to help your own teammates get to the top, too. But I was just thinking, Me: I want to be on the top. At one point, Dean was clambering up—I was looking right at his bright blue wool hat—and he’d nearly made it when someone on the other team got hold of his leg from farther down. Dean looked up and called to me.”
Chris took another breath and let it out real slow. “He was reaching out a hand, yelling at me to help him. All I could think of was that if I tried to help him, and if I couldn’t pull him away from the other kid, we could both go down. It was him or me, not us. I can still see the strain on his face. A kind of panic in his eyes.”
He shook his head like he was throwing water off his hair and then stared down at his hands. “I ignored him. I looked right into his eyes like I didn’t know who he was, and I ignored him. And he was pulled farther and farther down the hill.”
He stopped. I said, “Did you hold the top?”
Chris looked at me. “Have you been paying attention? Yeah, I held the top. But I lost my friend.”
So this was my brother. And for several months now, he’d been an army infantryman, a grunt, fighting the VC. He’d signed up, in fact. Put off college to go. It upset my mom a lot; she wanted him to go to college, the first one in the family who would go. And he’s smart; he would’ve gotten into a good school. But mostly what she didn’t want was for him to get hurt. Or worse. Dad was a different story. He sounded so proud, telling his friends that his son had volunteered.
I guess I felt sort of someplace in between. I understood my dad’s pride; I felt it, too. On the other hand, lots of guys who go to ’Nam don’t come home.
After Chris signed up, Mom started going to church alone. She had always gone, or almost every week anyway, to the Lutheran church she’d been going to since she was a little girl. It was the church she and Dad got married in, and we went as a family until I was maybe, I dunno, twelve? Anyway, at some point I started putting up a fuss, and Dad said he’d stay home with me. A few times after that Mom insisted I go with her, but eventually she gave up trying to force me. To tell you the truth, I think Dad was just as happy to stay home, read the paper, lounge around, whatever. He worked pretty much six-plus days a week, and Sunday was the only day he could sleep in and just vegetate before he started doing paperwork for the store.
Chris kept going, though. That’s so like him, you know? I don’t even know how seriously he took it, but even if it meant nothing to him he’d go because of Mom. Chris never talked about it, although Mom would sometimes talk during Sunday dinner about something the preacher had said in his sermon. I just remember feeling glad I hadn’t had to get up early and then sit through it, on those hard wooden benches, in uncomfortable clothes, hot in summer and drafty in winter, pretending to feel all solemn and contrite and holy. What a crock, was what I thought.
But several weeks after Chris signed up, one Saturday dinnertime Dad said, “Irene, you going to church tomorrow?”
“Of course I am. I always go. You know that.”
Well, she almost always went, anyway; there was no point in arguing, so I kept quiet. Then Dad said, “Think I’ll go with you.” And after that he went with her a lot. I was old enough by then to stay home on my own, so that’s what I did. I figured if God was going to listen to anyone about keeping Chris safe, it wasn’t gonna be me.
That homecoming scene happened pretty much as I’d pictured. Chris looked tall and masculine and strong, but his hair was longer than I’d imagined; guess they don’t make them keep it buzz cut. But there was one real important difference. After Dad offered the beer, Chris looked at me before he answered. “How’s my kid brother? Too old for a hug?”
He held an arm toward me. This foolish grin slid onto my face from somewhere—I couldn’t stop it—and I shrugged and moved toward him. His arms felt so strong around me, like there was nothing he couldn’t do. He made me believe he was glad to see me.
All of us wanted to know what it was like, all the stuff there’s no room for in letters, all the stuff we wanted to hear him say with his own voice. That first night, though, he was just too tired, barely able to sit at the dinner table, but he was so happy to be eating home cooking. Every so often he’d just sit there, face blank, eyes closed, chewing slowly. You could tell he was committing every texture, every hint of flavor to memory.
At one point he set his fork down and said, “You know, I never expected the food over there to be good. I just didn’t know how—different it would be. From good food. From this.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end he just shook his head slowly and put another forkful into his mouth.
We’d been sending him care packages. The first one had lots of different stuff in it, like socks and underwear and little goodies. The letter he wrote back was clear: All that stuff was great, but what he really wanted was FOOD. So the next packages all had peanut butter (“choke” is what the guys called it over there), crackers, cookies, candy, Tang, more cookies, more candy, and he loved it. We couldn’t send anything that would go bad, like cold cuts or cheese, that sort of thing, but his favorite seemed to be cookies. All kinds. Plus, he said in one letter, they were great for trading with the other guys for things.
“What kinds of things?” Mom’s return letter asked. Probably she wanted to be able to include everything he might want to keep and everything he might want to trade for. But his response was evasive. “Oh, just whatever. You never know what you’re going to be in the mood for.”
While he was home, in private, he swore me to secrecy and told me that what he traded cookies for—though he did eat a lot of them—was beer, cigarettes, and koon sa. Marijuana. But he sure wasn’t going to tell our folks about those items. I’d always thought of Chris as kind of a Goody Two-shoes, in a lot of ways. He always seemed to do everything right, as far as our folks were concerned, and I always felt like the troublemaker. So, to use one of my mom’s favorite phrases, imagine my consternation when Chris told me he smoked pot! It was the first sign, I think now, of the new way I would come to see him—a lot of stain on the pure white—by the time he left to go back overseas.
That first night, though, at the dinner table, Chris nearly nodded off before he could finish his piece of the chocolate cake Mom had made, but he asked for more coffee and that seemed to perk him up a bit. Then he left the room for a minute and came back with stuff for us.
He gave Mom a huge piece of blue and green silk material that she could use to make whatever she wanted. It made her cry, and she worried that she’d get salt stains on the silk. Dad got a really cool pipe. It was made of some special kind of wood they had over there. He wanted to use it immediately and even got up, mumbling about trying it first with the most bland tobacco he had so he could get a sense of the pipe, but Mom made him give it to her so she could wash it first.
When it was my turn, Chris said, “Hold out your hands. Make a cup.” And onto my palms he dropped five round metal pellets. “Ever heard of a cluster bomb?” I shook my head. “Those five are from a SADEYE. It’s about as big as a baseball. Lots of them get dropped at once, and when they hit the ground they explode. Then all these steel balls go shooting out.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mom shudder. But I said, “Neat!” Then Chris handed me something wrapped in brown paper. Dad asked to hold the pellets, and he kind of played with them while I unwrapped the package. I held up a pair of shoes. Sandals, really. They were super ugly. I looked at Chris, confused.
“Those, little brother, are called Ho Chi Minhs. They’re made out of cut-up tires. The straps are from inner tubes. We wear them around camp when it’s hot, or when it’s muddy or wet. You can’t hurt ’em.” He grinned like they were a real treat.
“Thanks!” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. I was thinking I’d just have to give them a try; Chris didn’t steer me wrong as a rule.
Mom wasn’t so patient. “Good Lord, Christopher! What do you want to go perpetuating that man for? He’s dead, and that’s where he ought to be. Why name a shoe after him?”
Chris just shrugged.