He gave me another shrug. “I didn’t have any use for them in California, which meant somebody—my mother or father, someone—was going to have to throw them out. I just saved them the trouble.”
I thought of the awards I had won in high school, the plaques for being class valedictorian and for winning the California Newspaper Journalism Scholarship that would help pay my first-year college tuition. They hung proudly on my bedroom wall.
“Didn’t they mean something to you?”
“Yeah. They meant a lot of bad memories.” He shook his head and stubbed out the cigarette. “All medals represent is where you’ve been and what you’ve done. And believe me, I didn’t need any help in that department.”
“But couldn’t they help you get a job, I mean . . .”
William shook his head. “No, no, no. What? Go into interviews and announce you’re a screwed-up Vietnam vet, a psycho baby killer?” He looked out the garage door from above the tops of his knees. “That’s why I left New Jersey. I didn’t want to face all those people I grew up with, the families that had been a part of my life. They didn’t look at me the same when I got back.”
I understood, as much as I figured I could. “Is that why you came to California?”
He smiled. “One time in Vietnam I dreamed of a sunny beach with no humidity and beautiful girls in bikinis.”
I laughed.
“I’m telling you the truth. I took the trip to LA chasing a girl, but the girl was just an excuse. I was chasing the dream. After two days she was gone, but the sun was still shining, there was no humidity, and the beaches were crammed with bikinis. I put on a tank top and shorts and went to the beach every day. At night I slept on the sand or on someone’s couch, and I thought they were the best days of my life.”
“No family in Southern California?”
“Nope.”
“No friends?”
“None.”
“You went just for the sunshine and bikinis?” I said, smiling, thinking I’d never have the guts to do that. Then again, I didn’t think I’d have the guts to fight a war in Vietnam, either.
William gave me a long stare, and for a moment I thought he was angry. Then he smiled. “From where I’d been . . . What else was there, man?”
I drove home hoping to talk to Mike, ask him if William had ever told him any of the stuff he’d told me, but Mike wasn’t at the house. He and Maureen had gone out, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized William’s story wasn’t my story to share. I didn’t have the right to tell it—not to Mike and not to my friends.
I never did.
I walked into my room and grabbed a change of clothes for my shower. My plaques and framed certificates hung on the wall, a road map of my past. They didn’t say a thing about where I was going or what I’d do when I got there, and they had no significance to anyone but me. They’d likely go in a box when I went off to college and another sibling claimed the bedroom as his or her own, and they’d remain buried in that box until I earned enough to make a down payment on a house. Then I’d retrieve the box and store it in the basement or attic of my own home. Unlike William, I didn’t have the courage to throw out those plaques, my medals. I feared I would lose a part of myself I could not yet let go of.
William had tired eyes in 1979, the eyes of a young man who had grown old well before his time. Todd did also. It was as if they had lived a decade in that one year, and when they returned home, the world passed by without so much as a pause to glance at them. Maybe that’s why William had thrown out his medals. They didn’t mean anything to him, because they didn’t mean anything to the world that passed him by—certainly nothing positive. Vietnam was the war everyone wanted to forget. So did he, apparently.
And someday, I realized, when I’m gone, my plaques and certificates will also be just sad memories that my wife and my children will have to decide what to do with, reminders of who I had once been. And it will hurt them to throw away the box with the mementos of my life lived.
I won’t do that to them, hurt them that way. I’ll throw the box out someday, just like William, so they don’t have to.
April 7, 1968
The bodies of the five Viet Cong killed last night lay side by side in the center of the firebase. They laid them out like they weren’t even human, like they were caught fish put on the shore before gutting. A swarm of flies covered their skin and hovered above their bodies. Barefoot, they were wearing thin black shirts and pants that looked like pajamas, not uniforms. They looked like skinny poor kids, and it was hard to imagine they could cause so much chaos, that they could have killed three marines, including Kenny.