The Reason You're Alive

  Hank raked his fingers through the little hair he has left on top. He should have shaved his head ten years ago, but that would make him look like his army vet father, and his European wife wouldn’t want that. She’d rather have everyone talk behind Hank’s back, laughing the whole time at the few long strands of hair he’s clinging to.

  Then Hank said, “What if you had died in surgery and we never got to say good-bye?”

  There were girly-man tears in his eyes, and he was blinking more than a sweet little actress trying to win a golden trophy. No doubt he was thinking about his mother again.

  “I’ll know when I’m gonna die,” I told him. “Everyone who survived the Vietnam jungle is well acquainted with Death. I know that motherfucker better than you know yourself.”

  “This isn’t time for your superstitions,” my son said, because he didn’t know goddamn anything.

  His biggest opponents in life were the foreign she-devil he chose to sleep with and the heart-attack-inducing civilian stress he created for himself. Hank’s never really had to confront anything too challenging. Like most Americans today, he had been afforded the luxury of naïveté. His life had never been on the line. He never had to wipe his face clean of his friends’ blood and guts. Never had a Vietnamese anatomy lesson. Never tried to scoop up his buddy’s steaming hot insides off the jungle floor and make them into a person again.

  You’d think he’d thank veterans like me for that gift of naïveté, but you’d be wrong. Not even on November 11. Instead, he voted against a man who actually survived the Hanoi Hilton. The boy I raised from birth campaigned and voted for a man named Barack Hussein Obama. Hank celebrated like he had single-handedly won a war when the liberals took over the White House. McCain never had a prayer.

  3.

  It’s hard to talk about war with people who haven’t seen real action. You don’t understand. You will never understand. And so I can’t tell you everything. But if you listen the right way, you might just learn a thing or two anyway.

  My father served in World War II under Patton. Stormed Normandy. When I was little, I used to ask him about his war experience, hoping for epic stories full of gunfire, tanks, and Nazi-killing glory. When I was a kid, he only ever told me two tales. Neither had anything to do with death or violence.

  The first was about stumbling onto an abandoned champagne warehouse outside Paris after Europe had been liberated. He and his buddies were given an hour to drink their fill, and so they did, spraying each other with endless bottles of France’s finest bubbles, “more than the average American could buy with an entire year’s salary.”

  The second story my father told me was about his being run over by a US jeep in the middle of the night. He was too tired to dig his foxhole deep enough, and consequently a jeep ran over his leg while he was sleeping, fracturing his shinbone. He was sent to Paris to recover.

  According to the story, he would sneak out of the hospital at night on crutches, find the nearest bar, and try to pass himself off as a famous American singer, not yet big in Europe. The next Frank Sinatra, or something like that.

  “After the war ends, you’ll be hearing my name everywhere,” he lied.

  The French enjoyed his singing so much, a local artist painted my father’s likeness onto the wall of a big Parisian club, or so the legend goes.

  I was maybe ten when I found a German officer’s uniform in our attic—swastika armband and all. There were two bullet holes through the chest and two ruby-black bull’s-eyes of dried blood. Even back then I realized there was only one way you acquired such an artifact. When I asked my father about it, I was wearing the SS Nazi officer hat. On the front of it, an eagle perched on a swastika with its wings spread wide. Underneath that was a skull and crossbones. When I was a kid, I didn’t know any better, so I just put it on my head. I thought it looked pretty badass, which was the fucking point, I guess. Hitler Youth. That Führer knew how to recruit, let me tell you.

  Understandably, in hindsight now, my old man went from calm to wild-eyed in point-five seconds and began striking me on the side of the head with an open hand. The first pop caught me square on the ear, which produced a loud ringing and sent that Nazi cap flying across the room. My old man never hit me with a closed fist, and I never hit Hank with a closed fist either. Not once.

  Outside, my father threw the whole Nazi uniform into an empty oil drum we kept in the backyard for burning trash. He poured a gallon of gasoline on top. But when he lit the match, he hesitated, and it burned itself out between his finger and thumb. He kept lighting matches, but he wouldn’t drop them in. I was watching through my bedroom window. After seven or so matches went out, he finally remembered he had Nazi-killing stones between his thighs and did the deed. I could see his entire body shaking from fifty yards away, silhouetted by the rising flames.

  I didn’t fully understand what I had seen until a decade later, when I caught a Vietnamese peasant smearing chicken blood on VC uniforms, back in the jungle. We all knew this guy and used him often to get information only connected locals would know. These people were so poor any one of them would bring you his own mother’s head for a hundred US dollars. That was like ten million dollars to them.

