More shit hit the fan. Old shit. Old shit as if it had been shoveled and flung and had hung in the air for years, hovering, slowly floating in the air currents toward the blades. I still had to deal with the paternity suit. And I was charged with resisting arrest, assaulting law-enforcement officials, breach of the peace, concealing a deadly weapon (the forty-four-inch oak two by four!), and half a dozen other charges. Incredible!
For all the blustering about High Meadow the vets had done down at the White Pines Inn, and elsewhere, the having mortars, sentries, booby-traps and the tunnels of Cu Chi, the authorities essentially found nothing. Are you surprised? Guys had been vigilant but there never had been sentries. The gates had always been open (except that one time when we hooted at Chief Hartley). As to weapons, High Meadow had the few rifles, a few registered pistols and my old single-shot shotgun. The way it was pictured on the front page of the local paper the day following the raid, it looked impressive. Yet considering the number of vets and what could have been, or would have been had High Meadow been an armed camp, we were highly underarmed.
Sherrick did the legwork but officially I was represented by Mark Tashkor and Jesse Rasmuellen of Williamsport—both veterans, though Jesse Rasmuellen was only an era vet. Charges, and never-filed charges, against High Meadow, against Bobby, against me, slowly disintegrated. Fuming rage mellowed, became fuel, became drive. In the end, local, state and federal officials had made so many errors—for example, the search warrants had been stamped by a clerk, not signed by a judge, and the warrants’ numbers were blank (improperly recorded prior to authorization)—that Tashkor was able to get the assault charges dropped. Then the concealed weapons charge, and all the minor charges were withdrawn, and the breach of peace charge was found unprosecutable.
We did not have the funds for a major legal countersuit, and Sherrick, in spite of his law school years, really wasn’t qualified. For a time he attempted to get the Public Civil Liberties Union to take our case but they were not interested in veterans who seemingly were proud of their service. The PCLU saw our case as contradictory to other cases it had supported over the past decade: draft avoiders, resisters, and service members desiring early release from active duty.
Still Gary wanted restitution, revenge. He struck back. He wrote up the account of the raid, had it printed, names, addresses, every detail he could uncover. Then he mass-mailed a copy to every address in Mill Creek Falls and the surrounding area. He implicated Ernest Hartley, Senior and Junior, and dozens of their cronies in a politically motivated ploy that had illegally involved state and federal authorities. Gary got away with it by declaring his publication to be a biyearly investigative reporting magazine! Freedom of the press! Hartley, after sixteen years as mayor of Mill Creek Falls, did not run for reelection in 1980. Still, the new sewer plant and system was begun (is still under construction at a now estimated cost of $48 million), and the South Hill development of Whirl’s End Golf and Country Club, the mall, the mall extension, and Hobo Hollow Estates never missed a beat.
We withdrew further, fought our withdrawal. Bobby had been devastated by the raid, had, like all of us, turned inward. Ty Mohammed was a godsend. If sales is an art, Ty was a true artist. For months Bobby was afraid to speak to new people, afraid they had seen him being taken into custody on Channel Five’s 1st Witness newscast. He was afraid clients would fear their EES systems would explode. Ty was oblivious to the point of ruthlessness. He was the kind of salesman who could sell coal to Newcastle. Given an honest, well-priced product, given the cause of the vets and the environmental and financial justifications, Ty saturated half of Pennsylvania and southern New York with EES’s message. While Bobby called every past client, every distributor, every supplier; while he explained how the misunderstanding had occurred, how EES and High Meadow had been totally exonerated; while he virtually begged everyone to remain with him, with us, and “rest assured nothing is going to explode”; Ty couldn’t have cared less. Black, bearded, in a leased gold Cadillac and three-piece suit, nine-fingered, one-eared, one-testicled, golden-smiled Ty, within six months of his arrival, even with the recession of 1980 grasping the nation, tripled EES sales! He buried our withdrawal in work. EES was rolling again, business was good, the crop was being sold.
Work buried other emotions for Ty. He would not visit Luwan. He was cool to Randall, to Phillip and Carol, to his mother. He opened an account in Jessica’s name, deposited half his earnings there, but he did not let her know, did not let her see him. He told no one. Nor did he tell anyone at High Meadow of his cancer.
