Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  34

  BOBBY’S ANGER ABATED, PERHAPS was assuaged by the season, the lights, the smiles and good cheer, perhaps by something Father Tom said to him, or said at mass on Christmas morning. Bobby’s health seemed to improve. He regained some weight. The changes were like lifting a cross from the shoulders of all.

  He was still transfusion dependent but his body was reacting positively to whatever new therapy they had him on and he returned to work, part-time, and to spending long hours reading and writing in Grandpa’s office. With his improvement, with the new year, came an improvement in the local economy—or so it seemed. The solar business was slow, but general and construction plumbing and heating were steady. Bobby’s mind remained sharp.

  “I’ve tried.” Don spoke softly. It was a Saturday in January 1983. Don Wagner and Carl Mariano were with Sara in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Noah, Paul and Am were in the living room. Bobby was in Grandpa’s office working on his writings or his designs—he’d been vague in describing, to Sara and the others, his latest project.

  “Nothing?” Sara asked. She pursed her lips.

  “Dead ends,” Don said. Immediately he felt self-conscious for having used the word dead. Quickly he talked on. “I’ve found every Wapinski in Texas, Oklahoma ... I think from Missouri south. But no relatives. I’ve checked Wopinski, Rapimski, Wapin, a dozen variations. And if there ever was a Cadwalder ... well, they’re all unlisted.”

  “It’s okay, Don.”

  Carl too spoke softly. “Have Bobby call his mother. He’s got to ask her.”

  “I told him that,” Sara said. “He said, ‘No friggin way. I wouldn’t have her marrow in me. Just no friggin way.’ You know ... he ...”

  “Sara”—this time Don used the word on purpose—“I’m at a dead end.”

  “I ...” Sara put a hand to her forehead. “Don’t ... you don’t have to try anymore. This last time up ... don’t say anything, okay? Doctor Dachik, Bobby’s hematologist ... she ...”

  “What?”

  “She said Bobby only has a twenty percent chance of surviving a bone marrow transplant. It’s too ... it’s gotten too risky.”

  Vu Van Hieu disappeared, or so it seemed, without a trace, without notice. Some vets searched the pond, recalling Ty. Most were afraid to call the police, afraid of repercussions, yet more afraid of an unknown, perhaps ill-fated demise. A few knew. They’d been asked to remain silent.

  Early March 1983, in the vicinity of Mill Creek Falls: Hieu, Bobby, Tony, Carl, Don and Jeremiah Gallagher, a small room, curtains drawn.

  “Saluté,” Tony said. He wished he had a glass of High Meadow wine to raise to Hieu but they’d brought nothing with them.

  “Thank you, my friend,” Hieu said. “I will be commuter rebel,” he joked. “I will be back.”

  Bobby clapped Hieu’s shoulder. “You take care of yourself.”

  “Oh yes. You too. I ...” Hieu paused. His discipline wavered. “I once tell you I am fundamental American principles, you remember?”

  “I sure do,” Bobby said.

  “I am still,” Hieu said. “But I am not fundamental American behavior. It upset me so much how they treat you. Your people, the VA, the IRS, the FBI. How they treat veterans! They see you as cause of the war. They see Viet Namese people as victims of your war. They treat you like piranhas ...”

  “Pariahs,” Bobby whispered.

  “... but to me, they condescend like I am a child victim. Like you say before, slavery by alms. Thank you for letting me work hard.”

  “Ah, Hieu. I never paid you what you could have earned on the outside.”

  “You pay okay. I save my money. Now I invest in the liberation effort.”

  “Are you sure?” Don Wagner asked.

  Hieu smiled. “Yes. I am sure. You know, I see Viet Namese who came here, who fled maybe before Saigon fell. Maybe with very much gold. Now they make much more. They live in mansions, drive big cars. I have no respect for them. I detest them. I throw them out from helicopters in my mind. That money they arrived with, that was my country. That was Viet Nam’s blood that they drained.”

  “Seems”—Tony turned from the group—“like a long time ago ... but, you know, if ... really, if I didn’t have Johnny and the girls, I’d join you.”

