Trudging through Vietnam’s mysteries

Thursday, February 19, 1998

Trudging through Vietnam’s mysteries

WAR: Tangible artifact brings war home to a child’s
imagination

There are some artifacts that hang in the most unusual places,
and throw shadows on the unlikeliest of innocents. There are words
that are never uttered for fear of explanation and there are no
explanations for a very elite conglomeration of events that
permeated the ’70s. There were no words offered to me, so at 10
years old I had woven my own images of Vietnam from the threads of
documentaries on PBS, M.A.S.H. (even though it was set in Korea) on
Channel 11 and scraps from my father. These things all helped to
explain the war, but at 10 there was more room for contextualizing
with a visual aid. My vehicle for understanding hung on a nail in
the garage, dark and heavy.

It must have been 1986 when I noticed them. One afternoon,
strangely void of one the WASP-y after-school activities designed
for blossoming young ladies, I went out into the garage determined
to find something new to play with. This cemetery for hobbies,
fashion and tools held spiders, dust and mystery. On the left side,
next to the never-used red Peugeot racing bike, a box of National
Geographics, and a pair of cranberry New Balance running shoes,
hung the objects of my fixation. Pendulous black leather combat
boots swollen with valleys of creases. They looked too heavy to be
suspended on a nail by the thin laces that had been knotted
together at the ends. The first time I saw them I thought of Beetle
Bailey cartoons and the punk rockers I’d seen in front of the high
school. The next thing I thought was, "these things lived through
Vietnam."

I sat down in a stupor about three feet away from them, avoiding
the puddles of Volvo grease and the rest of my sanctioned
little-kid universe. Spellbound by the evidence, I accidentally and
immediately gave birth to a ritual that I kept up for years. To
this day I don’t know if it started because I was a sensitive kid
with a vivid imagination or just a young dramatic determined to
feel the tragedies of the world. Either way, there’s no denying
that these boots forced me to feel things. I would look at them for
about an hour, starting off with images of gore, blown-up villages,
grotesque injuries, clips I’d seen on documentaries and still
photos from books secretly stationed on my father’s night table. A
10-year-old’s media montage of war. The next step was the audio. I
would create the sounds the boots had made on different firmament.
The slurping they would do in a swamp, the crushing and swishing
through dry bush, the thud on the platform of a helicopter. I made
a movie of my own, letting the images and the sounds merge into a
fantastical ghastly opera. The first time I did it I remember
getting up and gingerly turning one of them over, half expecting
the sole to have clumps of dirt and blood and hair stuck to it,
relieved at the tic-tac-toe of dried beige soil. It looked mundane,
like the stuff in my backyard. I let go and tried to keep my
distance, still wondering exactly where the soil was from.

The next part of my ceremony was the worst, because I let the
tangible boots go, and I began to let leased but legitimate misery
in. I began mourning for people I’d never met or harmed. I was
allowed to be sad in my secret garage. I imagined all the families
dissipated in the blasts, all the kids like me and my little
brother, all the grandmas (and on and on and on until I imagined
how it felt to lose everything I’d ever known). When the anxiety
had nearly peaked, and I couldn’t think of anything else one could
lose, I would hit the crescendo and mourn the living – my
soft-smiled father and all of the heavy black history he had gained
but could not hang in the garage.

That was 12 years ago, and I still don’t understand everything
about it (the war, the silence, my need to meditate on those damn
boots). Maybe I was just a weird kid. But I can’t help wondering if
other kids had the feelings I had growing up. I never asked. It was
not something discussed in my assigned circles of adults or peers.
When I got a bit older, my father told me more about what he did,
what he saw, what can never be understood by those who weren’t
there. Every year he would give additional increments of
information and I would understand a little more. In his clearest
recollections there is no jingoistic war-whoop of kick-ass gleaming
in his eye, there is only the aching hollowness of a man robbed.
Held at gunpoint by the comic-book heroes, society templates for
masculinity, matinee idols, and political mish-mash that left us
with the functioning silent wounded. In his clearest moments his
eyes explain that he holds the atrocities close and will always
have his vision obstructed by the vapors of innate mourning.

Now that I can discuss it, I’m not sure how much good it will
do. The truth is, I still don’t understand . I want to know how
these men came home, got married, started families and careers
after a tour or two. Then again, I suppose one doesn’t have any
other choice. I know of people who have fathers that served in
Vietnam (but I don’t know any of them who talk about). What
happened in their homes? Was there a tacit avoidance concerning the
subject of where Dad was in 1969? Did they discuss it without
emotion, were their Dads were proud and preachy? Miserable? Both?
Were they workaholics liable to snap or were they stoned? I wonder
how other children imagined it – the war, that is ; I wonder if
they asked, if they thought about it, if remains classified family
information.

The boots still hang, floating in functional obsolescence in a
Southern California garage. I haven’t done my meditation in years
simply because it is no longer an exercise in imagination because
when he began to talk about it, the Technicolor tragedy I designed
at 10 turned into a fluffy construction of one dimensional images.
I didn’t know war until I came face to face with it. You see, in
the garage, I never put anyone in the boots. Now they are
surrounded by a new pile of junk, some Buddy Holly records, a box
of paper towels from the Price club, bottled water and a lawn
chair. Still impossibly suspended, insouciant and hanging on the
nail on the wall.