How Far the Seed: War and Other Rudiments

Ben Quick

The summer before the divorce Al and Kathy Quick load their two boys into the back of the green station wagon and drive up the Rock River to a Fourth of July veterans getaway at a campground owned by a man sympathetic to Vietnam vets. Al at the time is so consumed with his healing process that he and Kathy have not slept in the same bed for months. The marriage, like so many others pairing men who have witnessed and been parties to unspeakable, unshakeable things with good-hearted women who can never quite understand, is dead.

At the retreat, a middle-aged man in a faded olive green Army shirt and stained jungle hat approaches Kathy. He tells her he lives in a halfway house. He asks if she would like to hear a story. He doesn’t wait for an answer, begins telling her of a young Vietnamese boy he encountered one day on afternoon patrol. The boy, gap-toothed and shaking, had walked toward the group of soldiers with a grenade taped to his hand. The man watched with big, frightened eyes as the child’s fingers crept closer and closer to the pin. It was as if he had not quite made up his mind, as if he was still grappling, in his young brain, with the enormity of what was about to happen. “Stop,” the soldier screamed. But the boy merely hesitated, twitched with recognition, and kept moving forward. At last, when he could wait no more, trembling, sweat soaked though his fatigues in long, thin lines, already anticipating the frenzy of pain and guilt, the man opened up his M-16. In the almost unbearable quiet, the raw stillness that grew and draped itself over the afternoon, the soldiers, the thatched roofs of the nearby village, the thin, gray rills of cooking fires, wrapped up in a cloak of the damp and oily smells of the war, he knelt and watched the slow trickle of blood grow from two holes in the boy’s forehead as the child laid down to die in the left rut of the red clay road. “I had no choice,” he chokes, “I had no choice.”

This sort of experience is common among the men in the campground, and so are the hauntings and tremors that take root in the dark spaces of isolation that so many war veterans occupy. The gathering together of these men, the purging of painful stories, the sharing of the kind dehumanizing terror that can only be believed by those who have seen and felt it up close, releases a cathartic energy that can nearly be seen dripping from the heavy branches of the big maples and oak trees that rise above the spread of tents and campers. Demons are named and shed. The wages war extracts from the spirit, the emotional burdens, are lessened by degrees, if only for a few days. Not so the physical.

Men, if they come back from war at all, often come back missing parts. Anyone who has witnessed a Veteran’s Day gathering has seen the limps, the formless pant legs, the stumps, the eye patches. What is striking about this particular congregation of vets is not that men with severed limbs or men crawling with the hard, raised lines of scars outnumber whole men; this is to be expected. What shocks, what causes the eye to stop and grow wide with wonder and bewilderment are the disfigured children. The shear number walking the dirt paths or being pushed in wheelchairs—some with club feet, some with arms like small, pink flippers or shrunken and misshapen legs, some with cerebral palsy—is astounding. As are the stories of the miscarriages. At the end of the night, there is a dance for the veterans and their wives in a cement amphitheatre where a band is playing rock and roll. In the middle of the hard, gray expanse, a one-legged man a few years older than Al and Kathy with rippling, tattooed forceps dances with a supple, dark haired woman. The man holds a crutch in his left hand and looks serious. His thin ponytail swings to the rhythm as he moves with the kind of surety and grace that attracts attention. Soon the dance floor is clear except for him and his partner. He spins; he sidesteps; he twirls the crutch and slams it on the concrete. Nobody moves until he stops. And when, after the song reaches crescendo and falls into the night air, he does finally shift his weight back to the thick wooden rod in his palm and lifts a black t-shirt to wipe the glistening sheet of sweat from his forehead, the scene erupts into applause.

