(“All My Relations”)
by B.A. Brittingham
Summer was winding down like the antique gramophone in Aunt Minnie’s Tidewater parlor. These were what the Romans had labeled the ‘dog days’ honoring the luminous rising Dog Star, Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major. Such Augusts were affiliated with heat levels that sent the Caesars scurrying for their breezy villas above Rome.
All of which is mentioned not only for purposes of scene recollection, but also to impress you with the benefits I have since derived from a liberal arts education. For in that summer of 1990, directly after high school graduation, I did not yet know such things, except for the gramophone part.
He was my age—or so I first thought. Afterwards I discovered that despite his apparent youth, Roland was already in his twenties; had in fact just turned twenty-five two days before we met that blistering, mid-summer afternoon.
Roland didn’t look like anyone I knew but chalk that one up as another of the remarkable pleasures of life in the capital. From the color of his skin, I might have guessed him to be Mexican or Puerto Rican. Except that the few Hispanics I’d encountered never wore their hair like Roland did.’
Some of the local boys back home had let their hair grow shoulder length and, like the generation that bore them, were looked upon as rebellious. Most of us regarded the possibility of being mistaken for members of the opposite sex as an image totally contrary to the dictates of our raging hormones. And so, like the recessive traits of Mendal’s peas, we dutifully reverted to the haircuts of our grandfathers, even to favoring the cool summer clip known as the ‘crew-cut.’
But Roland wore a braid. A long braid. From the length of it he probably hadn’t had it cut since late childhood. Stubby, paired plaits sported by the likes of Willie Nelson wouldn’t have caused me to bat an eye, especially after I discovered where Roland called home. But this lengthy queue, reaching almost to his waist, this was a fascinating oddity.
The stick he had leaned against The Wall was painted crimson at one end. Even in the utter stillness, it yielded almost immediately to the slick, stone surface.
“Did you try wedging it into that little gap?” I asked referring to the space between The Wall itself and the curbing in front of it.
“Yeah. It’s just a little too thick. Something I didn’t foresee when I was putting it together.”
“If you’re not in a hurry, I’ve got something in my car that might help.”
He glanced over his left shoulder and tossed me a smile/squint that was largely a result of the day’s brightness.
“Hey, Dude. I am in no hurry whatsoever.”
When I returned, he was brushing leaves from the stick after yet another failed attempt.
“Here,” I said handing him the one-pound coffee can into which I had shoved a few clumps of earth from beneath a tree.
“That’ll work.”
Roland plunged the stick into the can, molding soil around it so that it would stand straight. He settled onto one knee, his arm resting on the other while he looked at the can. He whispered something and made what Catholics call ‘the sign of the cross.’
He stood, turned and flashed me another smile, this one based on friendliness rather than the sun’s brilliance.
“Thanks a lot, Guy. Hope I didn’t steal your emergency gas can.”
“Naw. Back end of my car leaks once in a while. I try to keep something under it. Slow down the carpet rot.”
“Well, I appreciate it.” He thrust his hand out. “Name’s Roland Many Deeds.”
We shook hands. I glanced at the stalk in the coffee can, wondering how long it would be before someone came by, saw it and whispered to a companion, “Do they expect that to grow?”
“It’s a prayer stick.” He was leaning over to unbend one side of the feather that fluttered listlessly from it.
I nodded wondering if it was some aspect of Catholic ritual. Aloud I said only, “What kind of bird that come from?”
“Turkey. I looked for an eagle feather, but they’re almost impossible to come by.”
We stood quietly in the bake temperatures of mid-afternoon. He pointed. “That one up there. Brother.”
“Different last name.”
“Half-brother, actually. Same mother. Indians don’t think of that as making much difference.”
“Indian as in . . . ?”
“As in American. We’re supposed to prefer ‘Indigenous People’ but I gotta’ admit, it can be a mouthful. ‘Specially after a few beers.”
This ethnic revelation made him seem even more interesting. Like some exotic species. Almost.
“Jeez, I’ve never met an Indian before. Except maybe the time we visited the mountains in North Carolina. Stopped and watched some kind of Cherokee dancing. I figured they were just actors. Guess I assumed Indians were . . . extinct.”
