March, 1990
There I was, strapped in the cramped cockpit of a Navy A-7 jet bomber, flying in tight formation with John “Skid” Roe’s A-7, plummeting earthward together from the Nevada sky in a five hundred mile-per-hour bombing dive. I was staring, confused, at the sleek underbelly of Skid’s plane, which hovered seemingly inches above my Plexiglas canopy. Alarm bells rang shrilly in my head.
The hell’s wrong with this picture?!?
We’d just rolled out from a synchronized wing-over maneuver to commence our forty-five degree dive. Skid flew lead. On the desert floor two miles below us burned the remains of a white-phosphorus rocket—our practice target—which a third jet circling overhead the bomb-drop zone had fired there. But I dared not look for the sun-bright flame and white smoke on the ground; that was Skid’s responsibility. My job was simply to maintain my position just outside of Skid’s left wing and “pickle,” or release, a bomb at exactly the same time Skid released his.
Except, I wasn’t flying off Skid’s left wing—I was directly beneath him.
I’d fucked up the roll-in!
Even under less demanding circumstances, flying beneath another aircraft is difficult and dangerous. But my situation now was doubly alarming: a dozen olive-drab five-hundred-pound bombs swayed precariously under Skid’s swept-back wings like overripe fruit in a windstorm. Seeing them from beneath, so close I could almost reach out and touch them, paralyzed me. I stared, transfixed—until a flash of chilling clarity erupted in my brain: any second, now, Skid would be releasing one of those bombs.
The realization was a beat too late. Before I could roll my airplane to the side or radio for an abort, a burst of bright yellow light flickered from atop one of the bombs. I’d never seen a bomb-release cartridge firing before that moment, but I recognized it instantly. A knot of fear snatched violently at my stomach. Time ground to a crawl. I watched helplessly as the ugly green bomb detached from the wing rack and fell away, hurtling directly toward me, looming larger and larger like an obscene balloon inflating. A high-pitched voice–mine–exploded from inside my oxygen mask:
Fuck me!
“Mr. Campbell?”
A woman’s familiar voice jerked me out of my reverie. The scene I’d recalled from ten years earlier crumbled in my brain. Blue skies, the Nevada desert, the bomb falling toward me—all vanished. In their place sprang up a huge parking lot crammed with cars, which I’d been gazing at from a large dayroom window on the seventh-floor—the psychiatric ward—of the Seattle Veteran’s Administration Medical Center.
The effect was immediate, and overwhelming: a crushing sadness washed over me like an icy shadow. Outside, the overcast winter sky sucked the color from whatever lay beneath it—tree-covered hills, buildings, the Seattle streets teeming with morning rush-hour traffic—blending everything in a blasé hue of sameness that made it difficult to fix my gaze to anything at all. The only color emanated from a small private airplane that skimmed the western horizon about a mile away: its red beacon light, throbbing steadily like a tiny heart against the dark skies.
I’d seen this same airplane practicing touch-and-go landings at nearby Boeing Field several times over the past few days, but hadn’t given it much thought. But today, for whatever reason, glimpsing it had transported me nearly ten years into the past, to those final moments in the cockpit of my A-7—moments when, despite being so close to what I’d thought was certain death, I’d felt strangely more alive than I had at any other time of my life. Now, being yanked back to the present, I felt something vital leave me. The deep ache it left behind made it hard to breathe.
I should be dead.
“Mr. Campbell!”
I sucked in a breath and turned from the window back to the fluorescent-lit dayroom. A string of thirty or so dour combat veterans, interspersed by a trio of imperious-looking hospital staff, sat facing each other in chairs arranged in a large circle. Morning PTSD group.
The sight of them brought an even sharper ache to my gut, their presence a sobering reality. They could have been a funeral detail on an active battlefield. Bleak faces stared into the gray tile floor at the center of the room as if into a freshly dug mass grave; others scanned the perimeter with darting eyes, alert for an invisible enemy who was sure to attack at any moment. Poor sons of bitches, I remembered thinking the first time I’d met them: still fighting a war that was over nearly twenty years ago. I pitied them. But I also resented having been, in a sense, drafted to fight alongside them. I had my own war to deal with; I didn’t need theirs, too.
“Mr. Campbell, is there something going on outside the window you’d like to share with the rest of the group?” Dr. Chris Chavez, the moderator of the group, asked. No one spoke. Across the circle from where I sat, Chavez stared at me, apparently waiting for an answer to her not-so-rhetorical question.
I’d worked with Chavez in the past, enough to know I didn’t like her. She had a cool, aloof demeanor and a condescending air about her that I found irritating. I felt myself bristling under her stare, as if it were suddenly forty years earlier and I was sitting in Mrs. Osborne’s second-grade class, caught passing notes.