*****

Like many veterans of the marches and battles in the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam, my father doesn’t talk much about his war experience. What bits and pieces I’ve been able to assemble into semi-coherent narratives have come from a scattering of late night talks with my mother and one hazy conversation with my father on a rough-hewn log porch outside the gift shop at the Grand Canyon Lodge in Arizona. In the midst of divorce proceedings with his second wife, he had flown to Salt Lake City, rented a compact car, and driven down to spend a week with me on the North Rim of the canyon, where I was working for the summer. I barely remember the conversation, but I know it had something to do with my father’s Purple Heart and the questions surrounding what happened to the injured friend he carried over his shoulder that unfortunate day so many years ago. I realize now that he almost certainly was seeking me out as a witness, that something in the loss of his marriage had pulled back the flesh from the old wounds and triggered old images he needed to flush out, that under the eaves of that big log building floating between the ponderosa pines and the vast gap of terraced black space, in the cool, dry August air on the edge of the great plateau, over plastic cups filled with ice and liquor, with his first-born son, he was searching for comfort. And I think now that if I had been more attentive to my father’s suffering, if I had simply been able to say, “tell me more; continue,” I could have not only eased the pain my father was lost in, but I could have learned something of the etymology of my own suffering, my own dull angst. But the moment passed into the night, like so many others, with father and son moving thumbs in slow arcs over the lips of cups held between legs. It was not spoken of again.

*****

We load up and drive to the river—my mother, my father, my brother, an aunt, and I—to the slow muddy river that glides by wide and brown, next to the old gothic high school. Along with most of Dixon, we are here for the fireworks. There are blankets laid out on grass, coolers filled with soda pop and string cheese, paper flags, carnival rides. The riverfront carries the mingling odors of cotton candy and dead fish. Children trace their names in the humid air with lit sparklers and cast the thin metal rods aside when the gunpowder is gone. We spread our sheets and sprawl out to wait for the show. My father takes a walk. When the fireworks are over and he still has not returned, we look for him in the darkened crowd of spectators that is scattering toward cars and sidewalks. We look and look for what seems like hours, but cannot find him. We give up and drive home. Hours later, my father barrels into the backyard, confronting my mother with an anger that can’t be explained, as if there is something she should already know, some pact that has been broken, as if they have spoken an oath in dreams.

*****

Eight inches of snow fall on Washington D.C. on the twentieth day of January, 1961, initiating one of the worst traffic jams the nation’s capital has ever seen as John F. Kennedy takes his inaugural vows on a sloppy White House lawn. Up to this point, American involvement in the turmoil of Southeast Asia can best be characterized as secondary, mainly involving the grudging flow of money and arms to the fragile Diem regime in South Vietnam in a half-hearted attempt to fill the vacuum left by France in the wake of its hasty withdrawal from the region after French Foreign Legion troops were soundly defeated by Communist guerillas at Dien Bien Phu, and Vietnam was divided in half. But the American president is young and Irish-Catholic, a suspect combination in mid-century U.S. politics, and is worried that Republicans in Congress will paint him pink if he doesn’t hold the South from the communist guerillas. So he sets out to do so, and to do so with gusto, expanding U.S. military operations in a manner described by Noam Chomsky as a move “from terror to aggression.”

*****

In the fall of 1961 Al Quick is 14 years old, a high school freshman in the small river town of Rock Falls, Illinois. The oldest of five children in a household so poor that charity baskets filled with fruit, nuts, canned turkeys and boxes stuffed with second-hand clothes are all that arrive on Christmas, Al is shy and introverted as he enters adolescence. There is not much love between the parents—Albert and Betty—who married when Betty was just sixteen. Betty has just made a full and improbable recovery from uterine cancer and is waitressing nights at a pizza parlor in order to make enough money to feed the string of children—Al, Barb, Chuck, Mike, and Deb—and their father. She has become the primary breadwinner; she has no choice, as Albert has taken leave from his mill job at Northwestern Steel and Wire while recovering from the sinus infection that has burst into his brain and has left him with a steel plate and enough brain damage that he will, from this point on, seem a bit off kilter.

