The Return

CHAPTER ONE

It rained the day we buried Pete. I stood underneath the awning at the cemetery while the hard rain drummed on it. The rain reminded me of monsoon time in Vietnam, and it brought back other unpleasant memories as well. It was the kind of rain God dumped out on you from some giant celestial pitcher. That roared and echoed in your ears. That beat down hard on your helmet and pulled a dense, alive gray curtain around you. All these years afterwards, and I stood and I shivered remembering the monsoon rains. Little about Vietnam, as I recalled it, was ever actually gentle. Especially not the rain.

The preacher and the Army Reserve sergeant of the military escort stripped the American flag off the casket, folded it carefully in a triangle with the blue field showing and looked around for someone to give it to. If you didn’t count the funeral home people, the military escort, the gravediggers and the preacher Pete had never met, I was Lieutenant Commander Peter Brauer’s only mourner. The worse thing about getting old is that you outlive all your friends. It can happen that you outlive so many from your own era it becomes difficult to find anyone who remembers it with you. It even starts to get foggy in your own mind. Each year it fades a little more, like old snapshots.

“Mr... uh...?” The preacher had forgotten my name.

“Jack Kazmarek.”

“Mr. Kazmarek, are you...?”

I reached for the flag. “Yes,” I said.

I was the only one.

The preacher and the military escort shuffled about uneasily. Then they drew on slickers and raincoats and the preacher popped open a black umbrella. The hard gray rain reached in and sucked them away. I tucked the folded stars-and-stripes up into my armpit. The man from the funeral home nodded at the gravediggers. I stood staring into the open grave while the diggers filled in on top of the casket with shovelsful of dark mud.

I was the one who found Pete dead. The two of us were always checking in on each other.

That was the sort of things old soldiers did when they got too old to soldier; they puttered in the back yard, told war stories and checked in on each other.

When the hearse had arrived to remove Pete’s body, the attendant in the black suit said, “Are you the next of kin, Mr... ?”

“Jack Kazmarek.”

Pete always called me Pollack. I was Lithuanian, but Pollack was close enough for Pete.

“I guess you could call me next of kin.” I said. “I’ll be taking care of arrangements.” The black suit looked at Pete’s body stiffened on the floor. “A heart attack. Maybe a stroke,” he decided professionally. “We’ll have to call the police since no doctor was present at time of death.”

The second attendant was so fat he panted when he walked and greasy sweat soaked the armpits of his shirt. “Old age,” was his diagnosis. “We get them like this all the time. How well did you know the old man?” he asked me,

“He’s my neighbor.”

He pointed at the framed photograph clutched in Pete’s hands. “Who’s the Chinese piece in the picture?” he asked.

“She’s Vietnamese,” I corrected. “Eurasian. Part Asian, part French.”

The traditional ao dai she wore curved deliciously where it ought to curve and then trimmed at the ankles. It coordinated with the trishaw in her background and the wall like the one around the Citadel in Hue. Dark eyes gazed directly out of a face so beautiful it always took my breath. Over the years I had grown as familiar with the face in the portrait as with the face o£ my own Elizabeth, God rest her soul. It had hung on Pete’s wall for over twenty years that I knew of. It was hanging on the wall of his Florida Room when Elizabeth and I moved in next door after I retired from the army.

“What was it all about?” the fat attendant asked.

The police detective when he came asked me the same thing.

A trail of bloody vomit led across the carpet from Pete’s kitchen to the Florida Room.

Vomit crusted the wall where he dragged himself up to pull down the picture; it soiled hands so cold and stiff they had to be pried free of the frame, He died with his eyes frozen wide open, the way a guy died when death surprised him, Like when a rocket cut him in half or when a round from an AK-47 thumped through his cranium with the sound of a pickaxe striking a watermelon

His glazed eyes were fixed on the Asian girl in the faded black-and-white print.

I had often wondered what a guy was thinking in that instant his light flickered and went out in an ambush or on a hot LZ. With Pete I didn’t have to wonder. The last thing LCDR Peter Brauer, U.S. Navy (retired), saw and thought about when he died was lovely Mhai’s face.

The doctor said alcohol was what finally got Pete. His liver was as hard as a bowling ball.

It was more than gin and beer though. It was something deep and sad, something at ol’ Pete’s core, that finally got him. Something from the war.

