which were filled with easy chairs and coffee tables; it had bow windows overlooking the brilliant display in the rose gardens: rich velvet blooms of scarlet, orange and yellow. The place and the scene made war almost unthinkable.
Blake had visited once before, a few months ago, entirely himself, brotherly and solicitous as though I was already a member of the family. He never mentioned the killings at Kam Sung, and now that I recollected, never had; I was always the one to allude to them first in the rare conversations we had at the time; and even then, despite my obvious consternation, he never showed the slightest concern about them. He had been through a number of heavy firefights after that incident as he progressed from company to regimental command. Perhaps the most recent horror blotted out the one before. On this occasion we talked mainly about personalities while Gail listened.
Colonel Vaughan had been moved to a staff job after Kam Sung and then resigned. “An emotional man,” Blake said dismissively. “Never sound.” Jack Boyd was serving in Hawaii. “Still running all his sleazy sidelines.” Peter Weston had been discharged sick with an ulcerated stomach. Two of the lieutenants who had joined the Regiment with me had died in action.
I asked Blake about his new command, and he modestly said he was looking forward to getting back to the front line with his men.
Blake asked me when I was likely to be discharged, saying that I seemed very fit and well. I had deliberately avoided telling Gail the latest relatively good news from Dr Meadows because of the problems it would raise. What was I going to do when I left the home, and what part would Gail have in the plan? I had no precise answer to these questions and pushed them out of my mind whenever I thought of them. I liked the veterans’ home and I felt safe here. Now Blake, who would expect a straight answer, was pressing me. He wasn’t a man you could fob off with bland evasions. He would press until he got a clear view.
I had to say, “I could get out in the next few months”, because that was what Dr Meadows had told me. Gail could talk to Dr Meadows at any time she liked about my rehabilitation. He appeared to respect her as akin to a fellow practitioner. Patient confidentiality apparently didn’t count. My intellect was on the dissection table. I knew this from Gail’s comments to me about what had passed between me and Dr Meadows. She could find out the truth, so there was no point in saying I didn’t know when I might be discharged.
Blake’s next question was the one I had predicted about the future. I replied that I would travel for a while, take it easy. I tried to sound a little dazed, tried to suggest I wasn’t quite competent to plan for the future yet. Blake said that it was right to come back to civilian life slowly, but was immediately conscious that Gail wasn’t mentioned. He glanced at her. She smiled painfully.
“When are you two going to tie the knot a bit tighter than it is at the moment?” he asked.
It was an indelicate question because Blake, despite his cleverness, was brash in human affairs, hardened, brutalised even, by the military life. I couldn’t think of anything to say in answer.
Gail filled the gap. She gave a low, humourless laugh and said we were thinking about it.
In recent months, I had gone out with Gail whenever she could get leave and come to Rochester from her posting in Buffalo. She was a good organiser and we always had a planned activity: a walk in the country, a show at a gallery, a movie. We had drinks and dinner afterwards at a quality restaurant. We would hire a hotel room and make love, or sometimes make love in our rental car. I had immersed myself in the pleasure of these carefree meetings. Gail made no demands on me or exerted any overt pressure, but I was conscious that I was being drawn more and more deeply into commitment to her. I was powerless to stop myself. I loved her.
After Gail’s remark the air around us seemed to lose its brightness. Twenty minutes of desultory conversation followed and then Blake stood up and took his leave. Gail settled in the chair near me. We watched the slim figure of the young lieutenant colonel as he moved out through the doorway and into the gardens.
“He’s a wonderful soldier, Bob. Never a word of complaint about the war, or even anger about the protesters,” Gail said.
“Jim just gets on with job. He’ll make General for sure.”
We sat for a while enjoying the roses; I talked about my visitors and my sessions with Meadows.
Gail leaned over and touched my cheek. “It isn’t going to work, is it, us?”
For a long time Gail had been challenged by my withdrawal. But as a nurse she was sympathetic to a wound which would heal in time. As a lover she was perhaps spurred
on by love that was not requited as passionately as she wished. She would have been wrong in thinking that I didn’t love her wholeheartedly, but I was a divided man. I had bathed in the sensual delights of our meetings without wanting to project our relationship any further. She saw this and suspected my feelings.
