Full Circle

  He took another hit from the joint, holding it for a long time, as if preparing for the climax of his story. I was surprised to find that I was anxious for him to finish. Despite the fact that he was sitting in front of me, and therefore alive, part of me feared for his life.

  "I don't really know what happened after that," Dylan said. "I just knew we had to take that hill, so I kept moving forward, shooting everything that got in the way. I heard bullets, but none of them touched me. I felt like some kind of god, like there was this force around me or something. I could see the top of the hill, see guys going for it. I tried to run with them. Then something slashed across my face and I see this VC in front of me. I don't know where he came from. Just a little guy. Couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. He's holding his rifle and screaming at me, jabbing this old bayonet toward me. And I realize he's got this big white patch pinned to the front of his jacket and it says KILL THE AMERICANS . I'm staring at that patch, and he's screaming something I don't understand, and I'm getting madder and madder. And all of this takes maybe a few seconds. Then I aim at that patch and I shoot."

  He stopped there, letting us all imagine the path of his bullet and the inevitable conclusion of its flight. I imagined the body of the Vietnamese soldier as it crumpled to the ground. I saw the spreading stain as his blood poured out. I couldn't help wondering what his name was, how he had come to be a soldier, and what he'd left behind. Dylan saw him differently.

  "We took the hill," he said proudly. "The NVA were all over it, but we cleaned it up. My face was bleeding pretty bad, but I had a medic patch it up until I could get it fixed up. It wasn't until later that I saw this."

  He reached into the pocket of his shirt and drew out a playing card. It was the King of Spades. The card had been cut in half diagonally, the resulting scar on the king's face mirroring the one on Dylan's. Dylan flipped it over in his fingers, looking at it as if it were the world's most precious jewel.

  "Spades represent the guys in the 506th," he said. "Most of us tuck one of these into our helmet bands for good luck. I guess it worked. That gook caught it with his bayonet, but he didn't kill me."

  With the story over, a lot of the audience dispersed to find refreshment or more cheerful conversation. Andy, Ryan, and I stayed. Dylan's story had raised a lot of questions for me, and I wanted to ask him something.

  "How do you feel about all the people protesting the war?" I asked him. "I heard there were more than 250,000 in D.C. last month, and a lot of them were veterans."

  He shook his head. "They don't get it, man. They just don't get it. We're over there getting killed for a reason . We're there so those Commie bastards don't take over. Those Vietnamese, man, they love us. You go anywhere there and they're all, ‘Thank you, Joe! Thank you for helping us!' They think America's the best place in the world. And the soldiers, we're happy to be there. It wasn't until new guys started coming in saying people back home were calling us baby-killers and shit that guys started getting down. If those hippies could hear the little kids tell us how great we are, man, they'd shut the hell up."

  Andy and Ryan were nodding in agreement. I wasn't as convinced, although I had to admit to myself that there was something noble about wanting to help keep Vietnam free. Like most people my age, I'd been raised to see Communism as a mold, something that, once it took hold, spread quickly and invisibly until an entire house was brought down in ruins before you knew it. If we were in Vietnam because we were trying to stop the Communists from taking over, I reasoned, it couldn't be a bad thing, even if it was a terrible thing.

  "I'm going in," Ryan said, and Andy and I looked at him. "Yeah," he said, as if we'd asked him a question. "I got a pretty high number in the lottery, and I just don't think it's fair that I get to stay out while some other guy goes in my place."

  Dylan clapped his brother on the back. "Way to go," he said proudly. "If more guys had your balls, we'd win this thing next week."

  I started to ask something else, but was interrupted by a girl calling out, "Come on, everybody! It's almost midnight." We all got up and joined the others, who were in the den. As if it really were December 31, people had donned party hats and were holding noisemakers in their hands, ready to ring in the new year. From the happy looks on the faces around me, I saw that I wasn't the only one who was glad to have a second chance to start things off right. I pushed the memory of my failed New Year's Eve with Jack and our parents out of my mind, and as the last ten seconds of 1969 began to slip away, I counted them down along with everyone else.

