Excerpt from Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life by Jean Hay Bright
Vietnam notes, submitted to Maine Public for inclusion in Vietnam War Documentary project
From Chapter 2
I met Keith in high school biology class, when I was a mere freshman and he was a mature sophomore.
He was tall and handsome, a football player, albeit second string. I did not rebel at the assigned seating which put me next to what I considered this marvelous hunk of male humanity.
To my amazement, Keith paid attention to me, something new in my bookish, introverted existence.
Over that year, I learned that Keith was the oldest of his father’s nine children by two wives. His life, which fluctuated between his father’s and mother’s homes, was complicated and difficult, but certainly more interesting than my own predictable, stable, loving — but boring — existence. I listened to his tales of woe, happy that I could be supportive, and enchanted at a view of life so different from my own.
We were a couple all through high school.
Graduating in 1964, Keith tried college, but dropped out after one semester, and got a job at a gas station. When I got my diploma the following year, money was tight, but I had it all figured out. If I got a daytime office job in downtown Youngstown, I could take a full load of classes at night at Youngstown University (now YSU).
A job in the order department at the Youngstown Public Library, which paid $200.35 per month after taxes, did the trick. It was enough money to pay for college tuition, books and other fees, but not enough to also buy a car to get me the 12 miles between home and work/campus. My folks didn’t have a spare car, and public transportation didn’t reach into the suburbs. A commuter campus then, YU had no dorms. But a room at the YWCA was very cheap, and, located as it was on the edge of campus and a block from the library, was convenient to both work and class.
So that’s what I did.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was heating up. Keith was able-bodied and, no longer in college, was fodder for the draft. He pulled a relatively low number. It was clear his time would soon come.
We got engaged and started making wedding plans. My folks offered to pay for my college education if we would put off the wedding until after I graduated. I declined. I was 18, gainfully employed, and capable of making my own decisions.
Apparently Keith felt the same way. Without consulting me or anyone else, he went into the Navy recruiting office and enlisted as a Seabee, for a four-year hitch. Although surprised at this development, (how could he possibly figure that four years in the Navy was better than two years in the Army as a draftee?) I knew I would just have to deal with it. After all, men made decisions like that all the time, and I was in love with this one. And besides, the move would get us both out of Ohio. If Keith didn’t get killed in the process, we might even have a good time.
We were married on April 16, 1966, and spent our brief honeymoon in Paris — Paris, Tennessee, where Keith’s paternal grandparents had a cabin on a lake.
I would give the honeymoon mixed reviews.
Mammoth Caves, the underground caverns full of stalagmites and stalactites, were marvelous. Such wonder and beauty, hidden beneath what looked like ordinary rolling fields — sort of how I felt about Keith at the time.
It was spawning season on the lake to which Keith’s grandparents had retired. Five-pound carp were everywhere in the shallows. Keith declared aboriginal urges and said we were going spear fishing.
Borrowing deep boots, we waded in. He took a long sharpened stick and speared several. That done, I was ready to go back to the cabin. After all, how many carp could one eat?
“Well, probably none,” he said. “Carp is too full of tiny bones to eat.” Then why kill them? I asked.
“Because they are here,” he said. “It’s fun. And look, there are so many, we couldn’t make a dent” in their numbers.
He seemed more primed for military duty than I was comfortable with.
Later, while Keith was off with his grandfather, I had a cup of tea at the Formica-topped kitchen table with Keith’s grandmother, a frail, smiling woman not five feet tall. I thanked her for their hospitality and the use of their A-frame visitor’s cabin behind their lakefront home. I asked her how she liked retirement living in western Tennessee. She liked the area fine, she said, but the area didn’t like her and her husband.
I didn’t understand. Was it allergies? Or the weather, which had to be hotter and stickier in the summer than the Ohio they had left? Didn’t they have air conditioning?
“Oh, no dear, that’s not it at all,” she said. “It’s because we’re Catholic.”
“Catholic. So what if you’re Catholic? Why would that be anybody’s business but yours?”
“Well, they don’t trust Catholics in these parts. It makes it hard.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “What do they think Catholics do that they don’t do? Weird rituals or something?”
“Oh, no, dear,” said this wisp of a woman with a meek voice to match, “they think we’re conspiring to take over the world.”
