The Turtle Warrior (15 page)

I waited and watched Bill scamper up the stairs before I ran into the kitchen. I didn’t know what to do. I ran to the table and then to the refrigerator, jigsawing around the room, my hands touching every surface until I stopped at the kitchen sink. I gripped the edge of the stainless steel sink and listened for the first knock at the back door. It came and went and then again. Minutes passed, and still the insistent knock on the back door. I opened the door slowly and saw Ernie’s face before I saw the two uniformed men behind him.

“Claire. We need to talk to you. Can we come in?”

I motioned them in. They all walked into the kitchen.

“Claire,” Ernie said again, “this is Lieutenant Hildebrandt, who is with the United States Navy Chaplain Corps, and this is Lieutenant Schlessinger, also with the Navy. They are from the reserve base in Madison. May we sit down?”

“Yes.”

All three of them pulled out chairs and sat down at the table. I did not sit down, choosing instead to lean against the countertop.

“Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Lucas?” Lieutenant Hildebrandt urged. I shook my head and stared at him. I shoved my hands into my pockets and picked at the lint gathered in the seams. The three men tried not to stare back. I knew what they were looking at. I was a mess. My pink foam rollers were loose and unraveling in some places on my head, my housedress was stained with coffee, and even I could smell the dishwater, coffee, and the musty remnants of sleep on my body. I could see that the officers were afraid of putting their immaculate uniformed arms on the kitchen table. Besides having stacks of magazines and newspapers crowding the center, there were breadcrumbs and smears of peanut butter and grape jelly from where Bill had made his own lunch.

“Is John home?”

“He’s at the mill,” I answered Ernie. I saw the one officer part his lips, and I knew what he was going to ask. So I cut him off at the pass. “And won’t come home even if I call him.”

“Where’s Billy?”

“Upstairs. I made him go upstairs. Please don’t talk loud.”

“Claire, we’re here because—”

“I know, Ernie,” I said, interrupting him. Then I could not shut up, my mouth running on a single breath of air. “I know because the military only visits for a reason. And that car ... I know what that car means. Didn’t you guys used to drive black sedans during World War Two? It’s a good thing it’s not summer. Otherwise every farmer in the field from town to here would know. Everyone knows what your car means.
Everyone.”

It was as though the pain had lifted me above myself, above the men in the kitchen, and kept me hovering close to the ceiling. Although I could feel it, some part of me moved away from it, and I could be calm. I know it surprised them. The men were so startled that they remained speechless. So I asked them.

“What has happened to my son?”

Lieutenant Hildebrandt leaned forward and looked up. She was direct. His instinct, honed by his own tour of duty in Vietnam, was that this was not a woman easily deceived. She had the blank stare of an insomniac and skin so milky white that she was nearly transparent. He had seen that look before, that look of endurance sustained by desperation and hope. She appeared to be reduced to the same basic elements as the men he’d seen at the end of their calendars, counting the days till their tours were up.

He was not supposed to tell the specifics. But the higher-echelon assholes in Washington who made such policies weren’t sitting in this woman’s kitchen three miles outside the tiny farming and logging community of Olina, Wisconsin. He’d been in so many kitchens. Yellow kitchens, blue and white kitchens, kitchens with rooster plates lining the walls. He had come to realize that it did worse damage not to tell the families at least some of the details. Especially to those families where a body wasn’t shipped home. When it was an MIA.

She waited.

He nervously fingered the envelope in his hands, aware of Lieutenant Schlessinger’s by-the-book righteousness. So what if they heard all the way back to Quantico that he had disobeyed the policy? Fuck the policy. He had been a theology student and then an ordained priest before he had become an officer, and his tour of duty in 1965 and part of 1966 had been in the same area where her son had been killed. His thirteen-month roll through Vietnam had obliterated any foolish idealism he had ever spouted or believed in, any of the big world concepts about peace. He could no longer sleep through the night, and his thoughts were anything but pure. It had even changed the way he talked.

He had never heard the word
fuck
used so often or in as many contradictory combinations. Fuckin’ Fantastic. Or
we’re fucked. Fuck off. That’s fuckin’ A-okay with me. Cute little fuckers.
Every now and then the men remembered who he was and what he stood for. Then they apologized for swearing in front of him. But after a while he ceased to hear the language, considering it background noise like the wind. It had even become part of his vocabulary.
What a blessed fuckin’ mess.
But he would never say “motherfucker.” That was more profane than taking the Lord’s name in vain.

His time in Vietnam had altered every cell in his body. He could still smell it on his skin: lime-covered shit and the puking odor when they burned the latrine waste, fresh blood, and the gutty smell of ruptured abdomens. Blood. He’d never forget the smell of blood. Or the heavy greasiness of it on his hands, slippery between his fingers.

He stayed in the reserves as an act of contrition, a penance for what he witnessed, and to do the best he could as a chaplain and a casualty officer in notifying families. He was a United States Naval Chaplain, assigned, as all Naval Chaplains were, to the Marine Corps for duty. The Marines did not want anyone but someone from the Corps itself or from the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps to notify the families. In all the sickness that was Vietnam, it was one of the few things that made sense. It was a perverse kind of honesty that he could not help admiring. If the Marine Corps took sons and husbands, if those sons and husbands died, then the Corps had an obligation and a duty to see it through to the end. If there was anger or hatred, it was to be absorbed by the Corps as well.

