I touched it. “My mom gave it to me when I got confirmed.”
“Good Italian Catholic boy. My mom gave me one just like it before I shipped out to boot camp.”
“Are you Catholic?”
“I was.” He brought the cigarette to his lips. “When I first got to Vietnam, I used to take out that cross and kiss it all the time.”
I did not see a chain and cross around his neck and didn’t recall seeing either when he and Mike worked without shirts. “What happened to it?”
William took another drag. His hand shook. “I lost it,” he said, looking away, and again I felt something, that there was more to tell but William wasn’t about to tell me. William shrugged. “It wasn’t doing me any good anyway. I figured if God wasn’t going to listen in Vietnam, when I needed him most, I wasn’t gonna keep asking.”
Again, I gave the comment a moment of thought, covering the pause with a drink from the beer can. Finally, I asked, “So are you an atheist?”
William tilted his head, as if thinking about it. “I don’t know what I am. I don’t put too much stock in that ‘praise Jesus’ stuff. I’ve been to hell, and I didn’t see any sign of God. After a while you stop looking. You figure it out on your own.”
For the life of me I don’t know what compelled me to say what I said next, maybe that underdeveloped frontal lobe. “But you lived. That had to mean something.”
William gave me a pensive smile. “You know what it meant? It meant I got lucky. That’s all. Dumb, blind luck. Guy in front of me steps on a land mine that was meant for me. Bad luck for him. Good luck for me.”
William snubbed out his cigarette and stood, and I was glad he did. I thought I knew about the Vietnam War. I had heard and read about all the young men who had lost their lives, about what they had experienced, and what they had perpetrated. I knew about the My Lai Massacre, about soldiers coming home to protests and people calling them “baby killers.” I also knew we’d lost a lot of young men who were my age when they died to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, and that when we had pulled out of the country, it had fallen to the communists anyway, and everything American soldiers fought and died for seemed to have been a waste. I recalled the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which indicated the war had not been driven by idealism and that the US government had lied to the public and to Congress, which made the deaths of those young men all the more senseless. But those were impersonal snippets learned from news articles. William had been there. He had lived it.
When William spoke of Vietnam, he was like a live electrical wire I had gripped. His stories sent a current through my body. But then, just as quickly, William flipped a switch and the current turned off, leaving me drained and tired.
Like my high school friends who embellished our stories to perpetrate an illusion, I sensed William held back information about Vietnam, about what he had truly experienced, to perpetrate his own illusion—that the war hadn’t affected him. But I sensed it had.
After four years of high school, I didn’t feel like I really knew my friends, not at their core; I had never gotten past the veneer we all erected to protect ourselves. And I didn’t feel like I knew William. Not in the least. I knew the happy-go-lucky William with the chuckle in his voice, but not the Vietnam William who had, somehow, managed to survive and make it back alive.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know that William.
PART II
NEVER, NEVERLAND
April 7, 1968
I was wearing my helmet and flak jacket and cradling my M-16 like it was a lover. I couldn’t see Kenny, but I could hear his muffled snoring beneath his poncho. At times he choked and coughed, as if he had sucked in the plastic. In the darkness, the sound was magnified. Every sound was magnified. I wanted to punch Kenny and tell him to shut up, but he couldn’t very well roll over.
I couldn’t see jack shit. The night was ink-black darkness, the darkest darkness I’d ever experienced. I know now what it’s like to go blind. One minute you see things. The next, nothing. I kept telling myself I was in a John Wayne movie. Victor Cruz put that thought in my head, but it was better than thinking of a rat pouncing on my face and ripping out my flesh. I looked around for the movie cameras and the overhead boom microphone—’cause that shit couldn’t have been real.
But it was real.
I don’t want to be here, and I just got here. I’ve got a whole year, plus a month. I miss New Jersey. I miss my parents and my brothers and sisters. I just want to go home, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. I want to get to Oz, click my heels three times, and go home. And when I get back, I sure as shit won’t run away again.