“Yeah. Us and the buffalo. Your waschiu forefathers sure tried. But we’re tough. We wouldn’t go away quite that easily.”
He said this without resentment, in a smooth, light tone. We might have been exchanging last night’s ball scores.
“Your brother drafted?”
“Nope. Enlisted. Our mother called it ‘the summoning of the warrior spirit.’ Ira Hayes Complex, I call it.”
“‘Ira Hayes?’”
“Yeah. Ever been to the Iwo Memorial? It’s over on one end of Arlington.”
“Is it that that big Marine Corps statue?”
“Yeah. Made from one of World War II’s most famous photographs. 1945. Pacific campaign. U.S. was sitting on Japan’s doorstep. When the Marines finally took Iwo Jima, they planted the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi. Ira Hayes was one of the men in that photo. He became a larger-than-life metal figure.”
“So he was a hero.”
“In war he was. Maybe not in his own life. He was also a Pima Indian. From Arizona.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh. What’s the connection? Well, some of us—not me, mind you, but others—get themselves all wound into this great warrior image they nostalgically associate with our history. With what we’re supposed to be as men. Me? I think they just want a chance to rewrite the outcome of the Indian wars.”
“Monday morning quarterbacking.”
“Right. I don’t much like how the past treated us but, hey—there’s a certain kind of discipline involved in accepting what’s done. I guess there’s just a part of each of us that naïvely believes something unfair ought to be adjusted. We keep thinking we can fix it. And we waste a lot of time that way.”
“So is this Hayes guy still around?”
“No. He died oh, more than thirty years ago. Seemed like there was just no place for him once the war was over. No spot where he could feel comfortable, not among your people or even his own. Ended up an alcoholic. They found him alone one winter, frozen to death. Thirty-two years old.”
“Why would your brother want to be like him?”
“Dude, he didn’t want to be like the Hayes who died ten years after the war. He wanted to be the Hayes who stormed to the top of that mountain, who was part of something historically meaningful. Something that gave him . . . greatness. Trouble was ‘Nam wasn’t the same kind of war as WWII. People back home were ashamed of it. Creepos at the airports yelling at guys in uniform, ‘Hey-hey! Whatta ya’ say / How many babies did you kill today?’ That sort of garbage.”
“Yeah,” I said pulling my cap lower to block the sun’s glare. “I gotta’ cousin, a real brain, took one look at his draft notice and what was going on over there, booked right on into Canada. Spent the seventies finishing his education.”
“No shit? Smart man. Lot of them ended up in jail when they came back.”
“Our Grandfather Branch was still alive then. He did a little behind the scenes politicking, hand shaking, calling in favors from the old days when the Coulbourn name carried a lot of journalistic weight. Got it all quietly straightened out. Schyler was lucky.”
“Damned lucky.”
Gus Ehrdman, one of the Parks Department rangers I worked with that summer, came by to tell me they were short someone up at the information kiosk and needed me to fill in for afternoon breaks. Normally, that would have been the point at which Roland’s narrative terminated, forever remaining a question mark like the one that hovers after you have inadvertently overheard part of a startling discussion on a bus, only to lose the finish when the participants get off. Then it becomes your choice: turn your mind elsewhere or create your own ending.
I turned to shake hands with Roland. “Nice meeting you,” I said.
“Same here Dude. Only you never told me your name,” he said pitching another of his congenial, even-toothed smiles.
“Rick Coulbourn.”
We started off in our mutually contrary directions. Then I heard him call out, “Hey, you get off in time, I’m meeting my old lady over at the Museum of American History. There’s a restaurant on the first floor. Come find us and we’ll shoot the breeze.”
The Smithsonian is an impressive site cascading across Washington’s nucleus. Although originally endowed by the Englishman John Smithsonian, it is a national repository for the things that embrace our humanity in general, as well as for what is singularly American. The ground floor restaurant is a perfect example. It was designed to resemble a Victorian ice cream parlor complete with embossed tin ceiling, dark wood gingerbread trim, marble tables, etched glass partitions, and floors of small black and white hexagonally shaped tile.
