A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “Thank you. That will be all,” the colonel said.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  It was May 1965; I watched Owen closely—to see if he’d received any further discouragement from Colonel Eiger. Something must have happened—the colonel must have said something to him—because that was the spring when Owen Meany stopped smoking; he just gave it up, cold. He took up running! In two weeks, he was running five miles a day; he said his goal—by the end of the month—was to average six minutes per mile. And he took up beer.

  “Why the beer?” I asked him.

  “WHOEVER HEARD OF SOMEONE IN THE ARMY NOT DRINKING BEER?” he asked me.

  It sounded like something Colonel Eiger would have said to him; probably the colonel thought it was a further indication that Owen was a wimp—that he didn’t drink.

  And so, by the time he left for Basic Training, he was in pretty good shape—all that running, even with the beer, was a favorable exchange for a pack a day. He admitted that he didn’t like the running; but he’d developed a taste for beer. He never drank very much of it—I never saw him get drunk, not before Basic Training—but Hester remarked that the beer vastly improved his disposition.

  “Nothing would make Owen exactly mellow,” she said, “but believe me: the beer helps.”

  I felt funny working for Meany Granite when Owen wasn’t there.

  “I’M ONLY GONE FOR SIX WEEKS,” he pointed out. “AND BESIDES: I FEEL BETTER KNOWING YOU’RE IN CHARGE OF THE MONUMENT SHOP. IF SOMEONE DIES, YOU’VE GOT THE PROPER MANNERS TO HANDLE THE ORDER FOR THE GRAVESTONE. I TRUST YOU TO HAVE THE RIGHT TOUCH.”

  “Good luck!” I said to him.

  “DON’T EXPECT ME TO HAVE TIME TO WRITE—IT’S GOING TO BE PRETTY INTENSE,” he said. “BASICALLY, I’VE GOT TO EXCEL IN THREE AREAS—ACADEMICS, LEADERSHIP, PHYSICAL FITNESS. FRANKLY, IN THE LATTER CATEGORY, I’M WORRIED ABOUT THE OBSTACLE COURSE—I HEAR THERE’S A WALL, ABOUT TWELVE FEET. THAT MIGHT BE A LITTLE HIGH FOR ME.”

  Hester was singing; she refused to participate in a conversation about Basic Training; she said that if she heard Owen recite his preferred COMBAT BRANCHES one more time, she would throw up. I’ll never forget what Hester was singing; it’s a Canadian song, and—over the years—I’ve heard this song a hundred times. I guess it will always give me the shivers.

  If you were even just barely alive in the sixties, I’m sure you’ve heard the song that Hester sang, the song I remember so vividly.

  Four strong winds that blow lonely,

  Seven seas that run high,

  All those things that don’t change come what may.

  But our good times are all gone,

  And I’m bound for movin’ on,

  I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way.

  They sent him to Fort Knox, or maybe it was Fort Bragg; I forget—once I asked Hester if she remembered which place it was where Owen was sent for Basic Training.

  “All I know is, he shouldn’t have gone—he should have gone to Canada,” Hester said.

  How often I have thought that! There are times when I catch myself looking for him—even expecting to see him. Once, in Winston Churchill Park, when there were children roughhousing—at least, moving quickly—I saw someone about his size, standing slightly to the side of whatever activity was consuming the others, looking a trifle tentative but very alert, certainly eager to try what the others were doing, but restraining himself, or else picking the exactly perfect moment to take charge.

  But Owen didn’t come to Canada; he went to Fort Knox or Fort Bragg, where he failed the obstacle course. He was the best academically; he had the highest marks in leadership—whatever that is, and however the U.S. Army determines what it is. But he had been right about the wall; it was a little high for him—he simply couldn’t get over it. He “failed to negotiate the wall”—that was how the Army put it. And since class rank in ROTC is composed of excellence in Academics, in Leadership, and in Physical Fitness, Owen Meany—just that simply—failed to get a number-one ranking; his choice of a “combat arms designator” was, therefore, not assured.

  “But you’re such a good jumper!” I told him. “Couldn’t you just jump it—couldn’t you grab hold of the top of the wall and haul yourself over it?”