Although the family is poor and in many ways unhappy, in the eyes of Albert there is still something precious growing within the dirty white walls of the clapboard home on the wrong side of the river town—the athletic prowess of his firstborn son. As he moves through high school, young Al appears to shed his shyness, becomes the star runningback of the high school football team, a ladies man, a fighter. The fights become legendary; brawls involving Al and two of his classmates—Dick Lundquist, a wiry boy from down the block and Dan Kraft, the Illinois state heavyweight wrestling champion— that bring police cars and paddy wagons, drunken fisticuffs that end with teenage boys riding to hospitals on ambulance gurneys and late night visits from Sheriff’s deputies. One such scuffle ends with warrants issued and Al and friends in hiding for days. By the time he is twenty, his nose, which already bears the crock and heft of Scandinavia, is crooked and scarred as well.

In his senior year of high school, Al Quick cuts and weaves his way to all-state honors on the football field. He is recruited by the Big Ten schools, but has grades better suited to small colleges with less stringent academic standards and ends up settling for a football scholarship at Wesleyan College in eastern Missouri. Separated from his family, away from his tight knit group of friends for the first time in his life, lonely, Al sinks back into shyness, neglects his studies, and within a year drinks himself right back home to Rock Falls. In normal times, a young man dropping out of school is not cause for panic. With his country at war and a college deferment the only thing standing between him and a draft card, leaving school becomes frightening. But Al makes it through the next few months without having his number called and in August of 1967 somehow finds himself on the football field of Millikin University—once again, on scholarship. And once again, he drinks himself right back home and onto eligible draft status. This time he isn’t so lucky as the last. In the spring of 1969, after a year spent delivering soda pop to grocery stores and making the nightly rounds at local taverns, Al Quick finds himself on a bus bound for basic training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. A few months later, head shaved and filled with a rudimentary knowledge of war tactics, he boards a commercial flight to the combat zone.

*****

My father is a good man. I can trace this goodness in many ways: the reluctance to put his men in harms way, his decision, upon returning from Vietnam, to enter into a career that centers on helping people, his role in environmental and social justice movements, the tender manner in which he gives of himself to his four-year-old grandson. My mother—from whom he has been divorced for over fifteen years now—tells me stories of the way he cared for my brother and I when we were young children, of how he relished the role of the soft, caring father, of how much time he spent with me, of how, when my parents were students at Southern Illinois University, the nurturing of the children was divided equally between husband and wife, of how my father, long hair streaming behind his unkempt beard and deep blue eyes, could be seen flying through the streets of Carbondale on his second-hand ten-speed, smile on his face, and me in a faded white child seat, helmet nearly obscuring my head, cooing in delight. But hand in hand with this goodness, part of a dual legacy given from father to son, is a certain passivity, an inability to verbalize pain and guilt, a propensity toward internalizing shame, toward keeping secret those aspects of the self that are less than beautiful, not fit for the dinner table.

*****

I am in the living room of the yellow house on Park Street. My mother and six-year-old brother are with me. My father is upstairs. This is around the time of my parent’s splitting off, the time of the great confusion. There is a weight of sadness upon the scene, blurring its edges, obscuring details. This much is clear: My mother putters around, scraping things off the couch with nervous hands, trying her best to project normalcy. And this: there is a great wailing that emanates from the bedroom at the top of the stairs. The tone is both grieved and panicked, lonely and tense. It vibrates through me like tinned steel. I will carry its sound forever.

*****

Counter-insurgency is a long and awkward utterance, a word that depends on the existence of a root word, insurgency, which is defined in Webster’s as, “a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as belligerency.” In the case of Vietnam, the people perpetuating the state of revolt—the insurgents—are a loose but growing number of communist soldiers recently given the tacit approval of the Hanoi government in North Vietnam. They have begun conducting night raids on military posts and villages in the South under the name National Liberation Front, and become known condescendingly to Diem supporters as the Vietcong. In Vietnam, countering the insurgents involves denying the Vietcong and their allies in the countryside and hills the apparatus of survival: food and forest. Before long, the primary method of denial becomes the application of vegetative defoliant to three distinct plant communities; the dense broadleaf vegetation that blankets the Vietnam outback and turns roads and supply routes into ambush zones; the mangroves that line swamps and provide habitat for the catfish and shrimp that are staples of the Vietnamese diet; and the fields of foodstuffs—rice, manioc, sweet potatoes—that an agrarian population such as Vietnam’s relies on to support insurgent fighters and children alike.

