The World Played Chess, page 29
2. how to be a husband, and
3. how to be a father.
Everyone just expects you to do it.
So . . . What else?
I’m going to keep another journal, the second one in my life. And I haven’t had a drink or a drug in thirty-seven years and counting. Sober and happy.
I’ve forgiven God.
I didn’t really have much choice if I wanted to be sober, but I realize now it was the right thing to do. My beef wasn’t with God, it was with the war. It took a long time to figure that out, though. I had to forgive myself first. If you read my journal, you know why. I hope you did. But I realize that when I wrote that final entry I left you in a bad place, a hopeless place that I once inhabited. That wasn’t fair. I’ve come to realize that no situation is hopeless unless we let it be.
I take responsibility for what I did. If I could take back that one moment in time, I would. But I can’t.
I had to find a way to live with it. To live with that young boy. Years of counseling helped. He’s still around, though he no longer haunts me. I no longer fear seeing him. He is my moral compass, my conscience. Whenever I get angry, he’s there to calm me. The way you did that day when you stopped me from swinging the sledgehammer at whatever that guy’s name was. Whenever I want a drink or a smoke, he’s the consequence of going down that rabbit hole again. He’s pushed me to lead a good life, to make amends, and I’ve tried. I worked with other veterans fighting similar demons for almost four decades. I like to believe I also taught them how to turn a foe into a friend.
I imagine I’ll have a conversation with that boy when, hopefully, I reach those pearly gates. I imagine he will be there to greet me, I hope with a hug and not a fist.
I will finish my twelve steps in the afterlife. I will make amends with him and his family.
You gave me that chance, Vincent, when you listened, and when you stepped in front of that sledgehammer and kept me from ruining what was left of my life. Because of you I met my wife and my daughter, and I found myself. I hope you know that.
Todd Pearson. I wonder if you’ve thought of him? I looked him up. Step eight in my recovery—make a list of all the persons I have harmed and be willing to make amends. Turns out Vietnam killed Todd and he didn’t even know it. Died of cancer from Agent Orange in his forties, like so many other veterans. I spoke to his wife—he divorced and remarried.
Well, I’ve rambled long enough. And now I need to ramble along.
I hope this letter finds you well. If you ever talk to Mikey, please give him my best. And, you never know. I just may drive this RV up to your front door one day and honk the horn. I hope you won’t mind seeing an old friend.
I think of you as a friend, Vincenzo. And I thank you for being there and for listening. You have no idea what it meant to me.
Peace. Semper Fi.
William
PS. If we do ever see each other again, I want the true story of what happened with that Italian girl from New York that summer. I know you didn’t tell me the truth, and I applaud you for your discretion. But I’d still like to know.
I lower the letter and look out at William’s yard. I don’t cry. I smile.
I’m happy for William. It’s what I needed to know, why I came. I needed to know he was all right. I do have one disagreement. This will not be his second journal. It will be his third.
I was also William’s journal that summer so the stories didn’t, maybe, drive him crazy. He told me his stories and, maybe, I don’t know, maybe he felt a little better.
I like to believe so.
I’m glad he told me about Todd, but sad, also, at his ending. Some years after working for Todd, I, too, had searched for him. I went by the house on Bayswater, where he no longer lived. The post office had no forwarding address. Likely he moved out of the house when he and his wife divorced. Years later, I looked him up again, this time using the internet, though I figured the chances of Todd being on social media were slim to none. None. I never did find him. Now I know why, and I can also shut that door. He is another life lost to Vietnam, a name that hopefully will also be etched on the black granite memorial in Washington, DC.
Maybe someday I will write that book William suggested, that owner’s manual for young men. Maybe I’ll catch that dream, of being a writer, for both of us.
Or maybe I’ll just tell the story of William, of Vietnam, and the summer of 1979.
Maybe.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There is a saying we writers hear bandied about: “Write what you know.” Most writers I know say the better adage is “Write what you’re interested in.” Stories such as The World Played Chess and The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell come from the heart. As I explained in my acknowledgments in the latter book, I have never had ocular albinism and I was fortunate to only have been bullied in one instance that I can recall. But I do have a brother with Down Syndrome, and the subject of bullying and what it does to both the bully and the victim interested me. So I researched it, and in the process, I found Sam Hell and ocular albinism.
The same is true with this novel. First, it is a novel, not a memoir. I never served in Vietnam or in any branch of the US military. The Vietnam War, however, always interested me. I don’t know why exactly, much like I don’t know why Elvis Presley interested me. Maybe because they were a part of my life. I was born in 1961 and, like Vincent, graduated high school in 1979. I do recall, as a young boy, watching the news at night and seeing the helicopters in Vietnam, the soldiers fighting over there, the wounded, and the dead in body bags being flown from the bush. I recall thinking about how young those men were, how their lives had been cut so short. I watched the protests on television and felt the protestors were justified, but I worried that our country was being torn apart.
Mostly, I recall being interested. The war captivated me, particularly the thought that so many young men and women were being sent halfway around the world to fight not an invader—like the Nazis—but a political theory. Communism.
