THE PRESENCE OF THE GONE by Peter Nolan Smith

Boston is a four-hour bus ride from New York. My brothers and sisters lived in the southern suburbs of my old hometown. After my return from overseas in September 2011 from my European posting I called several times to arrange visits, but my father’s death in 2010 had disconnected our present paths from the routes of the past.

We are still family and that December my younger sister asked, “Are you coming home for Christmas Eve.”

“I’m working late on the 24th.” I also had to open the safe at the diamond exchange the morning of the 26th and I apologized for my holiday no-show.

“I understand.” Pam was heading to her in-laws in New Haven for the 25th.

We wished each other ‘Merry Christmas’ with love, thinking that we might see each other until some distant date in 2013.

Happily Pam phoned from New Haven on the 26th to announce that her loving daughter and she were arriving at Grand Central Terminal that morning.

“We’re having a ladies day in the city with the various members of my husband’s family, but I could meet you for a drink at the Michael Jordan’s steakhouse after our shopping.” My sister had promised to take her daughter down to Chinatown to purchase cheap knock-off fashion bags and glasses. Sawah was an easy teenager to please.

“That sounds good to me.” My boss Manny wasn’t at work, so we could close early. “I’ll see you then.”

My co-workers were more than amenable to my suggestion of cutting out at 4:30 and we packed away the jewelry in record time. After Hlove and I double-checked the safe and security alarms, we were good to go.

Twenty minutes later I entered the Grand Central Terminal from Vanderbilt Avenue. The elegant train station was bustling with comings and goings of commuters and holiday shoppers. There was few open spaces like it in the world and I glowed in the power and beauty of New York before noticing my sister waving from a table shared with three other women and my niece, who greeted me with a kiss.

I shook hands with the older woman with a pleasant smile
“I’m Ryan’s mom.” She was married to my sister’s husband’s brother. Her son was serving his fourth tour in Afghanistan.

“I’m Ryan’s fiancee.” A pretty girl with long brown hair offered from across the table. “We met in Afghanistan.”

“She worked for intelligence,” Pam said to prevent my asking any questions. Her hair stylist had worked a miracle on her color, then again she was known as Auntie Stunning to her nieces and nephews. I was simply Uncle Bubba. “If she told you what she really did she would have to kill you.”

“I’m not a spook,” Marie protested with a laugh.

“My brother says the same thing.” My sister has joked that I have been in the CIA since graduation from college. “His last job was writer in residence to a British Embassy in Europe.”

“Unofficial position.” Madame l’Ambassador was a long-time friend.

“Definitely a spook.” Another young lady commented from the banquette. “I’m Marines too. Just back from Afghanistan.”

“Happy you could make it.” My sister hugged me with tenderness.

Whatever difficulties separated us during our youth have been buried under the hubris of time. The defense lawyer was my good friend and saved me with a timely loan after Hurricane Sandy. She knew me well and asked, “Care for a glass of wine?”

“A Mer-LOT.” I mimicked my father’s pronunciation of the wine and my sister laughed, “Glad to see that someone is keeping up the tradition.”

“Not only that, but I teach people about the milkman’s and lumberman’s handshakes.”

“Oh, no.” My sister and niece groaned in familial harmony.

My father loved to show children these handshakes on his travels with the Elder Hostel. The tour operators warmed him that parents might think that he was strange. We did the same. He ignored everyone and I demonstrated both to Ryan’s mother.

“Another Smith tradition.”

Their train was leaving in twenty minutes, so we rapidly conversed about our connections and histories. I told them about my petitioning to the Pentagon to get a pension for my anti-war protests in the 60s and my sister mentioned our entering Studio 54 with the legendary wrestler Andre the Giant.

“The greatest athlete of all time.” I liked saying that because it’s true and most people don’t realize how true it was.

“You must have lived a great life?” Marie asked with envy. She was young. Life in the 70s was nothing like today. “I read about those times. They seem like a dream. Everyone and everything was so free, especially the drag queens.”

“Really?” Her comment took me off guard. Maybe she was a spook.

“Yes, there nothing like that now.”

