The World Played Chess, page 18
“You put together a nice birthday for Mary Beth. One she’ll always remember,” I said.
“I told you, it’s all about making memories.”
“Why do you think I put on the Santa suit at midnight on Christmas Eve for all those years?” I said.
“Because I told you I wouldn’t give you any Christmas sugar if you didn’t.”
I laughed. “Yeah, there was that.”
She pulled away and gave me a look. “Something else motivated you?”
“Just the Christmas sugar,” I said, and we kissed.
My phone rang and I reached for it. The caller ID was unknown, but the area code was local. I answered it.
“Mr. Bianco?”
“Speaking.”
“It’s Eric Rochambeau,” he said. Serra’s principal.
The name surprised me. “What can I do for you, Mr. Rochambeau?”
“There’s been a car accident. I’m sorry. I’m wondering . . . I’m sorry, but the details are sketchy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Is Beau home with you?”
I felt my knees go weak but managed to stand, and I looked to the backyard, to where Beau sat texting.
“He’s here,” I said. “We celebrated his sister’s sixteenth birthday tonight. What’s happened? Why did you ask if Beau was home?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just assumed . . . Chris Carpenter was in a car with three other seniors. I just expected one to be Beau.”
“No,” I said. Then, “What happened?”
“A drunk driver on the 101 freeway swerved into their lane. Peter Oxford jerked the steering wheel to avoid the impact, but he hit the guardrail and flipped the car.”
“Oh no. No,” I said, tears welling in my eyes. “Chris? What happened to Chris?”
“What is it? What’s happened?” Elizabeth asked. “Vince, what’s happened?”
“Oxford was hospitalized in critical condition with head and back injuries,” Rochambeau said. “The two seniors seated in the back seat walked away with bruises and cuts.”
“Chris,” I said again. “What happened to Chris?”
“I’m sorry,” Rochambeau said. “Chris didn’t make it. I don’t know the details.”
His words blurred, something about Chris sitting in the passenger seat because he was too big to sit in the back, about initial reports that he had hit the ceiling and snapped his neck. The car did not have airbags.
I listened, but I stared into the backyard, at Beau. He had moved to the back door. I gave the phone to Elizabeth. “Vince,” she said again. “Vince.”
I went to the door just as Beau stepped through. “I can’t get ahold of anyone,” he said, and I hugged him. I hugged my son with every ounce of my being, with every bit of love in my soul, and I cried, knowing that it still would not be enough.
“Dad?”
Behind me Elizabeth sobbed. “Oh, dear God,” she said, sinking into the chair. “Oh, dear God.”
“Dad,” Beau said, starting to resist my hug. “What happened?”
I looked at my son and I wished, more than at any other time in my life, that I didn’t have to tell him what had happened, that I could somehow remove the pain I would inflict, and somehow inflict it on myself.
Beau looked frozen in place.
“There was a car accident,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Beau. Chris is gone. That was Mr. Rochambeau on the phone . . .”
Beau gasped. His eyes widened with fear and panic. He looked like he couldn’t breathe.
Elizabeth, instinct kicking in, rushed to her son. “He’s hyperventilating. Get a bag.”
I went into the kitchen and pulled open drawers.
“Vince!”
I found the brown lunch bags, grabbed one, and handed it to Elizabeth. She had her hand on Beau’s back. Our son was bent at the waist, gasping. “Beau, short breaths. Take short breaths.”
Elizabeth put the bag to Beau’s mouth and he took great gasps; the bag looked like it might explode with each exhale.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” I said.
“Hang on,” Elizabeth said. Beau’s breathing gradually became more regular, but he still couldn’t talk. Sobs choked his words.
My cell phone rang again, and I looked to where Elizabeth had placed it, on the table near my chair, in the light of the table lamp, beside William’s journal.
I thought of EZ dying in William’s arms, his life force slipping from his eyes. I thought of Kenny, who William had called Haybale, and who died from a one-in-a-million shot. I thought of the others who stepped on land mines and booby traps, and I wondered how anyone could ever accept the death of someone so young. How anyone could saddle up and move out as if it had never happened.