I had no trouble locating them. The cafe wasn’t all that large and Roland let out a yelp of recognition that was part welcome, part war whoop. Maybe I just imagined that, given his background.
His wife, Cora, was a soft-spoken, pleasantly round-faced young woman several years younger than her husband. That she lacked the usual angularity of late teen-hood could have been attributed to the pregnancy her husband announced almost immediately, or perhaps merely to a genetic predisposition to gentle curvaceousness. What Granddaddy Branch used to refer to as “a woman built for comfort, not speed.”
“Have you ever been through this place?” Her awe was apparent.
“No. Been meaning to all summer. I did make it to the National Air and Space Museum.”
“We went there yesterday for a couple of hours.” He paused before adding in a low voice, “I needed to kill some time, maybe to psyche myself up before going to The Wall. Put in the front of my head what I wanted to say to him. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.”
Thinking of the old man who had told me that it took the government twenty years to find and return to him a few bits of bone—all that was left of his son—I asked,
“Wasn’t there a body?”
He appeared startled. “Oh, yes. It’s buried back home in the Catholic cemetery. On the rez.”
“‘Rez’?”
“Reservation,” he clarified. “Pine Ridge, South Dakota.”
The waitress refilled their iced tea, asked if they wanted dessert and took my order.
“Sometimes there wasn’t a lot left,” I remarked trying to jump-start the interrupted conversation.
“No, that wasn’t the problem. They sent him back real quick. I was five years old and I remember the funeral perfectly. It was the beginning of October. That morning was the first snowfall.”
“Winter doesn’t fool around in your part of the world.”
“Nope.” His earlier enthusiasm had withered.
“Guess you hear a lot of stories, working where you do,” remarked Cora in the ensuing silence.
“Yeah. Quite a few.”
“Does it scare you?”
“Sometimes. Mostly what I hear . . . I don’t know. It surprises me. All of us grew up surrounded by nasty comments about Vietnam. People kind of wanted it to just shut up and go away.”
“Yeah,” said Roland focused now on a plastic straw he was twisting into a series of tiny accordion folds.
“But that memorial opened, people stopped talking so bad about ‘Nam. It’s like they started reconsidering it. ‘Course my mother always thought of it as something the Spirits had sent to test her dead son. And all the other sons. Like it was some kind of Vision Quest. She just didn’t get the political slant of it.”
“Lot of people on both sides didn’t,” I said.
“And when they did, their opinions weren’t much changed, were they? To hear my mother tell it, it was his fate. Amerindian version of Karma.”
“So she’s not mad that he died over there?”
“Oh no. ‘It is the will of Wakantanka.’” That’s God to us. Under his breath he added with barely suppressed rancor, “It is the shit of the buffalo bull.”
He leaned back in his chair still toying with the pleated straw. In my evolving perceptiveness, I understood that the story was still there, gently dog-paddling just below the surface. I ought to be collecting these I thought.
“First time I saw this guy, I was six. Father St. Onge told me I should go light a candle for my brother. It was summer. Beautiful day. So, I went to the cemetery instead. Figured to check on my prayer stick. Like the one you saw me with today, only this was the first one I’d made. I’d go up there and pretend to talk to Chet. Some stuff you’re better off not saying to the living.
“There was a guy there, which was kinda’ strange ‘cause you don’t usually see men in our graveyard in the middle of the week. Grandmothers maybe, but the men are in the fields or off the rez at their jobs. Or looking for work.”
“Sometimes just getting drunk,” said Cora softly.
He never looked at her, just nodded his head slightly and muttered, “Comes with the territory. Anyway, I came up in back of this guy and I can tell without seeing his front that he’s not one of us. Something about the way he stood. Or maybe it was his clothes. Tailored real sharp. He was dressed up like he was coming from a wedding or a funeral.
“And I’m thinking ‘what does this damn white man want? It’s ‘cause of people like him that the best of what we were is somewhere far behind us, things us kids only hear about.’
“To us it was people like him made the war that took my brother to a place where he could pretend that the past still lived in his bones, that the courage of chiefs and the wisdom of shamanism still flowed in his veins. People like this white man were the reason Chet came home in a military-issue box. Shoved into the ground just when it was starting to freeze. Not even a few days’ rest where he could look up at the roots of the bluestem.