Wonderment. Am [ahm] is the Viet Namese symbol for the female principle—much as is yin in the Chinese yin-yang dichotomy. They named her Brigita Am until my mother, Jo, pointed out that the baby’s initials were BAW, which to Jo and then to Linda and Sara, too, were terrible initials with which to saddle any little girl. So they renamed her Am Brigita Wapinski—no one objected to ABW except Aunt Isabella who thought Am should be changed to Eva for Sara’s grandmother. They named her on Thanksgiving night, eleven hours after she was born. Some of the vets liked the name Brigita but most called her Amy. Like all the other children—Noah and Paul Anthony, Erik and Lindsey Schevard, even Gina and Michelle when they were up—Am was virtually adopted by everyone at High Meadow. But being the last born—being born when the population was again rising, when we were so badly in need of a lift in the aftermath of the raid—Am became special. We marked her birth with the planting of an oak tree over her placenta, me acting the preacher, saying, “As this oak grows strong, so shall you and as it lives long so shall you.” Thirty men said, “Amen.” Am had more uncles than any girl in history, and that brought us closer, made us feel more like brothers. Through her, through all the kids, with Sara and Linda and Emma’s help, we, and Bobby too, slowly re-began the expansion, the conscious turning out to embrace the community.
Another month passed. The trial of Eisenhower and Dulles, JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Kissinger, was a dud. Not that a lot wasn’t learned but concentration had been disrupted, research time usurped. Had or had not the governments of the United States been true to the nation’s founding principles? We never reached a verdict.
Five months from the day of the raid: There is a statute of limitation on paternity suits. Mark Tashkor wanted to invoke it. I wanted to know if Zookie’s kid was mine. I tentatively agreed to help support, only to find that Zookie had dropped the case, refiled naming Gaylord as the father.
More changes. What changed more than anything was Bobby’s re-realization that the world, that people, run on elation, spiritual elation. It is the fuel that makes things go well. It is what makes life good. Life is supposed to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is a basic human right. Ask Tom Jefferson! Ask Sam Adams!
... whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
And yet happiness seemed to have been legislated out of our lives. Happiness had been destroyed by governmental overcomplication; by reduction to triviality by academia; by a narrowing of perspective by the media’s interpretation of our lives; by fear of risk and loss by insurance companies and school boards; by those who, wishing to provide equal opportunity to all, were seeking to level all by reaching for a common denominator and inadvertently finding that the only true common denominator is mere subsistence. We’d become competent men doing competent work—trudging on without joy like so much of America, without pleasure in our achievements, seeking passive “pleasures” like spectator America, boob-tube America, dumbed-down America seeking lowest common denominator sustainability, forgetting that true sustainability requires work; requires striving for quality, for substantive value, for elation that is an adjunct of hope, freedom and achievement.
Bobby reasoned it thusly. “We made ourselves vulnerable by
becoming, as a microcosmic community, stuck. We did not reach out, expand ourselves, except in business and in an antagonistic political manner. For all our elegant, internal solutions, for all our simplifications, we have not gone public! We’re building a tower of cards on a kayak when the structure requires a supertanker.”
Wherever, whenever his ears told him, Bobby would raise his head, gesture toward town, “Hear that bell?” he’d ask. “That’s St. Ignats. This town’s got to know who we are, who we were. Not who they thought we were, not who they think we were because they saw Apocalypse Now or The Deer Hunter or Rambo, or 1st Witness News.”
The expansion of unstuck vets, of the unstuck microcosmic community, grew into the larger community not simply as a business element like EES or Kinnard/Chassion or even the Mall, but as one-on-one volunteers helping the elderly, tutoring school children—especially “problem kids” of which and for which the vets both had a special understanding and an affinity, coaching in-town youth basketball, soccer and hockey, joining the PTA, the Rotary and Chamber of Commerce (after all, EES was now the sixth-largest company in town), helping the financially disabled—particularly with the reconstruction—plumbing and heating—of their homes, volunteering for church or temple functions which lead to assisting St. Ignatius with the sponsoring of the Huynh Thanh family, and finally to opening up High Meadow, the institute, the library, the mock trials.