“There was back then.” I told her about Boston’s The Other Side, the trannies of the Meat Market and a transvestite trapeze show on 45th Street. “I think the place was called GG Barnums. I had a friend Dove. She was always trying to get me to go home with her. I refused her each time, even though she looked like a vogue model.”

“Some of them were so beautiful.” Marie cooed, while her future mother-in-law frowned with moderate disapproval. America was changing albeit step by little step.

“Dove was gorgeous and she saved my life once.” I recounted how Dove had stopped a beating at the hands of a New Jersey biker pissed that I had interfered with his roughing up a gay ballet dancer.

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. So many of them are gone like so many of my gay friends.” I think about them often.

“I know what you mean.” Her future sister-in-law was talking about fallen Marines.

“My brother died of AIDS. He comes to me in dreams along with my mother. They visited me at a Cape Cod cottage, then he runs out to a beach filled with all the gone like that movie LONGTIME COMPANION.” The final scene filled the empty beach with the dead and I started crying about the loss of my friends and family. I could feel the gone in the air. They were everywhere.

Pam put her arm around me as did the Marine, who said, “I know, I know.”

I stifled the tears with my palm.

The mother nodded with sympathy. Her son was halfway around the world.

“Thanks.”

“We all have these stories.” Marie grasped my hand. She shared the trauma. “Everything will be better one day.”

“I like to think that.” I wanted the troops back home and a cure for AIDS and to see my kids in Thailand soon, each a simple request complicated by hard times.

My sister signaled for the bill. She paid fast. The train departure was in four minutes. We rushed down the stairs to the platform. They caught the 7.05 to New Haven with a minute to spare. Pam hugged me with my niece joining her embrace.

It was good to be with family and I waved goodbye walking back into the terminal.

No one is really gone as long as we remember that they were here.

Not my brother, my friends, or the fallen Marines and soldiers or the Afghanis lost to decades of war.

We are all here.

Then, now, and later.

Burning A Draft Card Never

After the 1963 assassination of JFK, the United States became more embroiled in the Vietnam civil war.

Support for our involvement was widespread, however according to Wikipedia a twenty-two year-old conscientious objector, Gene Keyes, setting fire to his card on Christmas Day 1964. While the federal government declared the destruction of a draft card a prison able crime. From 1965 to 1973 over 25,000 young men set their draft cards afire.

In 1968 I tried to join the US Marines at 16. My Uncle Jack had served as a combat USMC lieutenant in Korea. The recruiter at Lower Mills, Boston said I was too young to join, but to return the following year when I turned 17. I wasn't interested in fighting the Viet Cong, but getting out of my hometown on the South Shore and away from a Catholic education under the Black Robes.

In May of 1969 I returned as requested. The same recruiter gave me a parental permission slip for a seventeen year-old. My mother, despite being a virulent anti-communist, refused the signature and I was stuck in that town.

In June 1970 I received my draft card and draft lottery number. A very low 96 and the Pentagon had almost a half-million troops in that involvement with no sign of the promised peace. I went to a local college and grew my hair long.

In 1972 then an anti-war hippie I failed Multivariable Calculus in my sophomore year of university. Failing out of college meant loss of my student draft deferment. My Selective Service # was low. 96. An F meant I was Vietnam bound. Professor Remy Marcou took pity. His daughter was my friend and he passed me with a D- on the promise that I drop my math major. Thusly I was spared from the slaughter.

I never burned my draft card, but protested the War as I now protest the current Endless War.I still remember seeing you on the floor outside a BC cafeteria and asking you”What are you doing” Your answer :” I am a dead Vietnamese peasant,sssh” I stepped over you and went to lunch.

I still have it,

ps I left Boston in 1976 never to return, but I named my son Fenway.

APOCALYPSE NOW AND THEN by Peter Nolan Smith

I tried to enlist in the Marines soon after my 16th birthday. My mother wouldn’t sign the papers. The 1968 Tet offensive had dented her belief in the final outcome of the Vietnam Conflict. The dead were airlifted home in coffins. The wounded filled the VA hospitals. Discharged soldiers were portrayed as drug addicted monsters. A neighborhood boy came back from the Far East with nothing more than a thirst for beer.