“I said, ‘You go home. This is our place. No wasichu allowed!’”
I felt Cora studying me, waiting for me to ask. When I did not she said, “Do you know what wasichu means?”
“Not really.”
“Literally, it means ‘stealers of the fat.’ Mostly it refers to people whose grandparents or great grandparents came from Europe. The first time the Lakota saw a white man he was stealing the good parts of a buffalo that our people had hung in the branches of a tree.”
I felt my face flush with embarrassment as Roland remarked, “Too bad those Indians didn’t see the writing on the wall. Hey, no offense, Dude. It was all a long time ago. We’ve accepted it.”
The waitress returned, deposited my cheeseburger with fries along with the banana split they would divide.
They teased each other as they assaulted opposite ends of the confection, joked about which of the three ice cream flavors they would assign to the baby, about the fairness of Cora’s getting to enjoy it while sending it down.
“Listen, when you start sharing these swollen ankles and feeling like you got to go pee all the time, then you can gripe about me getting to eat all the strawberry.”
He said something in their own language, and I saw a look of tenderness pass between them. She glanced at me sheepishly, then apologized. I did not have the words to tell her how gratifying it was to see this mutual affection arise from whatever sadness and brutality dwelt in the untold portion of Roland’s tale.
We talked about nothing in particular for a few minutes and then Cora excused herself, announcing that she had to go to the sand box.
“So this guy, he turns and looks at me—a ballsy little Indian kid telling him to get lost—and I see something funny about his face. He’s got on these big, real dark sunglasses so I can’t see about half of it. But the piece I can see reminds me of melted wax. I mean, like all the parts that are supposed to be there, are there, but there’s something funny about the skin itself. You know?
“So he points to Chet’s stone and he says, ‘do you know where this man’s family lives?’ I said, ‘sure, but what business is it of yours?’ And he says, ‘I was there when he died.’
“I asked him, ‘Did he die like a warrior?’ And when he said yes, I took him to my mother.”
Cora was back from the ladies’ room. She whispered something in his ear, and he looked around for the waitress.
“Hey, Man. I’m sorry to have dragged you over here but Cora gets tired fast these days. I think maybe I should take her back to the motel.”
“Sure, I understand.”
Cora apologized again, then suggested, “You could follow us back. After he drops me off, you guys can go sit by the pool and talk some more.”
She was so sweet and it was so simple; exactly the sort of thing a couple of guys probably would never have thought of.
I wandered around the parking lot of the Evergreen Motel. Roland settled her in and made a phone call back to South Dakota to speak with his mother who, aside from her obvious grandparenting interest, was also the local midwife.
“Thought I forgot you, huh? Just wanted to check with my mother, make sure Cora was okay. She’s fine. Mom said it’s normal for her to get tired and don’t let her walk so much tomorrow. Where’re you going?”
I pointed to some plastic lawn chairs shaded by a copse of mature pines.
“Nah! Hop in my truck. There’s a 7-Eleven up the way. We’ll pick up some beer.”
After we were out and rolling along the main drag he had an afterthought, “You don’t mind, do you?”
Was he kidding I wondered? Free beer with no risk of carding—it was every male adolescent’s dream.
“Sometimes I just gotta’ get away. It’s not Cora . . . God, she’s everything. And I am like really looking forward to this baby.”
He stopped, seemed to be considering something, then added, “Maybe I just think that having it around will make me get responsible. Make me find some real employment instead of all these crappy coupla’-hours-at-the-gas-station-chump-change jobs. Scares me when I think he may grow up—end up like me. But I hate leaving the rez and there’s not a lot of opportunity there. We got a job placement service, and they had a couple of decent openings, only I’d have to go through some training. It would mean being away in Sioux Falls when the baby’s born.
“Shit,” he said pulling into the 7-Eleven, “maybe I just don’t have the guts.”
“Something happen to that ballsy little Indian kid who tried to run off the white man?”
He reached to open the door. A feeble, sad smile spread over his full lips. “Yeah. Life.”