*****

The details of the next two years in Al Quick’s life are sketchy at best. This much is true: Al earns sergeant stripes early in his tour of duty. He knows enough about America’s role in Southeast Asia to have formed strong opinions about the war—strong negative opinions. Because of this, and because of a general fear of guns and blood, he often leads his men away from the fighting into hollows and holes in the forest and mangroves where he hopes they will be safe from the killing. He develops a sense of responsibility for the soldiers under his care not unlike that which a big brother—which in fact he is—feels for his younger siblings. The big brother’s solace during his tour comes in the form of care packages sent from Rock Falls by his mother. And the prize in the package that the blonde boy with the crooked nose digs for with hands that are oiled and stained from cleaning M-60 machine guns and digging foxholes is always the same, a clear glass jar striped purple and brown from the inside with the peanut butter and jelly concoction known as Goober Peas.

Al and his men see the orange streamers at night, and hear the report of gunfire, smell the acrid sulfur of the mortars, but usually manage to circumnavigate the worst of the action, manage to survive intact. But a war zone being what it is, sooner or later, if a person spends enough time there, he is going to be shot at. And sooner or later, no matter how hard he tries to avoid the heart of the fighting, the big brother will have to lead his little brothers into harm’s way. And so one night finds Al’s shoulder ripped through by shrapnel from mortar fire, and sees him carry a friend who has been hit in the face and torso over his shoulder in search of medical attention. Screaming, bellowing the calls of war, the unrestrained cries, Al leaves the friend with a medic, never learns the young man’s fate. The shrapnel cannot be completely removed from Al’s shoulder, and to this day, when it shifts and settles, he feels a sharp pain course down his arm and is run through with the memory of that night and the wounded friend.

*****

I entered into this world on a hot, muggy July evening in 1974, the sun just beginning to sink down into the hardwood forest that holds the small town of Morrison, Illinois from miles upon miles of fields of corn, fields that would have been at least six feet tall by then, that would have been ripening with lines and lines of evenly spaced thick yellow ears sheathed in long green leaves. The delivery went without complication in the thick, still air of the white room. There was the usual moaning, the usual frenzy of middle aged female nurses and the calm, older male doctor reaching his latexed hands to cradle my small wet head as it emerged from my mother. There was much crying and celebration, the ceremonial cutting of the umbilical cord by the bewildered father, the grandparents waiting anxiously in the sterile hallway of the old hospital, aunts and uncles, friends. There was also this: although in every other way I fit the profile of the stereotypical bouncing baby boy, although in every other way I was what you might call normal, my left hand, instead of a tiny mass of grasping fingers, was almost round, and at first glance, fingerless. Looking closer, a person could see there were indeed fingers in the flat bell of flesh and bone, but no space between them, and bones were either misshapen or missing. Instead of clutching like a tiny claw at nipples and beards, it flew from side to side like the club on the tail of a prehistoric beast. My grandmother was horrified.

*****

I am walking down Park Street on my way to the yellow house. Since the divorce half my days are spent with my mother in a second floor apartment on Locust, several blocks away. I am supposed to be with her tonight, but some longing on this particular evening has caused me to seek out the old place. Dusk has come and gone, and only a trace of dark blue in the western sky suggests the passing of the late-summer day. As I approach the yard, I notice my father standing on the front porch with a cigarette in his right hand, a Merit Ultralight. I can see the orange glow of cherry grow when he puts the cotton filter to his thin lips and shrink when he takes it away. By the time he finally perceives the sound of my feet moving through the tall grass of a yard that hasn’t been mowed for a month, I am probably thirty feet from the porch. He stops in mid-drag, throws the remaining length of cigarette in the flowerbed, and attempts a frazzled greeting. A line of smoke creeps up from between the lilies, and wisps drift from his mouth as he talks. Still, he doesn’t think I know.

