The World Played Chess (93)

I imagine I’ll have a conversation with that boy when, hopefully, I reach those pearly gates. I imagine he will be there to greet me, I hope with a hug and not a fist.

I will finish my twelve steps in the afterlife. I will make amends with him and his family.

You gave me that chance, Vincent, when you listened, and when you stepped in front of that sledgehammer and kept me from ruining what was left of my life. Because of you I met my wife and my daughter, and I found myself. I hope you know that.

Todd Pearson. I wonder if you’ve thought of him? I looked him up. Step eight in my recovery—make a list of all the persons I have harmed and be willing to make amends. Turns out Vietnam killed Todd and he didn’t even know it. Died of cancer from Agent Orange in his forties, like so many other veterans. I spoke to his wife—he divorced and remarried.

Well, I’ve rambled long enough. And now I need to ramble along.

I hope this letter finds you well. If you ever talk to Mikey, please give him my best. And, you never know. I just may drive this RV up to your front door one day and honk the horn. I hope you won’t mind seeing an old friend.

I think of you as a friend, Vincenzo. And I thank you for being there and for listening. You have no idea what it meant to me.

Peace. Semper Fi.

William

PS. If we do ever see each other again, I want the true story of what happened with that Italian girl from New York that summer. I know you didn’t tell me the truth, and I applaud you for your discretion. But I’d still like to know.

I lower the letter and look out at William’s yard. I don’t cry. I smile.

I’m happy for William. It’s what I needed to know, why I came. I needed to know he was all right. I do have one disagreement. This will not be his second journal. It will be his third.

I was also William’s journal that summer so the stories didn’t, maybe, drive him crazy. He told me his stories and, maybe, I don’t know, maybe he felt a little better.

I like to believe so.

I’m glad he told me about Todd, but sad, also, at his ending. Some years after working for Todd, I, too, had searched for him. I went by the house on Bayswater, where he no longer lived. The post office had no forwarding address. Likely he moved out of the house when he and his wife divorced. Years later, I looked him up again, this time using the internet, though I figured the chances of Todd being on social media were slim to none. None. I never did find him. Now I know why, and I can also shut that door. He is another life lost to Vietnam, a name that hopefully will also be etched on the black granite memorial in Washington, DC.

Maybe someday I will write that book William suggested, that owner’s manual for young men. Maybe I’ll catch that dream, of being a writer, for both of us.

Or maybe I’ll just tell the story of William, of Vietnam, and the summer of 1979.

Maybe.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


There is a saying we writers hear bandied about: “Write what you know.” Most writers I know say the better adage is “Write what you’re interested in.” Stories such as The World Played Chess and The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell come from the heart. As I explained in my acknowledgments in the latter book, I have never had ocular albinism and I was fortunate to only have been bullied in one instance that I can recall. But I do have a brother with Down Syndrome, and the subject of bullying and what it does to both the bully and the victim interested me. So I researched it, and in the process, I found Sam Hell and ocular albinism.

The same is true with this novel. First, it is a novel, not a memoir. I never served in Vietnam or in any branch of the US military. The Vietnam War, however, always interested me. I don’t know why exactly, much like I don’t know why Elvis Presley interested me. Maybe because they were a part of my life. I was born in 1961 and, like Vincent, graduated high school in 1979. I do recall, as a young boy, watching the news at night and seeing the helicopters in Vietnam, the soldiers fighting over there, the wounded, and the dead in body bags being flown from the bush. I recall thinking about how young those men were, how their lives had been cut so short. I watched the protests on television and felt the protestors were justified, but I worried that our country was being torn apart.

Mostly, I recall being interested. The war captivated me, particularly the thought that so many young men and women were being sent halfway around the world to fight not an invader—like the Nazis—but a political theory. Communism.

I graduated from high school in 1979 believing, like many young men, that the world was my oyster, and my future, limitless. My sister’s boyfriend did get me a job working on a construction crew with two Vietnam veterans, and I did get the education of a lifetime over that summer. Like most Vietnam veterans, the two men didn’t talk much about their experiences. Stories usually came when we were out drinking a few beers. They would open up and tell me what it was like to one day be an eighteen-year-old living in America and, seemingly, the next day be in the jungles of a foreign country, with a foreign climate, fighting against a foreign enemy you didn’t know and didn’t have anything against who was actively trying to kill you. Neither man understood the war, or his place in it, how it would have any impact on his life or the lives of Americans in general. They both said no one ever could offer them a good explanation as to why they were supposed to shoot and kill Vietnamese people living in Vietnam. Both expressed the feeling that they were the foreigners and that their presence never felt justified. What also struck me were the similarities between these two men, despite differences in age, branch of service, and experience. One was a marine, the other, army. For men still young, they seemed old to me that summer, and fatalistic. They did not believe in God, they drank too much—in my opinion—they were quick to get into fights, and when they did, they usually picked the biggest opponent. They seemed to live day to day, like they no longer trusted the promise of a future.