...this is really an unfinished story, written elsewhere as a blog in several parts, perhaps the things that have started me thinking about women and war and violence and abuse...put together like this, it is long...
The Last Time I Saw Richie, Part 1
The last time I saw Richie, he wrapped his rubber tourniquet around my neck, laughing, and he wouldn't stop. He was high again, in the middle of a party, everyone looking down to the ground, whispering to each other, giving him cold looks. Fucked up again, hopeless case. Instead of trying to hide his state of being, Richie was making a spectacle of himself, whipping out his tourniquet and doing tricks with it, like trying to strangle me. And laughing.
This was many years ago. I still wonder about Richie often, I wonder what happened to him. At the VFP in Dallas, I sat out in the dark where George and Dave were allegedly playing music but mostly talking, finding out that George knew Richie, small world, small world this is, you never know where you might meet a home boy, but had not seen him for more years than me. So no news of Richie since the tourniquet incident.
I wrote those words weeks ago, when I first accepted a class at a prison for the fall, somehow I thought of Richie, the first person I think I ever visited in jail. Other things came into my mind, and I thought it was the start of a more formal story, one with a point, at the time the events surrounding a young vet in trouble were an ongoing huge family soap opera across at least two continents and in many different cities. There were many relatives involved in the confusing situation, wives, girlfriends, distant kin. Talking to another mother of a vet who I talk to often and foremost, it came up that another mother, who I believe probably has a more standard type family than either one of us, was questioning whether we should even be helping this young vet at all, because of the way he allegedly treated his wife, according to some family members, but not others. There was silence on the phone. We thought of our own scrambled families, of our own sons, of their wives and girlfriends. "Damn," she said. "If we only helped the ones who treated their wives well we wouldn't be helping any of them."
I just started thinking about the bad, fuck up vets, and the fine honorable upstanding ones, and whether there was really a difference, whether some were deserving of help while others should simply be ignored and left to drift around. Because that was kind of what was being suggested, that we apply certain standards to help us decide which ones are deserving of mention and assistance.
So I wrote several paragraphs about Richie, who was only out of Vietnam a couple of years when I first met him, about the same age as my oldest son I think, and sometimes a junkie and sometimes homeless. Mostly being homeless meant living in Rosa's garage or sleeping on someone's couch. Richie was in jail several times for stupid junkie things, nothing major. Most of his friends were fed up by the time I knew him, so he didn't bother to call for bail, or if he did, he didn't get it, he just did his 30 or 60 or 90 days in county. At fifteen, the idea of Richie being locked up this way without even anyone to visit him was heartbreaking. How could people be so cold? So me and my girlfriends spent a lot of time either planning to go visit Richie, or going to visit him. Mostly the planning part, visiting Richie became one of our ongoing missions. Usually, it meant hitchhiking to whichever county facility he happened to be in, presenting our very fake identification, and being turned away because we were not eighteen, they never even looked at our ID cards very long before rejecting them. Then we would hang around the jail facility for a while, trying to come up with a better plan, which we never did. But Richie, I hope you know we really did try.
I left the story where it was, because I got tired of writing, and kept thinking about it, feeling kind of guilty because in order to make my point, I would have to make Richie's life worse than it was. He did have a wife, Terry, who came to visit him once when he was living in Rosa's garage, from Brooklyn where he was from. Probably I am judging her by her cats-eye glasses and unflattering limp pony tail, but she just seemed like a mousy Brooklyn housewife who talked about boring things like paying bills. She sat on the couch with Rosa the whole time, talking about Richie and how bad he was doing, and how he wouldn't pay the bills. She shook her head a lot. Richie just wouldn't straighten up and be responsible. But I never was under the impression that he was particularly mean to her, and couldn't figure out what he would do with someone like that any way.
And besides, sometimes things come together like that, but if I don't write them down all at once they fall apart. Everything changes. Things fall apart, they unravel. Everything morphs, constantly.
I think it started unraveling when one of my students told me that he dreamed that his wife was "one of those Taliban women" and he was slitting her throat. He is a veteran of Afghanistan and Katrina, Oklahoma National Guard, he can't decide which one was the worse in terms of his PTSD. He came up to me after the first class and wanted to know if I would be showing any films that might aggravate his PTSD. He made me think of Juan, an earlier student of mine, also Oklahoma National Guard, a veteran of Afghanistan and Katrina, who told me the way I taught history made his PTSD act up, that his girlfriend told him not to come over after history class anymore, that it made him too angry. Really it was not me, but US history, that made him so angry. Juan had been through a lot of counseling already, he said he could drive again, he was a driver in Afghanistan and when he came back he just couldn't drive. But he was still bad, he was an honor student, he was the best student in the class. He could not really write the answer to an essay question; he could not keep it in order, his exam booklets were covered with little separate notes all over the pages, and apologies from him. I always gave him full credit, all the information was there, somewhere scrawled in the margins, it was just hard to find.