*****

Before 1961 is up, Kennedy sends Dr. James Brown to the newly established United Sates/Vietnamese Combat Development and Test Center (CDTC) in Saigon to explore the effectiveness of a variety of herbicides for use as counter-insurgency tools. The results of Brown’s work are a cluster of compounds that come to be known as the rainbow agents for the colors of the identification bands on barrels of the herbicides. Agents white, purple, and blue will all see use in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but the most intensively employed, by far, is agent orange, a 50/50 mix of the n-butyl esters 2,4 dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4 D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). The origins of agent orange lie in an obscure laboratory at the University of Chicago, where, during World War II, the chairman of the school’s biology department, E.J. Kraus, discovers that direct doses of 2,4 D can kill certain broadleaf vegetation by causing the plants to experience sudden, uncontrolled growth not unlike that of cancer cells in the human body. Kraus, thinking his findings may be of use to the Army, informs the War Department, which initiates testing of its own and finds no use for the hormone before the war ends.

The American military is well funded and ambitious, and experiments with 2,4 D continue through the 1950’s. Late in the decade a suitable mix is found, a mix whose manufacture creates a byproduct called dioxin, a chemical that twenty years later will be acknowledged by the E.P.A. to be “one of the most perplexing and potentially dangerous known to man.”

*****

In the early spring of 1971 Al Quick—Purple Heart pinned to his jungle fatigues—is given an early discharge so that he can see his mother die. The cancer pronounced gone by doctors has never really left her body, has only been idle, in hiding, and has come back with aggression to take her over, has come for good. Several days after Al arrives back in the lazy river town, Betty Quick passes from this world in a Rock Falls hospital room.

Along with the legacy of loss that follows Al back to Midwestern America, along with the images and the guilt, there is something more tangible, something that can be seen and felt, a rash that covers his back, raised hive-like splotches that don’t go away until his firstborn son, still two years from conception, is nearly three. The name for this rash is chloracne; its cause, prolonged exposure to herbicides. Al Quick, grieving for a company of little brothers and for a mother, rashed, bitter at fighting in a war he didn’t believe in, infused with a sense of weary idealism, goes to work at a home for the developmentally disabled tucked in cornfields along Route 30 ten miles east of Rock Falls in the village of Nachusa.

*****

I ran through the first half of my childhood like any other Midwestern boy, playing soccer, baseball, fishing, running around the neighborhood in packs, playing war games in the local woods, sneaking off to the candy store with my younger brother, digging up earthworms in the big garden between rows of tomatoes and hot peppers, watching with delight as aphids and sow bugs crawled over my hands. Although during this time I endured a number of surgeries on my hand in a prolonged attempt to separate fingers, and although I remember being ordered by my doctor to wear a series of uncomfortable brace-like contraptions to bed—sterile smelling and feeling contraptions meant to somehow force the bones in my hand to bend into a theoretically more functional formation—these were happy times for me. Too young to feel any of the selfconsciousness that would later seep into my mind, stubborn and creative enough to circumnavigate any sort of limitations to physical activity my hand could have placed on me, protected still from the harsh judgments of adolescence, I had no idea—at least consciously—that I was different from other children in any way. I climbed trees, played catcher in little league, kept goal for my soccer team, won the sprints in swim meets as a member of the Dixon Dolphins. Still, I have to believe an awareness was growing. I suspect there were innocuous comments from neighborhood boys, partially hidden conversations, questions. I know there were questions. And parents, even kind and well meaning parents, can fumble with answers.

I remember this event well, and I often wonder why, considering the apparent lack of intensity, the absence of any real drama. Perhaps the reason I recall this so often is because of the archetype it seems to represent, the underlying theme, a thread that runs thick through much of my life. I must have been close to ten years old that day my mother and I ambled through the worn automatic door of the old Eagle’s Supermarket and across the chipped green and white checkers of tile. I think we came for only a few items, the only one mattering to me being the ice cream. We were gliding across the tile of the store, headed straight for the open freezers of the dairy section, my mother and I, me in my shorts and t-shirt, she in her gardening clothes. We were moving fast, and were so close to the freezers that I could almost feel the chill, could almost see the dense coating of hoarfrost on their inner chambers, when she looked at me, ran her eyes quickly from my face to my shorts, and asked, with impatience: “Why do you keep your hand in your pocket? Don’t you think people know?” And of course my left hand was stuffed in the pocket of my shorts. By this point, hiding my flaw had become second nature, an act of instinct rather than will.

