A final farewell to a man whose every utterance pressed upon me with gravity, whose every slight cut through to my marrow with brutal self-recrimination—my father. Every praise he heaped in my direction added another layer of comfort to the sanctuary in my mind. I took refuge there often. I wanted nothing more than to please him.
Sitting at the graveside for his interment as waves of grief suffused every breath I took, I kept quiet. I suppose it’s an inherited trait; he wasn’t a talkative sort. He never shared much about his past, and now, too late, I wondered why I hadn’t asked. Quite probably because I never wanted to upset him and felt he might perceive my curiosity as prying. Hard to know, really know one’s father—how he’ll react when an innocent question may result in another deep laceration instead of a straightforward answer. He was my blind spot.
But then, they came and draped a flag over my father’s coffin, playing taps in honor of his memory, dressed in military garb and standing at attention. They saluted him before folding the flag again and handing it to Aunt Mary. She thanked them for their tribute, actually mouthed a “thank you,” as she nodded her head and then looked the two soldiers in the eye.
I was seething! I knew better than to open my mouth and decry the proceedings, knew better than to make a spectacle of myself in light of the pall engulfing us all. No, better to keep still, better that I honor his memory with plagiaristic silence, no matter how hot the flames of outrage inside me.
Now’s not the time, my intuition warned. Maybe tomorrow… maybe never.
If one thing was certain, it was that dad loathed the military and all it stands for. He’d see an honor guard at a ballgame and say, “Oh, look! Children with rifles perpetuating the lie!” And he meant it. Perhaps Aunt Mary didn’t share the same opinion he held, but this was his funeral, not hers and I couldn’t help but feel this act of respect was more a disrespect to his memory.
Yes, he was in the infantry, fought in Vietnam. Beyond that, he shared nothing about the experience except to say he didn’t want to talk about it. It came out in other ways, like his disdain for the honor guard, like turning off any war movie playing on television.
All I knew at that point was my exhaustion and wanted nothing more than to go home and finish packing his clothes so they could be donated to Goodwill. He would’ve liked that I’m doing that—that’s the sort of man he was.
And there, sitting neatly folded in his bottom drawer, beneath his swim trunks and his shorts, I found his Army shirt. It surprised me he hadn’t rid himself of it—probably more a keepsake than anything else. Unfolding it and grasping it by the tops of the sleeves, I held it in front of me like a floating apparition deciding whether to donate it. Then I thought to try it on to see if it fit me. The moment it draped itself over my shoulders, I felt very dizzy and immediately decided to take it off, clutching at the front placket with both hands and pulling.
Before I knew it, Gunnery Sergeant Hanks, the scariest son of a bitch I’d ever laid eyes on was up in my face so close the dirty stench of war on his breath assailed my nostrils and made me gag, his nose pressed against mine so hard, it made my eyes water. “Corporal Farnsworth, what the blue blazes?! Think the VC’s gonna stuff money in your panties if you strip for ’em?”
I immediately dropped my hands, leaving the unbuttoned shirt where it was.
“No, sir!” I shouted back, the saliva shooting from the sides of my mouth and hitting his cheek. But he didn’t notice, not with the grime and mud and sweat that caked his face. It was all I could do to not piss myself, my knees quaking, living this surreal nightmare into which I’d suddenly been cast. It couldn’t be factual, but the machine gun fire in the background cemented me into the reality of the moment and I had to buck up. Or die.
“Move out!” he bellowed as he turned away from me, and the men—boys, really—started marching through the knee-high grass in the middle of nowhere with the sun shining bright above us, indifferent to the fact that we were in a fight for our lives. At any second, and there were far too many of those, a report of gunfire would suddenly erupt from a tree line in the distance and the screams of soldiers hit by searing metal projectiles would follow them down to the ground. Some of them never got a chance to even cry out, dead before they could react. And there I was, living it as he had lived it.
I’d never once seen my dad shed a tear, never believed he knew how to cry. Now I understood it wasn’t that he couldn’t, but that he’d shed every one of his lifetime’s allotment for men whose names were Wilson and Bradenhurst and Anderson and “Lucky” Marzano, Marshall and White, and most of all for Levy, the one who had saved his life but who lost his when my father couldn’t return the favor. And he’d tried. Tried to stop the bleeding from his thigh with superhuman pressure on the artery, tried to keep him conscious and alert, even as he watched the life ebb out of his best friend’s eyes.
All of them, every last name on the list, had been through basic together, all had understood the most critical of lessons about looking out for your brother, and had then been tossed out of a helicopter into a palm-tree adorned hell in the jungles of Vietnam.
As night finally fell, I closed my eyes in the thick cicada-call sweltering darkness after marching through miles and miles of inhospitable jungle terrain, my legs feeling like they’d been encrusted with lead. But sleep eluded me, trying to come to grips with my new reality.
After a time—it might have been minutes, maybe a full hour—my eyes opened and I found myself no longer in the oppressive heat of a tropical night, the cool, soft breeze of the air conditioner welcoming me home. Startled, I sat up straight, my eyes wide. My first thought—my only thought—was to rip the shirt off. Only I didn’t. Instead, I stood alongside my bed and carefully removed it from off my body. And then, out of respect for his memory, for the time he lived through hell and made it home, for the pieces of himself he’d left behind in Southeast Asia, I folded it and returned it to the drawer where it had lain untouched for all those years. Some memories aren’t worth pulling out of hiding. Better to leave them to the moths.