Resilience Read Free Page B

like metal in the sun
,
    And lips too warm for lies.
    I always saw us, gay and good
,
    High honored in the town.
    Now I am grown to womanhood.…
    I have the silly gown.

CHAPTER 3
1965
    y father was wearing his greens, a foresty olive uniform with a sewn-down belt on the jacket. Like the music I loved, it was a throwback. In the Navy, only aviators wore the uniform. I loved the feel of it, and because it didn't wrinkle or stain like his dress whites, I could hug him hard and feel him. And this day, an early-fall day in 1965, I needed to touch him. I was sixteen years old and he was going to Vietnam. On the day he was to leave, he stood near the end of the low bleachers on the visitors' side of the Chofu High School football field, watching me cheer in my first game as a cheerleader.
    And then his duffle bags were in the car, where my mother, my brother, and my sister waited for him. He would say good-bye to me at halftime, and they would drive him to Tachikawa Air Base, and he would fly to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam. The rest of us would go home to our house at CampZama, Japan, and wait until his tour of duty was over or until he was injured or until a chaplain knocked on our door and told us he had been killed. Then we could go back to the States, with him or without him. I was lucky; a year later, we went home with him.
    He had been to war before—once, in World War II before he and my mother met, and again, in Korea when I was a youngster. I was in elementary school when he was a reconnaissance pilot during the Cold War, when his plane was shot at, likely by North Korean MiG fighter planes in a conflict a bit unreal for a nine-year-old. War was what the base children played to fill a summer—boys against girls—and the cold war cost some of those children their parents, but as real as the images are to me even today of the memorial services for lost pilots and crews, the real costs of that war were an abstraction.
    But the Vietnam War wasn't an abstraction to me. We had no television in Japan, where Dad was stationed before Vietnam, but the ways we did get news—the
Stars and Stripes
military newspaper and Armed Forces Radio—were blanketed in this war. No detail was too small for the most interested of audiences. The base on which we lived was the homebase for a military hospital nearby to which the Army first brought wounded soldiers from Vietnam, and we would see them at the hospital and, sometimes as they readied to return to war, on base. A quiet, handsome young man, not much older than I, maneuvering in a wheelchair, his one remaining leg in a cast. The war. The bandaged fellow walking with him, with features too large for his face and raw meaty scars across his neck, who never stopped talking. The war. The boy across the table who looked a little like my lab partner in chemistry but who could not look you in the eye. Rows of beds, and a seemingly endless line of casualties, most of whom looked like my brother, my friends.
    We would see the wounded, at the Depot, the hospital at Sagami-Ono where the most physically able would sit with a teenage volunteer, or in my case a teenage cheerleader, intended to be a moment of normalcy in a life turned upside down. They might have talked to some of my classmates about what happened to them in the war, what they saw, but when I would see them across the table at the hospital, they all talked about the same thing: going home. Even if they knew they would be headed back to combat, all they wanted to talk about washome. And the home they talked about was the home they left—left when they had two legs, left without shrapnel scars across their chest and neck, left before the images of war that would scar the places where the doctors couldn't reach. That's the home they craved. The one before.
    Men like my father have been going off to war for all of recorded time. And all of them have come back from war changed some, and some have come back almost different men. In