When he came back, he was carrying a half case of Budweiser which struck me as considerably more than we might need, but hey, who was I to gripe? We drove northwest out from DC along one side of the Potomac. Finally, he parked at one of those scenic overlooks.
It was early evening but neither the sun nor the heat showed any hint of abating. He glanced around before reaching into the paper sack, tearing open the carton and extracting two cans.
“Some of these park people cop an attitude when they see alcohol and I don’t know what the county drinking laws are here. Hell, I don’t even know what county we’re in.”
He took a long swig. Setting the beer down, he grinned, “You work over at The Wall. You gonna’ snitch about this beer? You maybe bein’ a minor and all?”
“I must look pretty stupid.”
“Didn’t think you would, but you just meet someone, you can’t always tell.”
He stayed silent, staring across a ravine towards some hills, while he worked his way through the rest of the first beer. As he popped the second one he nodded at a point in the sky. “Now that’s the place to be.”
The sable shape of a bird hung suspended on a thermal draft. Even at this distance the vast spread of its wings was obvious.
“An eagle?” I suggested.
“Would be nice to think so,” he said giving it a concentrated peer. “No. Most likely a turkey buzzard. But what must it be like to see things from up there? Ever try to imagine that?”
With some regret I admitted that I had not.
“I used to. A lot. Sometimes still do. You close your eyes and pretend you’re on the roof of your house. And you turn slowly, keeping in mind what the yard and all looks like, or what it might look like if you were really on the roof. Then you take a deep breath and pretend you’re going up still higher, like if you were swimming underwater and coming to the surface. You stop and look around again. If you know the countryside pretty well, you can see further into the distance, over the tops of the trees, maybe ten miles out. And below you, your house is getting smaller until it’s just a tarpaper postage stamp. You keep doing this until you can see the whole state, even the whole country. You’re supposed to do it until you’re like an astronaut looking at the entire marble. But you got to really center yourself.”
“You ever get all the way into space?”
He was sipping a little slower now, but the second beer was about shot. He shook his head.
“No. But I got far enough up to see the earth’s curve. If you can keep your focus your body starts to feel like you’re floating. Even afterwards, when you open your eyes you feel light. And you carry this picture around with you all day. Things look different, even though mentally you’re back on the ground. It was something I used to do when I went to the cemetery to talk to Chet. Used to imagine that if I was closer to wherever he was—you know, physically and spiritually—he’d hear me better.”
The shadows were growing elastic. Light dapplings that had been dependent upon a specific configuration of trees and sun, began evaporating into the encroaching dusk. He took a third beer and handed me my second, though I wasn’t ready for it.
“This guy, the one at Chet’s grave, he came to tell my mother. Our mother. He said he felt sure she would want to know.”
* * *
“We were flying out of Dak Seang. Things had been screwed up all year, ever since we started fucking around over in Cambodia, begging your pardon ma’am.”
The man who said this was sitting at the edge of a worn plaid couch. He was using his left hand to slowly rotate a gray cowboy hat resting over his other hand. It was this right one that initially he kept out of sight, first in his pocket, now in the satin lining of the Stetson.
“I’m fifty-one years old, Mr. Bennett. I’ve had two husbands, one that I buried and one that I should have. I’m raising the last of five sons. Out here I sometimes have to do emergency first aid until someone locates a truck we can use as an ambulance. There isn’t much you can say in the way of cuss words I haven’t already heard. So you go on and say what you have to, however you need to say it.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Well, we were based on the coast but when it started hitting the fan we could end up anywhere. I met your son, Chester, in late April. Took him out for a leg wound—he was lucky, shrapnel just missed the right femur—and we got to talking. He ended up at at the 12th Evac Hospital in Cu Chi and I stopped in to see him once. I heard he healed up pretty good, got R & R’d and didn’t figure on seeing him again.
“Day in April, around 1800 hours we go pick up three guys from a flanking squad. Some Cong had detonated a frag mine. Chewed them up bad. Wherever the hell the VC were in that jungle they could see the rest of the squad. Machine guns spraying. The occasional RPG. Anyway, Chester was right there, him and this other guy, laying down covering fire with their M-60s so we can get in and out. While we’re dusting off I looked back, saw him crouched down like he’d figured out where they were. I heard later that he took out a nest of gooks—seven, eight, nine. Depends on who tells it. I was impressed.