  We nicknamed this guy Ding-Dong because he would just appear out of thin air, and when we saw him, someone would always yell, “Ding-Dong!” which he liked to repeat with a huge grin on his face.

  In the jungle many of us collected Vietnamese souvenirs. I collected weapons, taking knives and guns off dead gooks. Other guys collected ears or trigger fingers.

  That Indian motherfucker who absolutely hated my guts and swore to kill me—as I said, I’ll talk later about Clayton Fire Bear, whose name I have changed to protect the innocent—used to scalp the Vietcong and wear those scalps on his belt. He had enough so that it looked like a foul miniskirt of hair.

  But there were uniform collectors too. Some US military guys—like priests and mechanics and cooks and some medics—were lucky enough to never leave the base, and therefore never got to kill the enemy. But they wanted their souvenirs too, so they often bought them from Ding-Dong. Only they thought they were buying the real deal, that he had stripped uniforms off dead VC. So when I caught him smearing chicken blood on fake uniforms, I knew I had him. If I told the men to whom he had sold memorabilia, men who had paid good money for VC blood, they would have slit his throat without blinking, and Ding-Dong knew it. We locked eyes in the jungle, and I didn’t have to say I owned him. Every cell in his yellow body knew it.

  I nodded.

  He nodded back.

  And the pact was sworn.

  I’d call in that favor a little later on during my tour.

  But that’s how I came to understand my father’s violent reaction to my finding that Nazi uniform in the attic, and the way he shook as he watched it burn in the old oil drum.

  My old man didn’t pay a Ding-Dong for his Nazi uniform. He did his killing fair and square and stripped his own dead. He couldn’t tell me that when I was a boy. There was no way to explain to a civilian—let alone a child—why he needed to bring that bloody Nazi uniform back across the Atlantic and hide it in his attic. I had to go to war to understand. Only then did I realize what I had unleashed when I found that Kraut uniform in the attic—and why I deserved to be beaten silly for my actions.

  During one of her long bullshit dinner lectures—which my son has many times privately told me I’m forbidden to critique—Hank’s wife once said that in dreams and literature, the attic is a metaphor for the mind and a house is a metaphor for a person. The basement is supposed to be your subconscious. I don’t know about the basement part, but rooting around in my father’s attic is where I first found the key to his darker thoughts.

  I still have the weapons I took off dead gooks. Proudest of a Colt .45, which I used to fire into the engines of enemy vehicles. One shot would stop a truck full of yellow men dead in its tracks. The guns I disassembled and sent home one piece at a time. The geniuses scanning
the mail were too stupid to realize you could send an entire gun home that way. Military intelligence. Oxymoron. The US government didn’t care about knives.

  My civilian son will never understand these things.

  My old man died in a lounge chair a few years back. Ninety-two years old. He was wearing the kelly-green Eagles tracksuit I had bought him, along with his favorite throwback Philadelphia A’s ball cap, which reminded him of his youth when he played semi-pro baseball and the A’s were still in our city. I saw my father through to the other side.

  My father had bought the bullet a few days earlier. Called me up and said he was ready to die.

  I said, “Okay.”

  He said he didn’t want to go to the hospital. He didn’t want any doctors involved, because he knew what liars and thieves they all are.

  “Understood,” I said.

  Then I sat next to him as he died in his favorite chair—a La-Z-Boy recliner. I paid a young, good-looking nurse to drip morphine under the old man’s tongue so he wouldn’t feel too bad as he went.

  When he was still lucid, Father said, “Your son needs you. Your granddaughter needs you. Remember that mission.”

  They weren’t there because they were in Hawaii on vacation and didn’t want to spend the extra cash to fly home early, which tells you a little something about my son, but I understood what my father was saying, so I nodded.

  Then I added the old man’s World War II dog tags to my lucky Vietnam dog tags, rubber-banding the four of them together and then threading my silver chain through all four holes. I showed the old man.

  He nodded.

  I tucked them into my shirt.

  He closed his eyes.

  When the good-looking nurse began posing the million-dollar question with her eyes, I nodded again, which meant more morphine. Legal murder. Only no one will say it. It’s supposed to be for the pain, but really you just help the dying overdose out of mercy. We made the decision without words. The little blonde was smart. Had murdered her share of old people already, and I admired her professionalism. If she had said the words, asked if we should kill my father, I’m not sure I would have been able to go through with what we both knew was the right thing to do. But she only asked with her eyes, which was classy and made the nodding easier. Helped me do my duty.

