Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  October 1984

  BY THE FALL OF 1977 High Meadow had reached its first critical mass point. Bobby could be away. I could be away. Things ran. George Kamp was a responsible worker/leader; so too Jim Thorpe. They got along well. Tom Van Deusen seemed to change overnight, a result of the great sandbag party. His intensity and focus changed. He became a savior of the pond. He wanted to run jobs, to help design projects, lay out schedules. And Bobby was only too happy to expose him to the resources and let Van Deusen take off.

  Gallagher never developed that drive but he was now more self-assured. It was his idea to install an alarm system that could alert all High Meadow to crises. We installed an old air-raid siren that Bobby had scavenged from Johnnie Jackson’s Salvage Yard, that had once stood atop the old elementary school in the Lutzburgh section of town. When activated that old siren could be heard over in Creek’s Bend, Old New Town, and probably halfway to Rock Ridge. Along with the siren we ran army surplus ground-line telephone lines to links in all the buildings.

  This was a time of building. Five more vets arrived. Howie Bechtel, Ron Hull, Steve Hacken, Mark Renneau, and our first non-European American, number fourteen, Art Brown—an African-American vet from Wilkes-Barre sent to us by Ty’s brother Phillip.

  Our labor was cheap. In the late fall we drew down the pond, widened and deepened the spillway—it took hours of jackhammering to bust up Pewel’s work so we could rebuild it in a way that boards could be more easily removed in case of flooding. We refrained the roof of the farmhouse to change the angle, and the EES crew embedded the solar collectors between the rafters and installed the glazing—but before they finished the shingles Bobby pulled them from the job to work elsewhere. We added a “messhall” adjacent to the bunkhouse (some of the guys became outstanding cooks), redivided the bunkhouse into four single rooms and a two-bay dormitory. Across the pond in the woods, Bobby let Wagner and Mariano clean and repair Pewel and Brigita’s first cabin. That was very emotional for him. Before he decided, if I recall correctly, he wandered half a dozen times—usually only with Josh but maybe once or twice with Noah—up to the cemetery. I imagine he needed to ask permission, but we never talked about it.

  We were going, always going, it seemed. I had to schedule meetings with Bobby. Grapes, that year, was our biggest farm topic. Through it all Bobby sniffled. His nose was always running and he was constantly popping over-the-counter antihistamines.

  Nineteen seventy-seven was the year of the Great Energy Debate in Congress and in the Carter White House. Bobby followed it closely. EES made its first collector arrays to be sold wholesale, sold to a father-son plumbing outfit in Binghamton, New York. They liked our prices, the quality of the product, the design, the service. In ’78 they purchased more than one hundred collectors. EES needed three more trucks to keep up with our crews. On the farming side we purchased a trailer/combine, a new tractor, and a used six-by farm truck.

  Nineteen seventy-seven was the year Willie Joe Namath went to the LA Rams; the year of Son of Sam; the Ali-Shavers fifteen-round decision; the Nixon-Frost interviews. It was the year Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley killed himself because he was stuck and no one showed him the solvent to become unstuck. That left me all shook up, feelin like I was down at the end of Lonely Street.

  By mid-’77 I was no longer stuck. I moved back in with Linda; told her about my dream the night Gina and Michelle were born; about so many of the things that had happened. Pop was talking to me again, too.

  Linda received her midwifery certification. On September 23, 1977, she delivered her first baby. (She tells me delivery is not the right word. She says, “It’s not like, ‘Hey Lady, you the one who ordered an extra large with double cheese and pepperoni?’” How I laughed over that. “Maybe catcher is the right word,” she’d continued. Catchers: catcher in the rye, in the alfalfa, in the birthing rooms—me and my Linda.)

  On the twenty-third Linda caught Paul Anthony Wapinski, with Sara and Bobby and Dr. Simon Denham in the new birthing room at St. Luke’s Hospital in Rock Ridge. The joy! I baby-sat for Noah at High Meadow. Most of the vets were at the house, waiting, expecting, playing with Noah—I wasn’t the only one who’d missed these good years of his children’s lives. When the call came we let loose with the air-raid siren and the cheers didn’t stop until Ernest Hartley, Jr., the mayor’s son, and three officers—Mill Creek Falls’ finest—came screaming up in three squad cars demanding quiet and an explanation, and cited us for disturbing the peace. That triggered flashes of anger so deep I think had we not been so happy, we might have engaged those bozos in hand-to-hand. We blasted it the next day, too, Saturday, when we heard that Carol Simpson, Phillip’s wife, Ty’s sister-in-law, gave birth to Theodore Jonathan Simpson—blasted the siren but only after we locked the driveway gate and when ol’ fat-butt Hartley came screaming in we just hooted at him, unseen, from the orchard, the strawberry patch and down in the culverts. I don’t think we could have had more fun.