I graduated from high school in 1979 believing, like many young men, that the world was my oyster, and my future, limitless. My sister’s boyfriend did get me a job working on a construction crew with two Vietnam veterans, and I did get the education of a lifetime over that summer. Like most Vietnam veterans, the two men didn’t talk much about their experiences. Stories usually came when we were out drinking a few beers. They would open up and tell me what it was like to one day be an eighteen-year-old living in America and, seemingly, the next day be in the jungles of a foreign country, with a foreign climate, fighting against a foreign enemy you didn’t know and didn’t have anything against who was actively trying to kill you. Neither man understood the war, or his place in it, how it would have any impact on his life or the lives of Americans in general. They both said no one ever could offer them a good explanation as to why they were supposed to shoot and kill Vietnamese people living in Vietnam. Both expressed the feeling that they were the foreigners and that their presence never felt justified. What also struck me were the similarities between these two men, despite differences in age, branch of service, and experience. One was a marine, the other, army. For men still young, they seemed old to me that summer, and fatalistic. They did not believe in God, they drank too much—in my opinion—they were quick to get into fights, and when they did, they usually picked the biggest opponent. They seemed to live day to day, like they no longer trusted the promise of a future.
Mostly, though, I recall they were good men.
My work on the construction team that summer, and thereafter during every break from school, helped finance my college tuition at Stanford. I could not have afforded to attend had it not been for that employment. My boss could have let me go any number of times when the work got too light, but he never did. He always found work for me, and he always paid me. I have tried to find him, without success, to thank him for what he did for me. I hope someday I have that chance.
In college, I found the book Nam by Mark Baker, true stories of men and women who served in Vietnam. I read it cover to cover, then a second time. I still have my first edition. The stories fascinated me, in part, because I felt as though I had heard so many of them that summer between high school and college. I rushed to find other books and read accounts equally as raw and honest. I watched Apocalypse Now and Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and many other movies on the Vietnam experience multiple times. I watched The Deer Hunter just once, but I have never forgotten it.
When I set out to write this novel, I had no intention of writing about Vietnam. I intended to write about that critical moment in every boy’s life when he goes from being a boy to being a man. There is no set timetable, but it seems the moment society expects this transformation to occur is when the boy graduates high school. We are expected to go off to college and come home a man. Or go off to work in the real world or join the military and magically understand what it means to be a man, a husband, and a father. There are no classes to help us. At least, there were none in 1979. Most of us, I assume, learn by emulating the men we know. Mostly I emulated my father, a good, decent, and moral man.
I also emulated a big brother who came into my life when I was in the eighth grade, a young counselor. Chris took me under his wing and helped me to grow up. He liked to say, “There’s no owner’s manual.”
And I emulated the two men I worked with that summer. I did not have a choice. They did not treat me as a boy and did not allow me to act as one. They did not have that luxury when they were my age. They depended on me to be at work every morning on time to do my job and get the work done, because they knew the dire consequences that could occur if one man failed to do his job. They expected me to earn my paycheck. And they relied on me because they needed me to be reliable.
When I sat down to write this story, I told my friend Dale what my intent was, and he responded, “It’s like that adage. The world played chess while I played checkers.”
I had never heard it, so I looked it up.
Sometimes we know so little, we are not even playing the same game everyone else is playing. Chess is complex and strategic and requires that we think several moves ahead of our opponent. We need to map out our future and be prepared to make unexpected deviations when necessary. In 1979, I was still deciding whether to jump the checker in front of me and get crowned. That summer changed me.
When I realized my novel was really about three men—Vincent, the father of an eighteen-year-old son; Vincent, the eighteen-year-old boy; and William, the marine—I knew I had to do a lot more research, but that was okay because the subject interested me. I read more than a dozen firsthand accounts of soldiers serving in Vietnam. I read articles, treatises, and military papers on the marine experience in Vietnam. I watched just as many movies and documentaries, including Ken Burns’s legendary documentary. Neither William nor Todd is any one person; they are an amalgamation of the stories I heard in 1979, the stories I read, and the stories I witnessed on television, in theaters, and on my computer.
Even with all that information, I knew I had more work to do. So I called up a friend of mine, Gunnery Sergeant Bob Mannion, a United States Marine, who served during Vietnam, and I asked for his help. Bob, who is also a talented writer, never hesitated. He sent me manuals and documents to help me understand the marine experience in Vietnam, and he read my manuscript front to back multiple times, making sure I got the weapons and terminology correct, the marine procedures accurate, and the Vietnam experience, hopefully, authentic.
I owe Bob a huge debt of gratitude. I am certain I got some things wrong simply because I misinterpreted what he told me. Those mistakes are mine and mine alone.
I also want to thank Joe, my son. It was Joe who suggested the book would be stronger if I could re-create an authentic Vietnam experience, and do so through a journal documenting a soldier’s powerful tour of duty. Joe has helped me now with three novels. He sees things at a ten-thousand-foot level, and his observations and suggestions are usually spot on.
I have had the chance to go to Washington, DC, half a dozen times in my life, and each time I go, I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I run my hand over the names etched in the black stone monument, and I try to remember those etchings are more than just letters. Those etchings represent real people who lost their lives far too young—deaths that forever changed the landscapes of their respective families, possibly this country, and maybe the world.
