When
my high school history teacher assigned each of us to interview someone who
served in Viet Nam, I could feel the tension in my shoulders mounting. The assignment would not be hard. At least six of my uncles served
in Viet Nam—blossoming into manhood in this far away jungle. At the time finding someone to
interview was less of a concern than the memories of being harangued by an
elderly deacon with detailed stories of digging latrines in Yellowstone Park
when we covered the Great Depression. Somehow I felt this assignment would end
similarly.
I
chose to interview my Uncle James.
One of three of my mother’s five brothers to fight in Viet Nam, he was
for many reasons the easiest choice for me. He and my mother’s love for him were a constant of my
childhood. He came to Texas from
his new home in North Philly like a regular whirlwind of love and activity and
masculinity. His visits to us, for
my siblings and I, were extended days of joy even when sadness brought him
home. If I had to endure being
regaled with times long gone by my teenage mind’s estimation, enduring it with
him would make it easier. At the
time I did not consider whether my ease was a cause of dis-ease for him. Asking him to share a time little
discussed in my family whose history is only recorded in the communal retelling
of my mother and her siblings gave me little hesitation, though now I
appreciate the need—for me and them—to pause before entering the pain of others.
At the time, I was not aware that this
would be the first, of many, times my intellectual pursuits would require me to
record life put in the balance by the state decisions. Today, most of the lives in balance are
only known to me by the pages of court documents or news articles, but I am all
too aware that these early immersions in my family’s legends makes them
familiar to even my most objective scholarly eye. At the time, I could not know that my Uncle’s stories would
be life lessons in power and knowledge.
Yet, they are. At the time,
I was young and had little time for old men’s stories. At the time, I did not have my own war
to protest. At the time, I did not
know that he would die too young from the factory dye that perpetually tinted
his fingers and nails. At the time
I did not know that hard work could kill.
At the time I did not know anything. I only knew what I was told. Find someone who was in Viet Nam and interview them. I chose my Uncle James.
I
cannot remember the exact questions I asked. Even now as I comb through my memory, I cannot tell
you any of the particulars. How
long he was there. Exactly where
in the country he was. What was
his rank? Who took care of my Aunt
Ella and my Cousin Michelle while he was gone? Why he, a man who was married with a child, was drafted in
the first place? What was in those lost letters he wrote my mother that always
grieved at their mention?
Were the ghosts that haunted him for more than a decade after his return
a specific spook or a more general poltergeist?
I
only remember two stories, but so vividly that they rerun through my mind like
a late night movie only partially viewed after interrupted sleep. The names and colors are muted, but the
overwhelming impression lingers.
Like a found snapshot, what happened immediately before and after are
obscured in comparison to the events of that one moment. If I had not been a student of politics
maybe these simple stories of a young man away from home and fighting for
someone else’s rights would not have lingered. What follows are the snapshot of Viet Nam my Uncle gave me
that day obscured by time—time from the happening to his telling me to my
re-telling now. The first is a
story of being found and the other is a story of not being lost.
To
appreciate the first story of him, I must first say a little about us. I have often joked that my fanaticism
for movies about the mafia is because they remind me of my own family, minus the violence. What resonates with me is the cemented
nature of the relationships among those who bind themselves one to another. If you are in the family, your membership obliges you to the collective above all
other relationships. There is the
sense among the members that the hands of la
famiglia can reach you at any time and from anywhere. There is no escape. It has always seemed that my family
followed a similar, but more loving and caring, code.
We
were a close-knit clan who had little need for outsiders. For the bulk of my life, the majority
of my family lived within miles, if not minutes or steps, of one another. The cartography of our homes was also a
study of our history. Although by
the time I was born most everyone lived in the city, all of our houses were
just off the road that led directly to the town where my mother was born and
where her family had lived since before emancipation. We were tied to each other physically and
emotionally. As a child, I felt
safe under their watch and always within seconds of their grasps. In the first of my uncle’s stories, I
learned the extent of that reach.
On
his way to Viet Nam, as I remember it, my Uncle James was stationed in
Hawaii. His time in Hawaii was not
completely like that of South Pacific
fame filled with song and dance, but it was similarly marked by racial
prejudice. Of the people I have
met who have lived in or visited this paradise in the Pacific, my Uncle James
is the only person to have left with the sincere belief that is was not
beautiful. For him, it was a
staging ground for war with beaches and palm trees. This was the first step to a place where he could die and
leave his wife and young child in a worse situation than they were at the
time.