Dennis Halley had seen action near the DMZ. The Boston Globe had mentioned his heroics during the Tet offensive. My hometown’s John Wayne was dating my next door neighbor. Addy Manzi was the prettiest girl on the South Shore. The three of us had vandalized an abandoned missile base of top of Chickatawbut Hill. The police had arrested me and I never gave up Dennis' or Addy’s name. I considered him a god and told him about my plans to join the Marines, while we were sitting by the Manzi’s swimming pool.

"Why you want to go?" He stared at the stars.

"I want to get out of here." My suburban hometown had three red lights, fifteen churches, and no bars.

“I wouldn’t do that.” Dennis had served with the Army Rangers. He had been decorated with medals and a puckered hole in his arm from shrapnel.

"Why not?" The Marines were proud.

“Marines are taking a lot of casualties. Officers are gung-ho for promotion. One West Point fuck ordered my friend to get some beer. A mine blew up his truck. My man died for warm beer. Viet-Nam is fucked and if you don’t have to go, then don’t go. The only people there are dumb fucks like me and poor white trash and blacks who can’t afford to go to college.”

“What about serving my country?” I believed in the American Way; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“I'm done served this country enough for the both of us. I spent two tours humping around rice fields, burning villages, and shooting at an enemy I couldn’t see. But one of them saw me good enough to shoot me. If I hear you signing up for the jarheads, I’ll kick your ass.” Dennis Halley was 20. He had killed VC. His eyes squinted like he was a stand-in for Clint Eastwood in THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY. His harsh words ran against the Pentagon’s optimism.

"What if I join the Army?"

"If you want to leave this town, then join a carnival or circus."

“Okay.” I wasn’t arguing with my hero.

“Good, now give me some room.” He nodded to Addy. They wanted to be alone. I didn’t have to be told why and wandered across the lawn to my split-level house. It was painted pink.

The strength of his advice changed my life. I became a hippie instead of a Marine. I protested the war. My father considered me a ‘commie’, but he didn’t want me to go to Viet-Nam. Like Dennis said the war was someone else’s fight and I avoided the last years of the war by attending college.

By the time I graduated in 1974 our troop levels were down to 1950 numbers, but more than 50,000 Americans had died in SE Asia and hundreds of thousands more had suffered grievous wounds to body and soul. Few of soldiers spoke about their experiences and those that had not gone wondered whether they missed the glory of war.

Dennis broke up with Addy and moved to California. She and I kissed after my older brother’s wedding. I was too drunk to attempt anything more in my family’s Oldsmobile. I quit my teaching job at South Boston High School in 1976 and relocated to New York. Manhattan was heaven for a young man in his 20s. I had friends. My girlfriend from West Virginia loved me and I worked at Hurrah, a rock disco on West 62nd Street. My days were free and I spent them going to the movies.

Double bills at the St. Mark’s movie house.

STAR WARS at the Whitestone Drive-in.

ALIEN on May 25, 1979 at a Times Square theater.

None was more important than the release of APOCALYPSE NOW on 15 August 1979 at the Ziegfeld Theater, where the sound was state-of-the-art.

Several of my co-workers from Hurrah showed up an hour before noon. I arrived thirty minutes later.

The line stretched around the block. The Ziegfeld was the only theater in New York showing the film, which had won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This was the first day, first screening. None of us had to be anywhere else in the world but here. Whenever someone asked why Anthony, Reese, and I were waiting, they disconnected from their day and bought a ticket. We had orchestra seats.

By 11:45 the show was a sell-out and disappointed film buffs were begging for tickets at any price. No one was selling. The thousand-strong audience filed into the West 54th Street theater with pride and we bullied our way to the center seats.

At noon the lights dimmed to a semi-darkness.

None of us were ready for what came next.

A jungle filled the screen and the repeating whoop of helicopters passing overhead strobed over the sound system.

Dust and fire.

The young boy next to me ducked, as if the rotor blade might slice off his head and then a byzantine strum of a guitar followed by chimes. The predominantly male audience gasped with recognition.

