Self Portrait with Stone

This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

Once, I fell in love with a well-read, athletic, thoughtful young man. We married on the day after his graduation from West Point Military Academy. Two years later he left for the war in Vietnam. After six months apart we met on the airport tarmac in Honolulu during his one-week Rest and Recreation holiday from war to enjoy our brilliant love. He placed a Lei of orchids and a pearl necklace around my neck. In our hotel room, he took bubble baths every day to wash away the dust, insect bites and foot rot. He slept in my arms.  

Here’s what really happened. He went to war in 1968 but two weeks before our date in paradise his body came back from Vietnam. The temperature soared to 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the day of his funeral, unusual for Connecticut in those days – so hot and humid that my great-uncle Ephraim, in his black wool suit, slumped to the ground at the cemetery with heat stroke.

Sweat glistened on the faces of the honor guard in their close-fitting uniforms and tight collars as they snappily folded the American flag the requisite thirteen times into the shape of a cocked hat and tucked in three of the brass shells fired during the rifle salute. I observed myself displacing my grief by pretending to be Jacqueline Kennedy in a dark blue A-line dress as the “hat” was placed in my hands.

I was twenty-two and I thought naïve superstitions could protect my beloved. Think positive. Think love, not war. Keep looking straight ahead. Don’t watch the news on TV.

After Dave’s death, I decided to forget about anything related to the military, and Vietnam – the country. If you saw me picking apples in September that year as the maple trees blazed blood red in New England you would not discern that I was busy blocking out all thoughts of my former life and South East Asia.  I rejected the existence of the people, the culture, didn’t care about its geography or time-zone, avoided Vietnamese restaurants. Perhaps I thought I could wall off grief and the futility of war by creating a boundary – a demilitarized zone – to protect myself from dwelling on the image I conjured from the telegram death notice: human flesh exploding in a booby-trapped underground bunker in the area of the Chu Chi tunnels.

I wasn’t immune to passive acquisition of knowledge. I learned, eventually, from eye-witnesses, that Dave’s experience in Vietnam had been six months of heat, monsoons, dust, jungle plants that tear your skin, stinging red ants, the stove-hot metal of misfiring M-16s, leeches, and scrapping for ways to stay human among thousands of youths transitioning from naive teenagers to horrified men.  Purple Hearts and Bronze Medals with Oak Leaf Clusters for Heroism, addressed to him, trickled in via the U.S. mail for months following the telegram.

These details became my image, my memory, of Vietnam. Why would anyone want to go there – ever – even after war?

The members of A Company 2/22 Infantry, of which Dave was Company Commander during 1968 and ‘69, were mostly teenagers during the war, farm and country boys from the South and Midwest. In the 1990s, some of those who survived began to write tributes to their beloved Captain on the virtual Vietnam Memorial Wall. Some re-found each other through the Internet and eventually gathered face-to-face in reunions at meetings of the 22^nd Infantry Regiment Society.

When Dave’s brother found their tributes in 2005, during a random Google search for Dave’s name, he contacted them and we were invited to their next gathering at a Regiment Society meeting in 2006. I had started to write about my experience with war even before I could speak about it, but never imagined that I would ever hear first-person accounts of what actually happened in Vietnam. My particular loss was muted in an interior cathedral behind my sternum. After being maintenance director of this private place for almost thirty-five years, how could I face the narrative of others? Isn’t it too late to talk about this old war?

Tearful, greying men lined up to greet Dave’s siblings and me when we arrived in Omaha at that first reunion. They embraced me as if I were a long-lost sister or a revered star of the county fair kissing booth. They poured out stories:

“He carried a picture of you in his pocket.”

“I’ve always wanted to meet you.” 

“ We would not have survived without him.” 

They called him “the old man” even though he was only 25 when he died because most of them were 18. They cried, describing his final hours, and were once again his platoon leader, code book carrier, tank driver, company clerk, soldier, soldier, and soldier. They said he made them feel safe in the darkest moments of war.

I listened to their stories into the evening for three days at that first reunion and let them guide me through slideshows, photos and battle positions on maps. They knew a lot about Dave and I dug into my memory for fragments from his letters about them that I could share. Whatever resistance I still held to sharing my loss of him melted in the heat of their devotion to his memory. They carved a place for me among their memories and served up morsels of intense information. Most comforting was the revelation that it had taken them years to talk about the war. I began to suspect that the way I handled my grief was not unusual, even common, thanks to them.

I’ve attended every reunion since, every eighteen months, wherever they are around the country. Their inclusiveness towards me is a salve, and perhaps I channel Dave for them. In 2008, during a reunion held in Washington, D.C., they asked me to lead the march to the Vietnam Memorial Wall after we disembarked the bus from the hotel.

