by James Reston
I just thought she was really, uh,
really American.
NADINE:Do you know I never talked with my husband
about being pregnant?
For nine months there was something going on down there
and we never mentioned it. Ever.
MARK: You know, it was tike I couldn’t talk to her.
I didn’t know how to respond.
NADINE:We completely ignored it.
We were obsessed with names.
We kept talking constantly about what we would name it.
I gained fifty pounds. It was sheer ignorance.
I was a good Catholic girl
and no one talked about such things.
I never knew what that part of my body was doing.
CHERYL:It was my naivety.
I was so naive to the whole thing, that his craziness
had anything to do with where he’d been.
I mean, I was naive to the whole world
let alone somebody
who had just come back from there.
NADINE:When the labor started, we merrily got in the car
and went to the hospital.
They put me immediately into an operating room.
I didn’t even know what dilation meant.
And I couldn’t.
I could not dilate.
CHERYL:See, I’d hear a lot from his family.
I worked for his father as a dental assistant.
And it was all they talked about—Mark—so I had to meet the guy.
NADINE:I was in agony, they knocked me out.
CHERYL:And I saw, I mean, I’d open a drawer and I’d see
these pictures—
NADINE:My lungs filled up with fluid.
CHERYL:. . . dead men. Men hanging. Things like that.
Pictures Mark had sent back.
MARK: Yeah. I kept sending everything back.
NADINE:They had to give me a tracheotomy.
My trachea was too small.
They went running out of the operating room to get
the right equipment.
Everyone thought I was going to die.
CHERYL:Once he sent back a bone of a man he killed. To his mother.
MARK: To my brother, not my mother.
CHERYL:Boy, did that lady freak.
NADINE:My husband saw them burst out of the room in a panic.
He thought I was gone.
CHERYL:Now it doesn’t take much for that lady to freak.
Very hyper. I think I’d’ve gone nuts.
I think I’d wanna take it
and hit him over the head with it.
You just don’t do those things.
WHAT THE HECK IS HAPPENING TO YOU? I’d say.
They never asked that though.
I don’t think they wanted to know
and I think they were afraid to ask.
MARK: I know. I really wanted them to ask.
CHERYL:I think they felt the sooner forgotten, the better off you’d be.
NADINE:I remember leaving my body.
MARK: I’ll never forget that.
CHERYL:They didn’t want to bring up a bad subject.
MARK: I came home from a war, walked in the door,
they don’t say anything.
I asked for a cup of coffee,
and my mother starts bitching at me about drinking coffee.
NADINE:I looked down at myself on that operating table and felt so free.
CHERYL:Your mother couldn’t deal with it.
NADINE:They gave me a C-section.
I don’t remember anything else.
CHERYL:My memory’s not as good as his.
It’s tike I put bad things in one half
and in time I erase them.
NADINE:I woke up in the hospital room with tubes in my throat,
stitches in my belly. I could barely breathe.
My husband was there. He said: Have you seen the baby?
WHAT BABY, I said.
Can you believe it?
CHERYL:That’s why I say there’s a lot of things, weird things,
that happened to us, and I just generally put them
under the tide of weird things . . .
and try to forget it.
And to be specific, I’m real vague on a lot of things.
NADINE:I never knew they were in there
and so I guess I didn’t want them to come out.
CHERYL:I mean, my whole life has turned around since then.
I mean, gosh, I got a kid and another one on the way.
And I’m thinking of climbing the social ladder.
I’ve got to start thinking about schools for them,
and I mean this, it’s a completely
different life,
and I’ve had to . . .
I’ve WANTED to chang anyway.
It’s really hard to bring these things back out.
NADINE:For my second child, the same thing happened.
By the third time around
they had to drag me out of the car.
I thought they were taking me to my death for sure.
MARK: Cheryl is amazing.
Cheryl has always been like chief surgeon.
When the shrapnel came out of my head,
she would be the one to take it out.
CHERYL:It’s no big deal.
NADINE:So when people ask me about the birth of my children,
I laugh.
MARK: Just like with Danny.
She delivered Danny herself.
NADINE:My children were EXTRACTED from me.
CHERYL:It’s no big deal. Just like pulling teeth.
Once the head comes out, there’s nothing to it.
VI
MARK: I want to tell you what a marine is.
NADINE:
CHERYL:
I have so much to do.