  “No,” Hieu said.

  “I would,” Tony said. He turned to Bobby. “Remember San Jose? We almost did—”

  “No.” Hieu interrupted. “You cannot. I know you would, but you cannot.” Hieu tapped his chest. “This is for me, for Viet Namese men, to recapture our dignity, to atone for our shame.”

  “There’s no shame ...” Tony began.

  “Tony, you are my friend. I know you very well. I know your battles. I know Dai Do. I feel such shame. I know the 2d ARVN Regiment at Dai Do. They were on your flank on the move to Dinh To. They the shits, eh? They run, huh? I know their commander a collaborator with the communists. Evil man. Evil agent. I didn’t know then. He brings me great shame. I will forever feel shamed by him, and by others like him.

  “That is why I return,” Hieu said. “With my cousins we will regain Viet Nam. We do it ourselves. You pray for us. You hold us in your thoughts. We can never again ask you, ask for American bodies, ask your support like that.”

  Jeremiah Gallagher nodded. “He’s right. This time you guys do it.”

  “Yes ...” Hieu smiled.

  “Get some for me,” Carl cut in.

  Don clenched his fist, shook it. “For all of us!”

  “Right on!” Hieu beamed. “Now I go. You thank Sara. You thank Linda. You tell everyone I go on vacation. I go see my cousins but you don’t know my cousins.”

  Only Bobby looked sad. “Cover yer ass, Man.”

  With spring came new growth, new life. The VA denied the appeal of Bobby’s disability claim but the Social Security Administration approved his disability application, back-dated the effective date, paid him three months’ retroactive benefits. To Bobby that acceptance, that acknowledgment, was of as much importance as the reimbursements. It gave him, returned to him, something intangible, something invaluable. And with a kick from Sara he became lighter, mentally more mobile within his physical limitations. The weeks, months, he had spent in fear, fear that his mind was going ended. Slowly assessment, action and assimilation replaced anger.

  “Ever since I came back,” he told Sara, “all I ever really wanted to do was to walk in these woods.” They had climbed through the orchard, descended to the spillway, crossed the dam and entered the far woods. Josh had accompanied them as far as the orchard but had lain down and let them proceed alone. “I mean, that’s almost fourteen years ago. When I first came back. I never thought of it as getting away from all that’s out there. I didn’t think of it as hiding. But I guess I did think of it as a safe haven from which to interact with the rest of the world, a base camp, you know, which would allow me to interact with them on my own terms. And I did. But then, coming back, I kinda withdrew and I guess I’ve been hiding out. I think the more I hide the more I separate myself from what the world is, what it’s doing to itself, the more I feel totally exposed to it. We can’t hide, can we?”

  “No.”

  “For me it’s been fourteen years. For America the war ended eight years ago. We’ve all been trying to get on with our lives but we haven’t ... It just keeps coming back.”

  “Um.”

  “Have I been carrying on like a complete ass?”

  “No, Bob. Never.” Her voice was soft, kind.

  “But I have been hiding.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. You seem pretty well immersed in the whole thing.”

  “I don’t feel like I’ve touched anything for a long time.”

  “There’s not a person who’s been here who isn’t better for the experience.”

  “They did it themselves. I just opened the door. And if I hadn’t, someone else would have. It’s not even my door. It’s my Granpa’s. He touched them more than I. I haven’t even been a gentle br
eeze. Geez, that’s it, that’s what I’ve been. A breeze. A slight touch on a few blades of grass. Bent them a little. But they’ll straighten back up in a second. And at the same time there’s ten tornadoes lined up about to rip through the fields. Great! Gentle breeze before the storms. Means nothing. Every single blade of grass is about to be uprooted, and I stood by and blew a gentle breeze and then stroked myself into believing I’ve had a positive effect.”

  “Bobby, you’ve had a wonderful effect.” Sara was louder now. She didn’t like it when he became maudlin.

  “Sara, do you know, right now, if I could, if I could, I’d push the button that’d destroy Hanoi. And the Kremlin. I would. Where do they get off enslaving ... not where, why? Why do they get away with enslaving millions of people? We went because of it. The enslavement came first. That’s the origin of what’s happened to me.

