Loon - Jack McLean [95]
He did mention you to me several times and told me what a good friend you were. I’m sure he admired you as much as you did him.
We have only the fondest and loving memories of Sid. He was an inspiration to us, his parents, as well as to others. We could not have asked for a finer son.
We hope all is well with you and that you are now back to the routine of civilian life again.
Thanks again for taking the time to write. I know how difficult it must have been for you.
We wish you the best of luck in the New Year.
Sincerely,
Mrs. S. MacLeod
EPILOGUE
MY TRANSITION INTO ACADEMIC LIFE WAS NEARLY seamless. I had a number of classmates from Andover who were now juniors and were able to give me a good base of support and guidance where appropriate. (Stay away from Econ 201, whatever you do.)
I lived at home for the first semester, so I was able to study with few distractions. I quietly slid back into family life as well. Activity around the Brookline household returned to what I knew as normal. There was little, if any, talk about the previous year. By November, I had without fanfare or ceremony taken down the map of Vietnam that had hung on the downstairs bathroom wall.
In the late afternoon when I got home from classes, Barby and Mom would be sitting in the parlor having their daily “Tea and Beav,” that is, watching Leave It to Beaver on TV while having afternoon tea. Sometimes when Mom picked up the mail from under the mail slot in the vestibule, she would quietly sing to herself the refrain, “Oh, dear. No mail from John today.”
To me these were mere words. To Barby and, of course, Mom, they were echoes back to a year of awful afternoons and wrenching weeklong silences cut by the relief—the enormous relief on those days when a letter came in—of knowing that I had at least been well five days before. I have no earthly idea what that must have been like for the three of them back in Brookline and can no more imagine their experience than they could mine. To them, the clang of the vestibule mail slot was akin to a sniper’s single rifle shot.
Every day.
By June, I had finished a successful freshman year, moved onto campus, and felt the strange relief that came from knowing that every boy that I had served with in Vietnam was now either safely home or dead.
On a raw late March New England day three and a half years later, a thin manila envelope addressed to me arrived through the vestibule mail slot in Brookline. The return address was the Department of the Navy in Washington, D.C. My mother picked it up along with the other mail, sorted out what applied to her, and put the rest in the gold tray on the front hall table. I would come by, perhaps, over the weekend, for a home-cooked meal and a break from my studies.
It was spring term of my senior year at Harvard University. This time the thin envelope contained good news. On March 29, 1972, my six-year obligation (two on active duty and four in the inactive reserves) was complete. I was honorably discharged, at the rank of corporal, from the United States Marine Corps.
In the meantime, I had quietly morphed into one of those Columbia University types that had evoked such visceral reactions from my Charlie Company buddies years earlier.
To the world I now appeared to be just another “long-haired, privileged little shit-fuck draft-dodging motherfucker.”
Except for the draft-dodging part, of course.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book emerged from more than one hundred letters home that I wrote during my two years in the United States Marine Corps from 1966 to 1968. My mother saved the letters and often encouraged me to “do something with them.” Thirty-five years later, my second wife, Karen, discovered the letters, as deeply buried among my possessions as my Vietnam War experience was buried inside of me. Karen echoed my mother’s earlier encouragement.
I began writing.
Thank you, Karen, from all of us.
Through fellow author, marine, and Vietnam veteran Bob Timberg, I met my agent, Flip Brophy of Sterling Lord