There's a Man With a Gun Over There (19 page)

Once in a while, correspondents Dan Rather and Marvin Kalb put their fingers to the earphones connected to the antennas, bent their heads, and listened, as if receiving instructions from some higher plane, perhaps from the booth where Walter Cronkite, that avuncular Oz in the kingdom of CBS News, sat, watching the proceedings below. Perhaps they were getting word about the frenzied confrontations between the police and the student demonstrators outside.

On Wednesday night, August 28th, Walter Cronkite hurriedly interrupts Dan Rather.

“Dan, we have to cut over to Ed Bradley, outside on Michigan Avenue.”

The screen fills with gray, blurry images.

“Walter, it's quite a melee out here, with the Chicago police confronting protesters,” Ed says, ducking down when something flies past the camera.

The picture is out of focus, as if the cameraman is part of the struggle on the streets. We hear heavy breathing and curses, the thud of nightsticks into bodies, bursts of what sound like gunfire, but the lighting is dim, making the battle something from a hardly seen nightmare. The camera keeps moving around, looking for an image to settle on.

“Is someone shooting?” a bouffant-haired woman in an A-line skirt asks, clutching her purse to her bosom. She's at the edge of the camera shot and nervous as a bird.

“This is Chicago. Chicago for Christ's sake,” a voice from somewhere says.

Maybe most frightening is the undigested quality of the film. We're used to television summarizing things after they happen—not puzzling over scenes as they occur.

And, look, there—is it possible?—stopping to pose for the camera, my God, it's Grimes Poznik. He's blowing “Charge!” on his trumpet, as if signaling that now the real chaos of the sixties is underway. Protesters wearing high school football helmets and carrying baseball bats pass the camera in a dark blur. Cops appear, looking back and forth, many of them wearing white helmets.

“What's going on?” my mother asks.

Ed Bradley is coughing. The shots were tear-gas canisters being launched into the crowds of demonstrators.

“Walter, it's chaos out here on Michigan Avenue. It looks more like Vietnam than middle America.”

“What's going on?” my mother asks again, her cigarette halfway to her mouth.

“We're about talked out,” Roger Mudd says to Walter and to America the last night of the convention.

Commentator Eric Sevareid nods. “Yes, Walter, we don't know what else to say.”

“We thought about leaving,” Walter Cronkite says. “These thugs make it hard to tell America's story . . .”

Thugs? Thugs in America?

How could that be? It must be the war protesters, right? They're the cause of this trouble, not these soldiers in their brown shirts.

Esquire
magazine hired French novelist Jean Genet, Beat memoirist William Burroughs, and all-around crazy man Terry Southern to cover the Democratic convention.

Southern picked up this observation when he noticed Genet staring at the dashboard of the Ford they were riding in: “What can be in the mind of someone who names an automobile Galaxie?”

I'm reading this quotation now, decades after Terry Southern wrote it down. I think, as I read those long-ago words, of how information can rhyme. I now know (as Terry Southern perhaps didn't) that the overwrought egotism, which put the name Galaxie on an ordinary automobile, took place in the time when none other than Robert McNamara was an executive of the Ford Motor Company.

Mr. McNamara is, of course, one of the chief architects of the war in Vietnam.

My first car—my beloved 1961 Ford convertible with the smoky Mileage Maker Six engine and the doors that filled up with water every time it rained—was a Galaxie. I had been living in McNamara's world for years and didn't know it. The Galaxie, in fact, was introduced in 1959, the year Buddy Holly died.

Ah, the lovely years of my youth were just another chapter in the Book of War.

What I didn't know, what Jean Genet doesn't know, is that Robert McNamara is a broken man in 1968. The data he collects add up to one unmistakable total: the war in Vietnam can't be won by the Americans.

The day after the Democratic convention ended, I went up to the bathroom where my father had sat shitting black, cancerous blood.

I took off my shirt, studied my back in the mirror, and thought about carving FUCK YOU there. I realized that I would either have to write backward in the reversed image the wall mirror gave me or use a second mirror to guide my hand. It was quite confusing.