*****

Nineteen, broke and strung out, I phone my father. I know his wife is on her way home from work, and that there are two pitchers of iced coffee on the second shelf of the fridge in the south Albany flat. A head of fresh arugala in the crisper. I picture goat cheese and a loaf of good bread on the oak table. My father dropping hunks of clean mushrooms in a sweet marinara, wiping hands on a thick blue towel. Candles. While the phone rings, I try to gather my thoughts, the words. I don’t say what I want to say; that last Sunday I swam naked in the Platte, that it was a fine August day to float on the clouds, that the river swung broad and low and braided loose into many soft channels, that the sandbars were warm, that I felt strong, that the ride back toward the lines of the wide Nebraska dusk grew brilliant with rose and amber, that I don’t know where it all went wrong. That I need answers. What I do when he picks up the line is scan the white breath of the cold basement to make sure I am alone and begin to sob. At some point I ask him for help. He answers in a voice so void of color I wonder if he’s heard me.

*****

By the end of 1961, technicians at the CDTC decide the time is right, the testing is complete, and the dispersal methods are sound. On January 13, 1962 three Air Force C- 123s—twin-propellered short-range assault transport planes that look something like whales with wings and are designed so that fuel is stored in the belly to minimize the risk of shoot downs—lift off from Tan Son Nhut airfield in South Vietnam, each loaded down with better than one thousand gallons of agent orange. The planes fly low over the Ca Mau Peninsula, taking hostile fire here and there, finally reaching the prescribed site where their chemical cargo is released in continuous sprays from three sets of thirty-six high-pressure nozzles mounted on internal defoliant dispensers. A mist can be seen settling over the mangroves as the crews of young men complete their mission and turn back toward Tan Son Nhut. Operation Ranch Hand is underway.

Fifteen thousand gallons of herbicide are sprayed over the forests and fields of Vietnam that first year. By 1966, the annual application increases to 2.28 million gallons. In retrospect, the ecological and human consequences of the spraying program will seem catastrophic. Right now, in the thick of an increasingly desperate conflict, with a silent enemy hiding in the bush, the extermination of mangroves and rice crops, the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of forest canopy, and the desertification of land adjacent to supply routes, are embraced as moves toward creating the conditions for winning the war, conditions that seem to be slipping farther and farther away from American military strategists in Washington and Saigon. The kerosene stench of chemical rain that falls on American troops as they slink through the hinterlands in search of Vietcong is seen as a bearable nuisance. The lethality of the dioxin carried by the fog that settles on the farms of South Vietnamese peasants and the convoys of American soldiers, like so many war costs, is a hidden concern, an issue to be dealt with in the future, or not at all.

*****

In the brick halls of the Nachusa Lutheran Home Al Quick meets a like-minded group of idealists: Mike and Cindy Barge, Alex Asafa, Mark and Masha Cunningham, Ken and Sheryl Novak, and a young, bookish woman with long brown hair and eyes as blue as his own. Kathy French, daughter of a small town insurance salesman, fresh from four years of awakening among the peace activists at Shimer College in Mt. Carroll, lives in the basement of an old Victorian home in Grand Detour, a hamlet nestling in the hardwood forest within the great bend of the Rock River. The day they meet, Kathy mentions that her dog has just had puppies, and as it happens, Al is looking for a pet. Less than a year passes before she is pregnant with the couple’s first child.

The rash still covers Al’s back on his wedding day and has not gone on July 22 of 1974 when Kathy gives birth to a boy whose left hand is clubbed and webbed and missing bones. And though he functions perfectly well most of the time, there are occasions when Al becomes frightened or agitated for no apparent reason. The marital problems are surfacing. The slow creep has begun.

