Will Zeng
Prof. Hoffman
5 Dec. 2016
IDC 1000H
Historical Fiction Project
Away I Waited
Saw the recruiters again. Nine twenty-seven. Third time this week. They always moved in groups of three. They first appeared near the subways and like rats, the slowly crawled out of the sewers, handing out flyers, shouting patriotic propaganda, and beaming guilt at any passersby. They had carved out a niche for themselves on the concrete crags out on 23rd and 6th. That was where I saw them every day as I commuted from deep Queens to class.
But they soon weren’t satisfied with their spot and as the war dragged on for longer than Ike promised and all the volunteers abroad were either disillusioned or lying in ditches, or perhaps both, the recruiter’s smiles melted away at the seams exposing the red within. Had it finally dawned on them that their guilt shaming might be morally wrong? Nope. Because as days passed, months, and years, and their superiors and their superiors breathing down their necks, they moved into the schools.
“A proud institution of higher learning” I read off a brochure somewhere once, of higher learning rather than war. That was partly true, just partly. LBJ couldn’t touch us with his draft but he didn’t need to. Despite our professor’s best efforts, despite the hours my friends, my family, and practically half of New York City spent out on the streets protesting the draft, it not only went through but the recruiters were also granted clearance to move in. They set up camp in the hallways that once served idealistic young men and women with stars in their eyes. They erased those stars and hung a banner covering the entirety of the front hallway, slithering past the corner, wrapping around the hollow pipes, and engulfing the entire hallway in a deep crimson. It divided the college into two halves: One that shouted the virtues of the United States government and the other that didn’t.
Reflected in the recruiter’s eyes and their skinny smiles was a kind of ravenous hunger, like starved wildebeests, eyes that follow you in the night and down a dark corridor. Theirs were the eyes of death and they were looking straight at us. We wearily listened to their inflated stories about the heroic deeds of our soldiers, how they defied all odds, how they pulled best friends, enemies, four-star generals from the back of burning trains into over-loaded Jeeps, and how they freed grateful civilians from a tyrannical communist regime. But somehow it worked. I wanted it to work. Their stories somehow enticed the best of us. It enticed the innocent, the soon-to-be-guilty, the lovers of peace and friendship and faith. The recruiters weren’t completely human and neither was I, not for a long time.
I knew a woman once, and she was hopeful once. I’ve only heard this story through the recollections of others but what I knew was that she was on the same plane as my parents when they immigrated to America. Partly, because they couldn’t afford otherwise, partly because they wanted to see the sights, they boarded a plane that went the long way round. From Minsk to Warsaw and a small detour to Slovakia, then on to Beijing, skipping over Vancouver to touch Seattle and finally to New York City, the metropolis of dreams.
She shared my parent’s fondness of the American Dream, and, I guess, that’s what drew them together but that was also what broke them. She was hopeful once. She loved hot dogs, baseball, and even the stifling noise of the city. She carried a pink duffel bag that she got from a week-old Sears Roebuck catalogue pilfered from a neighbor, a Revlon RC720 hairbrush covered with strands of flaxen hair, a neatly folded picture of her family back east, and in one of her many pockets was a letter from her son, dated 1939. Mrs. Sybyil often rose with the sun and was at her desk before even the first lanes of morning traffic. She often imagined lifting the wisps of smoke that curled and twisted from the exhausts of the cars in front of her, dancing in the morning rays a dance only they knew, and she was reminded of the sunny days back in Slovakia.
In her little crinkled photograph, they stood next to a poplar tree and a path leading to the banks of a lazy river, just a man, his wife and their little boy wrapped around his neck. They were beaming at a photographer and as he took the picture, the lazy river reflected the beams of brilliant white sunshine and whitewashed the sides of the photograph. Or perhaps it was waterlogged. She allowed herself to think about that time, she remembered that not too long after that photograph was taken, the Hungarians came, then the Germans, and then the Soviets came and in all that mess, she kept quiet. Not because she misunderstood the gravity of her situation but because she was the sort of person who’d rather stare forward at the beautiful horizon rising in the distance than at the fires behind that lapped at the cold arms behind her.
