My Detachment Read online

  I asked Morrisseau for his story. It had started some months back, he said, when he’d begun speaking out against the war and suddenly got orders for Vietnam. Then he went to Washington and stood in front of the White House, in his uniform, holding a sign that said 12,000 AMERICAN CASUALTIES, WHY? He was arrested, he wasn’t charged, but when he got back he was told he couldn’t leave Fort Devens. He had made up his mind he wasn’t going to Vietnam. He planned to go no farther than Logan Airport in Boston. His lawyer would arrange a press conference there. Morrisseau would explain his reasons for disobeying his orders, then file a form as a conscientious objector. But he never got to Boston.

  On the morning of the appointed day, a colonel came for him in an Army sedan. Within minutes it was clear the driver wasn’t heading for Logan.

  Where were they going? Morrisseau asked. The colonel wouldn’t answer. Morrisseau said, “You’re taking me to Fort Devens Airfield, aren’t you, sir?” The colonel answered, “Yes.” Could he make a phone call? Morrisseau asked. If there was time, the colonel said. Could he file the form for conscientious objectors? If there was time, the colonel said. And then they turned a corner and through the windshield, leaning forward from the backseat, Morrisseau saw the airfield and a small, two-engine plane without military markings. The car pulled up beside it. The colonel turned to Morrisseau. “I’m giving you a direct order. You will get on this airplane, you will not get off this airplane until you arrive at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.” Could he make a phone call or file his form? Morrisseau asked. There wasn’t time, the colonel said.

  The plan seemed obvious to Morrisseau. The post’s commanding general had tainted the case against him. The Army wanted to spirit him away to another post, in the patriotic South, so that when Morrisseau refused to go to Vietnam he would do so in another military jurisdiction. Politely, he told the colonel he wouldn’t board the plane. So he was arrested. Now he awaited court-martial. The case had many irregularities. He had reasons to hope he’d avoid jail but was ready for the worst.

  “Weren’t you scared?” I asked.

  Morrisseau said, “Sure. But I don’t get scared anymore. I just feel kind of cold.” I think he smiled.

  It wouldn’t be easy refusing to go. The Army wasn’t amused when lieutenants disobeyed orders for Vietnam. One of my classroom’s windows at Fort Devens looked down on the fenced-in exercise grounds of the post stockade, a small asphalt playground. Recently, since I’d gotten my orders, I’d been watching a young inmate shooting baskets inside the fence, dressed in monstrous-looking boots that must have been filled with lead. He would come outside at the same time every day and play by himself in slow motion, out in the open air for about fifteen minutes. Then a tall sergeant would emerge and lead the young man back to jail. To me just now, the Army seemed to offer only various forms of imprisonment. You couldn’t get away, and if you tried, the prison just got smaller.

  But Morrisseau and I were drinking beer, and as the conversation wore on, I felt bolder. Several times I said, “The bastards!” Several times I told Morrisseau, “I might refuse my orders.” He didn’t tell me what he thought I ought to do. He just said, “I know I wouldn’t let them send me over there to kill and die.” He rummaged around among his piles of folders and clippings, then handed me a copy of the famous photograph that captures the Saigon chief of police in the act of executing a member of the Vietcong: the prisoner stands, hands bound behind him, his head beginning to recoil from the impact of the bullet. “Look at that. Just look at it!” said Morrisseau.

  I glanced around the room: a box of cereal, a few utensils on a windowsill, a stack of law books in a corner with a baseball mitt on top of them. He’d been sequestered here for months. I wondered how he stood it. He was saying he planned to run for public office after all of this was over. He was going to get something for himself out of this. And it was as if the alcohol in me evaporated. He wasn’t a saint, but he had moral courage, and he knew it. It seemed like something worth knowing.

  I said we should play a game of catch outside one of these days. Oh, he said, he’d love to throw a baseball again. Promising to come by with my own fielder’s mitt soon, I left his room. I felt a great deal better once I got outside. That guy in Cambridge would certainly shake my hand if he had seen me back in there. Maybe I really would refuse to go to Vietnam. Outside that room, the prospect didn’t seem so scary after all.