  At one, the room erupted in applause as we welcomed in 1970. I turned and looked for someone to kiss, but everyone around me was already partnered. Andy had his arms around a girl. Someone had given him a party hat, a cheap paper thing covered in glitter and feathers. He had it on his head, trying to hold it there while he kissed the girl. She was laughing, her arms around his neck. Behind them, at the edge of the room, was Dylan. He was staring at the television, no expression on his face. Then he looked up and into my eyes. When he saw me, he held up his hand, the forefinger extended and the thumb raised. He pointed this gun at me and pretended to fire. His mouth opened in a silent "bang" and then he laughed.

  CHAPTER 21

  I was not assigned a new roommate, but nonetheless I was not alone in my room. Jack's presence haunted it more fully than if his flesh and bones had inhabited the space. Every morning I awoke to his empty bed, the desk with no books, and a closet whose hangers rattled accusingly whenever I walked by. Returning after class each day, I still opened the door and half expected to see him there. Twice I woke up, convinced he had called my name, only to find that I'd left the window open and the winter air was rattling the blind.

  School was a welcome distraction. I found that with little effort I could easily lose myself in the multitude of tasks associated with higher education. The taking of notes, studying of texts, and writing of papers were my antidotes to loneliness, and I ingested my daily dose gladly. I looked forward to sitting in class, where I could focus my attention on the instructor and not on my increasingly-dark moods. I frequented Pattee Library so as to avoid being in my room, and made friends with the student workers, who sometimes let me stay in my carrel after hours while they performed their nocturnal duties. I was particularly drawn to one of my new electives. Having enjoyed my philosophy class the previous semester, I'd signed up for another, this time focusing on existentialism. Immersing myself in the writings of Pascal, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and the like, I began to question the value, the nature, the reality of my life. Every action and every human feeling became suspect, until ultimately I was left with one simple question: What was the point of anything?

  My arrival at this most basic conundrum of philosophical reasoning took all of three weeks. With the surety and suppleness of youthful thought, I almost abandoned my previous beliefs overnight (such as they were) and threw in my lot with men who assured me that what I was feeling was simply man's inescapable desire to make sense of the insensible. The teachings of my Eastern muses were forgotten as, in my search for evidence that would lend value to my feelings of hopelessness, I clung to whatever

  "proof" I could unearth that none of it really mattered. And proof was in abundance in the work of these philosophers and those they influenced. I read voraciously. I became enamored of Herman Hesse, Kafka, and especially Jack Kerouac, whose death the prior October I had barely noticed, but whose passing I now mourned deeply. Like so many of my generation, I found in Kerouac a kindred spirit, a relentless questioner on a search for something real and true. His brash, breathless prose got into my blood and made me drunk. After reading On the Road , I was more than half in love with him. In my daydreams I imagined myself traveling alongside him as we sought out the meaning of everything and discovered that it was, in the end, nothing. In short, I traded one Jack for another. This new Jack, handsome, older, and wiser, was both the man I wanted to be and the man I wanted to be with. Unafraid of life, he'
d plunged headlong into it, whereas I remained on the shore, timid and fearful, afraid to put even my toe into the water. Measured against him, I came up short, and this made me doubt myself. How could I become a man—a person—of any worth if I couldn't even embrace life? How could I find who I was when I viewed the world from the safety of my own mind?

  In the tradition of all who worship artists, movie stars, and other idols and long to see them as divine, I ignored the fact that Kerouac's search ultimately led him into a life of chemical dependency, depression, and death from alcoholism. This I attributed to his sensitive nature and inability to live in a world that was ultimately doomed, thereby conveniently and usefully turning him into a martyr and deepening my affection for him. Years later, when it was revealed that Kerouac was, among other things, a closeted homosexual, or at the very least a frustrated bisexual, I would understand more fully our parallel lives and my attraction to him and his work. At 19, I simply saw him as my god. One night toward the end of January, when yet another in what seemed to be an endless series of snowstorms had wrapped the campus in its arms, I sat in a corner of the library reading Sartre's The Words . While the wind howled outside, I made my way through Jean-Paul's autobiography of his first ten years of life. Fewer than fifty pages into it, already I felt myself an intellectual child. At an age when I had been unable even to tie my shoes on my own, Sartre had been making cognitive leaps and bounds, realizing even at five or six that his life was merely a series of events dictated by others, with himself playing a role based on what they needed from him. Reading this, I found myself relating to it, nodding my head in agreement every few pages.

