Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [27]
The Carpenter household of Mary’s youth was not locally famous for its sanity. To wit, people never asked her father why so many years after the war a black flag still hung in all seasons from the pole in front of his house. They didn’t ask because they knew why it was there. Black flag of remembrance, to honor those missing in action and prisoners of war. Mary’s mother often wished Russell would make the gesture of removing it, if only because she believed he might find it therapeutic. The countries themselves had reached diplomatic and economic accords, and Vietnam, she’d heard on the news, had allowed American officials to help identify what servicemen’s remains could be found and repatriated, though those remains were but corpseless dogtags in some instances. She dared not suggest that if these countries, which had so hated each other that they’d decided to go to war in the first place, could now see their way clear to making peace, wouldn’t Russell be smart to try to do the same? He’d tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about. Tell her she didn’t know what it was like to lose three brothers in the same year in the same war. Perry at Khe Sahn. Nick somewhere north that spring, as their parents had been informed, succumbing by all accounts courageously under monsoon rains in a filthy prison. Clifford who had come home in body only.
Russell himself had been a frustrated 4-F patriot grounded at home because some military doctor pronounced him unfit for duty on account of his arrhythmia. —Irregular heartbeat, for godsakes. It’s what’s in a man’s heart makes him a good soldier, not whether it beats like some freaking clock. You want a clock? Go to a clockmaker. Yet given his brothers’ fates, the wonder was why Russ still regretted that he never got the chance to fight.
Perry—Bravo Company, 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion—was among the first to go down in the stunning barrage of shelling that caught the marines off guard in an infamous moment of bad timing, February 1968. Overseeing the building of bunkers out of sandbags for recon, he took some searing shrapnel along with half of his men who didn’t return home alive, either. Perry at least had some story attached to his death. The words Khe Sahn were, like the term Tet Offensive, recognizable to many condolent neighbors, who learned them from battlefield reports that flooded family rooms in endless nightly cathode streams the first months of that pivotal, luckless year.
Nick’s death was probably worse, as deaths went. Slower, and frustratingly mysterious. Nick had no such story. His remains were not released, and the intelligence regarding his demise from natural causes while held as prisoner of war was sketchy. Not having an official story was like not having lived or died.
Unlike Perry and mad Cliff, poor Nick was never repatriated, and this bothered Mary’s father more than anything under God’s sun. Russell loved his brothers, however conjecturally and distantly and even hatefully, and so, as Russ answered whenever he was asked, he would continue to display that POW/MIA flag against the day when the government—theirs, ours, anybody’s—could attach a believable story to the capture, internment, and death of his middle brother. Their mother and father had died without knowing. It seemed a reasonable goal.
Russell and Rebecca Carpenter’s children grew up with the flag flying beside their front door, and to them it was as much a part of the architecture of the house as its windows, battenboard facades, and tin roof. Mary’s uncles were still, in different ways, missing in action, was what it meant. Over in the cemetery, two had their names, dates, and In Memoriam carved into marble tablets, but only one was there in the ground. Since neither Mary nor her siblings could remember which of their dad’s brothers had been killed in action and which died a prisoner of war,