I stared with tired eyes down into the open black yawn of Pete’s grave while the rain beat on the awning and streamed off the sides. I didn’t realize I was trembling from old memories, from old horrors, until someone touched my shoulder. I recoiled as though kicked or struck by a bullet.

“Are you all right?” one of the diggers asked.

I gave him the Vietnam thousand-yard stare.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded this time.

“I’m sorry’, old-timer. We have to take down the awning now.”

CHAPTER TWO

In the middle of the night. That was when the reality of the war returned to most vets. I came back from Southeast Asia with memories that produced sweats in the middle of the night. Sometimes I sweated so much Elizabeth had to get up and sleep on the sofa. “Let it out, Jack. Let it all out. Talk about it, tell me. I’ll listen, honey. Let it all out or it’ll poison you.” After the first few years she stopped asking me to talk about it. I couldn’t stand it if she had known about me.

Maybe it was the rain that brought on the sweats the night after I buried Pete. I tossed in bed, soaking the covers and pillows. Elizabeth was no longer there to rescue me. It was all so real again.

Sgt. Holtzauer’s face loomed out of the black past and the black future, like one of those faces that suddenly appears leering in a carnival funhouse. It was blackened with camouflage paint as the helicopters jerked us out of Fire Support Base Savage with dizzying, disorienting speed. The choppers rocketed up from earth. The FSB swiftly diminished into a jumble of shacks and mud, concertina wire and sandbags. Wind moaned past the helicopter’s open door as it soared into space. The FSB became Vietnam, Vietnam became Asia, Asia the earth and the earth glowed like a marble against black cloth. I was dying trying to catch my breath because you cannot breath in outer space. My lungs screeched and rasped as they collapsed around the vacuum.

The door gunner with his M60 machine gun suspended in the door on a bungee slowly turned his head to look into the bay. He wore a flight helmet and a dark wraparound visor. The chopperful of silent grunts reflected in the visor as bleached skeletons. Green flesh began to materialize on one of the skulls. I recognized the weak chin and watery eyes of Bugs Wortham the FNG, the fucking new guy. Scared shitless. Wailing and sobbing.

“Lieutenant Kazmarek-k-k-k-k...” Like a voice echoing from a well.

“Shut the fuck up, Bugs.”

“Lieutenant Kazmarek-k-k-k-k-.

“I said, shut the fuck up.”

I slapped my hands over my ears. My hands were those of a skeleton. I couldn’t keep Bugs out. I realized with horror that Bugs wasn’t in a well, he was echoing inside the bones of my own skull. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. It was always the same thing. But I couldn’t keep him out. His normally squeaky voice turned doomsday hollow. It filled every cell of my being.

‘Lieutenant Kazmarek-k-k-k-k... Daniels sees things. Daniels knows. It’s different today, Lieutenant Kazmarek-k-k-k-k...I’m tellin you, Lieutenant Kazmarek-k-k-k-k, Today is a different day...’

The bottom fell out from underneath the chopper. It plummeted back to earth. Weightless, the skeletons of Third Platoon held on to each other and screamed in unison. The earth expanded. There was rain, sheets and curtains of blinding rain. And from out of the rain, as if from the rain itself, issued the tortured shrieks and cries of the damned.

That was the point when I always awoke, soaked with sweat and gasping to catch my breath. For the past thirty years my nightmares regularly replayed that much of the different day. Up to Bugs Wortham saying it was a different day and the chopper falling into the rain. They never went past that point.

After a moment of rapid breathing to prove my lungs still worked, I got out of bed and went to the frig in the dark. Somewhere in the town a siren screamed. Sirens screamed day and night in Florida retirement communities. I swigged from a jug of orange juice to calm my nerves. Feeling better, I sat on the old sofa on the screened-in back porch. It was still raining, but in a gentle murmur now. Reflected streetlights from out front turned the rain into a silver veil against the night. I stared through the veil at the darkened hull of Pete’s empty house next door.

CHAPTER THREE

Days passed before I finally forced myself to enter Pete’s house. I kept hoping an unknown heir or somebody would show up. No one did, of course. That left me to go through his things. Surely he had prepared a will bequeathing his estate to an old veterans’ home or something. His house couldn’t just set there abandoned until the weeds grew up and the neighborhood started rocking out the windows.

It was like entering the shell of a ghost. My breathing became the house breathing. Slightest whispers of sound magnified themselves and echoed. Funny how one day there could be life and noise and spirit, the next day echoes and nothing else. I should have gotten used to that in Vietnam, but no one ever really gets that used to it.

