Patricia Brennan - Incoming

 

It’s 1969, and I’m riding with my boyfriend, Jack, and a few friends up to northern Wisconsin. All of a sudden, Jack sees something out the window that makes him lurch out of his seat. I can see the tendons of his neck just vibrating in fear. And then, a minute later, he just relaxes back in the seat, because he realizes that the funnel of clouds in the distance was just from the paper mills of northern Wisconsin. It wasn’t an incoming mortar attack from the Viet Cong. 

 

Jack had just gotten back from Nam, a couple weeks earlier than that. He’d been drafted to fight the war. The whole time he was in country, he and I wrote letters back and forth. I actually was protesting the war in Madison, but Jack made the war real to me. And that whole year he was there, I had that clutchy feeling that you get when you love a soldier who’s in active combat. But now, Jack was back home. He was safe. The war was behind us. That’s what I’d been thinking. But when I saw him clutch at that smoke in the distance, I knew the damn war was still alive, at least in Jack. 

 

So, a few months later, he took off. I knew he had to go and fight his demons. So, he roamed the States and Canada with a few friends while his crew cut from the army grew out. And by the time he got to art school in California, his hair was long and free, and I figured he was too. 

 

So, four years later, when he and I got married, the Vietnam War seemed like ancient history to me. I could easily imagine Jack had never even been there. And that made it easier, because Jack would never talk about the war with me. Not ever. That was amazing, because Jack and I knew each other since we were in first grade. We grew up together in a little Iowa town. We had all the same teachers, we knew all the same classmates. But Jack’s year in Vietnam, it was like a black hole. 

 

Well, I did know the basics of what he did there. And he was a helicopter door gunner. That meant that his job was to provide fire cover while they were landing and picking up troops in the jungle. And Jack, when he was over there, he sent me a picture of himself standing by his chopper. He’s got one combat boot up on the open doorway of the copter, and his hand is resting on this enormous automatic machine gun that’s mounted there. It was Jack’s gun. I couldn’t imagine him shooting that thing, spraying hundreds of bullets out per minute. 

 

And the truth is, I didn’t want to picture him shooting that thing. I prefer to focus on another picture he sent me, where he’s holding this adorable pet monkey that he had adopted from the jungle. And that looked like the Jack I knew, fun loving and creative and affectionate. So, in our marriage, it was comfortable for both of us to just pretend the war hadn’t happened. We just ignored the fact altogether, but that war had a way of leaking into our home.

 

Like, one night, Jack and I were at the dinner table, and we’re lingering over our last glass of wine and our little boy starts singing the song that he had learned that day in preschool, America the Beautiful. His sweet voice is singing about the spacious skies and the amber waves of grain. And all of a sudden, I notice that tears are streaming down Jack’s face, because the song had brought him back to the funeral of a hometown buddy who was shot down in Vietnam. And Jack, in full uniform, was a pallbearer at that funeral. 

 

Jack started telling me that when he was carrying the casket out of the church, he completely broke down. And he said the worst part of the funeral was that the father of the boy, whose name was Bob Shares, looked to Jack for answers for why his son had died, and Jack had nothing to give him. The reason this memory is fresh in my mind, is that I recently ran across the journal entry that I had written that night, and it prompted me to look up the memorial of our classmate Bob Shares. Bob died in Vietnam on November 18th, 1969. And then, I was titled to make another secondary discovery, the date on the journal entry, was also November 18th. So, Jack had broken down and cried on the very anniversary of his friend’s death.

 

It’s easy to write that off as coincidence and that might be all it is. But I wonder if it’s more-- That night of Bob Shares’ anniversary, people who loved him were grieving for him. And maybe somehow that grief traveled through the ether and reached Jack’s subconscious, because I think the pores of his war wounds were always open. When you’re a vet or married to one, you never know when an incoming mortar attack is going to hit.