So I told my student about Juan, and then told him about two films that I knew I would be showing that would probably cause him problems. I told him matter-of-factly, it was pretty easy to identify what he might not want to see, in this one, there will be many dead Filipinos, including women and children, and burned villages, and water torture, but they are only photographs and they are old, from the turn of the century. So they might not bother you as much. Then in the one about Vietnam, they do talk about mutilating bodies, but it is very briefly. But, I told him, in that one about half the film is about after they come home, and even though I have seen it many times, I often start crying, because I do. It is the vets and their families talking about PTSD, and it always upsets me, no matter how many times I see it. I have learned to show it at the end of class, because otherwise I will have to just turn on the lights and be the professor again, and that is hard to do if you are crying.
I taught this class every day, all summer, 100 miles round trip. I talked to this student after class every day. He often told me of dreams and fantasies about hurting his wife. He often dreamed of slitting her throat. During the first exam he stopped half way and said "I can't do this. My hands are shaking to much." And he held up his hands which were shaking hard for everyone to see. "I had a really bad night. I think I was hitting my wife in my sleep." His writing looked all wobbly, like that of a really old man. He stays after class almost every day. He often worries about hurting his wife. Other times he starts talking about corpses he recovered after Katrina, sometimes he starts describing them vividly, and I can tell he can't stop himself, so I stop him, it's the only thing I can really do. He also talks about all the problems he has with school and getting it paid for, he is not doing GI Bill, this is some kind of veterans disability program, and they won't pay for the classes he needs, even though they approved the program in the first place. He gets very upset and frustrated, he has a hard time keeping track of all the details himself. He is going for some kind of medical certificate.
This is a college in rural eastern Oklahoma, there is a hospital that is probably one of the few places to work, his wife is some kind of medical tech there. I think of all the people just in this county who get paid to assist veterans. This campus is the center of a Veterans Upward Bound program, with at least five listed employees whose job it is to help veteran students. And then there are all the people with the county office for disability services, the program he is under. None of them seem to be able to solve these problems, but I can't tell, he has a hard time telling me. I tell him he needs to get the PTSD diagnosed so he can get disability services, at the college I mean, this doesn't amount to much, he could get a note taker, take the exams some where else, other things that might help him. He wants to do this, but then he starts saying he is already 60 percent disabled with medical problems, if he was diagnosed with PTSD then it would probably put him up to 100 percent, and he doesn't want to do that. I have to remind him that he doesn't have to apply for benefits. It's not like the VA will come begging if he doesn't apply for increased benefits for PTSD. Just go for counseling. I ask if there is even a Vets Center around there. He says there is, he will go--sometime, when he has time, several weeks from now, maybe. When he has some time. Usually he ends the conversations with, "Well, I think I'll go talk to my wife. That usually makes me feel better."
He decides to watch the movie about the Philippines, it is a very disturbing movie, there are a lot of photos of dead civilians and destruction, but it does not seem to bother him too much, he never mentioned that it did. I show the movie about Vietnam, Soldados: Chicanos in Vietnam, on the second to the last day of class. He thought about it, and decided that the part about the PTSD would probably be too much for him. We talk about this some before I show it. When it comes time to show the movie, he gets up and slowly walks out, everyone is quiet, because they know why he is leaving. He knows they know why he is leaving. It is a big stadium-style classroom, and he has a long way to walk, past everyone to the door. I start thinking, this is worse, his leaving, walking out in this forlorn way, worse than if he watched it. For the first time I can think of, I can just watch the movie, it doesn't really upset me like it usually does. I think, well, really it is not that bad, other people watch it and it is just some people talking. It is just us. Watching him leave the room bothered me more than watching the movie.
It is just us. I think about him every day, I miss our conversations even though they were so upsetting. He was a nice guy, very mild mannered, not someone who would hurt his wife I think, but someone who is tired of thinking about it. I hope he went to the Vet Center over break, even though I'm not sure how much faith I have in it, there is nothing else there.
The Last Time I Saw Richie, Part 2
Eastern Oklahoma is kind of like Guam. If you don't join the military there isn't going to be much else.
This same county, right where I am teaching, was the center of something called The Green Corn Rebellion in 1917. Somewhere around three to five hundred farmers gathered somewhere near here, right here in Seminole County, mostly cotton tenants and sharecroppers from Oklahoma and Arkansas, thinking they were going to join a huge march to Washington DC to protest the draft and World War I. They called it the Green Corn Rebellion because they got hungry while they were waiting, so they slaughtered a cow and barbecued it, and gathered some green corn to go with it, that's what they just called eating ears. These counties out here had about the highest percentage of registered Socialists in the country at the time, they were against the war, World War I, they were draft resisters. My own family were cotton tenants just south of here 100 miles or less, just across the Texas border at the same time, those farmers who never marched to Washington would have been the same age as my great grandpa, they must have heard about it down that way, it was big news. Especially when a vigilante posse along with the local sheriff, armed, raided the gathering and dispersed it, some of them went to trial.
Now it is like veterans central around here, the descendants of farmers who resisted war. A lot of things changed over the course of the twentieth century. The growth of the military, and the way people look at it all, is one of the main themes of my classes. As time goes on, and I teach the same things over and over, while the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue, this theme becomes more and more up front. We take it for granted now, the large standing military, soldiers being sent overseas, what else would soldiers do? It seems normal to us, it seemed normal to our parents, perhaps even our grandparents.
