In the early eighties, I took my father back to the beach he stormed. The people of Normandy treated him like a hero. That’s the only time I ever saw my father cry, in a little restaurant over there. The owner and head chef came out and thanked my father for his service. Everyone there stood up and applauded. It was a good moment. Maybe the best thing I ever did, taking him back to see the land he helped liberate from the fucking Nazis.
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!
My father lost his watch storming Normandy. That was a little safe detail he’d tell civilians. Slid off somehow as he was making his landing. His father had given him the watch before he left for war as a sort of good-luck piece. The last time my old man saw his father’s watch was on the boat that took him across the English Channel.
And so on the beach in Normandy, when his back was turned, I laid down a gold Rolex in the sand and said, “I think I found your watch!”
Father turned around fast, and the expression on his face was beautiful. He looked like a little kid who’s heard the crack of his bat hitting the baseball, and somehow he knows he’s just smacked his first home run.
“Eve, look!” he said to my mother. “I found my watch!”
The watch I bought him was the most expensive gift he had ever received from anyone, but he didn’t even care about the monetary value. He wanted to stage photos of himself pretending to be shocked and then celebrating finding his watch, almost forty years after he miraculously survived a thick swarm of Nazi bullets. It was a good piece of theater. The happiest I ever saw my father. Best thing I ever did, taking him on that trip.
That night in the hotel, I heard a knock on my door around midnight.
I had been reading books about World War II so my father and I could have educated conversations. I envied my old man: he fought in a war that made sense afterward. I remember I was reading about Patton. That man was quotable. I was thinking about this fact when I heard the knock: “You’re never beaten until you admit it.”
I put on a robe and answered the door. My father was standing there, wearing pajamas and the gold Rolex. There were tears in his eyes. He didn’t have to say anything—if you’re battle-tested and you’re with other battle-tested men, you never do. He reached out and put his rough, weathered hand on my shoulder. He nodded, and I nodded back. Mission accomplished.
My father loved seeing the people he liberated. Me, personally, I don’t like the people my war tried to liberate.
My good buddy, who was over there in Vietnam when I was over there—who’s now a multimillionaire many times over—decided to go back, planned the whole trip, had the visas, hotel rooms, flights, everything else. He was just pushing me to go with him, go with him, go with him.
I was like, I can’t, Frank; I can’t. You don’t understand. It’s too emotional. Can’t do it.
I never did go back, but Frank did. He loved it. He went all over on his return—Hanoi, Saigon, even into Cambodia to see the temples. But he was in a different situation than I was. He was company commander and had a construction crew over there, so he spent pretty much the whole tour building hospitals and schools and roads and stuff like that. What he did was positive. And he stayed in Nha Trang, a very nice French resort on the coast.
“Frank, you don’t understand,” I said. “When I was in Vietnam, I didn’t stay in a hotel. I stayed in a jungle. I slept in trees. Ate canned food and snakes. Spent all my days killing people. What I wanna go back for? I got no good memories. You have a lot of good memories. I got no good memories. I want nothing to do with those people, or that place.”
Plus, there was the memory of the bad shit I was ordered to do to that big Indian motherfucker, Clayton Fire Bear, but I’ll explain all that later.
Regardless, I don’t have a D-day.
Nowhere to visit.
5.
The second time my son, Hank, visited me in the hospital, he was a little more hospitable, so I asked him if he might bring my granddaughter for a visit. Like I said before, Ella and I have an understanding. But Hank said she was in Amsterdam with her bitch mother.
“When are they coming back?” I asked, which is when my son began crying again. I’ve never met a man who cries more than my son, and it never fails to alarm me. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the jungle. I saw a lot of men like Hank get killed quickly. They’d buy the bullet before they even began their tours, and that would make them a huge fucking liability.
I remember this one time we were assigned an FNG—Fucking New Guy. He looked like he was twelve and could hardly stand up with all his gear on. I don’t even think his balls had dropped yet.
“You guys are going to make sure I don’t die, right?” he said.
And he wasn’t joking. There were tears in his eyes. He had bought the bullet on day fucking one. We all knew he’d be dead within hours, maybe minutes. Once you thought you were going to die, you did, and usually in a hurry. There was no reason to speak with him—he was already gone, and we didn’t want Death to think we had anything to do with this bullet-buying FNG.
I glanced down at his brand-new boots, and they looked about my size. Mine were waterlogged and had a few holes. Fucking rice paddies. Jungle rot. The meat of my feet was literally falling off the bone.
“His boots are mine,” I said to the rest of the men.
“Why are you claiming my boots?” the FNG asked in the voice of a little girl whose beloved cat is about to be put in a sack and drowned in a river.
No one answered him.
Everyone claimed different pieces of his gear as he spun around, looking for eye contact and begging any of us to speak with him. We knew acknowledging him in any way whatsoever was suicide, so we pretended he wasn’t even there.
An hour later, a sniper shot him through his left eye. We returned fire, and no one else was wounded.
Now, why did the gook sniper pick the FNG?
Answer: he didn’t. Death picked. The FNG had bought the bullet with his whimpering and fear. It was obvious. We were protected because we didn’t engage with that sort of behavior.
I put on my new socks and boots and was grateful to be alive, glad that Death and I still had an understanding.
But my crying son, Hank, and I weren’t in the Vietnam jungle; we were in a Jefferson Hospital room in Philadelphia. So I asked what happened with Femke.