“‘Nother time I run into him, maybe six weeks later, we drop into this fire base to pick up some wounded. CO’s down so Chet, he’s running the show. Giving instructions about where to reinforce, where to drag the casualties. The Cobra gunships have already been there and shoved fuckin’ Charlie back into hills but somebody’d called in big time air support. No sense trying to get out if they’re going to bomb the surrounding bush, so we stay put. I patched up the ones that could be saved and tagged the others. Then me and Chet shared a . . . smoke.”
The boy watched as the man’s left hand began shaking, saw him place the gray Stetson beside him on the couch so he could fumble in the breast pocket of his jacket. Saw him remove a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. Saw it at nearly the same time he realized that the now uncovered end of the right arm ended in a smooth stump.
Connor Bennett he had called himself. Later, when Roland was older, he would read the letters his mother kept in a shoebox. Especially two where Chet had mentioned “Conny.” No, his mother had told him, this was not some new girlfriend his older brother had taken up with.
The man inhaled sharply two or three times, pulling in the nicotine laden smoke that seemed immediately to compose him. The boy said nothing but was mesmerized by both the handless arm and the peculiar skin of the man’s face. It was dim in the living room, but Connor Bennett had not removed his sunglasses.
“We got to talking about home, things we missed. He told me how he was an Indian. How this here was home. He talked about summer. Said the air was full of the hot, sweet smell of sage grass. How when the wind passed over it, it moved like somebody’s big hand brushing the fur of a golden retriever. Purely made me want to see it. Wishful thinking, I guess. The way things were then, we wanted to see anything that wasn’t ‘Nam. Somebody could’ve said home was the middle of the Sahara, we’d have imagined it right into a California beach full of booze and bikinis.
“You grab the smallest piece of reality and then build into it every god-damned normal thing you can remember, every shred of whatever used to represent sanity back before you started questioning what even that meant.
“So after the planes dropped their loads we figure it’s probably safe. Dustoff. No more than thirty feet up we take a lucky sniper hit. Knocks out the rear rotor. We sink like whale shit. I can hear flames. Smell fuel. I’m trying to drag a stretcher out. Fuckin’ A, here’s Chet again, shovin’ one of the others out. Then he goes in a second time to get the chopper jock. The Huey blew before he was well away from it. Burned the back of his sateens pretty bad. He laughed it up. Made a lot of jokes about his blistered butt. Kept warning me not to get too excited when I tried putting some burn ointment on it.
“Finally, I threw the stuff at him, told him to just salve his own god-damned ass.”
He halted, gave a rough, slow chuckle that mutated almost instantly into the cough of way too many cigarettes. He tilted his head down like he was studying whether or not to put out the smoke. Then lifted it to his mouth and sucked hard until its red smolder nearly struck his lips.
“I wrote it up in my report. So did the ensign who lost his bird. Recommended your son for something. I don’t know what. They ever send any medals back?”
The woman’s voice was calm to the point of flatness. “No. I got a letter from some captain, though. After.”
Bennett shook his head. “Yeah, that’s procedure. But a lot of the time, later in the war, procedures sorta’ got trampled on.”
He paused, shook his head again. “Chet shoulda’ got something though. If anybody deserved it . . .”
Bennett leaned back and crossed his legs. There was another long silence which the woman tried to ease by offering him coffee or a soda. He appeared not to have heard her, so intently was he gazing at the boot toe of the crossed leg. Finally, it seemed to seep through to wherever in the past he was.
“That’s kind of you, ma’am but no thanks.
“Last time . . . that last day . . . same fire base. Just as pretty a day as this. I heard the Cong had been quiet for near a week. Guys were getting antsy. Boredom you know. When it quiets down sudden like that . . . well, the action’s out there and you want it to hurry and be done with. Present itself. Not just hang back.
