His note had asked me to read the entries in order. I had honored his request. It had not been easy reading. I stopped for a period of time after Chris’s death. I had tried to start again, but each time I had to put the journal down. I could now imagine what it had truly been like to be eighteen years old and to have lived through what William had written about. A part of me didn’t want to read the end, didn’t want to read again how everything had turned out. It was enough, for a part of me, to know that William had made it home alive and, after some bad times, that he had found his way, that he had married and, hopefully, lived a good life.
But he’d sent me his journal for a reason. He couldn’t throw it out, and he didn’t have anyone else with whom he could share his stories. I felt as if I owed it to him, for everything he had taught me about growing up that summer, what he had taught my son. I owed it to him to finish the journal.
I opened to the final entry, and I noticed immediately that it was written in ink, not pencil. The writing also was not as scribbled. It did not appear as rushed. This entry had been added after the other entries. Well after.
Vincenzo,
I’m glad you’ve come this far. I hope you will come just a little farther.
The personal greeting from William jarred me. Its immediacy made it eerie, as if William had been watching me all this time, as if he knew all along that he intended to give me his journal, that he had more to tell me.
It’s important to me that you know the truth and, hopefully, after reading this, you will understand. I was nineteen years old. A boy really. A boy whose humanity, values, and sense of himself as a moral, righteous person had all been compromised. The war took that from me, more than anything else that it stole. I lost all understanding of myself, everything my religion and my parents had taught me. I had a hell of a time getting it back. I had PTSD that summer we worked together. Many GIs didn’t know about PTSD then, because so little was known about its effects. The VA kept turning away all these GIs with the same symptoms—quick to anger, suffering with anxiety and panic attacks, having flashbacks and nightmares, eating disorders, and substance abuse. We didn’t know then that PTSD symptoms can remain dormant for years, until triggered by an event. I don’t know what triggered mine. Everything, I guess.
In Vietnam, killing became very impersonal. We never called the people “Vietnamese.” They were “VC” or “Gooks,” “Chinks” or “Charlie.” You didn’t feel like you were killing a person, though of course you knew you were. Much of the time outside the wire, you didn’t see the guy you shot, so we told ourselves we didn’t kill anyone. At least I did. Those times you did see the bodies, you told yourself it wasn’t a bullet from your rifle. It was someone else’s bullet. You didn’t really know.
Except I did.
One time.
It haunts me.
I told you the story. But not the whole story. You deserve to hear the whole story. The real story. The truth. I hope you will understand. I hope you will forgive me.
I set the journal down and I looked beyond the ring of light cast by the lamp, toward the hall that led to the bedroom where Elizabeth watched her show. I thought I wanted to read William’s journal alone, with just him, as had often been the case over the past year.
Now, I wasn’t so sure.
The lamp shone like a lone streetlamp on a deserted street. But for flashes of blue television light on the hall wall, the rest of the room, and the house, was dark. And the dark had always scared me. I didn’t know why. It was one of those weird things. Even in my own home, the place I had lived for two decades, the darkness caused my imagination to flare and, at times, to run wild. I thought it was just an idiosyncrasy, but one night when I went to shut off the hall light, Mary Beth called out to me from her room. “Can you leave it on?”
“Why?” I asked, peering in the door.
“It’s my night-light,” she said. “I’m afraid of the dark.”
So maybe it was a genetic fear. All I know is that I would have been terrified in Vietnam, as William described the night, in darkness so black you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. But I knew it wasn’t the darkness that scared me this night. I was scared about what awaited me on the final pages of William’s journal, what he called “the real story” and “the truth.” I worried about why he hoped I would forgive him.
I wondered if anyone else knew what I was about to read. Had William’s wife known? Perhaps. A close friend, doubtful. Everyone’s past contains things we are not proud of, skeletons in our closets that we do not share, not with strangers and not with those we love and who love us. We fear that to do so will change their perception of us, and their belief in who we are.