I was at that age when men start asking themselves what comes afterward. What did come afterward? Anything?

I hurriedly collected papers and pictures and anything else that might offer a clue to someone in Pete’s past, someone other than the Vietnamese in the picture and me, and carried the boxes next door to my house to go through. They sat unopened stacked in a corner of my kitchen. Not that I was too busy to start on them. I didn’t play golf or anything—golf was such a stupid lawyers’ game—and almost everyone Elizabeth and I had socialized with was either dead or in retirement homes or something. I simply procrastinated, reluctant to start digging in the boxes and into Pete’s past. It would be a little like going through someone else’s diary or files. So I watched the soaps. I puttered around in the back yard. Every time I looked up toward the fence, Pete wasn’t there.

The hearse attendants had wrenched Mhai’s framed picture from Pete’s corpse and propped it against the wall in his Florida Room. She was over there in the dark all by herself. I was a sentimental old fool, but I went over anyhow and brought her to my house. I hung the portrait on my Florida Room wall, where I wasted so much time with TV cable reruns of Gunsmoke and Bonanza. That didn’t work. I put her in the kitchen, then in the living room where I spent little time. No matter where I put her, her eyes seemed to follow me wherever I went. They say the Mona Lisa’s eyes are like that.

“What is it you want to tell me about Pete and you?” I asked her.

It’s another sign of old age when you start talking to pictures and other inanimate objects.

Or to yourself.

Having Mhai in my house made me uneasy, like I might be soiling Elizabeth’s memory by living with another woman. But I couldn’t bear to lock her in a closet. She was beautiful. We looked at each other, as old friends will. We were old friends, having lived next door to each other for more than twenty years. Old friends—but her name was the only thing I really knew about her, other than the fact that she seemed hauntingly familiar from the first day I met her. As the years had passed, however, I became unsure of whether I recognized her or whether I merely grew so familiar with her image in the portrait that I thought I knew her. Not that it mattered.

Mhai was from a long time ago. Of a different life that had lost much of its reality and survived only in the nightmares and lingering guilt of veterans.

I always thought Pete would tell me about her some day. He never had. Now he never would.

Pete was several years older than me and he had seen some shit in his lifetime. We were both military retreads, much older than the average grunts by the time Vietnam blazed up. Pete had seen action in both World War II and Korea, while I turned draft age only as the Big One ended. I didn’t go to Korea, although I was in the career army at the time. Both of us were Mustangs, having worked our way up through the enlisted ranks before being commissioned officers. I always thought I was the oldest second lieutenant platoon leader in Vietnam.

Pete and I, we understood each other. We had been there, done that, collected the medals. We could talk about Vietnam. You couldn’t talk about Vietnam to guys who had never been there. We would start out jawing over the back yard fence, which soon led to beers in Pete’s Florida Room. My doctor at the Veterans Admin Hospital advised me to lay off alcohol. So had Pete’s. But fuck ’em both very much, My Elizabeth had died of the Big C five years ago. Pete was divorced three or four times before Vietnam, no children that he knew of, and then never remarried after Vietnam. I always suspected it had something to do with Mhai.

Pete’s Florida Room was almost like a shrine. Half the floor by the outer wall had been converted into a goldfish pond surrounded by polished river stone. A little waterfall kept the water circulated. The wall opposite it was painted navy blue, upon which Pete displayed all his U.S. Navy SEAL memorabilia—framed medals and awards; carved wooden eagles and golden tridents; t-shirts; a navy commander’s cap with gold braid; photographs of SEAL teams diving and training and at war; more snapshots of his Lien Doc Nguoi Nhai, the South Vietnamese Frogmen he trained and led in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

The remaining wall opposite the door and screened-in windows loomed startlingly white and displayed a single item—the enlarged black-and-white framed portrait of Mhai. It hung there until the day Pete, dying, dragged it down so her face would be the last thing he saw.

“What’s her name?” I asked the first time he admitted me to her presence.

“Mhai.” The way he said it precluded further questioning.

I stood staring at her, thinking that she looked familiar, searching my memory for the recollection, finally concluding that Vietnamese women often seemed familiar to those of us who had been there.

Pete had spoken of Mhai only one other time during our long friendship. One beery afternoon he stood in front of the picture for a long time.