“It was nothing. I was just watching an airplane.” I didn’t bother mentioning my waking dream or how crappy the world outside looked or the life force I felt being sucked from me every time I laid eyes on these broken men. I figured that hadn’t been the point of her question.
“Mr. Campbell,” she said, her tone expertly patient, “please give the group the courtesy of your attention. As we have already explained to you, the success of milieu therapy is seriously compromised without the active involvement of each individual group member. We expect you to participate, even if it’s just by listening.”
We glared at each other for a moment. I’d never been good at weathering a public ass-chewing, and I thought briefly about saying something about it. What the hell, I thought—something provocative, perhaps. But right then I didn’t have the heart to argue about it, about anything. I nodded and tried to arrange my face into something contrite. The effort seemed to satisfy her. She shifted her attention to a small, shriveled-looking man sitting a few chairs away to my right. “I’m sorry for that interruption, Mr. Sloan,” she said. “Please go on.”
Sloan had been gazing into the abyss at the center of the room. He cleared his throat and spoke toward it. “Well, as I said, we were out on patrol southwest of Da Nang. The company commander called up on the field telephone and told us to join up with our sister platoon for a clearing mission—what turned out to be a ‘Zippo raid’, really—on a village a few clicks away.”
I looked at the clock and groaned inwardly. There was still an hour to go in the session. I’d already heard plenty about these brutal “Zippo raids” from some of the other vets. I had no desire to sit through yet another “gook” village being burned to the ground at the flick of a Zippo lighter. Around me, blank faces peered into space. They may or may not have been listening, I couldn’t tell. Sloan’s monotone voice was easy to tune out. I let my eyes close, and a dark expanse seemed to open above me. The droning sound floated up into it like a balloon rising into a black night sky.
I was grateful for the silence. But I was soon feeling lonesome and depressed. Even more, it seemed, than when I’d first come to the PTSD ward a week earlier. I was at the point where I could hardly function. I was riding a runaway roller-coaster of mood swings that often came close to hysteria. I was not only angry; I was enraged. Fuck had become a regular part of my speech. I routinely refused to comply with simple rules, such as arriving at group meetings on time or not talking out of turn. And I was suspicious of the hospital staff, particularly the doctors. This, despite knowing that these people really were here to help me. Despite my having come here of my own accord. Despite knowing that simply being on the ward quite possibly had saved my life.
Of course, I’d brought much of my rage in with me. Most of it stemmed, I think, from feeling helpless, unable to crawl out of the deep pit I’d dug for myself over the past several years: three marriages, all ending in acrimonious divorce; friends and relatives avoiding my company; not one, but two bankruptcies; and the mother of my youngest child threatening to take away my visitation rights if I didn’t start coughing up money for child support. I was miserable in my mind-numbing job as a waiter, thoroughly blocked when it came to writing—ostensibly my real profession—and the woman I had for many years called my mother would no longer write to me or answer my phone calls. In short, I had managed in less than ten years to piss away all the good things I’d spent my life working to achieve—not the least of which had been my career as a Navy pilot, the one endeavor on which I’d foolishly pinned my self-worth and my identity as a man.
Being here on the PTSD ward seemed only to add to that rage. And I didn’t know why. The staff had assured me during my patient intake that attending these group therapy sessions twice a day would be helpful, but I had yet to see its benefit.
What I did see was a wall of resentment steadily building up in me toward these men. Don’t get me wrong: I couldn’t help but feel compassion for them, in view of what they had gone through, what they were still going through. But I had grown to loathe their company. From the first day, I had begun to feel alien from them. Sure, we shared many of the symptoms of that general malady known as being “fucked up.” Our marriages and other relationships were a shambles. We couldn’t get or keep decent jobs. We were vessels of shame and anger and depression, the weight of which often wore us down to the point of feeling suicidal.
But there were other differences in our backgrounds that loomed huge between us. I had never been in combat, had never shot at another human being, let alone killed anyone, had never witnessed a man dying. I had never had to fight for my life in that way. After eleven years of military service, I had grown to despise and fear weapons of any kind, and the philosophy of violence that spawned them. I detested all wars, even the supposedly “good” ones. Those factors alone had me living on a different planet from these men, most of whom were proud of their service and would go back if they could.
Even the pathogenesis of our PTSD was markedly different. Theirs had stemmed from battlefields in the rice paddies and jungles of Southeast Asia. Mine had sprung from a different kind of battlefield: my own childhood home.
I kept thinking I didn’t belong there. But then, where did I belong?