  Linda came up that night—Gina and Michelle were at Grandma’s. It was the weekend of our eighth wedding anniversary. Bobby was inside with Noah. The guys were either on the basketball court or on our new soccer field, or in town. I took her to my old cubicle, then behind the false wall, into the tunnel, down to the deep bunker. I explained to her my fears about a coming nuclear war; my thoughts about joining Mill Creek’s nuke freeze movement, my trepidations about that movement’s “fringe” director, Joanne Wapinski, about not being able to tell Bobby because of Joanne. I was surprised, perhaps, jolted, that Linda didn’t see what I’d done as paranoia. “Even Bobby doesn’t know,” I said. “Don’t say anything.”

  George Kamp left at Christmas—our first graduate. He returned to Towanda and in January opened up a small auto-parts store. I might just as well finish him out. He returned periodically—sometimes just to visit but mostly with parts for our trucks or the old ’53 Chevy—and of course each year he came back for the barn trial. By the Great Media Trial of 1981 George had two auto-parts stores. He had remarried, had his first child in 1982. In ’83 he was elected to the township’s board of aldermen.

  By late ’77 Bobby was looking for ways to speed up the High Meadow rehabilitation process. People were inquiring; we were receiving requests. “Could I come in June?” “Can you help me?” “I could get there by bus, I think.” “Do you provide transportation?” On and on and on. Mouth-to-mouth word tends to become garbled. “Can I join your army? I’m a real good shot.” “I’ll pay whatever your fee is if you can help my husband (son) (brother).” Bobby wrote or called them all. “Can I come there to die?” To me it’s unbelievable how many asked that question though when I rethink my own story, I should not be shocked. “No,” Bobby’d answer. “We don’t warehouse people. Come if you want to sleep for a while, or if you like apple fritters and maple syrup, and if you want to live.” Constantly Bobby or I, Thorpe, Gallagher, Sara, and believe it or not, Carl Mariano, were explaining Bobby’s approach, explaining High Meadow.

  My brother, Dr. Joe, used to get on me when I’d bubble with enthusiasm about what we were doing, accomplishing, during this time. I’d say, “Viet Nam veterans can do anything.” I’d say, “We’re the best of the best—the heart of our generation.” I’d say, “We’re the vanguard, we are leading our generation and much of the world into the future, into the eighties.” He’d say, “You’re seeing a skewed sample. Most vets are bums with unresolved psychological problems.” He’d try to be tactful, usually leaving out, “including you.” I’d say, “Naw, look at us. Come up and visit us. See what we’re doing.” He’d say, “I know what you’re doing. I think it’s terrific. But who are you guys? Who do you attract? At least half of you are either Marines or Airborne, right?” “Maybe,” I’d say. He’d say, “Don’t you get it, Tony? Most of you up there chose to be something above average even before you entered the service. How can you compare the average vet with that helicopter pilot you’ve got? Or that ground radar technician? And everyone there is there of hi
s own accord. It’s not random selection but people who have elected to be something more than the mundane. I’m not putting that down. I think what you and Wapinski are doing is highly estimable. I just don’t think you could do that with an average veteran population.”

  We’d argue on. I’d say, “Sure you could. We’re not different.” I’d think, but not say, “You’re saying that because you’re not a vet. You hid in school. You’d have to question your choice to agree with me.” Instead I’d say, “You don’t get it, Joe. We are average vets. For a lot of the guys this is a last resort. They’ve got no place else to go. They were all the way down with their backs to the wall.” “Yes,” Joe’d say, “but they chose not to remain there. Wapinski is an anomaly. You too. Not everyone is capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. You watch TV. Most Nam vets are so psychologically scarred they either should be locked away for their own good, or for the protection of society ... or maybe they’re harmless but they’re albatrosses on society ... they’re on welfare or sponging off relatives.”

