The World Played Chess (85)

December 24, 1968

My plane landed in Tokyo to refuel for the flight to Seattle, but I never left my seat. A flight crew got on and the stewardess told me I had time to get off the plane to stretch my legs and buy some food. I declined. I was not going to tempt fate by getting off the plane until I landed safely in New Jersey.

The plane was refueled, and ten hours later, we landed in Seattle. US soil. From Seattle I flew to Newark, New Jersey. It was all happening so fast, thirty-six hours from Vietnam to stateside. In Seattle I had to deboard and change planes. I went into an airport bathroom. I realized I hadn’t washed Vietnam from my body, though I had changed into my laundered utilities before boarding the plane in Vietnam. My hair was unkempt and my face unshaven. I looked like hell. I’m sure I smelled worse, given the looks I received. I tried to wash using paper towels. A guy approached the sink beside me. My skin tingled with the anticipation of a confrontation.

“Did you serve?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Thank you,” he said.

I turned and looked at him, uncertain what to say. He smiled and stepped past me.

I fought back more tears.

I reached my gate. I hadn’t called my mom and dad to tell them I was on my way home. “Home.” It sounded like a foreign word.

I looked for a pay phone just as I heard a woman’s voice over the loudspeaker. She advised that the flight to Newark was boarding. I was not about to miss it.

Six hours later, I was in the back seat of a taxi. The taxi driver was Asian. He kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror, the way people in the airport terminal glanced at me, the way the people in the villages glanced at me, like I was a rabid dog that would bite. Like I didn’t belong. The taxi driver was driving fast. Everything was whizzing past the windows. I leaned forward to check the speedometer. He was driving the speed limit. Sixty-five miles per hour. After so many months of the slow crawl of humping, the sensation of speed was terrifying. I thought he was going to crash. I thought he was trying to kill me.

I thought of the irony.

Death still followed me.

Minutes from the airport, he exited the freeway and drove me through Elizabeth’s business district. Just like that, I was home. I’d made it home. People walked the sidewalks. Cars drove the street. Everything was the same. The faces of the people. The houses. The buildings. The businesses.

But I didn’t recognize any of it.

I didn’t believe any of it was real.

It was a forgery. Vietnam was real.

I told the taxi driver to pull over. He looked at me in the rearview mirror.

I told him again, “Pull over.”

The fare was $6.23. I threw a twenty-dollar bill at him and got out. Money meant nothing to me. I walked the streets in my utilities. Defiant. Seeking a confrontation. People stepped out of my way. They stared as I passed, no doubt wondering if they knew me, thinking, He looks familiar. No one greeted me. No one else thanked me. No one said a word.

I wanted to grab the approaching man by the collar of his suit jacket and ask him if he knew what was going on in the real world. I wanted to tell him, all of them, that young men, their sons, were dying in the bush every day, that they were being shipped home in boxes. Nobody looked at me long enough for me to speak. I was not real. I was a ghost. I was an imitation of the young man who left this town. I’d had no time to decompress. Nothing to prepare me for my return to civilian life. They’d just thrown me back, like an unwanted fish, and told me to swim. OJT.

I stepped inside a bar and took a stool at the far end, away from everyone. I didn’t know what time it was. I didn’t care. The bartender approached. I asked for a beer. The bartender asked to see my ID. I looked at him like he was joking. He stared back. I wanted to lean across the bar and rip his throat out. I wanted to scream at him, “Do you know where I’ve been?”

“You can’t be in here if you’re underage,” he said. Then he turned to walk away.

“Are you joking,” I said, not about to give him the satisfaction of getting out my ID. My uniform should have been enough. “Seriously?”

He turned back. “It’s the law.”

“So is sending me to a foreign country to kill. None of you had a problem with that.”

“Take it up with your congressman,” he said.

“My congressman sent me!”

“Then your senator. I don’t really care. Just get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

I almost dared him to make the call, but I was tired of fighting. I was done fighting.

I left the bar. As I walked, it started to snow. I stopped and looked around at the businesses. Christmas decorations in windows. Colored lights along the exteriors, and Christmas music emanating from inside the stores. The temperature was suddenly cold. From where I’d been, it was freezing. It felt so good.

I started the long walk home.

I could do it.

I’d humped for miles through streams and rice paddies and over mountains. The hardest part is getting up off the ground and taking that first step. Then you take another, and another. You walk away from where you’ve been, toward your next checkpoint. I tried not to think, not to dwell on where I’d been, on the past. I tried to forget it all. It was irrelevant anyway. I didn’t take terrain or villages. I just kept moving.

So I would keep moving now. I walked on, away from the past.