Sloan finally came to the climax of his story. “I heard a noise. This young Vietnamese kid came out from behind some trees, where I guess he’d been hiding. It took me a second to realize he was pointing a rifle at me. There wasn’t time to think. I swung my rifle up and fired off the entire clip. The boy fell back.” He looked down with glazed eyes, as if the dead boy lay there at his feet. “He was the first person I ever killed,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “I’d been in-country six days.” He looked at Chavez. “I’d lied about my age to get into the Marine Corps. I was just sixteen years old.” He hunched forward in his chair. A man next to Sloan put a hand on his back and held it there.
No one spoke for nearly a minute while Sloan trembled. Finally, Chavez looked around the room. “Who else would like to share?” she asked.
I felt myself tense up, as I always did with these open invitations to spill our guts out for everyone to see. People had begun to fidget a little; I looked up at the clock and noticed, with no small relief, that we were close to breaking for lunch. Not that I cared that much for the bland mystery-meat and overcooked vegetables that was the usual fare around here. I felt like a coiled spring, ready to snap. I wanted out.
Chavez waited patiently for a volunteer. Gradually, a sound rose up out of the silence: the muffled roar of a small airplane engine from outside the window. I figured it was the same airplane I’d seen earlier, on its way now to another pass at Boeing Field. The sound grew louder, then diminished as the plane passed by. No one else seemed to hear it. A sharp ache jabbed at my gut, and seeped into my chest to become a painful yearning. But a yearning for what?
“Mr. Campbell,” Chavez said, startling me once again into the present. “What’s going on with you? You’re obviously preoccupied.”
I thought about it for a moment and shrugged. I couldn’t begin to articulate what I was feeling. I didn’t understand it myself. There were only hints, bits and pieces of things that didn’t seem to fit into any sort of cohesive whole. “I don’t really know,” I finally said.
Chavez looked at me as if trying to guess what was in my brain. Then she flipped through her clipboard notes for a moment. I thought I might be off the hook. But I wasn’t. “I’m wondering,” she said, looking back up at me, “if you might want to elaborate some on what you’d said last week about your father.”
“My father?” I tried to recall. The events of the past week had been a confusing blur to me. “I don’t remember saying anything about my father.”
She glanced again through her notes. “Let me see,” she said. “Yes, you talked briefly about your father last Friday. You’d said something about always believing that he’d loved you.” She looked up, her voice softening. “Despite the fact that he abused you horribly, both physically and sexually, before he finally abandoned you.”
I felt my face go suddenly hot. “I said that?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t have a clue how to respond. Not only could I not remember what possessed me to say anything about my father in the first place, I couldn’t imagine anyone in the group wanting to hear about him now. Why had she thought they would?
I glanced over at Sloan, who was plainly eying, in his mind, the boy he’d just killed. Across the circle, next to Chavez, sat one of the two men I shared my room with, a cadaverous-looking man named Dave Hopper.
I’d been horrified to learn his story. He’d been a sniper during the war, and had killed over eight hundred people. Eight hundred! He’d lived with it for twenty years before it finally got to him and he’d tried to hang himself. A few chairs away from Dave was Mike Thompson, a brooding, scraggly-looking former POW who’d spent seven years in the Hanoi Hilton. Mike had watched his copilot being beaten to death by the Vietcong, and had himself been tortured so badly that he still couldn’t walk upright. He was in here after trying to drink himself to death.
I looked around the room at others whose ghastly stories I’d heard. I felt, more than saw, them all looking at me, certain I’d heard them all thinking, What the fuck are you doing here? I suddenly felt as if I hated them, all of them.
“I don’t—really feel like talking right now,” I said to Chavez.
She nodded, and then gave me a tentative look. “I remember you had also mentioned last week that you’d been feeling suicidal, that there was a situation at the restaurant where you work—with a girl, if I recall—that you thought might have triggered it.” She let a moment pass. “Did you want to talk about that at all?”
“No.”
Chavez nodded, her brow furrowed. She seemed to consider pressing the matter, but kept quiet.
We moved on. After a couple minutes of trolling by Chavez, another man spoke. Through the thick fog that still hung around me, I caught that he was finally getting back disability pay amounting to over one hundred thousand dollars—after wrestling with Uncle Sam for it for nearly twenty years. The check, he said, really was in the mail.
“That’s wonderful news,” Chavez said, smiling. “You must be very pleased.”
The man’s face reddened. “I thought I would be. Now I don’t know. All that money.” He looked suddenly as if someone were pointing a gun at him. “The thought of going into a shopping mall. It scares the hell out of me.” He glanced at Chavez with tears overflowing his eyes. “Isn’t that the damnedest thing you ever heard of?”