  “I COULDN’T REACH THE TOP OF THE WALL!” he said. “I AM A GOOD JUMPER, BUT I’M FUCKING FIVE FEET TALL! IT’S NOT LIKE PRACTICING THE SHOT, YOU KNOW—I’M NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE ANYONE BOOST ME UP!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ve still got your whole senior year. Can’t you work on Colonel Eiger? I’ll bet you can convince him to give you what you want.”

  “I’VE GOT A NUMBER-TWO RANKING—DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? IT’S BY THE BOOK. COLONEL EIGER LIKES ME—HE JUST DOESN’T THINK I’M FIT!” He was so distracted by his failure, I didn’t press him about giving me a dynamite lesson. I felt guilty for ever speaking to Colonel Eiger—Owen was so upset. But, at the same time, I didn’t want him to get a combat-branch assignment.

  In the fall of ’65, when we returned to Durham for our senior year, there were already protests against U.S. policy in Vietnam; that October, there were protests in thirty or forty American cities—I think Hester attended about half of them. Typical of me, I felt unsure: I thought the protesters made more sense than anyone who remotely subscribed to “U.S. policy”; but I also thought that Hester and most of her friends were losers and jerks. Hester was already beginning to call herself a “socialist.”

  “OH, EXCUSE ME, I THOUGHT YOU WERE A WAITRESS! Owen Meany said. “ARE YOU SHARING ALL YOUR TIPS WITH THE OTHER WAITRESSES?”

  “Fuck you, Owen,” Hester said. “I could call myself a Republican, and I’d still make more sense than you!”

  I had to agree. At the very least, it was inconsistent of Owen Meany to want a combat-branch assignment; with the keen eye he had always had for spotting bullshit, why would he want to go to Vietnam? And the war, and the protests—they were just beginning; anyone could see that.

  On Christmas Day, President Johnson suspended Operation Rolling Thunder—no more bombing of North Vietnam, “to induce negotiations for peace.” Was anyone fooled by that?

  “MADE FOR TELEVISION!” said Owen Meany. So why did he want to go there? Did he want to be a hero so badly that he would have gone anywhere?

  That fall he was told he was Adjutant General’s Corps “material”; that was not what he wanted to hear—the Adjutant General’s Corps was not a combat branch. He was appealing the decision; mistakes of this kind—regarding one’s orders—were almost common, he claimed.

  “I THINK COLONEL EIGER IS IN MY CORNER,” Owen said. “AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, I’M STILL WAITING TO HEAR ABOUT A COMBAT BRANCH.”

  By New Year’s Eve, 1965—when Hester was making her usual statement in the rose garden at 80 Front Street—only 636 U.S. military personnel had been killed in action; it was just the beginning. I guess that figure did not include the death of Harry Hoyt; “in action” was not exactly how poor Harry was killed. It had been just like another base on balls for Harry Hoyt, I thought—snake-bit while waiting his turn with a whore, snake-bit while peeing under a tree.

  “JUST LIKE DRAWING A WALK,” said Owen Meany. “POOR HARRY.”

  “His poor mother,” my grandmother said; she was moved to expand upon her thesis on dying. “I would rather be murdered by a maniac than bitten by a snake,” she said.

  And so, in Gravesend, our first vision of death in Vietnam was not of that standard Viet Cong soldier in his sandals and black pajamas, with something that looked like a lampshade for a hat—and with the Soviet AK-47 assault rifle, using a 7.62mm bullet, fired either single-shot or on full automatic. Rather, we turned to my grandmother’s Wharton Encyclopedia of Venomous Snakes—which had already provided Owen and me with several nightmares, when we were children—and there we found our vision of the enemy in Southeast Asia: Russell’s viper. Oh, it was so tempting to reduce the United States’ misadventure in Vietnam to an enemy one could see! />
  Harry Hoyt’s mother made up her mind that we were our enemy. Less than a month after the New Year—after we had resumed our bombing of North Vietnam and Operation Rolling Thunder was back on target—Mrs. Hoyt created her disturbance in the office of the Gravesend local draft board, choosing to use their bulletin board to advertise that she would give free draft-counseling advice in her home—sessions in how to evade the draft. She managed to advertise herself all around the university, in Durham, too—Hester told me that Mrs. Hoyt drew more of a crowd from the university community than she was able to summon among the locals in Gravesend. The university students were closer to being drafted than those Gravesend High School students who could manage to be accepted by even the lowliest college or university.