THE END by the Doors.

A man’s face upside down overlapped with carnage.

A hundred matches ignited throughout the theater. Marijuana smoke clouded the air. APOCALYPSE NOW was a time machine back ten years into the past.

153 minutes later I exited into the steamy afternoon with a better understanding about why Dennis Halley was so vehement about my not enlisting.

“Do you think it was really like that?” Reese asked after fending off the next sitting’s questions about the film.

“I really didn’t know, but I wish I had gone."

"To kill people?"

"No, and not to serve my country." I wanted to bear witness to the spectacle of power and glory humbled by determination and I would gladly have risked my life to have the distinction of being a Viet-Nam veteran. Many men of my age felt the same way. We had missed out on the Big Show.

I fired no M-16. I never danced with hookers at a Saigon Bar, but my hair had been shoulder-length in April 1975 and I danced in the streets of Boston with hippie girls. Our side had forced the peace on LBJ, Nixon, the silent majority, and the military. The country turned its back on the War and the aftermath.

Several years ago I flew over Viet-Nam on a flight to the States from Thailand.

The country had looked at peace from eight miles high and I stared down at the mountains thinking about grunts humping 100 pounds backpacks up and down the slopes. It was a long way from America.

Back at work in the diamond exchange I told the security guards about my trip. Andy had served one tour in 1968. Army out of the motor pool. He had had no wish to end up a dead hero.

“I’ve been writing the Pentagon for a pension.”

“For what?” Andy knew my stance of the war. He felt it was a waste too, but also that we had to stop the reds from taking over the world.

“For all the years I protested against the war. Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NVA is gonna win.” The chant had served as a slogan at demonstrations throughout the USA.

“Fuck that. You traitors will get nothing.” Andy spat out these words. The Brooklyn native was right-wing. His 2012 choice for president was the feisty Alaskan Sarah Palin. "We did our part." I was joking with him.

“And you deserve nothing. I landed in Saigon at the beginning of the Tet Offensive. Bullets were smacking into the charter jet and the sergeants yelled at us to take shelter. I spent the first three days in a trench praying for a truce. Mortar rounds landed ten feet from our shelter. I stayed one tour and got the fuck out. I don’t get a pension for it, so why should some long hair peace-nik.”

“Hey, the Feds give money to everyone. Why not me?”

“But you were never in Vietnam?”

“No, but I was in Cambodia.”

“You served in Cambodia?” Andy didn’t figure me for Army and he was right.

“No, I visited Phnom Penh and Laos too.” Both countries were next to Thailand. Thousands of farangs travel to the borders for a visa renewal. I thought about Dennis Halley’s dead friend. He was one of thousands that didn’t come back to the States.

“Did you have cold beer?”

“A luxury. We drank it warm with it 95 in the shade and sweat pouring from every pore."

“Something worth fighting for?” I saluted the retired cop as a fellow veteran. "Not democracy.".

“Hippie scumbag.” He gave the finger.

“Baby-killer.” I didn’t mean nothing by it and neither did Andy.

My fingers split into a vee.

The gesture had many meanings.

Fuck the French to the English archers at Agincourt, since the frogs lopped off prisoners fingers to prevent their return to the killing ranks.

Churchill had transformed the vee into a sign for victory.

I remained true to the 60s.

“Peace.”

“And love.” Andy returned the gesture, for war was a young man’s game made dead serious by the decisions of distant old men and like everyone else who lived through those times we were glad to be sucking air into our lungs.

Here there and everywhere.

Two More

Steven Sutton RIP

Julian C Chase RIP Today The New York Times added Julian C Chase of Maryland and Steven Sutton from Georgia to The Names Of The Dead bringing the total of soldiers killed in Afghanistan to 1976. There is no mention of either man in drudgereport.com, cnn.com, or Fox News. Marine Julian C Chase died in Helmand province, probably on a patrol against the opium growers. A teacher said in the Washington Post, “From very early on, his plan was to go on to the Marines. For him it was just one more step in learning and growing as a whole person.” Steven Sutton was also killed in Helmand province by an IED. Both men will be missed by friends and family. Bring the troops home.