  By this point I’d be livid but I’d be holding my tongue because on and off I’d sponged off Joe who’d helped to raise my daughters. Shit! Enough of that. I’d clam up, mutter something like, “What you see on TV isn’t a random selection either.”

  At this time Bobby was telling us, “We’ve got to go beyond DAARFE-vader. It works when one is unstuck but it isn’t a solvent for the glue of traumatic stress. That’s going to require a new tool.”

  It was not by mistake or by chance that Wapinski was able to make such an impact. Bobby studied behavior. Not only screwed-up Viet Nam–vet behavior, not only successful vets—though this was one area of his focus—but behavior and behavior change in general. He interviewed the therapists at RRVMC (and came away enraged), talked to local psychologists and psychiatrists, went to Nittany Mountain College and purchased every psych text for every course they offered in the ’77–’78 academic year. Bobby was driven as much to discover and implement a quick, workable program as he was to design solar homes and efficient, sustainable communities. He’d rant at “the idiots”—usually not to their faces but to himself, in the barn or the orchard, in the sugarbush or on a roof. He had no patience with people he believed “should know better”; people who he felt were ignoring available accepted knowledge; people who “strongly” supported this point of view or that WITHOUT having delved deeply in the subject matter; people who had taken the easy way out, accepted pulp.

  “Hit em with the myth busters,” he’d say. “People believe all sorts of inaccuracies. Yesterday, one guy said to me he sure was glad his father knew people at the draft board. Otherwise, he said, he would have been drafted, put in the infantry, and sent to Viet Nam, like everyone else. I said, “Your chances would only have been about 3 per cent.” He couldn’t believe that. I said, “Figure it out. Two point six million in-country vets out of ten million era vets. You had a 26 percent chance of going if you were drafted. And only 10 percent of those who went were assigned to infantry companies.”

  Ideas evolved. “For the guys who did go,” Bobby’d say, “and who are now stuck, we need to develop a Quick Strike: Raid on the Brain solvent. Have them see they’ve got a gun to their heads—a major motivation to become unstuck. If a vet comes,” Bobby’d say, “he’s looking to change. He’s already motivated. It’s only a matter of pushing the right buttons, pulling the right triggers, transforming the meaning of the experience with the Raid. Look, right now much of the meaning, much of the interpretation of their experience is being foisted upon them from the outside. If we can bring it back to them, to the personal, if pride can replace shame, honor replace dishonor, camaraderie replace racism, and the military victory in which they were involved replace the political forfeiture to which they were not a part ...”

  Marvin Book arrived. Then Michael Treetop (a Native American). Then Knabe, Casper, Lorson, others. About this time too, Miriam, Joanne and Cheryl Wapinski (and Brian, though apologetically) enlisted the aid of Harold Rosenwald, Esq., to file charges against Bobby, claiming misuse of Pewel’s estate.

  Then came Gary Sherrick. “Bitta bing, bitta bang!”

  28

  THE BIG BARN, AN evening in late May 1978—It was warm. Sherrick was hot. He sat on a box in the shadow of the Slitter, apart from the others. The day’s chores and tasks were complete. The educational exercise—change the meaning by immersing into the truth, Bobby’s first attempt at a Quick Strike program—was under way. Wapinski sat on layout table number 1. Pisano was on number 2. Gallagher, Van Deusen, Thorpe, Wagner, Hull, Mariano ... sixteen vets in all, sat on crates, folding chairs, toolboxes, near the tables. Only Gary Sherrick was to the side, between the jerry-rigged elevator and the Slitter. Steve Hacken had been reading a David Ansen review of the film, The Boys in Company C, from a four-month-old Newsweek. “‘Vietnam,’” he’d read, “‘was not fought like any other war, and it can’t be told the way old war movies were.’”

  “What a bunch of crap,” Sherrick muttered. He was just loud enough to distract the few closest to the elevator.

  Bobby glanced over. He had not discerned the grumble but he’d seen the others turn.

  “‘... the film gives,’” Hacken went on, “‘a fresh and harrowing reading of a struggle so chaotic and irrational that it approaches the climate of hallucination.’”

  “What,” Sherrick yelled over, “approaches a climate of hallucination?” Heads snapped toward him. “What?” he barked loudly. He did not look at the group but talked toward the machine in front of him. “The film or the war?”

