I always call it the year from hell. It was preceded by the year my mother tried to kill me. Also known as the year my mother kept me away from my father followed by the year my father was gone. Which led to years in which I followed my father everywhere he went, going to the hardware store when I had no interest in hammers, saws, nails or even one thing the hardware store sold.
I was born into and grew up in the Marine Corps. My parents met in the Marine Corps and their first encounter was my father, a Sgt., warning my mother, a Pvt. to watch the way she spoke to superiors. After another snafu or two, they started dating. When they married, my mother had to separate from the Marine Corps, a loss she felt her whole life.
But the children started coming and the moving did too. She was 7 months pregnant with me, when my dad suddenly had orders to Hawaii. Three years later, he unaccompanied orders to Okinawa for a year. While my dad was gone, we lived in Massachusetts, away from the Marine Corps community, a few doors down from my maternal grandparents. My mother had the family car and freedom to come and go, three children in tow, for the first time in her marriage. She told me once that when my dad came home from Okinawa they almost divorced. He wanted to take over disciplining us and she didn’t have use of the car anymore, because he needed it to get back and forth to work, the both struggled to find a balance in their revised marriage.
But all of that was a cake compared to Viet Nam. My parents never wanted to and never would talk about Viet Nam. They both would turn their heads and look away. Then change the subject.
Viet Nam started for me with news on TV. We lived in Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps community, where I never saw protests except on TV. A year before my dad was due to go to Viet Nam, he got orders to Virginia. We moved when I was in second grade, in February 1968, in the middle of the school year before I learned how to tell time. I moved from a small progressive Catholic school to an underachieving public school. My dad started language school. His job was to learn four years of college level Vietnamese in one year. My mother’s job was to keep us away from him, while he did his homework, which was constant. A small room in our house was deemed his office. The door was shut. My father was in there when he was home, listening to reel-to-reel tapes and speaking Vietnamese.
My mother was pregnant. She already had an 8, 7, 5, 3 & 2-year-old. She was determined to do everything possible to support my father, which she did by making him special meals. Meals I was forced to eat. Meals only an adult would enjoy eating full of onions, peppers, canned salmon, teriyaki steak, chow mein and American chop suey. Six out of seven suppers were nightmares for me and a battle with my mother.
Both my Nana and my Grandma came around the time my brother was born and stayed for a while. They shared my room; all of us children slept in one common room.
In the fall, I changed schools and started third grade. Men landed on the moon, we watched it on TV at school. I’m not sure how that was possible. My brothers and I walked to school one day in freezing sleet and told my mom how much it hurt our faces, but she wouldn’t listen. She was too busy. We came home from school one day and the car was packed ready to move to Massachusetts. We got in the car and left.
In February 1969, we rented a duplex a few streets over from my maternal grandparents, away from the Marine Corps community. I joined a third-grade class that was working on their 7’s times tables i.e. 7 x 7 = 49. I didn’t even know what “times” meant and I had also missed my opportunity to learn how to tell time. I scrambled to keep up in school, when school had always been so easy for me. I didn’t like this new school where I had my first encounters with bullying, and my first encounters with teachers who didn’t care that children were bullying and being bullied. A first grader was the target of the fourth-grade boys. They took David’s bologna and mayonnaise sandwich from him, opened it up, and smashed his sandwich onto his face. The teachers shrugged their shoulders. So, my first-grade brother befriended David and tried to help him avoid the fourth-graders.
My mom was pregnant again. She put us in as many activities as she could. For the first time, we joined Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, Little League, took swimming lessons and music lessons. She tried to run herself ragged so she could sleep at night. Ironically, the Boy Scouts were only too willing to help her. Her husband was in Viet Nam, she was pregnant, she had a 9, 8, 6, 3, 2 and baby but my older brother could only be a Webelo if she would be a den mother to a group of first graders. My mother sent us to bed and hosted meetings in our dining room in the evening, doing project with a half-dozen six-year-olds. It was crazy.