“But, guys, I’ve never been here before,” I said. “ – I don’t know exactly where to go.” I was genuinely worried that we would trail off to some other monument.

One of Dave’s former platoon leaders pointed across a stretch of grass and said: “Don’t worry, we’ll be right behind you.”

In Seattle, we climbed together on replicas of armored personnel carriers (APCs) used in Vietnam. I felt uncomfortable being close enough to count the rivets and bolts of military equipment. Maybe they were going through their own desensitization process, touching metal and war machinery in a neutral environment without fear of having to risk their life.

In Georgia, at Fort Benning, we visited the “Vietnam Experience” in the United States Infantry Museum where jungle warfare is recreated in a dark, super-heated, humidified room with a circuitous trail densely lined with bamboo amid a soundtrack of ammo fire and muffled voices. Drenched in grassy-scented mist, we stepped over plastic windows on the floor revealing sharpened punji stakes pointing up from below. After five minutes, Tex, who’d lost an eye in the war, said: “Let’s get out of here. Going back to Vietnam is not on my bucket list.”

We escaped through a side door into the Cold War exhibit.

For several years, I’d received an email at least once a year from Jim, a Vietnam Veteran who organized a yearly tour to Vietnam and Cambodia. I read them and immediately dismissed them. In 2018, without an inkling of previous desire to go, I decided to join Jim’s tour. Was I conscripted by the impending 50^th anniversary of Dave’s death? He had gone, reluctantly. Why not me? His last message, in January 2018, said, “this might be my last trip.”

Mine, too. First and last. I signed up.

I bought two guidebooks to encourage my tourist sensibilities, but found them jarring. The many pictures I’d seen at reunions of shirtless, sunburned soldiers, slogging through rice paddies with an M-16 held over their head, or eating C-rations out of a can as they stood against scorched trees, intruded into the Lonely Planet’s descriptions of a “foodie paradise with swish gourmet restaurants and to-die-for Vietnamese eateries.”

Travel guides don’t describe Vietnam as war-torn, occupied and brutally colonized for 100-plus years. The fact that the country was ever ravaged by war is addressed in terse summaries like, “…the Vietnam War ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon.” Recent travelers report how much they enjoy bartering for straw hats in market places and ordering custom-made clothes. And, with most of the buried ordinance and landmines removed from the countryside, the greatest physical risk today is the potential for a gastrointestinal attack by bacteria in street food.

Trip reports say that the Vietnamese people love American tourists. Jim, our tour organizer, repeated during the planning stages, “It’s a country, not a war.” He added that he was hesitant to take other Vietnam Veterans along without vetting them first:

“I can’t gear the trip towards those who want to visit their old battlefields.”

I didn’t tell Jim that I knew where my husband was killed and I’d noted that it was already on the itinerary.

Nan Shepherd, the Scottish mountaineer, describes the ruminations about a significant place as an inter-penetration of place and mind that alters the nature of both.

But I had no place. The landscape I contemplated came from the recollections of others, and the hundreds of slides and letters Dave had sent back that I’ve had no access to for almost 50 years because I buried them all in the cemetery in 1969 at his funeral. I wanted them to be safe.

Flying towards Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City), at 35,000 feet, I was still trying to figure out why I was going. What did I want from this place after all these years of resistance to its existence?

The Korean flight attendants on Asiana Airlines wore embroidered mauve silk smocks over their uniforms as they passed out hot, moist facecloths. Their tailored hairstyles were identical, with dark hair sleeked back into a neat ball at the back of their graceful necks. They smiled and bowed with reassuring confidence.

I remembered reunion stories of the “Coca Cola girls” who slipped out of the jungle after a battle when the dust started to settle with boxes of ice holding beer and cokes teetering on the back of their bicycles. When Joe, the soldier who carried the code book for Dave back in 1969, described the “girls” to me one evening at a reunion he noted how uncanny it was that they knew when a firefight had completely ended and it was safe to come out: “Like intermission at a play.”

I cringed at this Hallmark movie rendering of war and innocence.

Our plane to Vietnam, a Boeing 777, resembled a gigantic, flying houseboat with an upstairs and downstairs. In the sitting area next to the bathrooms I watched other passengers do stretching exercises in front of a mirror. Could I stretch my mind to look forward to something on this trip? Dave had written to me in November, 1968, that he saw the Southern Cross among the stars when he flew to Vietnam. He said it was a symbol of good luck – a divine blessing! I craved his optimism and our old naivete.

Twenty-four hours later, at midnight local time, we landed in Saigon. Standing outside the terminal in a crowd, under street lights, humidity pressed in from every direction. A young Vietnamese woman wearing Capri pants and a tee shirt dotted with Daisy Duck images popped out in front of me from the moat of people. She smiled, bowed and handed me a bouquet of flowers.