After lunch I met with Dr. Steve McCutcheon, the head of the PTSD clinic, for my first weekly review. I knew McCutcheon from the VA Day Hospital group therapy program I’d been briefly involved in three years earlier, the same program where I’d also first encountered Chris Chavez. I didn’t like McCutcheon any more than I liked Chavez, and for the same reason: his overt, deliberate detachment. You could have told McCutcheon anything about what went on during the war, no matter how horrible, and his face would look as blank as a skin-colored dinner plate. It was as if he’d turned off his feelings—or maybe didn’t have any in the first place. It didn’t matter which; I’ve always had a hard time talking to anyone who won’t or can’t react. It’s not natural.
I sat to one side of his desk while he read through my file. Then he tossed it onto his desk, open, and leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. “You’ve been on the ward for a week now, Bill,” he said. “How would you assess your progress here?”
I shrugged. “Alright, I guess. It’s a little early to tell. I’m—still confused about some things.”
He stared at me for a long moment, closely, unblinking. “Any more thoughts of suicide?”
“No. Not since I’ve been on the ward.”
McCutcheon nodded. His flat expression didn’t change. Still, I got the feeling he didn’t entirely believe me. I had answered truthfully, if not completely. I didn’t mention how I was feeling as screwed up as ever. The only real improvement so far had been that the little voice in my head—that had urged me to open my veins a week earlier—was now strangely silent. In truth, I was scared shitless the voice might start up again once I left the ward. But I was even more afraid to tell McCutcheon about it.
We talked for several minutes about developing a release plan, something that included a job, a place to live, a commitment to continued individual therapy, and possibly some medication for depression and anxiety. He took notes. Most of what he wanted was already in place. I still had my job at the restaurant. I was already putting out feelers to locate a cheaper apartment which, hopefully, would free up enough money to pay child support again. The VA offered free weekly sessions with a therapist if I wanted them, and I indicated I did. Finally, I told him I’d rather not get back on antidepressants, at least for the time being. The side effects were difficult to handle, and my latest, Prozac, had just been documented, ironically, as possibly inciting suicidal thoughts.
McCutcheon finished his notes and glanced through them again. He nodded. “I’d like to support you on your plan, Bill,” he said. “I think it’s a good plan, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t walk off the floor in, say, another two weeks.”
“Great,” I said, although just thinking about that prospect made my heartbeat quicken.
“But I’ll be honest with you,” he said pointedly. “Some of the staff are becoming a little concerned about your behavior in group. Dr. Chavez, in particular, has mentioned several instances. But these are things all the staff have seen; profanity, yelling, belligerence. And a lack of attentiveness. Some might call it an overt refusal to participate.” He looked at me without blinking. “Do you want to talk about it?”
A trickle of fear began in my stomach. “Not particularly. Like I said, I’m still confused about things. Trying to make sense of them.” I shrugged. “I guess I’m angry. It’s a struggle.”
McCutcheon looked at me as if he were still waiting for something else. “Well,” he said finally, “it’s a concern.” He didn’t have to explain. Plan or no plan, nothing was set in stone. Unless I demonstrated a willingness to play nice, my voluntary status there could radically change. I might transition from a ‘free to go’ volunteer and find myself headed to a ‘not leaving’ permanent facility. There was no telling just how far down I could fall. I didn’t want to find out.
“I’ll work on it,” I said.
He nodded, which I took to mean he was inclined to let things play out, and I left, feeling cautiously relieved.
I used the few minutes before afternoon group to call Franco’s, the restaurant where I worked. I’d been putting it off until I had a better idea when I might be released from the hospital. The phone rang several times before the day bartender, an older woman I knew simply as Mama B, answered.
“Franco’s.”
The noise in the lounge was loud enough that she had to yell into the phone. Apparently the place was hopping. I told her who I was, and asked to talk to Jay Schnebly, the assistant manager. “Let me see if I can find him,” she said, and put down the receiver. I listened to the noise. I imagined people wearing bow ties and tuxedo shirts running around with trays of steaming clams, crab or salmon held over their heads, catering to their rich clientele, many of whose million-dollar yachts were tied up to the dock alongside the restaurant. I thought about my servitude to these people, and felt a strange mix of pride and a deep envy.
Someone picked up the receiver. “This is Jay,” came a voice.
“Hi, Jay,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “It’s Bill Campbell.”
There was a noticeable pause. “Yes, Bill,” he said. “We’re a little busy around here. What can I do for you?”
I told him I was two weeks away from being released from the hospital, and that I wanted to be put back on the dinner schedule.
“Uh—yeah, okay,” he said. “That would be the twenty-eighth.” I heard him riffle through some papers. “Let’s see. I guess I can fit you in Thursday through Monday. But we’ll have to move you to section two.”
I’d been used to having section one, the largest and most lucrative group of tables. Section two was much smaller, and was almost exclusively assigned to the newer hires while they were being trained. But I knew Jay was being generous letting me come back to work at all. I’d be foolish to argue the point. “I’ll take it,” I said. “And thanks.”