“I will never forgive myself, Pollack,” he said. “I don’t think God will either.”

“We’ve all done things,” I said. “Especially in Vietnam.”

I thought of that different day and let out a breath so filled with pain that Pete turned sharply to look at me. My voice caught in my throat.

“We’ve all done things,” I croaked.

Pete waited.

“We haven’t all done what I done,” he said finally, with the same catch in his throat. I waited.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I asked anyhow. “What? What have you done?” But I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Couldn’t tell me anymore than I could tell him about the different day.

Pete’s blue eyes faded year by year. Red veins spread beneath the skin of his broken and mangled nose. His face with its tracings of wrinkles and scars assumed the texture of a pumpkin left too long bleaching in the sun. One nasty scar tugged up the left corner of his mouth and lent him a perpetual sad, sad smile.

His secret, perhaps, and Mhai’s secret were hidden inside the boxes still unopened in my kitchen.

After a certain age, your prostrate starts waking you in the middle of the night. Some nights I had to get up two or three times to empty my bladder. Then it was hard to go back to sleep. I wandered through the living room toward the kitchen for a swig of orange juice, which sometimes helped me to sleep, switching on lights as I went. Mhai’s eyes followed me; I hesitated in front of her picture.

“What is it you’re trying to tell me?”

Like she could really talk, Shaking my head, I ambled on into the kitchen and to the frig. My eyes happened to light on the boxes. For the first time I felt a stirring of curiosity. I staved it off. It was the middle of the night. I drank straight from the orange juice carton. My eyes moved back to the boxes, almost involuntarily.

What the hell. I was already awake. If I went back to bed, I would do nothing but toss and turn the rest of the night anyhow. Restlessness often produced the nightmare. I pulled the first box up to the table, opened it, and began sorting through yellowed letters, expired insurance policies with no living beneficiaries, ancient car registrations, military documents, old black-and-white photographs of ex-wives and navy buddies... Things old men have collected going through a lifetime. I kept stuff like that myself.

I found a couple of snapshots of Mhai, one of them with Pete in it. She looked more familiar than ever. I recognized Saigon’s Tu Do Street in the background. Pete wore field camouflage and his SEAL’s black beret. Mhai wore a Nancy Sinatra outfit with miniskirt and boots. It surprised me that she was almost as tall as Pete. Not that Pete was exceptionally tall, but she was still tall for a Vietnamese. Most of the gook women I had seen outside the gates of 9^th Infantry Division headquarters at Dong Tam were scrawny little bitches with short legs and no tits.

The other snapshot showed Mhai sitting in a U.S. Navy-gray quarter-ton Jeep in front of a Catholic church. I thought I recognized the church too, but couldn’t immediately place it. Mhai wore black peasant pajamas and a closed, suspicious expression. She seemed to be glaring defiantly at whoever took her picture. Her hands were bound in her lap.

By dawn, my slight stirrings of curiosity had flamed into a full attack, a virus. It was like, suddenly, I had been assigned a mission: uncover the story behind the framed woman Pete kept so reverently on his wall and the secret of why God would never forgive him.

Pete’s current telephone and address books contained nothing more promising than the numbers of plumbers, the local VFW and the like. I put aside a brittle address book with the ink faded almost brown. Old names and addresses. I got up and fixed breakfast, ate, showered, and then started calling. Marking off the numbers one by one as the respondents said they had never heard of Pete Brauer. Most people didn’t retain the same telephone number for two and three decades.

Disappointment mounting, I was almost through the book when I came to a name heavily underlined, as though it carried particular significance. Lump Adkins. In San Diego. I vaguely recalled Pete having spoken of a “Lump” who was commander of a Riverine Patrol element operating with Pete’s Viet Frogmen on the My Tho River out of the navy patrol base at Dong Tam. Pete and I fought in the same AO, area of operations, during the same period of time, but neither of us could recall ever having actually met.

I dialed Lump’s number. What luck if I found someone who had served with Pete. A graveled voice finally answered, “Yeah?”

“Lieutenant Commander Adkins?”

“Depends on who the fuck wants to know.”

The telephone receiver trembled in my hand. I almost hung up without saying anything. It was like I was taking a step into time where maybe I shouldn’t be stepping. I always pretended I had finally checked out of Vietnam emotionally; I hadn’t. None of us vets had. Maybe we never would.

“Lieutenant Commander Adkins, I have some bad news about an old shipmate.”

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