  The next evening I went to the Officers Club and sat down at the bar next to one of the lieutenants from my class. We began to talk about the Army. I said I couldn’t wait to get out. “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” I asked him.

  “I’m staying in,” he said. He didn’t love the Army, he explained, but if you put in twenty years, you got a decent pension, and you’d be only forty-one years old.

  This guy would trade twenty years of youth for a comfortable middle age. I had a familiar feeling, utterly irrational, that something would go deeply wrong if I didn’t point out right away the enormous differences between us. “You know what I did yesterday?” I said. “I visited Morrisseau. He’s my idea of a hero.”

  The lieutenant who was bucking for a comfortable retirement seemed suitably impressed. In fact, he looked worried. Then he said, “I’d watch out if I were you. You know the lieutenant who has the room between Morrisseau and you?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about him.”

  “Well, he got pretty drunk in here the other night and started bragging about how he was in MI and he knew the names of everybody who had gone into Morrisseau’s room. I don’t know if he tapes the conversations, but I’d be careful what I said in there.”

  I seem to remember a slight loss of color vision, so that the barroom and the lieutenant beside me remain in my memory painted a pale blue. What had I said in Morrisseau’s room?

  Nothing unusual happened the next two days. I decided I had simply heard another barroom rumor. I trudged into the main classroom building. It looked like one I’d known at Andover, neo-Georgian, brick, tall-ceilinged with echoing hallways. But it had doors like smaller versions of the doors to bank vaults, with combination locks and hand-wheels on their faces. The armored door to my classroom was open. A sergeant with a roster stood beside it, politely asking for our names as we filed past.

  “Lieutenant Kidder. I’m sorry, sir. You can’t come in.”

  “What?”

  He showed me the roster. I saw a red line slicing through my name and rank and service number.

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. It’s probably some mistake. You’ll have to wait for Mr. Hatfield.”

  In a moment, as if on cue, a very small man, nearly a midget, came around the corner. He took the clipboard from the sergeant. He looked at the roster sheet. He looked up at me. “You better come with me, Lieutenant.” He wore the gold and green bar of a warrant officer, a mysterious rank, I’d always thought. I walked beside him down the echoing hall. “Probably some clerk just had a bad day, huh?”

  Mr. Hatfield looked up at me inquisitively. He didn’t speak.

  “You better wait out here, Lieutenant.”

  He disappeared with the clipboard through another safelike door. The sign above it read MI.

  I waited across the hallway, beside a large, old-fashioned radiator, whose hillocks and valleys and chipped layers of paint I knew intimately by the time Mr. Hatfield reappeared, about twenty minutes later.

  “This was just a mistake, Lieutenant,” he said. He said the roster had been prepared some months ago, before my security clearance had arrived.

  I didn’t believe him, of course. I was sure he had listened to excerpts of my chat with Morrisseau and had realized I wasn’t the type they needed to worry about. But what did I care about that? I could have hugged that laconic, tiny man. The heavy door swung open and let me into class, back among my peers. I became a model student all that day, and even for a few days afterward, raising my hand to ask and answer questions about direction finding and long-running polyalphabeti
c keys.

  I used to tell this story to friends in the antiwar movement, describing my fear without its irrational components. I would say that all my courage drained out of me into that radiator while I waited in the hall. That isn’t true. I retained what courage I had. On another day soon afterward, I kept my promise and played catch with the arrested lieutenant on the grass outside the BOQ.

  He had to make a phone call first, for permission to go outside.

  It was easily the most nerve-racking game of catch I’d ever played. I imagined the spy from Military Intelligence watching us through his blank second-story window. Just like him not to let us see him. I let the game of catch go on for a time, then purposely made a bad throw. I made it look as if the ball had slipped out of my hand. I walked over to pick it up, so that I was standing quite close to Morrisseau. Then I said, from the corner of my mouth, “That lieutenant next door to you knows everybody who comes in your room, and I think he records your conversations.”