  Hacken stopped. With his thumb on the column he squeezed the magazine. “The film,” he said. “Did you see it?”

  Sherrick could not control his voice. It was full of indignation and disgust. “That’s not what it says. Reread it.” Three or four guys groaned. Sherrick had been interrupting all night. Hacken reread the line. Sherrick snarled, “‘Climate of hallucination,’ describes the word struggle. Not the film. Struggle. The war, damn it, seemed pretty fuckin real to me.”

  Gary Sherrick had been at High Meadow nine days. He was a genetic alcoholic and he knew it. He knew he was unlike most heavy drinkers and self-dosers. Once they learned why they drank, they learned to control their consumption. In Sherrick, one drink set off an immense craving for another immediate dose of alcohol.

  Bobby had formally checked him in. He had made Sherrick fill out the new High Meadow Job Contract and Personal History form that Bobby, with Tom Van Deusen’s help, had designed.

  Sherrick had been an alcoholic since his first drink in his sophomore year in high school. For years he’d hid it, denied it, and except for the baseball scholarship incident, he’d held his life together until May of 1975. He’d more than held it together. He’d excelled.

  Sherrick grew up in Indiana, attended Indiana University on an athletic scholarship until, in September ’65, because of one drink that had led to one thousand, the school did not invite him back. He dried out. Swore off. He spent three years in the army, April ’68 to April ’69 in Viet Nam, a doorgunner on a Huey slick. By tour’s end he’d been awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, six Air Medals, a handful of commendations. After discharge he returned to Indiana University, graduated in ’71 in the top quarter of his class, with a degree in history and government. For the next four years he worked as a policeman in Indianapolis. At night he took courses in law at the state extension. In 1974 Gary Sherrick was assigned to the Indianapolis PD Narcotics Investigation Division. In early ’75 he took a drink, went on a bender, was released from duty. In the ensuing three years he was in and out of VA alcohol treatment programs eleven times.

  “It helped at first,” he’d told Wapinski during that first interview. “But I couldn’t stay with it. I’d go back. Like iron filings to a magnet, it’d pull me. Then I’d check back in to the VA. Bitta bing, bitta bang. It’d be worse. If you’re a repeater, the VA treats you like a parasite. They write things in your file like you’re a
manipulator or a malingerer. So you learn to manipulate the system because you get dependent on it same as being dependent on anything else. If you don’t manipulate it, you’ve got nowhere to go. Then they make you feel guilty. You feel worse. Like what’s the matter with me? It drives you to your next drink.”

  “Bad question,” Wapinski had interrupted him. “Instead of, What’s the matter with me? ask, How can I stay on the wagon and enjoy it?”

  “Yeah,” Sherrick had said. “They said that too. But that’s not what they mean.”

  “Look—” Wapinski had tossed Sherrick’s new folder on the desk, “here we don’t keep records on malingering or manipulation. If you need help, we’ll help. All you have to do is follow our rules.”

  “What rules, Man?”

  “Simple stuff,” Wapinski had said. “No drugs. No booze other than what’s provided, which may not be much. We have a few blowouts now and then. Maybe some wine or beer—”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Um.”

  “I can’t control it ... if I start.”

  “Then don’t start.” Wapinski had moved on. At this point he had never dealt with a genetic alcoholic; he assumed Sherrick was, like many others, a habitual self-doser.

  “No individual firearms,” Wapinski had said. “We have community weapons for hunting and target shooting but they’re locked up. We target shoot most Saturdays twelve to three. It’s not mandatory. Lots of guys find it therapeutic. You know the dangers, you’ve seen what a weapon can do. Some guys are afraid of em because of that, because of what they did with em. What we do is let you do it again, with supervision. Like the rifle range.

  “Look,” Bobby’d continued, “here it is in a nutshell. You don’t hurt yourself, physically or mentally, and you don’t hurt anybody else. Jessie Taynor, downtown, she’s a big mentally retarded woman, she’s off limits. You touch her, we kill you. No questions asked. You participate in work, PT—basketball or soccer, or, ah, Lorson and Knabe are setting up a weight room—choice is yours. And you participate in our discovery exercises. Thursday nights we meet in the barn, just vets, and talk about what we’ve discovered. As to work, you can work with Tony on the farm, with Van Deusen out on job sites, or with Howie Bechtel in the barn building collectors or assembling duct work.”