“Your son was in the Fifth Marine Division and a member of India Company, Third Battalion, Twenty-sixth Marines. The Fifth Marine Division was based near Laos at the Khe Sanh Combat Base. India Company was aiding the Fifth Division, Bravo Company, in trying to regain control of a hill called Eight-eighty-one North when they encountered a heavy concentration of North Vietnamese. Apparently the reports were in error about the number of enemy forces there although they knew the NVA was building up. They just didn’t know how many or where and when they could expect some action.”

He paused. He wanted her to sit down. Hildebrandt had the uncomfortable feeling that she was taller than he was and that she actually looked down at him. He was prepared for any kind of reaction, as was Schlessinger. One father had threatened them with a shotgun, but most often they were either greeted with strained silence or engulfed with hysterical hugs from grieving family members.

“Khe Sanh isn’t that far from the DMZ. In Vietnam the DMZ is an allied military term. The Vietnamese call it the highlands, and it is hilly country, some of it covered with jungle that is extremely dense. It is suppose to be a demilitarized zone according to the Geneva Convention, but nothing in Vietnam goes by the Geneva Convention.”

The other officer coughed.

“There is a tribe of people that live in the highlands that are not considered to be Vietnamese by either the North or the South. They know that area better than anyone, and they are allies of the United States.”

They are called the Montagnards,
he nearly added. He would never forget the Montagnards. They were the smallest people he’d ever seen, with tribal markings on some of their faces. They were persecuted and unwanted by the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese called them
moi.
Savages. The Marines and other Special Forces units relied upon the Montagnards for intelligence and for guiding them through elephant grass, through jungle and plant cover so heavy that an average-size American was handicapped. Almost all of the men referred to them affectionately as the Yards. Yard scouts were essential. They could spot NVA booby traps. Modified grenades camouflaged in the vines. The vines would swing with their fatal fruit into a soldier’s face or chest, detonating upon impact. Punji stakes and pits. He often visited several Yard villages with one of the medics and assisted in giving vaccinations and cleaning up minor shrapnel wounds. They were not of Vietnamese or Chinese descent and they consisted of several tribal groups, each with a specific name. They were in fact the indigenous people of Vietnam. The American Indians of Vietnam.

Schlessinger coughed again.

“On January twentieth, the Fifth Marine Division stormed the western side of Hill Eight-eighty-one North. The commanding officer was killed. Your son was running after his CO when they last saw him. Until we can verify his death, we cannot officially say that he was killed, and so he is listed as missing in action. I have brought you a copy of the official report. His trunk with his personal belongings is being sent from Okinawa.”

He placed an envelope on the table.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lucas. On behalf of the United States Navy Chaplain Corps and the United States Marine Corps, I’m very sorry.”

It was selfish, but he hoped she wouldn’t ask any questions. Hildebrandt was exhausted. What he was prevented from telling her, and could not tell her, was that an F-4 Phantom had dropped a load of napalm so close to the Marines on Hill 881N that it was likely that her son had been caught in it and roasted alive. He prayed that Private Lucas had been shot before that happened. That he had died before being burned. Otherwise her son would have danced like a mythical but crazed fairy in the woods, glowing with flames.

I couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying.
Jungle.
Jimmy wrote home about the jungle, how it was thicker than the thickest forest we had here at home, how it was unbelievably humid and full of bugs almost as big as his hand. How frogs, bugs, and fish were eaten by some of the rural people called the Yards. How they scavenged through the combat base’s dump for food and how they even ate rats. How the jungle camouflaged some of the deadliest snakes in the world and how at night they sometimes heard the chattering of monkeys and once the roaring of a tiger. I read between the lines of his letters: the suffocating terror my son thought he was concealing. His letters to Bill were somewhat guarded even if they said a bit more. He never directly wrote of anything bad happening except for the death of his friend. Maybe this was military policy. Never tell
your mother the truth.

I tilted my head to one side like a chickadee. Missing in action. Had I heard right?

“They can’t find him?” I felt myself begin to descend.

“Not yet.”

“There must be a way!” My voice rose while the rest of me came down. Something had gotten hold of my ankles. I was not dropping but was being steadily pulled down.

“Mrs. Lucas,” Lieutenant Hildebrandt answered, his voice so low that it fluctuated with hesitancy and made it hard for me to hear him, “I know this is terrible news. The Marines never leave their casualties behind even at the risk of losing more men in retrieving the dead. They will keep looking until they find your son.”

Ernie leaned forward. “He’s right, Claire. Jimmy may have been taken prisoner. He’s missing in action. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he is dead. His division will find him. They will search until they have exhausted all their options.”

Whatever it was gave me a quick yank, and I came down the rest of the way into a tintinnabulation of pain. Eight months ago in the early June heat, I had stood on the cracked asphalt of the Standard station in Olina and watched my eighteen-year-old son board the Greyhound bus. He hugged me so hard that my feet left the ground. I felt his heart beat as though it were straining to escape his ribs and get back inside me. I couldn’t think of what advice to give him. And now it was too late. I should have whispered, “Stay scared and run like a rabbit.”