But crazy didn’t stop there. My baby brother was learning to walk and run. And get into things. My mom had to call poison control because the three-year-old fed the toddler a bottle of baby aspirin. The toddler was fast. She was polishing her Sunday shoes and holding the polish between her knees when he snatched the polish and drank it. Another time he drank kerosene. There were trips to the hospital for ipecac and trips to the hospital for charcoal. It’s a wonder she didn’t have a nervous breakdown. But who had time? There was a baby on the way.
She and my dad sent letters back and forth, trying to agree on a name for the baby that was coming. She either wrote or sent a tape almost every day and received tapes and letters back fairly frequently. At suppertime, my mom would turn on the tape recorder. We were supposed to have normal dinner conversation and include my dad so he could keep his bond with us. Once, she wasn’t sure if the tape had recorded, so she played it back. The only thing I could hear was our forks scraping the plates and occasional muffled voices. Maybe he was just happy to hear the sound of normal. Sometimes she played the tape he had sent to us. None of the tapes or their letters were saved. They didn’t have money to waste on tapes, so we recorded over his tape and sent it back. He recorded over ours and returned it. I remember that his tapes had the sound of helicopters in the background and occasionally shells thumping. My mom told me later that my dad told her the shells were being shot out at the Viet Cong, which wasn’t always true. He lied to her to keep her from worrying. How could she not worry?
She had my sister, and named her after a long-ago friend. I don’t remember her going into labor or going to the hospital. I don’t remember who stayed with us, while she was gone. I don’t remember a lot about that year. When I asked about it later, she told me my grandpa came to get her and took her to the hospital, where the doctor said she wasn’t ready to deliver, and where she almost delivered my sister in a hallway, because my sister came fast. And now there were 7 children. The baby slept in my mom’s room because there was no separate room for the baby. My mom wasn’t getting a lot of sleep.
When my sister was five months old, my father called to say he was coming home in a few days. The morning he was due in, we got up early and went to the airport. My father didn’t come in. We went back home and were walking in the door when the phone rang. My father was calling to say he had arrived at the airport in Boston. My mother hauled seven children back to the airport. And there he was, standing on the curb, waiting for us. My five-year-old sister pointed someone else out as “Daddy” and I realized that although we had pictures in the house, she had forgotten what he looked like. He had lost weight and toned up, looking the best physically that he ever has. I was so relieved to have him home.
We all lived in Massachusetts for a few weeks and my dad got a taste of my mother’s crazy year. I knocked myself unconscious. My toddler brother knocked the screen out of the upstairs window and sat on the sill; my mother had to talk to him, while my father ran upstairs to grab the toddler before he jumped out onto the sidewalk. I’m sure they were both relieved when we packed up and moved back to the Marine Corps base.
Back to the school I had left two years ago. Back to a community that I understood and a way of life I was used to. Back to life as normal. Or nearly normal. For years, I followed my dad around. If he went to the bathroom, I lingered nearby. If he went to the hardware store, (boring!) I went too. Whenever he was around, I wanted to spend time with him and make up for all I’d lost during those two years.
Over the years, I asked from time to time about Viet Nam. My dad would say what his job was and change the subject. If my mom was in the room, she would look away. It was obviously a painful, closed subject. But I felt like I had been through Viet Nam too, and no one would talk to me about it.
After my mom died, my dad wanted to clean out the house and throw everything away. My sister and I offered to clean out and donate everything. Among the papers, I found a map, showing where my dad was in Viet Nam. I did some quiet research without telling my dad and found a little information about where he was and what was going on during the time he was in Viet Nam. Finally, a few answers.
Last year my son said to me, out of the blue, that he knows someday I will go to Viet Nam. When I saw my dad recently, I told him what my son had said. My dad asked me why I would want to go to Viet Nam and where I would go. I told him I’m going to Hill 55, south of Da Nang, because I wanted to see where he had been. He confirmed that Hill 55 is the place he was stationed. And the subject was dropped. He’s eighty years old and still will not talk about Viet Nam.