  In 1966, two million Americans had so-called student deferments that protected them from the draft. In a year, this would be modified—to exclude graduate students; but those graduate students in their second year, or further along in their studies, would keep their exemptions. I would fall perfectly into the crack. When draft deferments for graduate students got the ax, I would be in my first year of graduate school; my draft deferment would get the ax, too. I would be summoned for a preinduction physical at my local Gravesend draft board, where I had every reason to expect I would be found fully acceptable for induction—what was called 1-A—fit to serve, and standing at the head of the line.

  That was the kind of thing that Mrs. Hoyt was attempting to prepare us for—as early as February 1966 she started warning the young people who would listen to her; she made contact with all of Harry’s contemporaries in Gravesend.

  “Johnny Wheelwright, you listen to me!” she said; she got me on the telephone at 80 Front Street, and I was afraid of her. Even my grandmother thought that Mrs. Hoyt should be conducting herself “in a manner more suitable to mourning”; but Mrs. Hoyt was as mad as a hornet. She’d given Owen a lecture at the monument shop when she was picking out a stone for Harry!

  “I don’t want a cross,” she told Owen. “A lot of good God ever did him!”

  “YES, MA’AM,” said Owen Meany.

  “And I don’t want one of those things that look like a stepping-stone—that’s just like the military, to give you a grave that people can walk on!” Mrs. Hoyt said.

  “I UNDERSTAND,” Owen told her.

  Then she lit into him about his ROTC “obligation,” about how he should do everything he could to end up with a “desk job”—if he knew what was good for him.

  “And I don’t mean a desk job in Saigon!” she said to him. “Don’t you dare be a participant in that genocide!” she told him. “Do you want to set fire to small Asian women and children?” she asked him.

  “NO, MA’AM!” said Owen Meany.

  To me, she said: “They’re not going to let you be a graduate student in English. What do they care about English? They barely speak it!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “You can’t hide in graduate school—believe me, it won’t work,” said Mrs. Hoyt. “And unless you’ve got something wrong with you—I mean, physically—you’re going to die in a rice paddy. Is there anything wrong with you?” she asked me.

  “Not that I know of, ma’am,” I said.

  “Well, you ought to think of something,” Mrs. Hoyt told me. “I know someone who does psychiatric counseling; he can coach you—he can make you seem crazy. But that’s risky, and you’ve got to start now—you need time to develop a history, if you’re going to convince anybody you’re insane. It’s no good just getting drunk and smearing dog shit in your hair the night before your physical—if you don’t develop a mental history, it won’t work to try to fake it.”

  That, however, is what Buzzy Thurston tried—and it worked. It worked a little too well. He didn’t develop a “history” that was one day longer than two weeks; but even in that short time, he managed to force enough alcohol and drugs into his body to convince his body that it liked this form of abuse. To Mrs. Hoyt, Buzzy would be as much a victim of the war as her Harry; Buzzy would kill himself trying to stay out of Vietnam.

  “Have you thought about the Peace Corps?” Mrs. Hoyt asked me. She said she’d counseled one young man—also an English major—to apply to the Peace Corps. He’d been accepted as an English teacher in Tanzania. It was a pity, she admitted, that the Red Chinese had sent about four hundred “advisers” to Tanzania in the summer of ’65; the Peace Corps, naturally, had withdrawn in a hurry. “Just think about it,” Mrs. Hoyt said to me. “Even Tanzania is a better idea than Vietnam!”

  I told her I’d think about it; but I thought I had so much time! Imagine this: you’re a university senior, you’re a virgin—do you believe it when someone tells you that you have to make up your mind between Vietnam and Tanzania?

  “You better believe it,” Hester told me.

  That was the year—1966, in February—when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began televised hearings on the war.

  “I think you better talk to Mrs. Hoyt,” my grandmother told me. “I don’t want any grandson of mine to have anything to do with this mess.”

  “Listen to me, John,” Dan Needham said. “This is not the time to do what Owen Meany does. This time Owen is making a mistake.”

  I told Dan that I was afraid I might be responsible for sabotaging Owen’s desire for a “combat arms designator”; I confessed that I’d told Colonel Eiger that Owen’s “emotional stability” was questionable, and that I’d agreed with the colonel that Owen was not suitable for a combat branch. I told Dan I felt guilty that I’d said these things “behind Owen’s back.”

  “How can you feel ‘guilty’ for trying to save his life?” Dan asked me.

