Loon - Jack McLean [90]
It was eight o’clock in the morning.
The early light poured into our house as I dragged my heavy seabag in the back door, completing the final leg of its long journey. Mom made me a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, orange juice, and coffee. The two of us spent the next hour at the dining room table making some small talk but mostly just quietly looking at each other in disbelief.
As my last feeble spasms of energy began to flicker, I pulled my seabag to my side, retrieved several personal items from the top, closed it, and dragged it down the cellar stairs to the far corner of the basement, where it remained untouched for years. I climbed back up to the kitchen, kissed my mother on the cheek, walked up the two flights of stairs to my room, removed my uniform for the last time, and collapsed onto the crisp clean sheets that waited on my gently turned-down bed.
I was asleep before my head hit the downy fluff of the pillows.
The following morning—or perhaps it was later that same day—jet-lagged, culture-shocked, and still exhausted, I took my parents’ big green Plymouth Fury out the gravel driveway and down High Street to navigate the twenty-five miles up Route 93 to Andover. Barby was finishing a six-week course at the Andover summer session. I was going to pick her up.
Every conceivable memory and emotion coursed through my veins during the forty-five-minute drive north. I was disoriented after my sleep but still felt my new life gaining on me with a speed for which I was ill prepared. Memories of other drives up to Andover—the deep depression of a new winter term or the day so long ago when my mother first drove me up from Summit to begin my freshman year—flashed in and out, all overlaid with the unscratchable itch of wondering what Dan Burton was doing at that moment. What hill was Charlie Company on? What time was it on the DMZ?
Had I really actually just been in a war?
A fucking war?
Barby had been the most vulnerable participant in the awful family drama that had unfolded over the past year and was, thereby, the one whose welfare had continually caused me concern. She hid it from me well. Any piece of correspondence from her absolutely made me smile, no matter the heat, the wet, or the horror of the moment.
It had been a long dark year for the three on the home front.
After I returned, I realized that they had all lived under a nine-month cloud at 14 Allerton Street. Each morning, they anxiously checked the New York Times front page for any news of Charlie Company. On June 15, their nerves were jangled when the photograph of our body snatch did in fact make the front page of the Times—above the fold.
Evenings brought the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Vietnam increasingly and predictably became the lead story there as well. Every Thursday, Cronkite would read the weekly body count. Dozens turned to hundreds turned to thousands during 1968. The family’s dinner table talk was always about what they’d heard of the war, reading my old letters aloud, checking the map of Vietnam that was hung in the downstairs bathroom to see exactly where I was. Wondering why I hadn’t written that day.
Barby said later, “It was scary thinking you might be killed, and it put a pall over everything. An unspoken gloom. Sitting in the darkened living room as the projector hummed and we saw slides of you and your buddies and the bunker, et cetera. ‘What do you suppose that is,’ Mom would say to Dad as they tried to decipher the slides without you to give a narrative. It was quite a time.”
And suddenly there I was, turning off Main Street onto Chapel Avenue and the Andover campus. Pulling to a stop, I looked up the familiar path that wound through the tall pines to Henry L. Stimson House. Then I saw Barb walking—and then running—down the path after catching sight of me at the wheel of the family car. It is a sight that will