*****

By the time I reached adolescence, there was no longer any doubt in my mind as to whether or not I was like other pubescent young men. I was different. I was less than, not quite whole. Instead of attempting to come to terms with what I have come to realize now is a minor glitch in DNA, instead of facing up to my own uniqueness, the shape of my particular hand-print, I tried hard to deny myself, to prove to myself that I was in no way distinctive from any one of the two hundred boys and girls I entered Dixon High School with in 1988. And at least on the surface of things, I succeeded. I joined sports teams, and on those teams—I’m sure this was a conscious act of rebellion—put myself in positions that required the use of both hands to be successful. And I was successful. I wrestled and won matches as a freshman, won four varsity letters as a soccer goalkeeper, brought home trophies and plaques. What’s more, I had awkward sex with teenage girls– a badge of honor for high school boys, something to be bragged about in locker rooms or at parties. I drank beer and smoked pot, grew my hair long, hung out with the right crowd, took a cheerleader to the senior prom. Inside, I was a wreck.

I recall the summer between my junior and senior year and a girl named Krista Farster, younger than me, brown hair, green eyes, slender, carrying always the smell of Elizabeth Taylor Passion. Krista was the first girl I spent more than one or two nights with, and I fell for her hard. Along with my friend Josh and his girlfriend Billy we spent the better part of the summer together. It was a hot summer, hot in the manner that all Midwestern summers are, tense and so thick with warm vapor that even the loosest clothing sticks to skin, and tightest fitting sunglasses slide down noses. That whole summer, when I was in the company of Krista—which was most of the time—I wore long sleeves. I would rush into my bedroom to change clothes each time she came to my house. There was a particular red cotton shirt a friend had loaned to me that I must have worn three times a week. I wore it in the water when we swam in the moonlight at the abandoned rock quarry; I wore it during sex on the gravelly shore; I wore it when to do so must have been agonizing. I thought the sleeves would hide my hand.

And the long sleeved t-shirt was not the only mechanism employed for hiding the truth of who I was. I took to wearing thick goalkeeper’s gloves that kept the shape of their fingers against gravity when I shook hands with players from opposing teams after soccer games (I often wonder if the gloves weren’t the part of the appeal of the position). I would bury both hands—so as not to be completely obvious—deep in the pockets of my letterman’s jacket as I flirted with girls from other schools at soccer games or wrestling meets. I learned to strike a variety of postures that kept my dreaded deformity out of sight; turning to this side or that, sitting down just so. I learned to live in a state of contortion.

*****

On the beach at Cape Mears, father and son. The Oregon coast is a landscape of shifting planes: beach, surf, open ocean, sky, long lines of sloping forest. All different colors. All soft. The planes grow and shrink and bend with cloud cover, wave surge, tide. They are broken only by the sharp forms of occasional basalt horns punching through the face of sea. If a person moves, the planes move with him. And I walk a line of tide leavings: smooth, milky bodies of dead jellyfish, swarming with sand fleas, shards of seashells in various stages of polish and tumble, some as smooth as hidden skin, others rough with rutted patterns, not a one whole, chunks of transparent green sea lettuce, sometimes whole stalks that look like bull whips, broken cleanly at the round base by some underwater torque or gale, pink and mauve claws and torsos of Dungeness and rock crab, and, pasting everything with a delicate, almost eerie thicket of matted gray and white, the fallen feathers of millions of shorebirds—cormorant and gull.

We pose for the camera. I stand barefoot, squint-eyed, smiling, my back to the white lines of low waves rolling on wet sand. I am wearing the black fleece given me by a stepmother that will soon be gone and a faded pair of blue cotton shorts that I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Stiff and somber, eyes hiding under dark glasses, skin shadowed by the rim of his cap, my father seems tired and beaten. An ancient pair of Army binoculars hang from his neck. Left hand buried in the pocket of his jeans, he reaches the fingers of his right hand around my torso, gripping my side, holding me tight. Up close, I can see the bags beneath his eyes, can feel the tense flesh between his shoulders, can taste the Nicorette fling like putty between lip and gum, tongue and tooth. Swollen and stale, but not altogether unpleasant, not necessarily rank, and certainly not strange, is the odor of loss that blankets him.