They couldn’t, of course. No one could.
So William and those marines simply refused to accept death. Not just once. They refused death over and over and over. I looked again at Beau, his body sagging in his mother’s arms, and I understood. For the first time, I truly understood. And I wondered if reality had crashed upon my family, upon Beau, as it had crashed on William that summer.
Chris’s death was tragic on so many levels, it was hard to comprehend. It seemed unreal, like we were all actors on a stage, waiting for the curtain to fall so we could drop that fourth wall and go back to being ourselves, back to our lives. I kept waiting for Chris to walk in the door with that big grin and give me an even bigger hug. “Hey, Mr. B.,” he’d say. Chris had been like a second son to me and Elizabeth. He’d been at our house as much as his own during the past eighteen years.
But he hadn’t been our son. Our son was home, alive.
I felt a deep regret that just days before, I had been thinking that Beau didn’t yet understand loss, that we had made his life too easy, that he didn’t even understand disappointment. I kept thinking of William Goodman’s admonition that summer and about what he had written in his journal—that while he had never accepted death, he had also never avoided death. None of us could. Even though he’d made it home alive, death had followed him. I wondered if, in my anger and pettiness, I had somehow brought this loss upon Beau, as crazy as that sounded. But a lot of what William had written sounded crazy. And yet, it had all been true.
Elizabeth and I reached out to Art and Josephine but our calls went to voice mail.
As Beau’s friends, and some parents, hurriedly came to our home, Elizabeth did what she’d always done. She fed them. At least, she put out food. No one ate much. No one drank. We barely talked. The young men, Chris’s friends, hugged and cried. They looked stunned, disbelieving, uncertain what to do or to say. They weren’t supposed to experience mortality, not at that age.
Seeing their pain made me think of my own experiences at their age, of driving home after I’d had too much to drink or getting in a car with someone drunk. I thought of how quickly my friends and I could have died, or killed others, maybe another high school student like Chris, who had his whole life ahead of him. Only by the grace of God had neither happened, but maybe, as with William and those other marines, I had only been fooling myself. “You don’t cheat death,” William said in the garage of that remodel during one of our talks. “You think you do, but you don’t. Death finds you.”
Eventually Elizabeth and I went to the hospital to console the parents of Peter Oxford. The Carpenters were not there. Chris’s body had already been taken to a funeral parlor, and the Carpenters were making arrangements for their son’s wake and burial.
We returned home. Just after midnight, Art called my cell phone. I didn’t know what to say. What do you say? He asked Elizabeth, Beau, and me to come over. We agreed.
After dropping Mary Beth at her cousin’s, we drove to the Carpenters’. Art answered the door looking lost. He embraced Beau and the two men cried. “He loved you, Beau,” Art eventually said. “Chris loved you like a brother.”
“I loved him,” Beau said.
Art released his embrace. “I was so relieved to hear you were not in the car, Beau. I thought you both died.” Art looked to me. “Why wasn’t he in the car, with Chris?”
“It’s Mary Beth’s sixteenth birthday. Elizabeth made plans. Beau chose to go to his sister’s party.”
“I didn’t want to go,” Beau said. “I wanted to go to the game, with Chris.”
“I’m so glad you didn’t,” Art said, but he looked to have lost his train of thought, and I wondered if he was thinking what I had thought when I heard the news. If Beau had gone to the game, he would have driven Chris. Chris never would have been in Peter Oxford’s car.
I thought of William’s statement to me that the difference between living and dying was nothing more than dumb luck. Was he right? Had dumb luck saved Beau’s life and cost Chris his?
Or was I looking at this all wrong? Maybe death wasn’t following me. Maybe God had a hand in saving my son. Maybe Beau would have also been in Peter Oxford’s car. Maybe God somehow intervened and spared Beau, spared my family. I knew William had lost his faith and his belief in God. He said God had abandoned him and the other marines when they needed him most. He said he’d been to hell, and nothing in eternal damnation could be worse than what he experienced in Vietnam.