“There’d been some trouble between three or four black soldiers and a band of Red-necks. The sorta’ stuff most of us had left behind. There’s that about combat—you see so much blood that it becomes the enemy. Blood means Charlie’s been there. Guy’s got black skin, white skin, hey, that’s great! Means he ain’t bleedin’ no place. Means he might be there for you when it’s your turn to go down, when it happens so fast and so hard you can’t yell medic! for yourself. It’s the glue that keeps you together so’s maybe you make it through that year of hell.
“But this other stuff, this shit going down between the races, it was gettin’ bad. Supposedly started over drugs. Somebody was sellin’, got their stash stolen, blamed somebody on the other side of the color line. They started threatening each other.”
“There were a lot of drugs?” The way she said it, it was almost a statement.
“Lots,” he replied with heavy emphasis. “Acid, opium, heroin. With the right connections, you could get anything. American dollars made it cheap.”
“My son?”
He wavered, deciding whether—or how much of—the truth he should tell. Whatever image he left her with would be irrevocable. She would carry it to her grave.
“Pot,” he said simply, honestly. “But he was no head. Just a doober now and then to take the edge off.
“Like I said, it was a real nice day. We’d brought in some medical supplies. There was no big hurry to be anywhere else so we stuck around. Sat in on a couple hands of poker. Chet comes back from a routine perimeter patrol. We’re having a beer. Jawin.’
“All of a sudden there’s loud talk, shouting. Something’s going on near the ordnance locker. Soon it’s a fist fight.
“At first everyone just kinda’ stood around like it was entertainment. A couple more got in on it. Next thing I know there’s a thunk-pop-flash. Hell, we thought the VC were back, all rested up. Instead, it’s this kid from Texas juiced on Jack Daniels and some kinda’ dope. Gone and pitched a Willy Pete grenade into the middle of things. I don’t know, maybe he was aimin’ for somebody. Maybe he thought it would spread them out. Maybe he wasn’t thinkin’ at all except to have some dumb-ass fun.”
“Mister,” the boy said, “who’s Willy Pete?”
“Come over here. Sit by me and be quiet,” said the woman with no sign of the impatient dread she must have been feeling.
“It’s a name the boys give to white phosphorous. Hotter than regular fire. Burn through you almost before you know it’s there.
“Right god-damn then and there is when they shoulda’ halted everything. On their own without having to hear from that captain. Might be they would have too, but he wasn’t real popular.
“He ordered them to fall in. Trying to defuse it he was. They all just stood there, glarin’ at him. Nobody said a word but you could hear this great big ‘Fuck Off, Sir!’ in the silence. See it in their eyes. He could, too. ‘Cause he backed down and let them finish their business.”
“‘Look Chet,’ I said. ‘That juicer’s gotten into the ordnance locker.’ We start across the compound. Somebody takes a swing at Chet and he’s into it. I get to the dump alone just in time to shove this drunken doper back inside so’s he can’t take whatever it is he’s got, out into that fight.
“We’re in there rollin’ around, havin’ our own little tussle. I’m tryin’ to get at what he’s got. But he was so fuckin’ strong. Just god-damn, certifiable, strait-jacket crazy. Last thing I saw was Chet bent down in the doorway.
“I want to believe I yelled to him, warned him to get out. That I thought I’d heard the first crack. Like ammo starting to go off real close. But I’m not sure if I said it. Or just meant to.
“They say he had me out the door. Juicer yells ‘Yehah, Mother-fucker!’ lobs the Willy Pete he’s been holding. It doesn’t get too far. Just far enough to flame my hand.”
He regarded the stump with a kind of look—disdain, horror, fury, regret—it was hard to tell what emotional parades passed in swift succession behind the sunglasses.
“Flame me and fry Chet. Because in that last second he threw himself over me. Saved my life.
“Begging your pardon again, ma’am. I shoulda’ said it better. But I want you to know they told me it happened so quick . . . the ordnance locker blowin’ right after . . . he couldn’t of felt even a split second of pain.”
“Is that what happened to your face?” the child asked without guile or cruelty, motivated by nothing except the direct inquisitiveness of youth.
“Hush!” his mother said pressing her finger to his mouth. “Please excuse the boy.”
