Twenty-three
The air is still, warm. Just at dusk, only the brightest stars are out. The Southern Cross is only partly there.
A man rolls a gate open and you walk carefully onto a sheet of tar. You go up eighteen steps.
The airplane smells and feels artificial. The stewardess, her carefree smile and boredom flickering like bad lighting, doesn’t understand. It’s enraging, because you sense she doesn’t want to understand.
The plane smells antiseptic. The green, tweedy seats are low-cost comfort, nothing at all like sleeping in real comfort on top of the biggest hill in the world, having finally climbed it. Too easy. There is no joy in leaving. Nothing to savor with your eyes or heart.
When the plane leaves the ground, you join everyone in a ritualistic shout, trying to squeeze whatever drama you can out of leaving Vietnam.
But the effort makes the drama artificial. You try to manufacture your own drama, remembering how you promised to savor the departure. You keep to yourself. It’s the same, precisely the same, as the arrival: a horde of strangers spewing their emotions and wanting you to share with them.
The stewardess comes through the cabin, spraying a mist of invisible sterility into the pressurized, scrubbed, filtered, temperature-controlled air, killing mosquitoes and unknown diseases, protecting herself and America from Asian evils, cleansing us all forever.
The stewardess is a stranger. No Hermes, no guide to anything. She is not even a peeping tom. She is as carefree and beautiful and sublime as a junior-high girlfriend.
Her hair is blond; they must allow only blonds on Vietnam departures—blond, blue-eyed, long-legged, medium-to-huge-breasted women. It’s to say we did well, America loves us, it’s over, here’s what you missed, but here’s what it was good for: My girlfriend was blond and blue-eyed and long-legged, quiet and assured, and she spoke good English. The stewardess doesn’t do anything but spray and smile, smiling while she sprays us clean, spraying while she smiles us back to home. Question. Do the coffins get sprayed? Does she care if I don’t want to be sterilized, would she stop?
You hope there will be time for a last look at the earth. You take a chance and try the window. Part of a wing, a red light on the end of it. The window reflects the cabin’s glare. You can’t even see darkness down below, not even a shadow of the earth, not even a skyline. The earth, with its little villages and bad, criss-crossed fields of rice paddy and red clay, deserts you. It’s the earth you want to say goodbye to. The soldiers never knew you. You never knew the Vietnamese people. But the earth, you could turn a spadeful of it, see its dryness and the tint of red, and dig out enough of it so as to lie in the hole at night, and that much of Vietnam you would know. Certain whole pieces of the land you would know, something like a farmer knows his own earth and his neighbor’s. You know where the bad, dangerous parts are, and the sandy and safe places by the sea. You know where the mines are and will be for a century, until the earth swallows and disarms them. Whole patches of land. Around My Khe and My Lai. Like a friend’s face.
The stewardess serves a meal and passes out magazines. The plane lands in Japan and takes on fuel. Then you fly straight on to Seattle. What kind of war is it that begins and ends this way, with a pretty girl, cushioned seats, and magazines?
You add things up. You lost a friend to the war, and you gained a friend. You compromised one principle and fulfilled another. You learned, as old men tell it in front of the courthouse, that war is not all bad; it may not make a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not something to scoff; some stories of valor are true; dead bodies are heavy, and it’s better not to touch them; fear is paralysis, but it is better to be afraid than to move out to die, all limbs functioning and heart thumping and charging and having your chest torn open for all the work; you have to pick the times not to be afraid, but when you are afraid you must hide it to save respect and reputation. You learned that the old men had lives of their own and that they valued them enough to try not to lose them; anyone can die in a war if he tries.
You land at an air force base outside Seattle. The army feeds you a steak diner. A permanent sign in the mess hall says “Welcome Home, Returnees.” “Returnees” is an army word, a word no one else would use. You sign your name for the dinner, one to a man.
Then you sign your name to other papers, processing your way out of the army, signing anything in sight, dodging out of your last haircut.
You say the Pledge of Allegiance, even that, and you leave the army in a taxicab.
The flight to Minnesota in March takes you over disappearing snow. The rivers you see below are partly frozen over. Black chunks of cornfields peer out of the old snow. The sky you fly in is gray and dead. Over Montana and North Dakota, looking down, you can’t see a sign of life.
And over Minnesota you fly into an empty, unknowing, uncaring, purified, permanent stillness. Down below, the snow is heavy, there are patterns of old cornfields, there are some roads. In return for all your terror, the prairies stretch out, arrogantly unchanged.
At six in the morning, the plane banks for the last time and straightens out and descends. When the no-smoking lights come on, you go into the back of the plane. You take off your uniform. You roll it into a ball and stuff it into your suitcase and put on a sweater and blue jeans. You smile at yourself in the mirror. You grin, beginning to know you’re happy. Much as you hate it, you don’t have civilian shoes, but no one will notice. It’s impossible to go home barefoot.