See, I got kids now.
Just to keep going.
I can’t be looking into
Just to keep my kids going.
myself,
I don’t sleep at all.
I’ve got to be looking
out.
When my kids complain
about supper.
For the next five years
at least.
I just say:
I know it’s crappy food.
When I’m ready to look
Well, go upstairs
in, look out.
and throw it up.
God, don’t get into the
I was in a cafe today.
kid routine. It’ll do
it to you every time.
Because you’re getting
their best interests
mixed up with your best
interests. And they
don’t go together.
I heard the funniest comment:
They go together because
it should be your best
interest, and then their
best interest. So what
are you gonna do to them
in the meantime?
She must be married.
She spends so much money.
You’re talking head-trips.
VII
MARK: There was this whole trip that we were really special.
And our training was really hard,
like this whole Spartan attitude.
CHERYL:The war is the base of all our problems.
He gets crazy talking about it
and you can’t get him to stop
no matter what he’s doing to the people around him.
MARK: And there was this whole thing too
I told Nadine about that really knocked me out.
There was this whole ethic:
You do not leave your man behind on the field.
I love that.
CHERYL:Well, he’s usually talking more than they can handle.
NADINE:You know, we had two months
of foreplay.
MARK: I came to a point in there:
Okay, you’re here, there’s no escape, you’re going to get taken,
it’s all right to commit suicide.
And it was as rational as that.
We came across a hit at night, we got ambushed,
it was a black guy walking point, and you know,
bang, bang, bang.
You walk into it. It was a surprise.
Well, they got this black guy.
And they took his body and we found him about a week later . . .
CHERYL:People start getting really uncomfortable,
and you can see it in his eyes,
the excitement.
NADINE:The first time I met Mark,
I’d gone to his shop to buy supplies.
I didn’t think anything about him at first.
(I’ve never been attracted to younger men.)
But he seemed to know what he was doing.
CHERYL:It’s almost like there’s fire in his eyes.
MARK: And they had him tied to a palm tree,
and his balls were in his mouth.
They’d opened up his stomach and it had been pulled out.
And I knew . . .
NADINE:I saw some of his work.
MARK: Nobody was going to do that to me.
NADINE:Some of the blood photography I think.
MARK: Better for me to rationalize suicide
because I didn’t want . . .
that.
I don’t know.
CHERYL:It bothers me because it’s better left forgotten.
It’s just stirring up clear water.
NADINE:We talked and I left. But I felt strange.
MARK: R.J. was my best friend over there.
He and I got into a whole weird trip.
We found ourselves competing against one another,
setting up ambushes,
getting people on kills and things,
being the best at it we could.
NADINE:All of a sudden, he came out of the shop and said:
“You want a cup of tea?”
I was in a hurry,
(I’m always in a hurry)
but I said, “Sure,” and we went to a tea shop.
(Laughs)
MARK: R.J. is dead.
He got killed in a bank robbery in Chicago.
(He was one of the few friends of mine who survived the war.)
NADINE:Two hours later, we got up from the table.
I’m telling you, neither of us could stand up.
We were gasping for breath.
MARK: See, I got all these people involved
in a Far East smuggling scam when we got back,
and then it all fell apart
and we were waiting to get arrested.
The smack got stashed in this car that was being held
in a custody lot.
Everyone was afraid to go get it.
So I decided to get it.
I did this whole trip Thanksgiving weekend.
I crawled in there,
stole the tires off the car
that were loaded with the smack.
I had R.J. help me.
We were doing the war all over again.
That was the last time I saw him alive.
NADINE:We had said it all in two hours.
What I thought then is what I think now
and I think I know everything there is to know.
We must have looked pretty funny staggering out of there.
MARK: I heard from one guy on a regular basis, maybe once a year.
He was green to Vietnam.
We were getting into
some real heavy contact that Christmas.
It was late at night, the VC went to us
while we were sleeping.
They just threw grenades in on us.
The explosion came, I threw this kid in a bush.
All I did was grab him down,
and he got a medical out of there.
But he feels I saved his life.
NADINE:When we got out onto the street we said good-bye
but we both knew that our whole lives had changed.
CHERYL:I know he has other women. I don’t know who they are.
At this point I don’t really care.
I have a child to think about
and just getting by every day.
NADINE:We used to meet and talk.