Jay grunted. “I hope you know, I had to go to bat for you with Bob. He wasn’t too thrilled about bringing you back.”
“I understand,” I said. “I appreciate it, really.”
“And just so you know, Mia’s working that shift too. She’ll be on one.”
Something squeezed my gut. Mia. A girl young enough to be my daughter who I’d met shortly after my breakup from my girlfriend Tamara. She’d been there, in the purely platonic sense, to help me through the pain and loneliness. Of course, I soon felt an attraction to her. It never got off the ground. The situation became ugly, particularly when she stopped talking to me. Literally. Our so-called relationship had been the catalyst for bringing out some of my most infantile behavior. Several times, in fact, she had reduced me to racking sobs.
I thought now about working next to her. Something bitter rose in the back of my throat. I swallowed it back down. “That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t think–”
“Truth be told, Bill, she’s afraid of you,” Jay said. “And, frankly, I don’t blame her, especially after that business you pulled with her car. It’s got a lot of people around here wondering about you.” He paused. “Me too, if you want to know the truth.”
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen. Mia had me served with a no-contact order.”
“Yeah, I heard,” Jay said, scoffing. “And we know just how effective those orders can be in protecting a girl, don’t we?”
It was a cruel remark, and it stung me. But I let it slide. I needed the job. I assured Jay I was getting plenty of help, that he wouldn’t have to worry about Mia, and that I’d cut my own goddamn hand off before I even got close to hurting another human being. I tried not to sound like I was pleading with him.
Jay sighed. “I’m going out on a limb for you here,” he said. “You screw this up, I’ll fire you so fast your head will swim. Are we clear on that?”
“We’re clear,” I said.
He hung up.
My mouth was dry and my face hot. A burgeoning pool of angry tears threatened to spill. I thought about what I’d left on the outside to come to the ward, and felt a fresh stab of pain in my gut. Nothing would have changed just because I’d spent some time here. Getting back into the swing of things, whatever that meant, wouldn’t be easy. Particularly when I was still in the dark about what had been causing my problems.
I was late for afternoon group because of the phone conversation, and having to go to the head afterward to take a leak and wash my face and try to cool down. Chavez shot me a look when I came into the dayroom. I took my usual seat by the window, but didn’t interrupt one of the younger vets who was whining about something. The rest of the group seemed collectively bored. The kid, whose name I remembered was Joel Setzer, ran a hand through his hair as he talked. His wrist had a ghastly purple scar that ran lengthwise from the hand to nearly halfway up his inner arm. I’d figured, seeing it for the first time, that he must have really wanted to go.
He was in the middle of explaining how he’d got himself “fucked up” while on a weekend pass from the floor, resulting in his off-facility privileges being revoked.
He swore it had all been an accident. He’d been good about staying off the booze and the drugs, and was taking his Antabuse as directed. But then he’d made the stupid mistake, he said, of buying an underarm deodorant without checking the ingredients. Of course, he said, it had contained alcohol. That was how he’d got drunk and fallen off the wagon. It hadn’t been his fault, he insisted. Even as he spoke, there came sporadic chuckles and groans from the rest of the group.
I couldn’t begin to pretend the slightest interest. I was still angry, and not a little ashamed, over my conversation with Jay. The thought of having to work again with Mia made my heart seem to want to punch its way out of my chest.
The ongoing discussion in the dayroom seemed to fade. My mind wandered. I was soon staring out the window again. The sun had finally come out, and some color washed over the scene. I couldn’t help searching the horizon for another airplane like the one I’d seen that morning. I didn’t find one, but my creative imagination did. I let myself be captivated until, in my mind’s eye, I was inside the cockpit, guiding the plane smoothly over the approach end of the distant runway, pulling back on the control wheel to begin the flare, holding it as the plane settled, holding it, until the final satisfying erp! of rubber on asphalt as the mainwheels touched down.
“Mr. Campbell!” Chavez called to me sharply. This time she didn’t bother to hide her irritation.
I turned from the window. Setzer had stopped talking. He sat in his chair, leaning forward, looking glum and deflated. Chavez glared at me. “Mr. Campbell,” she said, “perhaps you’d like to discuss with the group your rude habit of ignoring our simple rules of conduct. Rules, I might add, that no one else here seems to have a problem following.”
I just looked at her. An angry heat gushed into my face. I felt like my head might pop. What the hell was I supposed to say? I couldn’t just take the ass-chewing and mumble an apology. I had had enough of that this morning. She was waiting for me to say something. They were waiting. I couldn’t back down. I knew I was being stupid, but I couldn’t let her have this, not in front of them. “I don’t know why I have such a problem,” I snapped. I suddenly felt like I might cry. My raised voice felt thick in my throat. “And you don’t need to fucking talk to me that way.”