Where we helped others, others helped us. Pop helped Linda and me buy a house in Old New Town. After ten years in the apartment in Creek’s Bend, Gina and Michelle finally had rooms of their own, Linda had her study, we all had a rec room, and there was a yard where we planted trees and expected to watch them grow for fifty years.
Call it reaching out. Sara, Linda and Emma expanded their women’s group, opening it to any abused woman. And as a Viet Nam vet group we began networking with other Viet Nam vet groups—first in Pennsylvania, then Texas, California, North Carolina, the entire country. We may have or may not have had the most comprehensive program but we were not a unique grouping. Viet Nam veteran groups were springing up all over America. By 1980 the movement was a snowball turned avalanche.
On July Fourth the bells of St. Ignatius rang while we marched as a unit in the town’s parade. We had a strack color guard unit but behind we were loose, having fun, tossing candy into the crowd, handing out American flag decals, letting the children come out and pet our mascots—Bobby’s Josh and the nucleus of my new agricultural venture, three Viet Namese potbellied pigs. (We’d dressed them in blue uniforms provoking hoggy snorts from the pigs and squeals of laughter from Jessie Taynor.)
On the 5th the bells rang again marking the arrival of the Huynh family and of Vu Van Hieu, a lone boat person, a CPA, a man who, after years of communist reeducation camps, repeated escape attempts, and a year in a Thai refugee camp, had finally reached the relocation center at Indian Town Gap only to lose his sponsor. Bobby hired him unseen.
This was a happy time—perhaps the happiest and most fulfilling in Bobby’s life. Frankie “The Kid” Denahee, our 128th vet, came, brought with him the sad news of Fuzzy and Wildman. Still T-n-T and The Kid were together. I had to step back in time with them, as Bobby taught, becoming a ladder, giving them the ability to move on without taking from them the ability to return. All year I had been chided about the tunnel, the bomb shelter. Frankie joined right in.
Lea Balliet, Linda’s youngest sister, came to visit, to sing and entertain. She was as pretty as Linda, maybe prettier. At twenty-two she drove the guys wild—so naive, so innocent, she’d been only eight or ten when most of us had been in Viet Nam. Marcus came, too. And Lem, the Tunesmyth. And Lee, Corky, Spider, Steve all the way from Idaho, Big Don, and Chuck in Jody’s Cadillac—entertainers all of them, bringing their guitars, their music, their bands—veterans, all of them.
Later Bobby would look back and tag the year between the first raid and the next onset The Help Years, and he would snarl that the destruction of The Help Years had begun the week of Monday, 7 July 1980, with the letter he received from the IRS, and with the revolt of the excluders, and with the blood.
30
THE WIND BLEW COLD. The street was empty. He lifted the receiver, dialed the number. Snowflakes fluttered in the lee of the open booth. The sky was gray, not yet dark, late January, late afternoon.
“Internal Revenue Service. Criminal Investigations. Gilmore.”
“Yes.” He altered his voice. “I’m—I’m calling about one of your programs.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m calling about the program you’ve got for turning people in for tax evasion.”
“Yes.”
“You give rewards, right?”
“There’s a program ...”
“Percentage, right?”
“That can be arranged. Who am I speaking with?”
“No. I—I can’t tell you that. I’m talking the anonymous program. I know you do that.”
“In substantial cases ...”
“That’s what I’m talking here. Major fraud. Big time evasion. Maybe a hundred thousand. Maybe a million. None of the penny ante stuff.”
“Can you hold, please?”
“What? No!”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m calling from a pay phone. Don’t try to identify me.”
“No.” In the agent’s voice there was irritation, boredom, apathy. “I’m just getting a file to issue you a number. When you call, identify yourself by the number.”
“How do I get paid?”
“To bearer. Sent to a post office box.”
“Yeah. Yes. That’s what I want.”
“Can you give me some information?”
“First give me a number.”
“Okay. Your number is R as in Romeo, T as in Tango, L as in Lima, six, seven, six, four. Do you want to repeat it back to me?”
“R. T. L. Six. Seven. Six. Four.”
“Now, tell me who we’re talking about.”
