The World Played Chess
Robert Dugoni
The world played chess, while I played checkers.
—Origin and attribution debated
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things.
—1 Corinthians 13:11
PROLOGUE
A purpose, I have learned, is rarely found, but revealed. Only when I do not search does the purpose become clear.
So it would be with William Goodman’s journal. I had no idea why he sent it to me, but his purpose would reveal itself in time.
William mailed the journal he kept in Vietnam in a five-by-eight manila envelope addressed simply to Vincenzo, without my last name, Bianco. Scrawled in blue ink, the crude numbers and letters appeared rushed, as if William had quickly written the name and my Burlingame address, perhaps worried he might change his mind before he mailed the envelope. He did not provide his name or a return address, but I knew the sender. I had not heard that version of my name in nearly forty years, nor had I seen or spoken with the only person who had routinely used it.
William’s package arrived on a Saturday, via regular mail, with eight American flag postage stamps in the upper-right corner. That caught my attention. I opened the envelope with more than a little curiosity and pulled out a rectangular Tiger Chewing Tobacco tin—the orange and gold leaf scratched and aged, and the four corners, one of which had a dent, displaying flakes of rust. I held the tin like a religious relic, uncertain what it could possibly contain, or if I wanted to open it.
After a moment of contemplation, I popped the lid.
Beneath a folded sheet of paper, the kind once kept by a telephone to scribble hurried notes and phone numbers, I found a three-by-five-inch black hardcover notebook, the lined sheets filled with the same harsh handwriting as on the envelope. I unfolded the sheet and noted an illustration of a birdhouse with an American flag above the round entry hole. Again, it seemed as incongruous with the William I had known as the patriotic stamps.
The note, however, was vintage William—humor, with a seriousness lurking beneath his words.
Vincenzo!
Look what I found in a box in my storage closet.
I guess it wasn’t in the box I threw out with my medals and ribbons after all.
Fate, perhaps.
I was uncertain what to do with it. My wife is gone now. Cancer took her. She had a daughter from a previous marriage who, for all intents and purposes, I raised as my own. But I cannot give this to her. She wouldn’t understand.
It’s just me now. A squad of one.
I almost threw it out. Then I thought of you.
I thought of that summer. 1979? You asked about Vietnam. And you listened when others did not. You saved me from destroying my life, and you were the reason I found my life again. I don’t think you knew that. I never had the chance to tell you. I should have.
I believe we both dreamed of being journalists. I see on the internet you’re a successful lawyer. Dreams are hard to catch, aren’t they? I didn’t obtain my dream, either, not that one anyway, but I achieved so many others I never thought possible. I have no regrets, and I certainly won’t complain. Every minute of every day is a gift, and growing old a privilege, not a right.
I lowered William’s letter and recalled when he’d first said those words to me—in the garage of the Burlingame remodel. I had thought of his words often over the years, and I told them to my own children, though they didn’t have the depth of meaning they had coming from William.
So, the journal . . .
After the marines turned down my request to be a combat reporter, I bought this journal and decided to write my own stories. I once thought these scribblings might someday be the makings of a novel, but maybe they’re just the musings of an aging man once young, a man who lived through hell on earth and somehow survived, bruised and battered, but alive. Or maybe they’re just scribblings . . .
Now they belong to you.
Keep them. Use them if you see a purpose. If not, you know the drill. All I ask is that you read the passages in the order written, so you will understand.
Peace, Semper Fi,
William Goodman
Over the next year, I would endeavor to read one entry a day, as William had written them, never realizing William’s stories would be as significant now as they had been thirty-six years ago, and as painful. Some entries were just a rushed sentence or two, others, longer narratives. I read each entry slowly, searching for William’s hidden meanings. Some made me laugh. Some made me sad. Some were too horrible to imagine, or to live with, which explained why William sent me the journal and did not leave it to his daughter. He no longer wanted to live with the memories—I imagine reality had been hard enough—and he didn’t want her to live with them, either.