The American dream, she used to say, wasn’t without sacrifice. She came here with nothing and spent her first years in America volunteering at local pounds, homeless shelters, she almost had this uncanny knowledge of what you were feeling before you felt it. Her main job was a counselor for addicts, many of whom where former marines, seals, or army men. These were some of the most broken men in society, men who had seen the worst and all they wanted was to cut the cord, little by little.
The last I saw of her was in the fall of ‘65, when she visited my parents. She did not put up any fancy booths nor decorate the walls with blood, but her words rang loudly all the same. She declared that she was going to be a medic on the front lines, deployed as an auxiliary squadron in Saigon. I didn’t understand her reasons why then and I still don’t understand but the reasons why she went can’t be articulated. It’s a feeling you get when your dreams are crushed by brute reality and all she could do is to keep up hope. She told me that there will be a day where the war will end and as long as the sun shines bright and the rivers course through the valleys, life will always return to normal but today is not that day. Today she joins her husband and son. Perhaps she wanted to see the poplar tree again, perhaps she lost faith in us, perhaps she was convinced by blather of the recruiters, or had she finally found something she wanted to fight for. She had bright eyes and a brilliant smile; I couldn’t imagine how the teeth might look in a spider hole in Vietnam.
The day was warm, seasonably warm for the first time that month. Even though I expected it, my heart fluttered and my hands shook. There was no draft letter in my hand, but one in my throat and plenty of indication there would be.
How to break it to my parents? How do I tell them I wouldn’t be spending Christmas with them this year, or next year, depending on how the war goes? How do I tell them that I will have blood on my hands? The American dream isn’t without sacrifice, and even if they might not want our dream, even if there is nothing to fight for, America needs sacrifices. We need veterans to admire, we need those galvanizing and historic stories, we need enemies and martyrs, we need to create the tanks, the AK47s, provide financing for the war. We are slaves of our economic and social gods as much as the Aztecs were to theirs and we both spill blood to appease them.
I could feel it in my stomach—the dread and the pain wrenching through my belly and at least I could feel the pain wrenching my belly but I could not fathom the pain my parents felt. It’s one thing to commit to your resolve but it’s another to be forced to accept another’s. My parents knew, my sisters knew, everyone knew. Even the recruiters seemed to know as the vacated our halls and left it unsettlingly quiet. No one at school seemed to have anything to talk to me about and it was as if a somber cloud settled onto us, a cloud that would soon whisk me off to Vietnam.
Yet I couldn’t blame the recruiters, even with all the pain and the resentment I was feeling, they were not the ones who shoved me to war. It was a series of circumstances that included a woman, her son, and my personal responsibility to my country. It’s not sacrifice if you go into it willingly and with a smile. At least that’s what I think she believed. If you welcome it with open arms, then it can only be a present.
I volunteered for the war on July 7th 1969.
Life went on seemingly unchanged and yet the little things, the way people spoke to me, the way they looked at me with barely concealed pity, the way I saw at myself in the mirror sometimes, the little things I couldn’t control. She said to me that there isn’t anything worth more than life. The sun she said, gave us all life and it was not our right to lose that gift or take anyone else’s. Yet she went to war. Perhaps the recruiters were right: there is that thrill, that exhilaration in war is what we crave. There is a morbid fascination that we have with war but that was not the reason why. There were others whose life depended on my decisions and relied on my M-16 rifle. I looked up.
There was a leaf, the first of many to come, blossoming on the topmost branches of the tree, I remembered telling someone that I would climb, climb higher and higher and hide between the leaves and gnarled branches while playing hide and seek, never getting caught, never coming down until the sun set. The leaf trembled as the wind tried its best to wrest it away but the leaf hung on to its home. I pulled the leaf off.
I did it a favor.
It was going to fall off anyway.
Better sooner than later. And I followed the leaf to war.