I shouldn’t have said it. I knew as soon as the word was out of my mouth I’d made a mistake. Several of the group turned and looked at me, wide eyed, eyebrows raised. Even the ones I’d thought were comatose.
Chavez didn’t flinch. “And what way is that?” she said calmly.
“Like I’m a goddamn child. I’m thirty-nine years old, for Chrissake. A grown man.”
Chavez sighed. Despite her irritation, despite being confronted by an obvious madman, her features seemed to soften. “Not on the inside,” she said almost gently. “Emotionally, you’re a child in an adult body, trying to pass as a grown man.”
Then she looked at me without speaking. It took a moment for her words to sink in, for me to connect all the dots, to step back and look at the picture they formed. A cartoon image materialized in my head: a tiny boy, a sort of preadolescent homunculus, manipulated the levers and switches that controlled my life from a tiny chair in the middle of my skull, observing the events of the outer world through the windows of my eyes. I tried to shake the image away, but it persisted. I glanced at some of the faces in the group, hoping for something, even a twitch of an eyebrow to indicate some sort of dissenting opinion. There was no hint of one. I don’t know why I expected otherwise. Most of the group had turned their attention back to their sepulchral vision in the center of the room, if, in fact, they’d ever left it. I was alone in this.
“I’m sorry if that seems harsh, Mr. Campbell,” Chavez continued, “but I feel it’s important to be honest in here. Don’t you?”
“Oh, absolutely,” I said. My wavering voice sounded frantic in my ears, as if a hand gripped my throat and squeezed, cutting off my breath. Some of the other guys fidgeted in their seats, as if they were suddenly weary of having to deal with me. I felt trapped. I didn’t know how to end this thing that had gone so wrong so quickly. My only choice seemed to be to press on. “So how old would you say I am, on the inside, doctor? Eight? Nine years old?” I didn’t try to hide the venom in my voice.
“I’m not sure you’ve even made it that far,” she said, her voice dripping with pity.
Incredibly, just hearing her say it seemed to make it so. I felt my scrotum shrink, as if my testicles were withdrawing back up into my abdomen. I imagined she sensed it happening. I felt close to vomiting right there on the floor. “And how do I fix that?” I asked, my throat tightening.
She regarded me, thought for a moment. “I’m not sure you can,” she said finally. “The best you can hope for is to learn to live with it.”
Sudden tears splashed down my cheek; I jerked my hand up to wipe them away. “But haven’t I already been living with it?” I croaked.
She half smiled, sadly, looking at me as if looking at a photo of a cute puppy just after learning it had been born without its legs. “Have you really?”
Pow. The knockout punch. The question—a blunt accusation, really—settled over me like a freezing fog. I couldn’t have responded even if the words had formed in my brain. My face felt frozen, my lips sealed shut. I imagined I hated this woman. But I found myself caving beneath her credentialed authority. The more I played and replayed what she had said in my mind, the more the very pillars on which I’d built the structure of my manhood crumbled.
I looked at the men sitting around me and felt even more distant from them than I had before. There was nowhere to attach myself, not even to my past, which tangible events I had thought I understood and could count on for meaning. I no longer knew who—or what—I was, or what I had been.
Chavez made a mark on her notepad. “Perhaps it’s best we moved on,” she said. She looked around the room, her eyes finally settling on an older man with skin the color of rich earth and hair like fine white wool. “Mr. Davis?” she said. “You look troubled today. What’s going on with you?”
I was in a funk the rest of the evening. For some reason, I was drawn to look at my face in the shower room mirror. I did that several times. I talked to my reflection, listened to the timbre of my voice, studied my facial expressions, hoping to somehow gauge my maturity. Maybe catch a hint of that childishness Chavez had evidently thought was so obvious. But after awhile I couldn’t tell what the hell I was looking at. Even my voice no longer seemed to have a definite sound or character to it. It was like listening to myself think.
We ate a tasteless, forgettable dinner. I sat by myself in the dining area. No one made any attempt to visit. I didn’t blame them. Afterwards, a woman came onto the ward with a cart filled with craft kits, courtesy of one of the Disabled American Veterans units somewhere in Seattle. I pulled one from the cart: a snap-together plastic model of an F-15 jet fighter. I worked on it for a while, then got up and left it there on the table. I didn’t have the heart to finish it.
I read a little from a self-help book—Adult Children of Alcoholics, by Janet Woititz—which I’d brought with me from my apartment, but it depressed me. I thought I needed to laugh, so I went to the packed, darkened TV room and watched In Living Color: Jim Carrey portraying a guy named Fireman Bob, looking like he’d squirted flaming napalm all over his face. Normally I would have thought it was hilarious, but not tonight.