He
spent a lot of his free time in his bunk. Thinking is what I think he said he
did most. As a teen, I had no
imaginings of what those thoughts must have been. My uncle, like my mother and her other siblings, had grown
up much under his own tutelage after the death of their mother. Though known for his smarts, he
meandered through school. His meandering
led him to my great aunt and uncle—Ruth and I.G.—in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, he met his wife,
fathered my cousin, and opened a small restaurant in North Philly. Then he was
drafted. I now feel strongly he
must have wondered about the set of circumstances that landed him in a metal
military bunk on an island in the Pacific awaiting a trip to Viet Nam. I am sure he did not deconstruct the
ideological views at that particular point in the Cold War that saw this small
former French Colony as the lynchpin in preventing the world from falling into
the hands of communists, though he may have. It is my family who has taught me that knowledge and
education are not necessarily equivalents. I am sure he understood the effects of race that led him, a poor
black man, to stand in rifled opposition to his Vietnamese counterpart. I know he thought of his wife and young
daughter. He thought of my mom
because he wrote her letters. In
that bunk, he pondered his universe and others in ways my mind is just maturing
enough to imagine.
On
one of those thoughtful afternoons with his eyes closed, he sensed a
presence. He opened his eyes. Above him, smiling ear-to-ear, was his
brother Alex. Alex, two years his
junior, left Texas on a direct path to the U.S. military, with no detours in
the economic promised land of the North.
By the time he left the service, he would be a soldier, a marine, and
finally and longest, a sailor. The
sea was his calling. He was a
Seabee--the nickname for the Naval construction battalion. On my last visit to his home in
California just up the road from Port Hueneme where the Seabees are based, the
first thing he told me was to go to the back yard. In the backyard under the orange tree leaning against the
fence was a huge sign 15 feet wide and 5 feet high that read, U.S. Naval Base
Subic Bay Philippines. I turned to
see my Uncle with the smile I am sure he gave his brother that day in Hawaii.
I have never been to Subic Bay but I
know it because it is where my Uncle Alex met my Aunt Lilly. They would live there for much of their
early married-life at this naval facility on the coast of the island of Luzon
in the province of Zimbales. Zimbales
is the starred capitol of my mental map of the Philippines because of the
collection of people who with my Aunt have reconstructed their hometown in
Southern California mostly out of love and longing for origins. It is the place where my cousin,
their son, Jimmy would be deported for complicated governmental definitions of
family that said he was not really one of us. Jimmy’s Philippine birth made him
too much of a threat to remain in a post-September 11th America. I
turned again to the sign trying to imagine the feats necessary to get the sign,
put it on a ship, remove it from the ship, get it off the base and then put it
in his back yard. I asked my uncle
how and still smiling, he said he had no idea. I looked at my uncle and his sign bearing the name of a
place he loves and where his son now lives again. In that moment, I knew he was
a man whose love could move things.
I thought of his brother, my Uncle James, for whom my son is named and whose
recent death had shaken my family at its foundation and I knew he was also a
man whose love could also find things.
My
uncle—the sailor—found his brother—the soldier—on an army base in the
Pacific. In Uncle James’ version
of the story, Alex—like most Texans—told everyone within hearing distance about
the mighty state from which he haled and his home town. There were others like these brothers—black
men from small southern towns fighting again for a democracy they did not know
in the United States—who would find each other and form new Georgias, Alabamas
and South Carolinas in foreign lands.
One man told another who knew of a guy who was from a small town in
Texas that sounded like the one someone said in a conversation. This chain of information was only one
manifestation of the links between these two men. They were able to spend the
most time together since they had left Texas as boys looking for manhood. Because they are men and men in my
family—a particularly breed of man I have long observed—I know they did not
express their concern for themselves and the other. Nor did they acknowledge the deep and abiding love they
shared. But I know now that
sometimes the most loving act can be physical presence: This is an act they
would perform again and again. Criss-crossing this continent until illness and
death kept them still. They
happened across each other’s paths several times in Southeast Asia. They would
meet again only to depart for their separate battles. They would find, but never lose, each other through their
tours in war and life.
(The above post and the next to come were published in an essay collection on Black in Texas)
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