Six hours later, I was in the back seat of a taxi. The taxi driver was Asian. He kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror, the way people in the airport terminal glanced at me, the way the people in the villages glanced at me, like I was a rabid dog that would bite. Like I didn’t belong. The taxi driver was driving fast. Everything was whizzing past the windows. I leaned forward to check the speedometer. He was driving the speed limit. Sixty-five miles per hour. After so many months of the slow crawl of humping, the sensation of speed was terrifying. I thought he was going to crash. I thought he was trying to kill me.
I thought of the irony.
Death still followed me.
Minutes from the airport, he exited the freeway and drove me through Elizabeth’s business district. Just like that, I was home. I’d made it home. People walked the sidewalks. Cars drove the street. Everything was the same. The faces of the people. The houses. The buildings. The businesses.
But I didn’t recognize any of it.
I didn’t believe any of it was real.
It was a forgery. Vietnam was real.
I told the taxi driver to pull over. He looked at me in the rearview mirror.
I told him again, “Pull over.”
The fare was $6.23. I threw a twenty-dollar bill at him and got out. Money meant nothing to me. I walked the streets in my utilities. Defiant. Seeking a confrontation. People stepped out of my way. They stared as I passed, no doubt wondering if they knew me, thinking, He looks familiar. No one greeted me. No one else thanked me. No one said a word.
I wanted to grab the approaching man by the collar of his suit jacket and ask him if he knew what was going on in the real world. I wanted to tell him, all of them, that young men, their sons, were dying in the bush every day, that they were being shipped home in boxes. Nobody looked at me long enough for me to speak. I was not real. I was a ghost. I was an imitation of the young man who left this town. I’d had no time to decompress. Nothing to prepare me for my return to civilian life. They’d just thrown me back, like an unwanted fish, and told me to swim. OJT.
I stepped inside a bar and took a stool at the far end, away from everyone. I didn’t know what time it was. I didn’t care. The bartender approached. I asked for a beer. The bartender asked to see my ID. I looked at him like he was joking. He stared back. I wanted to lean across the bar and rip his throat out. I wanted to scream at him, “Do you know where I’ve been?”
“You can’t be in here if you’re underage,” he said. Then he turned to walk away.
“Are you joking,” I said, not about to give him the satisfaction of getting out my ID. My uniform should have been enough. “Seriously?”
He turned back. “It’s the law.”
“So is sending me to a foreign country to kill. None of you had a problem with that.”
“Take it up with your congressman,” he said.
“My congressman sent me!”
“Then your senator. I don’t really care. Just get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”
I almost dared him to make the call, but I was tired of fighting. I was done fighting.
I left the bar. As I walked, it started to snow. I stopped and looked around at the businesses. Christmas decorations in windows. Colored lights along the exteriors, and Christmas music emanating from inside the stores. The temperature was suddenly cold. From where I’d been, it was freezing. It felt so good.
I started the long walk home.
I could do it.
I’d humped for miles through streams and rice paddies and over mountains. The hardest part is getting up off the ground and taking that first step. Then you take another, and another. You walk away from where you’ve been, toward your next checkpoint. I tried not to think, not to dwell on where I’d been, on the past. I tried to forget it all. It was irrelevant anyway. I didn’t take terrain or villages. I just kept moving.
So I would keep moving now. I walked on, away from the past.
A car horn honked.
I looked over.
The car had slowed. The passenger leaned out the side window as if he were about to jump from the car. He had long hair, a droopy mustache, and the middle finger extended on both hands. His spittle hit the toe of my boot.
The past, I thought. Like death, it had followed me home.
Chapter 25
September 7, 2016
Two weeks after returning home from dropping Beau off at school, Elizabeth had gone into the bedroom to watch one of her shows and Mary Beth was out with friends, so I sat down in the recliner in the family room and turned on the lamp. I wanted to read the remainder of William’s journal alone, with just William.