Her kindness rattled me. I hadn’t thought about receiving special attention on this trip. Perhaps every woman of a certain age gets a bouquet. I eventually learned that she was Liu, our guide from Hanoi, and that her father had been in the North Vietnamese army during the “American War.” Jim had shared my story with her. Traveling incognito as a tourist rather than a war widow was no longer an option.

How would I return Liu’s kindness? Something inside would have to bend or dissolve. I hadn’t prepared for anything except watching.

The comfortable opulence of the Rex Hotel in downtown Saigon was another surprise. Perhaps I expected woven mats rather than eiderdown coverlets and polished cotton sheets in a huge bedroom with a white, marble bathroom. In the rooftop bar, a giant placard, like a cartoon text bubble, proclaimed it was the site of the “five o’clock follies,” the location of the press briefings about the war during the 1960s. Dave’s father lived in the Rex when he served here as a Brigade Commander, from 1965 – 1966, two years before his first born would arrive to lead an infantry company into the jungle.

Our second day began in the past as our guide pointed in the direction of a palm-lined road outside the bus window. He announced over his microphone:

“We will drive through typical southern Vietnamese countryside to Cu Chi district to experience the underground village of the Cu Chi guerrilla fighters and the remains of a bloody battlefield … a network of tunnels built during the long years of wars.”

The trip to Cu Chi was more than two hours from Saigon in our fifty-passenger, air-conditioned tour bus. A picture of the Buddha hung inside over the door where we entered and exited. The Buddha still has a private presence among the Vietnamese people in spite of the communist government’s attempts to wipe out his influence.

We passed abandoned rubber plantations where fines were paid by the U.S. Army for destruction of property as they pursued the Viet Cong fifty years earlier. Water buffalos, essential to the Vietnamese livelihood, were expensive collateral damage.

From my bus window, I spot a laughing, plump child, age eight or ten, running naked from a kiddy pool into a house, safe by two generations from the time when burning, napalmed children were described by Walter Cronkite on the nightly news. Now, car parts, Styrofoam take-out plates, and plastic water bottles litter the road. I remember photos of American soldiers with cigarettes drooping from their lips, sweeping this same, dusty road with mine-detectors.

I invite the names of some who suffered here to join me: Bill, Dick, Butch, Joe, Al, Mike, Charles. Those I met in photos crowding shirtless on top of military vehicles in dusty, defoliated clearings or posing with a pet monkey screeching from their shoulder.

I’m not the only one possessed by spirits. Alongside the road, decorative carved stone lions and monkeys, remnants of old beliefs, are still stationed at the entrances of most houses to scare off evil spirits. I read that, at one time, newborn babies were given terrible names and approached cautiously, with insults, by those who loved them:

“Oh, little Itchy Skin. You are so ugly! What will your parents do with such a disagreeable baby?”

If the evil spirits thought you admired – even loved – the baby, watch out! It may soon become sick and die. I asked our guide if this tradition has survived.

He smiled, “We Vietnamese keep everything for when we need it.”

As we approached the Cu Chi tunnels, I imagined the conflagration of prayers and spirits on all sides of war that have crowded this place. In the Buddhist tradition, the Vietnamese pray for the dead for 49 days after death, the estimated time needed for the spirit to be reborn into a new life – hopefully nirvana (enlightenment) and the extinction of desire.

Back in 1969, I knew nothing about Buddhism but I needed to carry a desire to extinction. Two months after his death, while the rest of the world was occupied with Woodstock and landing on the moon, Dave’s sister and I scattered his ashes in the grey scree at the north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, where the boots of other climbers would carry him and his dream to reach the top.

Our bus turns into a parking lot that accommodates multiple ocean liners like ours. Over the years since war ended, the Cu Chi tunnels have become a tourist Mecca with 23,000 reviews on TripAdvisor describing a mostly exhilarating experience not unlike a ride in Disney World.

During wartime, whole communities lived in these tunnels. Babies were born under the earth in subterranean hospitals that also tended the wounded. An underground fortress with discrete entrances puncturing the earth was not the kind of battlefield that U.S. ground forces trained for in the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia and the mountains of West Germany. In the literal ant farm that was the tunnel area, the U.S. and its allies worked from the top and outward, obliterating the landscape with Agent Orange and flames as they pushed cluelessly into the jungle, breathing and bathing in the carcinogens that would determine their own futures, should they survive.

After exiting the bus and visiting the “happy house,” every Vietnamese tour guide’s euphemism for toilet, we entered the tunnel area. We stood on packed red clay as Phat, our guide, pointed out ancient B-52 bomb craters and the rusted skeleton of a burned-out American Armored Personnel Carrier. We strained to hear Phat above the nearby French and German tour guides as he stooped down and lifted a 12 by 12-inch square of flat wood from the ground, revealing a black hole -a tunnel entrance.