  Hester said the same thing, when I confessed to her that I had betrayed Owen to Colonel Eiger.

  “How can you say you ‘betrayed’ him? If you love him, how could you want what he wants? He’s crazy!” Hester cried. “If the Army insists that he’s not ‘fit’ for combat, I could even learn to love the fucking Army!”

  But everyone was beginning to seem “crazy” to me. My grandmother just muttered away at the television—all day and all night. She was beginning to forget things and people—if she hadn’t seen them on TV—and more appalling, she remembered everything she’d seen on television with a mindless, automatic accuracy. Even Dan Needham seemed crazy to me; for how many years could anyone maintain enthusiasm for amateur theatricals, in general—and for the question of which role in A Christmas Carol best suited Mr. Fish, in particular? And although I did not sympathize with the Gravesend Gas Works for firing Mrs. Hoyt as their receptionist, I thought Mrs. Hoyt was crazy, too. And those town “patriots” who were apprehended in the act of vandalizing Mrs. Hoyt’s car and garage were even crazier than she was. And Rector Wiggin, and his wife, Barbara … they had always been crazy; now they were claiming that God “supported” the U.S. troops in Vietnam—their implication being that to not support the presence of those troops was both anti-American and ungodly. Although the Rev. Lewis Merrill was—with Dan Needham—the principal spokesman for what amounted to the antiwar movement within Gravesend Academy, even Mr. Merrill looked crazy to me; for all his talk about peace, he wasn’t making any progress with Owen Meany.

  Of course, Owen was the craziest; I suppose it was always a toss-up between Owen and Hester, but regarding the subject of Owen wanting and actively seeking a combat-branch assignment, there was no doubt in my mind that Owen was the craziest.

  “Why do you want to be a hero?” I asked him.

  “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND,” he said.

  “No, I don’t,” I admitted. It was the spring of our senior year, 1966; I’d already been accepted into the graduate school at the University of New Hampshire—for the next year, at least, I wouldn’t be going anywhere; I had my 2-S deferment and was hanging on to it. Owen had already filled out his Officer Assignment Preference Statement—his DREAM SHEET, he called it. On his Personnel Action Form, he’d noted that he was “volunteering for
oversea service.” On both forms, he’d specified that he wanted to go to Vietnam: Infantry, Armor, or Artillery—in that order. He was not optimistic; with his number-two ranking in his ROTC unit, the Army was under no obligation to honor his choice. He admitted that no one had been very encouraging regarding his appeal to change his assignment from the Adjutant General’s Corps to a combat branch—not even Colonel Eiger had encouraged him.

  “THE ARMY OFFERS YOU THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE—THE SAME CHOICE AS EVERYONE ELSE,” Owen said. While he was hoping to be reassigned, he would toss around all the bullshit phrases favored by the Department of the Army Headquarters: RANGER TRAINING, AIRBORNE TRAINING, SPECIAL FORCES TRAINING—one day when he said he wished he’d gone to JUMP SCHOOL, or to JUNGLE SCHOOL, Hester threw up.

  “Why do you want to go—at all?” I screamed at him.

  “I KNOW THAT I DO GO,” he said. “IT’S NOT NECESSARILY A MATTER OF WANTING TO.”

  “Let me make sure I get this right,” I said to him. “You ‘know’ that you go where?”

  “TO VIETNAM,” he said.

  “I see,” I said.

  “No, you don’t ‘see,’” Hester said. “Ask him how he ‘knows’ that he goes to Vietnam,” she said.

  “How do you know, Owen?” I asked him; I thought I knew how he knew—it was the dream, and it gave me the shivers.

  Owen and I were sitting in the wooden, straight-backed chairs in Hester’s roach-infested kitchen. Hester was making a tomato sauce; she was not an exciting cook, and the kitchen retained the acidic, oniony odor of many of her previous tomato sauces. She wilted an onion in cheap olive oil in a cast-iron skillet; then she poured in a can of tomatoes. She added water—and basil, oregano, salt, red pepper, and sometimes a leftover bone from a pork chop or a lamb chop or a steak. She would reduce this mess to a volume that was less than the original can of tomatoes, and the consistency of paste. This glop she would dump over pasta, which had been boiled until it was much too soft. Occasionally, she would surprise us with a salad—the dressing for which was composed of too much vinegar and the same cheap olive oil she had employed in her assault of the onion.