The World Played Chess (58)

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.