This novel is written with the utmost deference and respect to all those men and women who fought in Vietnam on both sides, as well as the Vietnamese people who lived through it. That includes my father-in-law, Dr. Robert Kapela, Major, United States Army Medical Corp on ground as medical doctor and recipient of the Bronze Star for his “meritorious achievement in ground operations against hostile forces” from May 1969 to May 1970. I have never had the chance to visit Vietnam, but Joe and other family members have, and each has said, to a person, that there are no finer people.
The racial slurs in this novel are not mine, and they do not represent me or the way I think or what I believe. They are far, far below the moral and ethical education I received from my mother and father. They do not even belong to the soldiers who uttered them. The racial slurs were part of the psychological warfare the military used to dehumanize the enemy so soldiers could kill other soldiers and not consider the reality of their actions. This, unfortunately, is a tactic that has been used throughout history, not just during the Vietnam War, or even limited to wars.
www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956180/criminals-see-their-victims-as-less-than-human
www.lassennews.com/racism-and-war-the-dehumanization-of-the-enemy
May we never forget, so we never again have to experience it.
I wish to thank Meg Ruley and Rebecca Scherer at the Jane Rotrosen Agency for their continued guidance and support. Thanks also to Jane Berkey, the agency founder, who took me out for a drink during one particularly difficult moment in this writer’s life and told me to keep going forward, that things would work out. She was right. They did work out, largely thanks to the agency’s incredible guidance.
Thanks to Danielle Marshall at Lake Union, my publisher, for her unwillingness to accept anything but my best. She read the first draft and told me I could do better, though she was kind about it. She was right. I worked with my longtime developmental editor, Charlotte Herscher, and together we improved the manuscript. Charlotte never lets me forget what readers expect when they buy one of my novels, and I’m grateful to her for pushing me.
Thanks to Sean Baker, head of production, and to Nicole Burns-Ascue, production manager. I absolutely love this cover and all the covers of my novels. They tell the story so well. Thanks to Dennelle Catlett, Amazon Publishing PR, and to Erica Moriarty, Kyla Pigoni, Lindsey Bragg, and all the others who tirelessly promote my work. Thanks to Jaye Whitney Debber, production editor, and Valerie Paquin, copyeditor. Thanks to Jeff Belle, vice president of Amazon Publishing, and Mikyla Bruder, publisher, and associate publisher Hai-Yen Mura. This is quite a team and I’m humbled to be part of it.
Thank you to the two men I worked with that summer of 1979 who inspired this work. Thanks to my former brother-in-law, Rick McHale, who got me the job and the education of a lifetime. Thank you to my high school buddies for allowing me to use their likenesses and some of our stories. I want to emphasize again, however, that this is a work of fiction. My high school buddies have grown to be great men who, though I live far away, I still consider my good friends.
Thanks to my mother, Patty Dugoni, who gave me my love of reading and writing. I didn’t fool her that night I snuck home and jumped in bed. She just let me think I did.
Thanks to my daughter, Catherine, and to my wife, Cristina. You’ve helped me to achieve a dream come true.
Last but never least, thanks to you, my loyal readers, for your continued support. Your emails have been heartwarming, intelligent, and inspiring. This has been a difficult year for all of us, but this book helped me put this experience in perspective. Most of the young men who served in Vietnam served for a full year. Marines served thirteen months. Those who served in World War I and World War II served much longer. They were separated from their families, their country, and their jobs. They awoke each day wondering if it might be their last. And the Vietnamese people endured more than fifty years of war.
Heroes. Every one of them.
RESOURCES
I know the Vietnam War experience is highly personal for each of those men and women who served. What I have attempted to capture and re-create in The World Played Chess is one fictional marine’s experience based upon the stories two veterans told to me during the summer of 1979 and thereafter and all the firsthand accounts documented in the books, articles, treatises, and military papers on the marine experience in Vietnam, as well as movies and documentaries. These resources are set forth in the attached list. Any mistakes are mine and mine alone.
Documentaries
The Vietnam War, ten-part series, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, 2019.
Articles and Journals
“Combat Photographer: Vietnam Through the Lens of Marine Corporal William T. Perkins, Jr.” by Frank Blazich, October 12, 2017, https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/combat-photographer-Vietnam.
“The Psychological Effects of the Vietnam War,” Edge, Josh Hochgesang, Tracye Lawyer, Toby Stevenson, War & Peace: Media and War.
“US Marines in Vietnam Vietnamization and Redeployment 1970–1971,” Graham A. Cosmas and Lieutenant Colonel Terrence P. Murray, US Marine Corps (USMC), History and Museums Division Headquarters, US Marine Corps, Washington, DC, 1986.
“US Marines in Vietnam, The War that Would Not End 1971–1973,” Major Charles D. Melson, USMC, and Lieutenant Colonel Curtis G. Arnold, USMC, History and Museums Division Headquarters, US Marine Corps, Washington, DC, 1991.
“The Marines in Vietnam 1954–1973: An Anthology and Annotated Bibliography,” second edition, History and Museums Division Headquarters, US Marine Corps, Washington, DC, 1985.