“First tell me who you are.”
“I’m Special Agent Stan Gilmore.”
“Mr. Gilmore?”
“Um-hmm.”
“Keep this file open. This is going to be big. I’ll call again.”
Monday, 7 July 1980—
Round and round the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel,
The monkey thought it was a-all in fun,
POP! goes the weasel.
The song was in his head, swirling, mixed with other immediate demands and concerns, new and old, swirling like flakes in a winter storm, Peppin, Zarichniak and Denahee, all, all morning, pulling at him, joy-terror-fear-questioning.
It was Noah’s first day of summer camp, first time on a bus, alone, going off without Sara or Bobby, without Linda or one of the vets. It had taken three months for his night terrors to abate, six for the acting out to subside, nine for him to again appear the confident little boy he’d been before the raid. Bobby thought of him at breakfast. Sara and Am had been upstairs. “What did the monkey say?” Noah had asked.
“I don’t think the monkey said anything,” Bobby’d answered. “Only the weasel. He goes—” Bobby put his right index finger into his mouth, blew up his cheeks, “Pop!” Bobby smiled.
“But Papa, why didn’t the monkey say anything?”
“I don’t know, Noah,” Bobby said. “That’s not part of the song. Just, ‘the monkey thought it was aaa-lll in fun. Pop! goes the weasel.’”
“What did the weasel think?”
“He was being chased by the monkey.”
“But,” Noah persisted, “what did he think?”
“I think he thought it was fun too. Don’t you think it’s a fun song?”
Noah hadn’t answered. Paulie, too, had been quiet, but he was always quiet unless he had something to say. Bobby wasn’t worried about him. Somehow, perhaps because of age or because he’d screamed through most of it and thusly had not seen much, the raid had seemingly not traumatized him.
“Noah?” Bobby said.
“I don’t know,” the boy answered quietly. “I just wanted to know what the weasel thought. That’s all.”
“Hmm.” Bobby had been about to continue when Sara came down with Am dressed in a yellow sunsuit and a big yellow sunbonnet.
“He’s going to miss the bus,” Sara had said to him. Then to Noah, “You don’t want to miss the bus on the first day, do you?”
The bus had come. Sara and Bobby, Paul, Am and Josh had all accompanied Noah on the long walk down the drive. Then quickly Noah, never before having even been in a school bus, scrambled up the stairs as if he’d commuted that way for years. In seconds the bus had gone. Then Paulie had burst into tears because he couldn’t go too.
Bobby was not focused on the here and now. He was checking in Frankie “The Kid” Denahee, the 128th vet, the ex-roofrat, ex-gunbunny. Vu Van Hieu was at a small desk in one corner, bent over the master ledger, entering figures in his impeccable hand. It had taken him one day to learn Bobby’s system. Carl Mariano was at a second desk that had displaced Van Deusen’s drawing table. A third desk was empty. Bobby looked at Denahee, continued talking, not listening to his own words but blabbing on automatic. “We’re brought up with the dual concept sane-insane. But, like in so many seeming logical tautologies it narrows the field and restricts our view of reality. So here we add a-sane, meaning without sanity, or beyond the bounds of reason, but not meaning weird or deranged or crazy. Asane, like baseball, the color green, dreams, intrusive day thoughts. Your reaction, your feelings, like most of us here, are normal and extraordinary. The circumstances, the events you’re reacting to were extraordinary....”
Bobby bent over the organization chart of High Meadow. There were now sixty-eight vets in residence—one of Asian heritage, one indigenous American, six Hispanics, ten of African ancestry, and fifty genetically European or Middle Eastern. The main office or headquarters consisted of Bobby, Tony, Carl, Don Wagner and now Vu Van Hieu. Tony also headed the column titled The Farm. Beneath him, with specific titles, were Thorpe, Treetop, Renneau, Cannello, and Rifkin, then eleven others. Van Deusen (design), Gallagher (construction/installations), Bechtel (assembly), and Mohammed (sales) headed the thirty-seven-man EES unit. Sherrick and Hacken plus five more ran The Institute; and in a new structure, Family Services, two vets assisted Sara, Emma, and occasionally Linda.
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