I was feeling restless, but I didn’t know why. I got up and went into the dayroom and sat in on a game of rummy. The other guys playing talked about about motorcycles, and I listened in, figuring the talk was safe and mechanical and beyond feeling and speculation. But I soon tired of it. The game was boring; nobody playing seemed to have much of a competitive spirit. We were just passing time, waiting for something to happen. I kept looking at the clock, unsure why.
At nine-thirty I went downstairs with some of the guys for the last smoke break of the evening. I didn’t smoke, but I liked going down just to be off the floor, to breathe some outside air and feel the cool on my face. But I had the growing feeling that I didn’t belong there anymore, as if some secret had been revealed about me in afternoon group that meant my membership in this men’s club had been revoked. I stood by, an outsider, and listened while the others talked about armament. LAWS. 9 mm Uzzis. Cannisters. Claymores. Quad-50’s. M-60’s. Mike-mike. 95’s. Mark-72’s. A few things I was familiar with; most I wasn’t. They talked about the “dinks” being nailed to trees by darts, or torched by foo-gas. Jokes and nicknames that were like code, the meanings behind most of which I had to guess. They made grimacing caricatures out of their faces—so many funny ways to describe a man’s dying!—and laughed, deep belly laughs. Then the laughter just sort of died and everyone was staring at their feet or had turned to face the parking lot where they didn’t have to look at one another. The smokers drew one last puff from their cigarettes and threw the butts onto the driveway already littered with thousands of them. Then we went back inside to the elevator.
I wasn’t ready for bed. Anxiety and a troubled sense lingered. I stood in the hall down at the nurse’s station while the two nurses on duty wrote their reports in everyone’s folders, and thumbed idly through a copy of the World News. On the front page was a photo of Ross Perot standing near a podium. An extraterrestrial being stood behind him with his strange-looking hand on Perot’s shoulder. Perot looked surprised.
A younger Panama-era veteran, whose name I recalled was Walker, came out of the nearby head. He nodded as he walked past me, then a moment later he turned and came back. “Your name’s Bill, isn’t it?” he asked. I told him it was. “I’m Brian,” he said. He put out his hand, and I shook it. “So, you used to fly?”
His question surprised me. “How did you know?”
“I think you mentioned it in passing one day last week.”
“Ah.” Yet another of the previous week’s disclosures I apparently didn’t remember.
“So, what’d you fly? Fighters?”
“A-7s,” I replied. “Light bombers. They weren’t very good fighters.”
“Oh,” he said, “right. A pig of an engine.” He must have seen the surprise on my face. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I know all about A-7s. F-4s, too. F-16s, you name it. I used to have an older brother in the Air Force, flew F-105s–“Thuds”–out of Korat.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “Jesus, I loved those planes. Looked like goddamn rocket ships, you know?”
I knew. I’d been infatuated with F-105s myself, and had once dreamed of flying them. But by the time I’d begun my flight training in 1979, it had been with the Navy, who flew different airplanes. The Air Force had long since replaced the F-105 with something more modern. “Beautiful planes,” I reminisced.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding wistfully. “Anyway, Jeff—that was my brother’s name—he got killed by a SAM over Hai Phong, be twenty-five years ago next month. I was still in third grade when it happened, too young to know what a SAM was. I thought it was a guy’s name.” He chuckled humorlessly, then drew silent. “I don’t remember much about him, really, except he loved flying. Couldn’t talk about anything else, and always with his hands in the air like this—“ He put out his flattened hands and waved them around in front of him like two airplanes engaged in a dogfight.
I smiled. “We all did that,” I said. “Tie our hands behind us and we’d forget how to talk.”
He went on to tell me the story of how his brother had died, how he’d been blown out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile after making a third pass at an enemy gun position threatening American ground forces. This, after his jet had already taken a hit from ground fire. It was likely he hadn’t known what hit him. But he had succeeded in destroying the enemy gun emplacement, saving American lives. It had earned him a posthumous medal for bravery. It had also earned him the distinction of being a real man in his younger brother’s eyes. “I wanted to be a pilot, like him, but I wasn’t smart enough. I could be tough, though. That’s why I joined the Marines. I think he’d have been proud of me.”
Walker’s face glowed with admiration when he recalled his brother. But the more I listened, the more depressed it made me. Jeff Walker had been a fighter. He had died a hero’s death, in combat, saving the lives of his countrymen. His plane had already been hit by ground fire, yet he chose to continue his attack a second, even a third time, knowing the likely result.
Conversely, I had never been a fighter. As a pilot, I’d been thousands of miles and nearly a decade away from anything resembling combat. I had been glad of it. While most of the military pilots I’d known openly believed the more dangerous the flying was, the better, my own flying had been characterized by an ever-increasing white-knuckle fear. Something which figured largely in ending my career as a pilot.