  “Like so many of the guys ... I felt most ... effective ... when I had a rifle in my hands and I was hunting communists in South Viet Nam. Damn it! That’s where I should be right now. With Hieu. Not blowing blades of grass but blowing away evil shit. Not picking up the pieces of their aggression—not enabling that aggression by alleviating the side effects. Defense. We have a responsibility to help people hold their freedoms. Regain their freedoms. We have that responsibility because we have the ability. We’re not some flat-broke emerging third-world nation. We’re America! We can have an effect—a clean, positive effect. If it weren’t for the simple-minded slime buckets that run this place, the greedy jackasses that’d rather make a nickel today and screw the future, the world could be beautiful. It could be safe.”

  Sara faced him squarely. “As long as you’re in it, for me,” her voice was clear, chastising, loving, “the world is beautiful. God’s made us a beautiful universe. Maybe we’ve spoiled parts of it, but not all of it. Definitely not High Meadow. Because of you. High Meadow is a Garden of Eden.”

  They strolled on in silence. Then Bobby said, “God. If I could have a disease where they don’t jab the bone marrow ... God, that lumbar puncture was the worst ... It would be a blessing. I’d be able to work more ...”

  “Bobby.” Sara interrupted him. “Why do you feel you have to do more than you’ve done?”

  “Because ...”

  “Because?” Bobby’s brow furrowed. Her challenge tired him. She saw it as getting him out of himself. “Because?” she repeated. The day was clear, the scant new foliage delicate, deliriously light green, the sun penetrating easily to the earth. “Do you remember,” Sara began, “when we got married?”

  “Of course.”

  “Father Paul’s words?” Sara asked. “When you truly love you love the other the way the earth loves the sun on the first warm morning of spring ...”

  Bobby stopped. “I remember that.”

  “... and you must have faith that spring will come again, and again re-light the land ... in the light of this new light.”

  “New light,” Bobby said. “That’s what I think every night. Give me one more sunrise. One more first light.”

  Sara prodded, “Because ...?”

  “Because I love you. And ... because I think we’re losing.”

  “Losing?”

  “To the greedy.”

  “Then what are you going to do about it?”

  “That’s it. I’m at the end—”

  “Damn it! No you’re not.”

  “But really ...”

  “I’m not asking you to deny ...”

  “... my disease ...”

  “It’s not yours. You don’t own it any more than you own a mosquito bite ...”

  “I do have it ...”

  “You also have mosquito bites ...”

  “They’re not the same.”

  “No, they’re not. So you’ve got two things to struggle with. The greedy and this thing which has infected you.”

  “And how do I struggle?”

  “You tell me,” Sara said. “How do they work?”

  Now Bobby’s life, and Sara’s, revolved around Agent Orange: research, the class-action suit, and Bobby’s own health maintenance. Typically, Bobby concentrated on gathering and understanding every shred of information available, on turning his limited energy to designing a program to counter the ill effects.

  The more he, Tony, and others learned, the more they rejoiced that their children were not born with major defects. And the more they empathized with Dennis Thorpe whose son had been born severely deformed, who, without the recent revelations, had blamed himself and his wife and she had done the same, until the strain dashed their marriage. Bobby, Tony, the others, felt for the families with malformed children. “Who, god damn it,” they said to each other, “thinks—I mean you’re twenty-fuckin-years old—that you’ve got your kids with you, genetically, ten years before they’re conceived? Who anticipates that something you inhale at twenty, or something you eat or drink, is going to cleave the genes in your juice so that at thirty, thirty! it’s going to make you father a monster! That your kid is going to be WIA from your war? That our grandchildren are going to be casualties, too. Or does this wipe out our genetic line?”