*****

Operation Ranch Hand is disbanded in 1971 under intense outside pressure stemming from a rising public awareness of the research showing the dangers of dioxin to humans. By this time, one-seventh of Vietnam’s total land area has been sprayed with herbicides; twenty percent of its forest is flattened. Studies will later show that the spray missions flown by the men of Ranch Hand had little or no effect on the path of the war, that the millions of gallons of herbicide dropped on nipa-palm and mangrove, on tropical rain forest, on trails and swamps and roads, on military barracks and rice paddies, saved few American lives. Studies will also show, and are beginning to show even now, that this strange substance held in the orange striped barrels was more dangerous than its handlers realized, and that American military leaders had known this for a long time. Dr. James Clary, the Air Force scientist who helped write the history of Operation Ranch Hand, in a 1988 letter to a Congressman investigating agent orange states: When we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s we were well aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the civilian version, due to the lower cost and the speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned.

*****

The slow creep of matrimonial decay continues to gain momentum. Al Quick is healing: the worst of the memories are loosing speed, are falling behind the pace of daily events. The support groups help, and so do the tasks of everyday life: the coaching of his two sons’ soccer and baseball teams, the Tuesday night softball leagues, the camping trips, the gardening. He is back in college, finishing a master’s degree in social work, driving to Champaign every week in the old Ford pickup to spend two days taking notes in the classrooms of the state university, the school that would not accept him before. And there is the work, the good work at the hospital, counseling people with addictions, suicidal tendencies, battered wives and rage-full husbands. But despite the healing, despite the gradual opening up, the years of emotional isolation have already taken too great a toll on his marriage; Kathy needs out. In the spring of 1986 the divorce is made final.

*****

The story of hiding, of not honoring elements of my humanity with the dignity of words, of admission, runs deep. Even now, though I would like to think I’ve faced my secret, named it, called it out of its corner, I’m finding that old habits die hard. If I’ve lost myself momentarily while driving my car, reading a book, or engaging in some other task that requires a chunk of my brain, I sometimes find that without my intending to, I have tucked my left hand gently behind my right elbow. Lying in bed at night before sleep takes hold I’ll often notice my left hand is resting underneath the ruffles of the comforter while my right hand sits bare and comfortable on top. Or I’ll think about a class I’ve taught on a particular morning, coming to a sudden realization that all the gesturing and hand waving was done with one arm.

But still, something has changed; some small corner has been turned in the darkest part of my mind, my spirit. I look at my hand, in its present state, more than two decades after the last surgery, after I finally said no more—no more casts, no more stitches, no more blood work, no more Darth Vader masks spewing anesthesia into my lungs, no more IV needles hanging out my arm, no more hospital beds and bad chicken noodle soup. I look down at the rumpled flesh, the grafts sewn between the spaces opened up to give me fingers, grafts of crotch skin, grafts that grow hair, and the lines of scars from the stitching, and the two tiny inner digits, and the middle knuckle that bears no fruit, and the pinky that juts straight out, and the short, thick thumb, and I am glad that I finally said no. They wanted to do more, the surgeons, wanted to cut a little more here, tweak the bone structure a little more there. And I said no.

I was six years old then. The corner has been twenty-five years long. And still there is the residue. A massage therapist once told me that the body’s memory is not unlike that of the mind. That worked and kneaded muscles will try for weeks to return to familiar patterns and positions, even if those patterns and positions were painful. That the body’s fibers, if not stretched regularly, if not exposed to the healing sweep of daily motion, will seek out the same snarls and knots, the same bunches and tangles, the same secret places that brought them in the first place to be laid bare on the masseuse’s table. That the way to rid the body of pressure is to train the muscles to forget. And that the way to forget is through remembering. Through going back in.

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