These sudden, dark slits into the earth must have terrified the smaller GIs who were forced to enter and explore them, not knowing who or what they might meet besides rats or spiders. Some thinner members in our group jostled, giggled and dared each other to dip down into invisibility for a few seconds.

Further along the path, tourists leaned in and twisted their necks to view the display of torturous “man traps” made with sharpened bamboo sticks and metal spikes from which it was almost impossible to extricate even the dead.

In Disney World, the ghosts in the haunted house ride are bobbing holograms beyond reach. Here, the ghosts lay within and beneath the dry leaves of the Kumquat trees that crunch under our feet; microscopic fragments of thousands and millions wounded and killed on all sides.

Only the extreme heat and the dense jungle seem faithful to the past held in my imagination. I duck into an 8×8-foot underground bunker, lit by a single lightbulb, just long enough to experience the cramped space where, in 1969, it was too dark and chaotic for one medic to deal with four soldiers critically injured with shrapnel wounds after the booby trap exploded – a place where people still screamed even after their faces had been blown away, according to the medic who described the scene to me at a reunion.

This could be the bunker where Dave entered with the Conscientious Objector who carried the radio, instead of a gun, with the antennae just at the right height to accidently trip the wire leading to the explosive device filled with fragments of metal and glass.

As I emerged from the bunker, M-16 and AK-47 fire cracked the air at one dollar per shot in the nearby shooting range next to the gift shop.

Take care, I wanted to say to the others. Think of the DNA beneath our feet.

But that could risk a certain self-exposure which might be followed by questions and random sympathy. Rasheed Copeland, in her poem entitled, “to be considered before inviting everyone to the lookout,” cautions against offering the spoils of our suffering to others. What are the spoils of suffering? The grisly parts I’d tried so long to avoid? Wasn’t that what I’d come to Vietnam to face? Perhaps I wanted to confront my old idea of selective blindness by plopping myself into the setting of my egregious memory. Sharing with soldiers who knew Dave and the old war had relaxed the borders around the original covenant with myself to remain silent. But, beyond that, exposition still felt out of reach.

When I asked our Cu Chi guide what he thought about the “American war,” he said: “Let bygones be bygones.”

Perhaps the oven heat and the smell of baking palm fronds are enough to allow me a glimpse of what Dave lived here. After two days, I was ready to go home but the myopia governing my abiding grievances still craved something.

From Cu Chi we headed north toward other battlegrounds: Hue, Danang, Hanoi. Our guides were in their forties and fifties, children of soldiers in wars against the French, the Americans, the Khmer Rouge, and the Chinese. My inquiry moved outward as we made our way through markets, shrines and battle sites. What was it like to be the child of a soldier in a country continually at war until the last invasion by the Chinese in 1979 – and still without independence? And still without achieving the goal of national autonomy that Ho Chi Minh had battled for his entire life?

Tong, who, besides being a tour guide, also ran a small coffee shop, didn’t hesitate to describe his father’s return home from serving in the North Vietnamese army in the 1970s:

“He was broken and couldn’t control his anger. It took him and my mother years of struggle before he became better. I hated the way he treated my mother. I hated him and the war that made him that way.”

We sat outside on the patio of Tong’s coffee shop next to a fragrant Jasmine bush with his wife. I held their two-month-old daughter on my lap while we spoke. Tong whispered that it was better to speak outside about certain things, “ -because there are always people listening.”

I glanced around at the other tables occupied presumedly by tourists, remembering that we were in a communist country experimenting with capitalism. Tong said working as a tour guide also helped him reconnect with his father. He leaned closer to me and crossed his arms over his chest:

“I was hired to guide a group of five American veterans coming to Hanoi. They wanted to talk with someone who served on the other side. I asked my father if he was willing, and at first he refused. Then he said, ‘yes’ and not only did he arrive for the meeting in his full dress North Vietnamese Army uniform, but he brought three of his comrades who wore their uniforms. These former enemies talked for hours through an interpreter. They were shaking hands and hugging each other at the end. My father thanked me for that day. He said it helped to move a stone in his heart.”

I recognize that stone and the tension to let it stay intact. I didn’t expect to meet myself in Vietnam and find others who lived with their own demilitarized zones, demonstrating Carl Roger’s theory that what is most personal is most universal.

Tong, age 43, a child of war. He could be my son. His father, a broken soldier. He could be my husband, had mine survived.

The late Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh believed that there is no separate self. We are all interconnected. We don’t have to stand outside and watch.

I tasted the taro root and smelled the wispy dried fish mounded like dust in baskets. I heard the splash of oars in the milky Mekong River and touched the cool, hard, packed earth that made the walls of an underground bunker. I held Tong’s daughter in my arms as she gripped my finger with her tiny hand.