Of course, I couldn’t admit that to this kid. Right then, I had a more desperate need not to look like a sissy, a coward, a non-man. A fraud.
The need took command. “I was nearly killed, myself,” I blurted out. “Several times, in fact.”
“Really?” said the kid. “Wow.”
“I was just remembering one of those times this morning.” I recounted the incident over the Nevada desert, up to the point where I watched Skid Roe’s bomb falling toward my canopy, with no time to get out of the way. I left him hanging.
The kid’s eyes grew wide, fried eggs on either side of his nose. “But how–?”
“How did I get away?” I scoffed. “My flight lead fucked up.”
He waited for me to explain. I told him Skid’s bomb was supposed to fall straight down from his wing. But Skid had accidentally flipped the wrong weapons-control switch, which activated a set of retarding fins on the tail end of the bomb. Just before the bomb would have come crashing through my canopy, the fins popped open like an umbrella in a strong wind, and jerked the bomb safely rearward. “It couldn’t have been more than inches away from my head,” I clucked. “I still can’t believe it didn’t hit my rudder on the way back.”
“Oh my god!” Walker howled and shook his head, obviously impressed that I had so handily cheated death. “You are one lucky fuck, my man.” He reached out his hand and shook mine. I basked under his admiring gaze, ignoring the hot flush of guilt suddenly rushing to my face.
An awkward silence arose. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. I was keenly aware of the obvious differences between this boy’s brother and me. Jeff Walker had died a hero; I had lived because of someone else’s fuckup. Like a botched abortion, this baby had lived.
I’d anticipated an ego stroke. But what I got was a harsh reminder about someone I could never measure up to.
The conversation trailed, and we said good-night. He walked to his room. I felt like a spotlight had been turned away from me, and was now following him. As if my manhood was walking down the hallway with him. He closed his door, leaving behind this little kid inside my head, wishing I hadn’t been so weak.
What exactly was it that made a man a real man? An existential question that haunted me. I kept coming back to Chavez’s cruel (as I saw them) comments during group. What mechanism ostensibly existed in a man’s head that clicked or buzzed or chimed to signal to him that he’d entered that coveted realm known as manhood? Or was the mechanism merely something, or someone, external? Someone—a father perhaps, or some other trusted mentor—to evaluate him and to tell him he’d passed the tests? And, whatever that mechanism, why did it seem I’d never been endowed with it? Why had I never felt like a man?
I thought back to that afternoon’s group session. I’d looked around the room and I’d seen men. Broken men; hurting men. But men, nonetheless. Maybe they’d been men simply because they were broken and hurting. Men stepped up to the plate and took their lumps. These combat vets certainly had. I couldn’t say the same for myself. By this measure, I’d come up short. I’d joined the Air Force when I was seventeen knowing full well whatever duties I’d be assigned would most likely be a safe distance from enemy activity. Even flying a combat aircraft had given me the false sense that I would be well above the pitched battles of war. I had known all along that I had an aversion to fighting. That I’d never been very good at it, had steered clear of it whenever I could. Real men like Jeff Walker had no such aversion. If necessary, they welcomed fights. Real men like Davis watched their buddies disintegrate before their eyes.
I folded up the paper and mumbled a goodnight to the nurses at the station, then went to my room. It was dark. Hopper was snoring. I left the light off. I got undressed and slipped into my bed. On the far side of the room, my other roommate, a featureless lump named Lempke, grunted in his sleep and let out a long fart. I thought with no small irritation that it was just a matter of time before the poison gas drifted over to my side of the room.
Then I noticed the gentle hiss of an air conditioning vent in the ceiling just over my head, reminding me eerily of the sort of gas nozzle I imagined hung from the gas chamber ceilings of Auschwitz. The combination led to a long depressing train of thought that ended with a poem I’d memorized back in junior high school which had impacted me deeply, back when I was still infatuated with poetry and stories and movies about the romanticism and “glories” of war:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
I lay there near to tears thinking about it. Yes, I was sad for the author, a British poet named Wilfred Owen—who ironically had been killed on the last day of WWI. But I was even sadder because in some twisted way I yearned terribly to have been there in the trenches with him, if for no other reason than to have been, to be, a part of that tortured brotherhood of men. Men like those whose room I now shared: ghostly Hopper, and even gas-bag Lempke. Men.
Eventually, I slept, not yet even beginning to grasp the true nature of the craziness that had befallen me. Nor really understanding in my heart the point the poet was getting at in the final lines of his terrible and beautiful poem which still echoed in my head:
Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori. “It is sweet and right to die for one’s country.”
The old lie. And God help me, but I still believed it.