  I read into the night as, one by one, the students around me packed up their books and notepads and headed off to dinner, movies, and friends, until finally I was alone. Then, turning a page, I read something that made me stop. "But when lightning struck and left me blasted," Sartre wrote after describing his epiphany that his life was nothing but a play, and he an actor in it, "I realized that I had a ‘false major role,' that though I had lines to speak and was often on stage, I had no ‘scene of my own.'"

  I reread the sentence again, then again, until it seemed that Sartre was speaking directly to me. In his description I recognized myself as the supporting actor in a drama that had been going on since my birth. While I'd believed myself to be the star of my own life, I now saw that I had been merely working in the shadows of others, first my parents and then Jack. Time and again, I'd become what I thought they wanted me to be, changing myself to fit their requirements. I'd been a son, friend, and lover, playing the parts as best I could. But I had never been entirely me, never been wholly Ned. I shut the book and sat, slightly stunned, as I accepted the truth that I didn't know who I was. I had never, in my entire life, done something solely because it was what I wanted to do. Always I had viewed myself as less important, my wants as less in need of fulfilling as those of others. Suddenly, my feelings made sense. I wasn't mourning the loss of Jack; I was mourning my lack of wholeness. Having seen myself only in terms of him—of us—I'd had a huge part of what I perceived as my self amputated by his desertion. Now, left with only stunted pieces of a soul I'd long neglected, I was slowly dying. I needed to revive myself.

  The question was how. The immediate and obvious answer was to, like Kerouac, take myself on an adventure. But I dismissed that as impractical and, worse, uninteresting. Many of my peers were already following the call of the counterculture, dropping out and going in search of the truth. I'd seen some of the results, and had been less than impressed. I wanted to go in a different direction from them, down a road where I would, for once, be required to expose who I really was as a man, and as a human. I needed a testing ground, free of safety nets and certainties, where my choices would really matter. In the outcome of those choices, I firmly believed, I would finally discover who I was. When the answer came to me, I felt as Sartre had, blasted by lightning. I would go to Vietnam. I knew it was a ridiculous idea, but I knew also that it was what I would do. War had long been a place for young men to prove themselves, and I had much to prove. Also, I had been thinking a lot about the war, and what it meant, trying to see beyond the protests and flag-waving on both sides to what it was really about. If, as Dylan and so many others said, we were in Vietnam to save its people from the threat of Communism, wasn't that a noble thing? And if that was true, wasn't it my duty to aid in the fight? I quickly turned my decision into a noble undertaking, brushing aside all reasonable arguments against its worthiness and latching on to the notion that I was doing something important. If nothing else, I argued, I would see the arguments of the philosophers played out in real life. There would be two sides, each believing itself to be correct, and the outcome would show who was right. Those of us engaged in the war of our own free will would be making choices based on these beliefs, living them on a daily basis instead of sitting in ivory towers debating them in hypothetical terms. Energized and excited more than ever in my life, I gathered up my belongings and ran from the library out into the blizzard. Heedless of the cold, I dashed across campus to Pinchot Hall. I felt the need to tell somebody of my plans, to make them real by giving them voice. My parents were the obvious choice, but also the one I couldn't make. I knew that my mother at least would try to talk me out of it, and although I recognized that it was cowardice on my part, I'd decided not to tell my family until I'd already enlisted. There was Jack, but he, too, was not an option. For one thing, I didn't want him to think that I was doing this because of him. For another, I had only his address at Wesley, and writing a letter would defeat the point of immediate action.

