Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [29]
And there were extraordinary things, too, such as the 1964 Olympics. There was a lottery on base for tickets, but tickets could also be purchased in Tokyo, so nearly everyone went to one event or more. My dad and Jay walked into a USA basketball game by simply following the Soviet team into the arena. Benny Graeff and Dan Doherty were mistaken for athletes on the New Zealand team by the gate attendant, misled by the Zs on their letter jackets, and they enjoyed the Olympics from prime athletes-only seats. Tina Morgan was down near the finish line when Bob Hayes won the gold in the one hundred meters. Barbara Bradford made her way to a chair on the field of the track and field events. When an official tried to chase her off, Don Schollander, the swimming sensation, told the official she could stay, she was his sister. (Yes, she is very pretty.) And I was with my dad trying to buy tickets in the lobby of the Tokyo Hilton when my father did his typical bellowing “Hey! Great to see you,” and reached his hand out to a muscular older man. Dad pulled him toward us when their hands met. “Jesse,” he said, in that intimate way he had of talking to everyone, “I want to introduce you to my daughter.” Did he know absolutely everyone? I wondered. “Mary Beth, this is Jesse Owens.” The great American Olympic star who taught Hitler that the black man could compete. It was an extraordinary time.
My junior year I was a cheerleader. My sister, Nancy, had tried out for junior varsity and I had tried out for varsity cheerleading on the same day, and my mother sat home praying, both or neither, both or neither. It was both. And I was cheering at the Chofu v. Zama football game the day my father left for Vietnam. A year’s tour of duty. I said goodbye to him as halftime started and cried all the way through the second half. We lost the game—we didn’t win a game that season—and the Chofu fans thought I was the worst sport they had ever seen.
I had never been afraid before, never worried, even when there had been reason to worry about Dad. But this was different, this was war. Many of the wounded were coming to the military hospital near us, so it was a war we saw up close. Even though we got no music from the States, even though the magazines and movies came late, we did get news about Vietnam. In fact, we got it constantly over Armed Forces Radio and in the Stars and Stripes. We didn’t know anything about the Smothers Brothers, but we knew about Prime Minister Ky.
My mother was worried, too, and she did something then I had never seen her do—she pulled herself in. She piddled in the house, she wrote in her journals, she read constantly, but she didn’t answer the telephone. Her busy life engaged in her community, to which we had become accustomed over the years, was over. She was just waiting, waiting for Dad to come home. Everything was Vietnam. When the news of the war came on the radio, all conversation stopped. When Mother had the chance, she invited an injured soldier—we didn’t even know him—who had been sent to Japan to recuperate before returning to war, to spend Thanksgiving with us. And when Dad would get leave, even a day, the world would stop. If it was just a day, we would drive to Tokyo and meet him there. Oddly, I don’t think war changed my father as much as worrying about war changed my mother. When I campaigned in 2004, I would often say what I knew to be true about the families of soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan: they could not listen to the news, and they could not stop listening to the news. It was the paradox that made the waiting unbearable. And there was no escape, no relief. Not then, not now.
Dad lived in the Hotel Rex in Saigon, and while he was there, it was bombed nearly nightly. We would hear it had been bombed before