That June, Keith started boot camp. After a short training period at Port Hueneme, California, he was transferred to Gulfport, Mississippi, to prepare to ship out to Vietnam. We rented out the back half of a drafty, rickety old wooden duplex propped up on cement blocks, with dozens of fire ant towers in the backyard and two-inch-long cockroaches always finding their way into the trash.
That duplex, a few miles up the coastal highway from the spot where actress Jayne Mansfield had met her death in a 1966 Buick Electra that had been driven forcefully under a tractor-trailer rig, was actually our second apartment in Gulfport. We had to leave the first — half of a partially-furnished run-down house with curling linoleum and a big four-poster bed dominating the living room — after we humiliated our sweet little old landlady by not only inviting one of Keith’s black Navy buddies over for a pre-deployment dinner, but then actually sitting out on her front porch with him afterwards, where everyone could see.
She had thought we were such nice young people.
Keith was soon deployed to Southeast Asia, and I became part of the cadre of young wives in the community waiting for our men to come back home. The young women who spent those long months on the fringes of the military bases weren’t into the patriotism, the flag-waving and the brass. But we also weren’t into the protest marches, because that would be construed as lack of support for the men, OUR men, who, by whatever means of coercion, intimidation or patriotism got them there, were putting their lives on the line at that very moment.
We young wives, in our late teens or early twenties, were just passing the time until our loves came back to us, hopefully breathing and intact, and we could get on with living happily ever after. Vietnam was something our government was inflicting on its young men. It was something to endure, but not to think too deeply about. It was not safe to think too much.
I got a job in the admissions office at the local hospital. It was just three tumultuous years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been passed. One of my responsibilities in my new job was to actively integrate sick people — black, white and brown — even those who didn’t want to be integrated. For some reason I had no sympathy for the whining of the whites, but I could not ignore the terror in the eyes of a few elderly blacks who refused to be assigned to double rooms with whites.
“I won’t sleep a wink,” one sick old black man told me, hacking away. I could see he meant it. And, despite my lack of medical training, I knew that wouldn’t help his condition one bit.
“Ah know ma place,” I can still hear that frail elderly woman say as she held her ground, sitting in her wheelchair in my office. Her eyes were open wide in fear at the prospect of having to negotiate the hidden land mines in the unfamiliar territory of being a legal equal in the same room with a white woman.
I probably broke the law, but I found other rooms to put them in.
Half-way through one of Keith’s two tours of duty, I met him in Hawaii on R&R. The whole week was nothing short of bizarre. There we were, two lonely people, one coming from a state of worried boredom, the other fresh off the front lines of a war zone, both grasping at the memories of a relationship that neither of us would ever have again.
In that tropical Hawaiian paradise, I was looking for comfort and connection in the arms of the man I loved; he was jumping at every noise, his eyes darting into the dark corners of every room, acting for all the world like a hunted animal.
Between the pineapple fields and entertainer Don Ho, I sought the emotional connection that was impossible to maintain through letters; he talked about Vietnam, and the tank he had come upon moments after it had hit an anti-tank mine that had torn it — and its crew — apart.
I wanted reassurance that everything would be all right; he explained how, as a telephone and electric lineman stringing and repairing wires, he was a prime target for any sniper in the area, a sitting duck all the time he was up on those poles.
At that time, two tours in Vietnam in a row was the limit for servicemen in Keith’s outfit. A few days after he was back from his second tour, I woke up and felt comforted by his warm, firm, intact body in the bed next to me. He was safe, he was home, we could return to what passed for normal, at least until we learned where he would be assigned next. We would leave the horrors of the war behind us. The headlines would belong to others.
I slipped out of bed, headed to the kitchen to make some coffee. My ankle caught on something in my path. I stumbled. Suddenly pots and pans were clattering down around me, and Keith was sitting up in bed, laughing.
“What?” I asked in confusion, on my knees by the side of the bed.
“A trip wire,” he said, grinning strangely. “Like the ones we had to look out for in ’Nam. Don’t worry, no explosives. Just a lot of noise. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, you know that, hon.”
To my puzzled look, he smiled, “I just wanted you to understand what it was like over there, having to watch every step. I rigged them before I came to bed last night.”
“Them?” I asked, incredulously. “Are there any more?”
“Not telling,” he said.