  That left only Andy. Although our relationship had cooled somewhat, at least on my part, I still considered him a friend. I acknowledged, too, that I wanted to impress him, if only to use his admiration as further proof that I was doing the right thing, or perhaps as incentive to not back down should I later have doubts. He would, I knew, be in favor of my decision. I decided that he would be the first to know. Chaz answered the door when I knocked, nodding brusquely and turning back to Andy, who was standing by his bed, stuffing clothes into a bag.

  "And another thing," Chaz said, apparently taking up a conversation I'd interrupted with my visit, "Angela Davis says Vietnam is a war against poor people."

  "Angela Davis is a Communist," said Andy. "Of course she'd be against Vietnam."

  "She's also a professor of philosophy," Chaz countered.

  "Was," said Andy. "Didn't UCLA fire her ass last year when they found out she was a Red?" "Yeah, but they had to rehire her," Chaz said. "They can't get away with trying to hide the truth." "The truth," Andy said, snorting. "What the fuck does Angela Davis know about the truth?" "A lot more than your motherfucking ass does," Chaz shot back.

  "But what the fuck do I care. Go on and get your white ass killed fighting for the man." "What's going on?" I asked.

  Chaz jerked his thumb at Andy. "Stupid motherfucker went and signed up," he told me. "Signed up?" I repeated.

  "For the army," Andy clarified. "I enlisted this afternoon. I'm not just going to sit "

  I stared at him, speechless. I'd come there full of excitement, and now I just felt cold. Andy had trumped me. All I could do was say, "Me, too." "You, too, what?" Andy said as he continued to pack his bag.

  "Enlisted," I said. "I mean, I'm going to. Tomorrow."

  "Yeah?" Andy said. "Cool. You should talk to the guy I talked to. Maybe we can get into basic together." Chaz was shaking his head. "You guys think you're going to be heroes? Is that it? Well, guess what, you're not. You're just going to go fuck up the lives of a bunch of people who don't want you there. Probably end up dead while you're doing it."

  He flopped onto his bed and picked up a book. I stood in the doorway, watching Andy and quickly losing my enthusiasm for the plan that had seemed so perfect only minutes before. He'd reacted to my news with only the slightest enthusiasm, nothing at all like the reception I'd expected. Chaz was simply dismissive. What I'd seen as a gra
nd gesture, the beginning of my life as a person who was finally living for himself, was instead taking on an air of unimportance, as if I'd announced that I would be having spaghetti for dinner.

  Still, I had to go through with it. I'd said out loud that I would. More important, I'd told myself that I would. I couldn't go back now. Not only would I look foolish to Andy and Chaz, I would look foolish to myself. If I didn't enlist, I knew that for the rest of my life I would feel the shame of not following through on the first major decision I'd made on my own.

  "What's the name of the guy you talked to today?" I asked Andy. He reached for a business card, which he handed to me. "Sergeant Vaughan," he said. "Nice guy."

  "Thanks," I said.

  "No problem," Andy said, as if he'd just loaned me a bar of soap or a quarter for the soda machine down the hall. I put the card in the pocket of my jeans and turned to leave.

  "Don't forget to ask if we can be in the same group," Andy reminded me.

  "Right," I said. "I won't."

  I left Andy to his packing and went back to my room, which now seemed colder than ever before. Sitting on my bed, I took out the recruiter's card and looked at it again. Would I really go talk to Sergeant Vaughan in the morning, or would I throw his card away and go about my normal schedule? Earlier in the evening, the choice had been clear. Now, with Andy already a step ahead of me on the path I thought I was blazing, I hesitated. Would the power of my action be diminished by his having gone first? Would I once more be assigning myself to a minor role while he assumed the spotlight? I thought about something Camus had written, and which formed the basis of much of existentialist thought, about how we are the sum of the choices we make. I was facing a choice, and whichever way I decided to go, I would be affecting my sum, either increasing or decreasing it. In the end, I wondered, what would I add up to? And which choice would result in a positive tally? I went to bed still undecided, hoping that I would wake up with an answer.