But I did believe in God. Maybe more now than ever.
I believed, and I thanked God with every ounce of my being that he did not take my son. I know that was selfish to think in that moment, with the Carpenters grieving the loss of their son, but I couldn’t live without my boy, and I wondered how Art and Josephine would live without theirs. How would they move forward? How else but with the grace of God? How had William moved forward?
How had the parents of all those young men?
Art wiped his tears and we followed him into the house. Josephine and their family—Chris’s younger brother and two younger sisters and his aunts and uncles and grandparents—had gathered in the family and living rooms. We stayed for an hour or two. I don’t recall. There was really nothing anyone could do but sit and console the Carpenters. After a few hours we decided to give the family some privacy and said our goodbyes.
Over the next couple of days, Elizabeth and I helped with the funeral arrangements, but it was Beau who organized the senior class to be altar servers at the funeral, perform the readings, and act as Chris’s pallbearers. Members of the football team attended Chris’s wake and his funeral with their white home football jerseys over their shirts and ties. The senior captains and coaches draped Chris’s jersey atop his coffin. Beau spoke at Chris’s wake, his tortured voice choked by sobs. He told the overflowing crowd how they all loved Chris, his sense of humor, his fierce determination on the football field, and how he always looked after those who were smaller than him, which was everyone. He told everyone that God must have called Chris home because he needed the best damn offensive lineman in the country to open holes for his running backs.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
At night, I could no longer read William’s journal. I could no longer read about death. It was too raw. Too close to home. Too real. I set the journal aside, and I realized that was something William had never been able to do. He could not set death aside, so he did not accept death as reality.
Not until years after those deaths did reality come knocking, and death found William. He told me he felt guilty to have lived, to have made it home when so many did not.
I worried Beau would feel the same guilt, for not driving Chris that night.
I didn’t want Beau to just move on, as William had been forced to do, without processing and coming to some understanding of Chris’s death. I didn’t want Chris’s death to haunt Beau, the way death had haunted William, until he could no longer handle all the ghosts.
I asked, and Serra set up grief counseling at school. Beau and many other students attended the sessions daily. Father John Zoff, a retired priest, also talked Beau through his grief, and Elizabeth and I arranged for our family to see a grief counselor. Together we tried to make sense of a senseless situation.
It would be a process. I knew this from experience. My father’s death, though expected, had been raw and painful. The first Christmas without him, his birthday, were melancholy. He had been a large presence in his family, and it was tough to have a celebration of any kind without him—weddings, the birth of a grandchild, baptisms. I always felt his absence. As the months passed, the melancholy faded, until, eventually, when I thought of my dad, I did so with a smile.
This would happen for Beau, but it was going to take time. Beau had lost a brother and a friend he saw every day. He would think of Chris every time he drove alone to school and drove home. He would think of Chris every Friday and Saturday night, at every game he attended, at graduation. He would feel his absence in class. He would feel a hole he might not ever completely fill.
I also understood better why William had been told to saddle up and move out. It was brutal and it was harsh, but it was because life does go on, which is why I assume William wrote in his journal, “Dying is hardest on the living.”
I went upstairs the night of Mary Beth’s birthday, and I asked her for the keys to the car we had just given her. She looked surprised, shocked, disappointed. “I’ll buy you another car,” I told her. “One with airbags.”
Elizabeth and I did.
Sometimes you make your own luck; I had learned this from William.
June 10, 1968
We’ve been out on search and destroy for a month. There’s been a lot of the former but not much of the latter. We hump in oppressive heat. Midday, the temperature is one hundred or more and the humidity matches it. It saps our energy. My uniform is stiff and white from dried sweat, and I can smell my own stench and the stench of those around me. We move, a listless, lethargic, silent column. I sweat more water than I can consume. I am constantly tired. The heat and the humidity, the loss of water, and the weight I carry on my back almost become too much. A part of me wants to just sit and give up, to give in to Vietnam, but Victor Cruz won’t let me.
