The World Played Chess (71)

“We’re going to dance all night, Shutter. The Puerto Rican girls are going to love you.”

Cruz felt the pockets of my vest. He looked puzzled, then looked at me like he’d just found a bar of gold. He pulled out the Tiger Chewing Tobacco tin. The one Longhorn gave me. The one I kept in the upper left pocket of my flak jacket, and in which I kept this journal and this nub of pencil. One more thing Charlie had to penetrate to kill me.

Only he couldn’t.

Cruz fell back against the log laughing and showed me the tin. He ran a finger over the dented corner. Then he laughed again. “Longhorn saved your life, Shutter. He saved your life. The bullet hit the corner of the tin and deflected just enough. It missed your heart and hit just below your collarbone, in the meat of your shoulder.”

“It went through clean,” the corpsman agreed.

Cruz said it again, this time to himself, as if not believing, as if he needed to hear it said out loud to believe it. “It deflected and went clean through. You are one lucky son of a bitch.”

But I didn’t feel lucky. I didn’t feel a thing.

I stayed behind that log until the fighting ended and the NVA melted back into the bush. The morphine wore off and I felt a searing pain. They called in a dust off, loaded me and Whippet and the rest of the injured, and flew us out.

The doctor who treated my wound also said I was lucky. I showed him the dent in the tin can and told him what had happened, that I’d kept the tin in my vest pocket and it had deflected the bullet just enough to knock it off target. He smiled, but he wouldn’t say for sure my theory was correct, not without the bullet.

“Although,” he added before leaving my bedside, “the wound does have an upward trajectory, which would indicate you may be right, about the tin deflecting it.”

I didn’t know if he was serious or just humoring me. Maybe he figured there was nothing wrong with a marine believing he had a lucky talisman. I’d seen grunts with anything from rabbit’s feet on chains to a necklace of VC ears. And each swore it was good luck, at least up until the day he died or, like Longhorn, his DEROS came up and he made it home.

The doctor likely figured, Let him believe what he wants.

What’s the harm?





Chapter 20


April 17, 2016

Elizabeth and I both sensed that since Chris’s death, Beau was searching for something, his own identity, perhaps. He had become more open to leaving the Bay Area to go to college, and he had applied to LA schools and schools on the East Coast. Elizabeth wasn’t happy about it. She kept asking Beau why he wanted to go back east with so many wonderful schools in the Bay Area.

Beau said he just did.

Elizabeth also did not want Beau to play football, but Beau had looked into attending football camps, including two in Los Angeles. I told her in private to let Beau go through the process. I rationalized that football could get Beau into a school that might otherwise be a reach, but that it was unlikely he would get on the field his freshman year anyway. He could then quit but stay in school and get his degree. Schools used student-athletes all the time. Student-athletes could also use schools. If the school didn’t like it, too bad.

I was more concerned that Beau’s motivation to play had something to do with keeping Chris’s memory alive. I thought of William, and his comment that sometimes you just have to live through things to truly understand them. I’d experienced something similar when my father died. Friends had lost parents, and while empathetic, I hadn’t understood the pain that could accompany that loss until my own father died.

I also did not want Beau to play college football. Most of his high school years were just before the CTE studies came out, before the movie Concussion with Will Smith hit the big screen. Elizabeth and I didn’t know what we didn’t know. Beau played the game undersized, but relentless, and he’d paid for it with injuries. He’d already had the one concussion. We hoped he would quit, but Beau had to make that decision for himself.

Beau and I jumped on a plane to Los Angeles, rented a car and a hotel room, and went through the recruiting process, which was an eye-opener. When we showed up at the first camp, I could see Beau’s nerves in his demeanor. Big, athletic players surrounded him. To make matters worse, the first thing the college recruiting team did was instruct the recruits to remove their shoes and shirts to get weighed and measured. They then handed each recruit a T-shirt with a number on it and herded them out the door to the practice field to be timed in the forty-yard dash and cone drills.

As I sat with other parents sweltering on metal bleachers and slathering on sunblock, I watched this process and felt sick to my stomach. I remembered the passage in William’s journal about his indoctrination into the US Marines, how he had been treated like a piece of meat, all individuality stripped away, everyone handed the same gray sweatshirt and sweatpants with a number that would be his new identity.

I looked down at the field and watched Beau going through another drill, doing bear crawls, rolling, getting to his feet, shuffling left, right, forward, back, then running to the back of the line to prepare for the next drill, and I realized that Beau, too, was a commodity for the coaches to mold and make bigger and stronger, and to indoctrinate on how to think and take their orders at face value. I worried about my son, my boy.

When Beau finished the camp, we went back to our hotel. In the morning we would drive down the I-10 freeway, and he’d perform at a two-day camp attended by coaches from multiple schools. I refrained from saying much to Beau about the camp that afternoon or the upcoming camps, except “Do your best and don’t worry about the rest.”