  Morrisseau nodded. I moved back to my position. We tossed the ball lazily back and forth. “Thanks,” he said.

  I never saw him again. But I imagined him, when I went off on my thirty-day pre-Vietnam leave, and as those days dwindled: walking in front of the White House with an antiwar sign, in uniform no less; looking out the windshield of an olive-drab sedan at an unmarked airplane with its propellers spinning and its door standing open for him; waiting hour after hour, day after day, in his little room, for the knocking of the MPS. I couldn’t see myself in any of those pictures. In the end, I think I went to war because it seemed like the safest thing to do.

  I WENT TO OYSTER BAY TO BREAK THE NEWS TO MY PARENTS. I WAITED UNTIL I was alone with my father in the living room. I walked over to the hearth, and leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece I said, “Dad, I’ve got orders for Vietnam.”

  He grimaced. Then he glanced toward the kitchen and said, “Don’t tell your mother.” Of course, she was upset when he told her, but she tried not to show it.

  My older brother was an enlisted man in the Marines, safely stationed in Washington. When he heard the news, he offered to volunteer for Vietnam so that I wouldn’t have to go. I’m not sure this was possible. But I was grateful he had made the offer. Now I could turn him down. “Thanks,” I told him over the phone. “But I can’t let you do that.”

  Some days later, back in Cambridge, I decided to write him a letter. I sat down in a window seat in an entryway in Adams House. Two floors above was the room where I had read Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of John Keats. I remembered the line I liked best: “… and John, with perhaps the greatest poetic endowment England has witnessed since the death of Milton, died at twenty-five in Rome.” I remembered the lines from Keats’s last letter, to a friend: “I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.” I wrote on and on to my brother, about the Army and the unjustness of the war, about memories from childhood. Then I wrote that, if things went badly in Vietnam, there shouldn’t be a fancy funeral. As for the $13,000 our grandmother had given each of us, he should divide it between himself and our younger brother. Suddenly, I felt tired of the voice in my mind. Maybe I’d finish the letter later. By evening I’d forgotten about it.

  Inevitably, I thought of Mary Anne. I wouldn’t tell her I was going to Vietnam. She’d be shocked and sorry when, in a month or so, she heard the news. Harvard’s academic semester had ended. The A.D. Club was mostly empty. I still had a key. I wandered through the rooms, and every time I passed the little one that contained the pay phone, I felt a tingling all over. Not to make the phone call was the noble thing to do. Even better, though, would be to call and not to mention the cloud that hung over me. Then, later on, she’d realize that I had called to say goodbye.

  “Mary Anne, hi. It’s Tracy. I just called to tell you I’m going to Vietnam.” The last time I’d seen her, months ago, back before Infantry School, I’d said I might volunteer for the war. Now I said, “I don’t want to go.”

  “I don’t want you to go either,” she said.

  We made a date, to have ice cream cones in Harvard Square the next afternoon. Joanie had planned a dinner party for that night, a special dinner for me. Mary Anne and I walked all over Cambridge and ended up sitting in a restaurant, where I told her about Joanie.

  “Do you love her?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m supposed to have dinner with her, but I’d rather have dinner with you.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

  “I can’t come tonight,” I said to Joanie over the phone.

  Joanie had a fetching way sometimes of doubling the syllables of words. “But I’ve been working on it all day-ay.”

  I’d told her about Mary Anne some time before. Now I said that I’d run into her. “And we were going to have dinner. Not a real dinner, just some sandwiches. You understand.”

  Joanie said, “All right. Thanks for calling.” She didn’t even yell at me. She was sweet. She was fascinating. She had been very kind to me. I didn’t want kindness, though. I needed perfection. So I stood her up for my old, perfect love. Only she could represent the loss I was about to suffer.