We hump up one hill and down another. We enter villages, most are recently deserted. We approach them carefully, with a forward team experienced in ambushes and booby traps. We go through them carefully, looking for rice, weapons, tunnel entrances. If we find anything, suspect anything, we burn the village to the ground. If not, we use the huts for shade to eat another C ration and rehydrate, and to sleep in spurts. It is the grunt motto. “Why stand when you can sit. Why sit when you can lie down. Why be awake when you can be asleep.”
I can fall asleep standing up.
We have a good point man in Bean. He prefers to walk point. He told Cruz if he dies in the bush, he doesn’t want to do so because some dumbass missed a trip wire or a mortar. In the bush, Bean sticks to the side of worn paths, if they can be found, and he searches before each step. The trails he finds, or cuts, are narrow and wet. Nothing ever dries beneath the thick bush. The bush sweats from the humidity.
Cruz tells us to remain evenly spaced, to not bunch up, but the bush has an eerie presence that causes men, even marines, to close ranks, especially at night.
We do not occupy the villages, or even the hills. We do not stay in one place long. Our mission is not to win terrain or seize positions. Our mission is to kill as many communists as possible. Each day this is reinforced, and with each marine we lose, I can feel something stirring deep inside me, an awakening of something dark that I have managed to keep caged, a malevolent force that seeks only to kill, that seeks revenge for the horrific conditions I must endure and the constant harassment that has taken so many of my brothers.
We have lost thirty-two men, eight per week, to booby traps and ambush mines. We’ve lost another three to heatstroke. Sniper fire harasses us. It can take us five hours to travel a mile. The sniper fire comes from the unbroken expanse of green that stretches from one mountain to the next, but we have yet to see the fabled NVA.
We hump through thick bush, climb rocks, wade waist deep through the boot-sucking mud of the rice paddies, and pull leeches from our bodies as we move from one checkpoint to the next so headquarters can keep track of us. Every so often you leave the bush and someone spots Charlie in a straw hat and black pajamas running in the distance. Probably the sniper who has been taking shots at us all day, but he’s too far to hit. He disappears into the tree line and lives to snipe another day.
Late afternoon we hump to the top of a mountain. Our checkpoint. Some trails are so steep you look up at the boot soles of the marine in front of you. When the ground is wet, your feet slide and you grab at the undergrowth—vines and bamboo—to pull yourself up, but the weight of your pack makes you off balance. Guys fall, taking out marines below them, like dominoes.
Some marines don’t get up. They just sit there with their gear, too tired, too mentally defeated. Cruz and the other squad leaders yell at them to motivate them, but it’s like Cruz is telling them to lift a two-thousand-pound boulder, an impossible act. They don’t even bother to try. You walk by them on your way up the hill. They stare into nothingness, like zombies, alive but without a soul. A half hour to an hour after we dig in atop our hill, the stragglers wander into camp, because nothing is more terrifying than being alone in the bush at night.
Once on high ground, the squad leaders set their perimeter. They direct us where to dig our foxholes for the night. I set trip flares and claymores and tie the cans with my marbles to the concertina wire. Then I dig my foxhole with my entrenching tool and fill the sandbags that will surround me. The ground can be like picking at cement, or it crumbles like sandstone. Everywhere, red ants and flies bite, and the relentless mosquitos fly up your nose and into your ears, searching for blood. Marines digging foxholes unearth nests of scorpions and spiders as big as hockey pucks. I don’t even look for the snakes anymore, unless I’m hungry.
Every time we stop for the night, Cruz instructs us to pull off our boots and socks to let our feet air out. So far, I do not have the jungle rot, though the rains will come, and when they do, Cruz says the rot is inevitable. We got another taste of the rain yesterday afternoon. The winds blew down from the mountains and clouds rolled in so fast I almost didn’t have time to slip on my poncho. Within minutes Vietnam pissed all over us, a wicked downpour of such intensity you could hear only the water pinging against our ponchos and helmets. Just as quickly as they came, the clouds blew past, and the temperature is pleasant for the first time in weeks. It won’t last.