We’d meet in the plaza and talk.
We’d go for rides in the car and talk.
CHERYL:See, lots of times people break up.
And then the man goes on to the next one.
And you hear the guy say:
“Oh, my wife was crazy.” Or something like that.
“She couldn’t take it.”
NADINE:Sometimes we’d be driving,
we’d have to stop the car and get our breaths.
We were dizzy, we were gasping for breath,
just from being together.
CHERYL:But the important question to ask is: WHY is she crazy?
MARK: So he wants to see me.
I haven’t been able to see him.
CHERYL:My brother is a prime example.
He nearly killed his wife a number of times.
She was a real high-strung person.
She snapped.
The family keeps saying, oh, poor Marge, she was so crazy,
MARK: He was only in the bush maybe five, six weeks,
but it did something to him.
He spent two years, he wrote me a letter,
in a mental institution.
I don’t know.
I knew he knew what I knew.
CHERYL:My brother’s now got one little girl
that SAW her little brother
get shot in the head by his mother . . .
MARK: I know who’s been there.
And they know.
CHERYL:And then saw her mother come after her.
MARK: But in a sense we want to be as far away
from each other as possible.
It’s become a personal thing. The guilt.
There IS the guilt.
It’s getting off on having all that power every day.
Because it was so nice.
I mean, it was power . . .
NADINE:You know they’re doing surveys now, medical research on this.
MARK: I had the power of life and death.
NADINE:They think something actually changes
in the blood or the lungs when you feel this way.
CHERYL:I’m sorry. They were married too long
for it just to have been Marge.
MARK: I’m sitting here now deep down thinking about it . . .
NADINE:You watch. Soon there’ll be a science of love,
and there should be.
CHERYL:When someone goes so-called crazy in a marriage,
I always think:
IT TAKES TWO.
MARK: It’s like the best dope you’ve ever had,
the best sex you’ve ever had.
NADINE:It was like dying,
and it was the most beautiful feeling of my life.
CHERYL:My brother’s on to a new woman now.
MARK: You never find anything better.
And that’s not something
you’re supposed to feel good about.
CHERYL:If Mark and I split up, I pity the next one.
MARK: I haven’t told you what a marine is yet.
CHERYL:Women should warn each other.
Pause.
NADINE:Everything Mark did was justified.
We’ve all done it.
Murdered someone we loved, or ourselves.
MARK: I mean, we were trained to do one thing.
That’s the one thing about the marines.
We were trained to kill.
NADINE:This is hard to say.
I have been in the jungle so long,
that even with intimates, I protect myself.
But I know that Mark felt good killing.
When he told me that I didn’t bat an eye.
I understand.
CHERYL:Look,
I think Mark and R.J. were close
only because they both got off on the war.
And I think they were the only two over there that did.
Doesn’t it kill you when they get into this men-talk?
All men don’t talk like that,
when they get together to reminisce.
They don’t talk about getting laid and dope.
Imagine getting together with your best girlfriend
and talking about what it was like the night before in the sack.
That grosses me out.
NADINE:I judge everyone so harshly
that it is pretty ironic
that I’m not moved by anything he tells me.
I’m not changed. I’m not shocked.
I’m not offended. And he must see that.
MARK: I had the power of life and death.
I wrote home to my brother.
I wrote him, I told him.
I wrote:
I dug it. I enjoyed it.
I really enjoyed it.
NADINE:I understand because I’m convinced
that I am even angrier than Mark.
I went off in a different direction, that’s all.
CHERYL:Now I don’t think Mark and R.J. were rare.
I think the DEGREE is rare.
I mean men would not be going on fighting like this
for centuries if there wasn’t something besides
having to do it for their country.
It has to be something like Mark says.
I mean he said it was like orgasm.
He said it was the best sex he ever had.
You know where he can take that remark.
But what better explanation can you want?
And believe me, that is Mark’s definition of glory.
Orgasm is GLORY to Mark.
MARK: I talked with R.J. about it.
He got into a hit once at about 8:30 at night.
And there was this “person” . . .
laying down, wounded,
holding onto a grenade.
(It was a high contact.)
We watched R.J. walk over and he just shot . . .
the person . . .
in the face.
He knew it.
As incredibly civilized as we are in this room, these things go on.
NADINE:Until you know a lot of Catholics