  It was June 1968. The year had begun with the Tet Offensive, when the Vietcong and North Vietnamese had attacked and briefly held many towns and cities, and even penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon. In the end they had been massacred, but Tet proved that Washington had lied about how well the war was going. In March, President Johnson had only narrowly won the New Hampshire primary over Eugene McCarthy, who had run against the war. Soon afterward Johnson had declared he wouldn’t stand for another term. Martin Luther King, Jr., had come out against the war. In April, he’d been murdered. But Robert Kennedy had joined the race for president. An opportunist, some people said, but I believed that he would win, and that he’d end the war. Like many Americans, I thought of him as “Bobby,” and as a friend, because I needed a friend like him just now.

  With a few exceptions, soldiers ordered to Vietnam had to stay there for only a year, an unusual arrangement in the annals of war. My term would begin on the twentieth of June, four months before the presidential election and seven before Bobby’s inauguration. But I’d managed to convince myself that if Bobby won, the war would stop and I’d come home early. It was possible, wasn’t it? Sometimes things went better in real life than in my fantasies. I’d never imagined, for instance, that being about to go to war would be so rewarding. Mary Anne was going out with me again. I no longer believed she’d ever been in love with someone else. Walking with her, I would stare sidelong at her lovely profile. I’d imagine I was trying to memorize her for my year of war to come. Once I confessed to her in consternation that here I was, twenty-three years old, and I still bit my fingernails sometimes. “I know,” she said. She made a mock sigh and smiled. “It’s just another one of my major disappointments.” So I knew I wasn’t yet quite perfect in her eyes, but I was forgiven.

  Maybe Bobby would end the war for me. And I’d come back from Vietnam in seven months and marry Mary Anne. I had proposed. She hadn’t agreed. I understood, but surely she could wear a ring—a family heirloom that my mother had given me after I’d slightly misrepresented the facts. We weren’t formally engaged, but Mary Anne accepted the ring.

  Then Bobby got murdered out in California. A few nights later I took Mary Anne to a soiree at Robert Fitzgerald’s house in Cambridge. He served May wine. We sat around him, mostly former students. I wanted to know what he thought about Bobby and the war, but he said only, “This one might have helped.”

  A few days later a mutual friend told me, “Mary Anne feels trapped.” That didn’t make sense. I should not have been surprised, the trap I’d built was so transparent. But I told myself that I was the one in trouble, hemmed in by history and the Army. Anyway, Mary Anne didn’t say that to me directly. She did try to give me back the ring I’d talked her into wearing. In anger, I told her she’d have to return it to my mother. But time was short. My
anger passed. She kept the ring. I was booked on a night flight from Boston to San Francisco. I asked her to come to Logan Airport to see me off.

  “No, please. I don’t want to. Please.”

  I had a face for occasions like this, an innocent, wounded boy’s face. I’d discovered it, not invented it, and I didn’t usually plan to assume it, but I could feel it coming on and was not unaware of its usefulness. “I’d like you to come,” I said.

  It was much more gratifying to have someone weep over me than to do it myself. Doing it myself was unnecessary. At the airport, I rushed back from the gate to console Mary Anne, then hoisted my duffel again and set off for Southeast Asia. One of the stewardesses on the flight to San Francisco tried to chat with me. She might well have guessed where I was going. Probably she just wanted to be nice. She asked if I was staying the night in San Francisco, but I didn’t take the hint, if it was a hint. Weeks later, thinking back, I’d realize she was pretty, but at the moment no one could penetrate my solemn high spirits.

  PANCHO

  I HAD HOURS TO KILL IN THE SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT BEFORE I RODE THE bus to Travis Air Force Base across the bay. I wandered around the airport and finally into one of its cocktail lounges. Two years before, walking toward the Greyhound station in Boston, bound for basic training with a duffel on my shoulder, I had imagined a movie camera trained on me. I’d been aware of the camera’s returning from time to time since then. Just now, it was moving in through the dim light of the lounge for a long close-up of me in my khakis, heading for a barstool. This might, after all, be the last civilian barroom I would ever visit, an idea that lent depth to the scene and didn’t really trouble me. Earlier I had chatted with an Air Force man just back from Vietnam, and he had told me it wasn’t very dangerous over there. “Honestly, I had a pretty good time,” he’d said. The light in the lounge was tinted brown, nearly the color of my uniform. I sat down and ordered a drink.