“It’s okay. Yes, son. That’s what happened to it. They did a pretty good job, them military surgeons. But burns are tough to fix. Guess I still look the freak. Feel it, too.”
He leaned forward. “This ever starts up again . . . ‘Scuse me, when it starts up again and it will ‘cause we haven’t learned yet how not to go on these killing sprees, you go wherever your feet or a bus ticket will take you. Don’t you let them do to you what they did to me and Chet.”
“Mr. Bennett, please. Don’t tell him that. I want him to be proud of his brother.”
“As he should be, ma’am. As he should be. That’s a given, isn’t it little guy?
“You asked earlier if Chester died like a warrior. And I say it again: yes. He can hold his head up proud among the spirits of all dead braves. Time comes, well, you’ll have to make your own decision. But somewhere, somehow we got to stop doin’ this shit.”
* * *
The sun was well into its slow glide down the western basin of the sky. A broad cloud formation—in college I would learn to call it cirrocumulus—lay high up so that the receding light defined its undulations the way wind marks a furrowed passage across dunes.
I would have felt better if Roland had let me drive back, but I didn’t know how to tell him he’d very likely had one or two more than he should have. I made a vague suggestion about taking the wheel in case he was tired. He got my meaning. Laughed and told me not to worry. Indians were used to handling firewater and gas-powered ponies.
The conversation on the way back to the Evergreen Motel was irregular, disjointed. Between exchanges I thought about what he’d told me. About the many faces of friendly fire. About unacknowledged acts of bravery. About trying to live up to old standards of heroism and how it might be accomplished in a combat-less world. About the endless surge of racial, religious and ethnic ludicrousities.
Twilight had settled by the time we reached the motel. Cora was sitting in one of the plastic lawn chairs, her feet propped on another. She was observing the silent courtship flicker of that evening’s firefly quota.
Roland bent to kiss her. The light from the sodium parking lot lamps was strong enough that I could not miss the alteration her face underwent when she smelled the beer. It was not angry or even judgmental. More a sad awareness, a flinching. A foreboding.
When he went inside to use the bathroom she and I talked a bit.
“He told you about Chester?”
I nodded.
“I don’t know why but it is something he has with him all the time. No matter what we do, where we go, this thing . . . it’s never gone. It’s twenty years since his brother died. That’s more years than I’ve been alive. I keep hoping we’ll have a boy so he can name him Chester. Maybe he’ll look more at the future.”
I didn’t know what to say. In the space of a few hours, I had been pulled into the anguished maelstrom of paired lives held captive to a past neither had lived.
She was reaching for her colorful cloth shoulder bag, removing a ball-point and a scrap of paper as she said, “He likes you. Don’t ask me why. I mean, you seem nice and all. But it’s sort of unusual for him to take to outsiders this quick. Mostly he stays alone. Sometime, maybe if you feel like it, you could write. Him, us. Whichever.”
Mentally, I squirmed. This was not a guy sort of thing to do. You wrote your mother, not other guys.
I took the paper, tore off the bottom, scribbled my address and handed it to her.
At Christmas there was a card. One of those you make up from a family photo. They were a charming trio of domesticity—“Roland, Cora, Baby Chet”—smiling out from the green center of a printed Christmas wreath. They looked happy. I meant to write back. But then there were mid-terms, and I forgot.
More than a year later I opened an envelope containing a short news clipping. It detailed the vehicular death of one Roland Many Deeds. The coroner called it “alcohol-related.”
The Wall makes no provision for after-the-fact deaths: those who die from indirect secondary complications or unhealed psychological wounds, those struck down by the early onset of what are usually age-related illnesses, those who cannot quite accept the forfeiture of loved ones.
In the end maybe what it boils down to is just words; words printed in newspapers or history books. Words chiseled into granite. Spoken words of remembrance. Words of rage followed by those of grief. Words bearing overdue accolades. And finally, the dull, distilled words of sociological conjecture.
Connor Bennett probably phrased it most succinctly, “Somehow we gotta’ stop doing this . . .”
Home – Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota – 1977
© 2026 B.A. Brittingham All rights reserved.
Excepted from Journeys: Pilgrimages in the Aftermath, published in 2002
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