  “Here’s another set of questions,” Tony said. “Does dioxin cross the blood brain barrier? Or any of the herbicide’s or the dioxin’s metabolites? Can it cause rages, violent behavior, insomnia, flashbacks, abnormal EEGs? PTSD caused by toxicity?!” Tony paused. He read aloud from a journal, “‘Some of the dioxin-biotoxin research indicates that a portion of combat stress reactions probably are not caused by delayed traumatic stress but are caused by defoliant poisoning of neural tissues which slows axonol impulse transmission as evidenced in abnormal EEGs and direct nerve tissue studies. The brain interprets and reacts to this lethargic activity—not as if one has suffered brain damage for which a brain will attempt to compensate via plastic recovery where other areas or structures take on the function of the damaged area—but by allowing the poisoned section to limp along and frustrate the rest of the brain. These studies hypothesized that biological frustration causes the stress reactions of many PTSD veterans.’”

  “Geez, Man,” Van Deusen said. “Then the entire scope of veteran maladaptive behavior needs to be reexamined.”

  “Yeah,” Mariano said. “Except the VA’s reacting identically to the Agent Orange studies as it did to the initial PTSD evidence. Listen to this. ‘Like a poisoned brain in which one segment contradicts another,’” he read from an article, “‘The $24 billion per year Veteran’s Administration officially denied all the evidence it was housing and treating—or mistreating.’”

  “‘Men were treated like criminals,’” Bobby read from a legal magazine. “‘Their rights were denied. Victor Yannecone, the prime attorney for the veterans in the class-action suit against the chemical companies, asked if the VA attitude was changing, answered, “Yes. The attitude has hardened. The attitude had become patently vindictive. The attitude has become militantly anti-Vietnam veteran.... The trail of broken bodies and dying veterans is getting longer.” ’”

  “It is not a matter,” Bobby continued, “of trying to hide from technology. Or of being an adversary of technology and going back to the soil like some reincarnated Thoreau at Walden Pond. We couldn’t stop it if we wanted to. Short of a thermo-nuclear war, we couldn’t get rid of all the polluting chemical companies, mining retorts, or manufacturing toilets. And we shouldn’t want to. You know, we really do live better today than a hundred years ago. We live longer. Our bodies are stronger. It’s difficult to dodge the carcinogens in our food, the teratogenic substances in our water, the embryotoxic waste in the air. But we can do something about it. We can band together. We can follow The Code. We can purchase only products manufactured by “clean” companies, or we can build our own chemical companies, run them cleanly—seeking new methods to guarantee that toxic by-products are not produced or that they are neutralized. Not stored. No storage is safe. If we pull together we can produce our chosen product lines more cheaply than the conglomerates.
And slowly, through the best capitalistic device available to us—fair competition—we can put them out of business.”

  Knowledge did not slow his decline. Nor did it serve Sara well. Her constant thoughts were now of greater information, of “there’s something out there on how to treat this that we haven’t yet dug up. Some monoclonal antibody therapy, some oncogene ... some magic dart ...”

  The trips to West Haven became more frequent. The dosage of antibiotics was increased, the potency elevated. Still the freight train chugged as if unstoppable.

  Bobby paused. Suddenly, to him, there was no longer any sense in searching the literature, in looking for proof that TCDD had caused his aplastic anemia. It was beyond reasonable doubt. The class-action suit that had been filed in January of 1979 in the names of four hundred veterans had grown to represent 40,000 veterans. To him it made little difference. For him it was the wrong approach. If the veterans won, he asked himself, would it significantly change his life? Compensation? Money was not his ultimate concern, had never been. And vindication was not sweet, not bitter, not positive other than it nudged the scale toward zero balance, toward the center, toward neutral perceptions and policies that had gone askew. But vindication would not right the wrong, would not give him four-month erythrocytes. Vindication and money were not inherently negative but, to him, their tendency to break his focus, to refocus his concern, his disciplined concentration away from his work, away from his expanded self onto his central self, was ruinous.

  For him to understand what was happening to him required an expansion beyond the search into toxicological effects, required of him first a fundamental understanding of his own biology, of the biophysical functioning of affected basic units, of his own cellular-molecular composition. At this point, though he did not yet realize it, the search for understanding, for How Things Work, the delving into human cellular mechanics, was but a new step to a deeper search, understanding, expansion.