I had to face the reality some time soon, and I said, “I don’t think it can.”
After a silence and a big swallow, she said, “I can’t understand why, Bob. We have so much going for us. We have wonderful times together. You would be working in school and I would be at a local hospital. We could have a house in a quiet place, maybe kids, eventually.”
I looked at her more closely: the wide, smooth brow, the frame of auburn hair, which just now flamed in the sunlight, the purpled tint of her eyes and the faint freckles on her creamy skin. She shone with sincerity and devotion, and she had just drawn a picture of the life that I wanted with her; but that life was behind a glass screen and I couldn’t go there.
“I guess I’m not all that well.” I was hiding behind my illness like the coward I was at Kam Sung, but what else could I do? Apart from telling her the cruel lie that I didn’t love her there was no other reason, apart from the unmentionable action of her brother.
“Plenty of soldiers get disordered by their experience and recover. You can’t expect it to happen in months. I’m willing to wait.” Gail had reverted to the safety of being my nurse and, of course, I had encouraged her by blaming my illness.
“No, you mustn’t wait, Gail. I don’t know when I’ll… ”
She reached for my hand and closed her eyes in the sunny, peaceful room. “The disaster of war brought us together and now it seems to be prising us apart.”
35
Geoffrey Amherst, my defence attorney, was a surprise visitor on a fine Sunday afternoon a few weeks later. I was just back from the gym and I’d had time to shower and change my clothes. I was feeling very relaxed and looking forward to a walk in town. I didn’t want to dig over old ground, but I welcomed him in the downstairs reception room. He was in uniform with an overcoat over his arm and a bulging briefcase; he was nervous and gentle, as he had been at our first meeting. He pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his case but we had to agree we couldn’t sit down then and drink. I took the bottle.
“I was in New York and I thought I’d come upstate to see my sister. And I wasn’t going to miss seeing you.”
Amherst had changed a little since I last saw him, or I was looking at his appearance with more care. He was a little fatter, slightly more bald and his features seemed coarser, but the big head, with its bloodshot slate eyes, was as alert as ever. We walked in the grounds. It was midsummer; the air was light; the sunlight on the flowerbeds a caress.
“Your friend Blake is a half-colonel now with a regiment of his own, Bob.”
“I know. He’s been in a couple of times. He’s having a charmed career.”
“He doesn’t have any uneasiness with you about killing the villagers?” Amherst looked at me keenly.
“Not at all. He thinks he’s right, and I imagine he believes that I accept that. Was there ever an official inquiry?”
“No. I think I’d have heard if there was. The Army buried the investigatory process like Blake buried the bodies, as I anticipated. I’m sure that, for the record, there’s a file at 33rd Regiment HQ showing that there was an inquiry at that level, and no evidence was found. Shelving Trask’s complaint is thus justified. Does it bother you?”
“I have to live with the memory, and with my part in it, even if, as Dr Meadows says, I shouldn’t let it worry me here and now.”
“The memory, yes… but you didn’t cause it.”
“I should have tried to stop it, but I didn’t. The truth is I pretended not to notice. I averted my eyes. And even if I couldn’t stop it, I should have reported it to my commanding officer and not had a knuckle-head like Trask telling me what my duty was. It isn’t a matter of looking back and realising; I knew at the time what I should have done.”
“Would it have been out of the question for you to have made your views known to Blake immediately when you met him at Kam Sung?”
“For me it probably was out of the question because I was in awe of Blake, a decorated hero, and he was a friend of mine and the brother of my fiancée. What would I say? ‘Excuse me, Captain Blake (or maybe, ‘Jim’). I’ve just arrived and had a look round and I think you’ve murdered a few people’?”
“You wouldn’t put it like that. You have the words and the craft. Moral cowardice?” Amherst shot one of his sidelong glances at me.
I hesitated, but… “Yes.”
“Well, you have to carry the can.”
“Yes, as Stefan Zweig wrote, no guilt is forgotten while the conscience remembers.”
“You’ve been over this with your doctor?”
“Every detail, a hundred times.”
“That’s good. It helps. So what are you going to do when you get out?”