I decided to hold a hand mirror in my left hand to check the work of my right hand in the medicine-cabinet mirror. But it was hard going. In the double mirrors, while the letters were in their proper order, everything was confused: up seemed to be down, and left appeared to be right, out was in, and in was out. I kept making mistakes and washed them off, rubbing hard with a brush to get the ink off my skin. My back turned gray from the ink and raw from all the washing.

When I finally had a fairly passable version of FUCK YOU inked on my back, I got a paring knife from the kitchen just to try a cut. I figured healed scars that read FUCK YOU might be even more dramatic than the pus-filled version. I was just drawing blood when I realized that I had no idea if the FUCK YOU I was about to carve was up or down as you actually saw it without the mirrors.

“Oh my God,” my mother said when I showed her my back. She began sobbing—big, heaving sobs. “What are you doing? What's happening? What's going on? Everything's getting so strange.”

30.

O
h, it was hide and seek for me. Running and running: running as fast as I could to get away. Vi-et-nam. Vi-et-nam. Vi-et-nam. Those three awful syllables. In my brain I was running, running, running. No one could help me, not my dear, gone dad, not my dear, sweet pudgy mother. No one, oh, no one, no.

I think I ran for years and years until it all caught up with me.

By the early 2000s, I had such prosperity: the BMW; the children in private schools; the perfect yuppie life; and there I was in Washington, DC, visiting an old friend, drinking Pinot Grigio at his mansion in Georgetown and spending the night at the Sheraton near the White House, right where presidents got their hair cut.

I have everything, and the next morning—Sunday—I take a cab to the Washington National Cathedral for Easter services and there is Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor doing one of the readings and all of us look happy and educated and prosperous and I'm in the cathedral bathroom changing into running gear and putting my dress clothes in a backpack and then jogging down Massachusetts Avenue past the Naval Observatory where the vice president lives.

Lovely, lovely the spring day. It's me and mansions and Al Gore and Sandra Day O'Connor. Lovely, lovely the air as I go running, running, running, just as I have two or three times a week since 1968, and then ahead of me is a line of people walking between two ropes on a sidewalk in a park and people are laughing and talking and suddenly I realize I'm in the line to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and people are getting quieter and quieter and I don't know what to do except move along though I don't want to be here and it's kind of like the way I went into the army and then there in the black granite is the first name I see and then the second and the third. Dale R. Buis, the first GI dead in Vietnam, followed by Chester Melvin Ovnard, except I later learn that Chester's name is misspelled on the wall, that it should be Chester Melvin Ovnand, and then I think they can't even get the names right and you and I and all the others are wading deeper and deeper into the dead and it's Maurice Flournoy and Alfons Bankowski and then they're adding up and I remember the box scores on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite and the United States supposedly winning the World Series of War and I'm walking deeper and deeper into the names of the dead. Frederick Garside and Ralph Magee and Glenn Matteson and why, I wonder, am I here and when will this stop and a homeless man wearing a wool blanket—exactly the kind of blanket we had in the military—is pointing at men and saying, “You. You. You're a brother, right? You're my brother aren't you?” and then he's pointing at me, as if some secret thread from the back of the tapestry connects us to each other, “You. You. You're a veteran, right?” and I'm nodding yes and I'm shaking my head no and I'm walking deeper and deeper into the names of the dead. Leslie Sampson and Edgar Weitkamp Jr. and Oscar Weston Jr. and I can see my face reflected in the polished black granite among the names and the homeless veteran pointing at me and there is Mr. Niederman and the pregnant woman and we're all there in the vast reflected land of the dead, us and them, us and them, reflected back and forth.

31.

I
got back to Maple Street in the fall of 1968 a few weeks before my draft physical.

Now that going to Canada and carving FUCK YOU no longer seemed like good options, I read through AR 40-501 again. I remembered what Arnie told me—cutting off part of my finger was the easiest way to go.

“Though remember,” Arnie had warned me, “one joint's not enough. You have to cut off two.”