  The old man whispered “Eve, Eve, Eve” for a while when he was morphine high. Barely audible. Eve was my mother’s name. She died of a stroke several years before.

  When the deed was done, I transferred my father’s gold watch from his wrist to mine as the little blonde called the boys from the crematorium.

  Two big guys finally showed up. One black. One white. The black guy had a panther tattooed on his neck. The white dude was pierced just about everywhere. His face looked like a fucking pincushion. Once they had my father on the stretcher and under the white sheet, I said, “Are you two Philadelphia sports fans?”

  “Hell yeah!” the white one said.

  The black guy just nodded enthusiastically.

  “You like the Eagles, then?”

  “Bleed green,” the black guy said.

  “Let me tell you something,” I said, putting a finger in each of their faces. “The old man goes into the fire wearing the tracksuit and the hat. I catch either of you wearing my father’s clothes, and I’ll put a fucking blade through your esophagus and watch you choke on your own blood. Understood?”

  I pulled out my military-issue switchblade I got off this Iraq and Afghanistan war vet I met at the VA. He was a true American hero, by the way. Three tours. Gave his legs for his country. He’s got prosthetics now. Completes goddamn marathons on those things, and could still kick your two-legged ass in five seconds flat.

  But the knife he gave me, you stick the handle between the target’s ribs and hit the button. A spring-loaded blade pops out and shoots into the heart, killing instantly. Imagine what it could do to a throat.

  I hit the button.

  The blade shot up into the air between us.

  The white one said, “Yo, man,” and then started talking about how people shit themselves when they die, which was supposed to prove he wouldn’t steal my father’s kelly-green Eagles tracksuit. As if this kid didn’t have access to a washing machine.

  I told him I didn’t give a fuck about all that. “My father goes into the fire, as is.”

  “Got it,” the spade said, and when I looked into his eyes, I knew he did. You can tell a lot by looking into a man’s eyes. I liked this black dude. He was honest. He understood the importance of my father being cremated in his favorite outfit. He was gonna do the job right, I could tell, so I let him and the other clown take away my old man’s corpse.

  The next day I called my father at 6:30 a.m., like I had done for the past four decades, to discuss the day’s newspaper headlines and the sorry state of the world over coffee.

  I had momentarily forgotten my father was dead.

  I remembered just as soon as his answering machine picked up. His voice was the same as always. He sounded welcoming and at ease and a little excited that someone had called.

  “Leave a message at the beep!” my dead father said.

  I didn’t say anything on the tape, but I called back several times, just to hear the old man’s voice. It was a strange thing to do, and it was hard to reconcile the fact that we had killed him with morphine the day before with the fact that his voice was so alive on the machine. I kept calling back just to hear it, over and over again. I couldn’t stop.

  Around ten, I went to his place and disconnected the machine. I threw it away just so I wouldn’t be tempted to play the message again. I had his dog tags. I had his watch. There wasn’t anything else I wanted, so I started stuffing trash bags, most of which were snatched up by the black ladies who worked at his retirement home. I have no idea what they did with all of my father’s junk. I didn’t care.

  In my father’s wallet I found three pictures.

  A tight-lipped black-and-white head shot of his best friend from high school, George Esher, who parachuted out of a plane back in World War II and was never seen again.

  A grainy picture of me on my wedding day. I’m in a dark-green tuxedo, wearing a huge velvet bow tie. Jessica’s standing next to me, wearing a white dress and holding a bouquet of light-blue flowers. Hank was in her belly. But I don’t want to talk about Jessica right now. I’ll talk about Jessica later.

  The third picture is my son, Hank, when he was playing Little League. Maybe ten years old. He’s holding a wooden bat and wearing a navy cap and uniform. It’s supposed to look like an official baseball card. The bat is resting on Hank’s shoulder because he wasn’t even strong enough to hold it up in the air for the time it took to snap a photo.

  Your son and granddaughter need you, I heard my father echo once again from beyond the grave, and I knew it was true.

  4.

  June 6 was my father’s favorite, favorite day of the year. After I got back from Vietnam, the old man opened up a little more about his wartime experience. Soldiers can talk to soldiers. D-day was his big day. The only thing he felt he did right in World War II. He lost a lot of time over there, and he got very emotional about it. But my father liked to recite General Eisenhower’s D-day message:

  Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.

  My old man knew the whole speech by heart. I think he had a drinking problem in World War II. I know he felt he had gotten men killed in an effort to secure booze. He never told me the whole story, but that’s why he never drank once he came home. Not even a drop of alcohol. He was sober on D-day.

  Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

  In the early eighties, I took my father back to the beach he stormed. Th
e 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.