“That’s the question that makes my head spin. Everybody asks me. I’m going to keep trying to learn from what happened. Move around the country. Apart from my parents, who are getting on a bit now, and a kid brother, I have no ties. I have a sense that I’ve been in a cage – much as I like this home – and I’m beginning to think more of roaming free.”
“Just hanging out, huh? It has its charms. On the contrary, I’ll be putting my experience into the grind of a city practice – New York – when I’m discharged.”
“We’re on two different roads, Geoffrey. What’s happened to the guy who only wanted a small-town practice in the Midwest? That’s what you told me. The easy life. Plenty of golf.”
Amherst raised his forearms modestly. “I’ve got the experience, and a connection in New York. Why waste it?”
I could see that the war wasn’t only killing and maiming, it was capable of changing the values of those who were lucky enough to stay whole and healthy. “Come on ‘Victory Day’! If you’re as slick as you were in my case, you’re going to do very well.”
“Maybe you should look at this another way, Bob. If you’d won your case you’d have gone back on patrol and probably ended up full of holes, face down in a stream.”
“As it is, I’m a free man with a memory,” I said.
Amherst wasn’t going to pronounce me guilty of cowardice and after a thoughtful pause he asked me, “How has the treatment been?”
“At first I viewed it as a painful joke; a well man pretending to be ill to escape a worse punishment: shame and disgrace. When I realised I was ill and I needed the time here to get straight, I began to feel better.”
Amherst looked at me cautiously. “Do you want to hear about Trask?”
Trask had been a constant disciplinary problem for me in the platoon, but more than that he’d been my conscience, gnawing at me during the days after Kam Sung and waking me in the haze before dawn with his knuckles in my spine. “Sure,” I said.
“He died in the detention barracks. So apart from you, there’s nobody to complain about what happened to the villagers.”
“The big machine rolled over Trask, eh? Formidable. How could I have even thought of opposing?”
“Maybe it wasn’t that. Perhaps it’s mere coincidence. I tracked the item down. He died of heart failure during a keep-fit session.”
“He was the kind of guy who would make it harder for himself anyway, a sort of self-induced harrassment.”
“Who knows?” Amherst showed the wry amusement of a man who had learned to live with life’s chances and conspiracies without being too worried to distinguish one from the other. “In war, the Army, any army,” he said, “has a problem about how to deal with the hinterland of violence of its soldiers against civilians.”
“It’s all there in civil and military law. I don’t have to tell you that as a lawyer.”
“Yeah. The writing is fine. The problem is that these actions fall into a grey area between legal and illegal. Was Kam Sung a legitimate
interrogation or not? In the background there’s always the possibility that the Army’s reputation will be sullied. No army would wish that on itself.”
“I guess that’s where I was, and Jim Blake was: in the grey area.”
“Right. And Gail Blake, what happened to her?” Amherst’s enquiry was polite, almost incurious.
I wondered if I could speak to him, to anybody except Dr Meadows, about my feelings for Gail; but Amherst wasn’t merely an inquisitive bystander; he had been the stage manager of a crucial part of my life.
“I care for her enough to understand that I’m not steely enough to shut out what happened at Kam Sung. If I can’t do that, I can’t see how we can have a life together. Without Kam Sung, we would have married and I believe had a real marriage like my parents’. It’s what I wanted and want now more than anything else.”
Amherst thought about this, frowned, drew deeply on his cigarette, looking from the placid gardens into the distance, over the lawns to the laurel hedge which bordered the road. The coloured cabs of cars could be seen moving along just over the top of the hedge. Kam Sung seemed impossibly remote. I thought that he didn’t really understand and was wondering how ill I was.
“You still see her?”
“Yes, but if you ask Gail, she would say I’m a battle neurosis case who hasn’t quite recovered. And in simple terms, I suppose that’s true. But I couldn’t begin to tell her what I know; it would be like poisoning her mind against Jim, whom she idolises. I couldn’t drag him off his pedestal like that either. I don’t have the guts. He’s a hero to her and to the Army. To me, he’s a strange man whom I almost fear, and I don’t understand. So there is this blockage in my relations with Gail as palpable as a wall between us. I feel it, and she senses it, but she can never know the reasons… so we have drifted apart, not practically but emotionally.”