I still keep thinking about Richie, but I have no where to go with his story. His story could be anything by now. I do a picture search with different versions of his name, I am sure I can remember the correct spelling of his name, I think I can still see it on his Army jacket, I think I can still remember. But that was a long time ago. I put his name in the search box with Vietnam after it, because otherwise there are too many. A lot of pictures turn up, a lot of old men, he would be in his early sixties by now, he could be any of them, I can't match any of them up with the young man I remember. There are a lot of different occupations listed, he could be any of them, he could have done anything with his life. He was not doomed because of a war, things could have got better for him. I like to think of that. I think of the real amount of time I knew him, only a few years, right after Vietnam. It only seems like forever because I was so young, a month seemed like a year then, I try really hard to remember how that felt, time feeling so long. Then I think how that must seem to the young, 12 months or 15 months in Iraq would seem like a lifetime.
I am driving in, thinking about my lecture about the Green Corn Rebellion, to descendants of those farmers, the children and grandchildren of veterans now, not war resisters, when I get a call from a soldier from Ft Hood, the reception is bad out here and I didn't hear his name, it is a long drive, and he talks through all of it. He keeps fading in and out, I can't hear all the words, but he is telling me a long story, about his psych problems, his PTSD, the problems he had with the Army, trying to get treatment. About how he would check himself in when he got real bad--because he didn't want to hurt his wife. About how he would check himself in, but he always got beat up, because they always tried to restrain him, and he resisted. It is not a good story, I don't want to listen to any more. I also know he has been telling this story over and over, his testimony, about how he doesn't want to hurt his wife. He has called for a reason, not this, he just felt he had to repeat the whole thing like he has so many times I'm sure, and when he gets to the part when he is going to tell me what he wants, why he called, the phone starts going out. "I'm out in the sticks!" I yell, a stupid thing to say, I hope he understands what I meant, I hope he heard me. Then it is gone. I never know what he wanted. I hope he doesn't think I hung up. I try calling a couple of times, but I am not using the phone often myself, it takes me a long time, and he never answers. I think he told his story so often he couldn't take it anymore. I never knew why he called.
On the way home, on Highway 9, a narrow state highway, a doe and two fawns, really young wobbly ones, run out in front of my car. This is unusual for the afternoon, although at night this road is treacherous, the trees grow up right to the edge of the road in some places and the deer run out before you can even see them. I am glad there is hardly any traffic today, usually there is, because the last fawn stumbles and falls, but I can stop. It has a hard time getting up and rushing after its mother. I think, later, some time later the fawn will not be so lucky. How is that? The doe just ran out across the highway, without even looking back to see if they were following. Hope? Does she just go on with life and just hope they can follow, no matter what? That is really how it is, how life is, not neat like in the kind of stories we would like to tell. It is messy and dangerous and we can only hope.
My son is writing me long emotional emails from Kuwait. I don't know what to think of this. In the almost ten years we have been apart, he has rarely emailed me. He sent me maybe two or three emails the whole time he was in Iraq. We have always talked on the phone at least once a week, for hours, all that time, but he never writes. I have barely called him since he went to Kuwait last year, he barely calls me. I don't know why, I am not calling anyone, but that usually doesn't include him. Sometimes it is like that, neither one of us can use the phone, maybe just from sadness, but usually it does not include each other. He is the one of my kids that I talk to when I can't talk to anyone else. So the emails worry me, he is so concerned about the future now. He thinks of leaving Kuwait, away from his boring little windowless cubicle. He worries about adjusting again, somehow this has made him feel safe, and now he is ready to leave. Sad to say, being tied again to the Army has stabilized him, gave him an income, helped his PTSD, most of the people on that base where he is, whether they are active or like him, have been in Iraq at least once. That is more comfortable for him I know. That is part of what he writes to me, but I already figured it out for myself. And he writes me, is everything OK? That is the first thing he writes, because it is not OK, I am so sad, but how would he know? It is unsettling, and I don't want him to worry about me. And he doesn't want me to worry about him. And I don't want him to worry about me...
Into the future, trapped by the past.
The Last Time I Saw Richie, Part IIII know it was all that talk about slitting his wife's throat that got to me, almost every day. Usually after class, but sometimes during, sometimes before, he didn't seem to care who heard. And you would have to meet him to know, mild mannered and polite, what he talked about did not seem to match up with anything about him, although he was agitated usually, nervous. He did not seem particularly angry. I never could figure it out, these dreams of his, his wife as a "Taliban woman", whatever that meant to him, and slitting her throat. Why that?
The knife part bothered me, every day listening to that. I used to have a thing about knives, I forgot, now I just keep them in the drawer. But I used to keep them on a high shelf, where only I knew. I could not have knives lying around, kitchen knives I mean, sharp ones, in case someone broke in, because they did, I didn't want weapons in plain sight. If I saw a sharp knife in plain sight and thought of this, it would be just like in slasher movies, like if they zoomed in on it real fast and played scary music like they do, that's just what it would be like for me, a moment of terror, and I would put the knife back on the high shelf. I used to have visions of bloody attacks, me and my kids, that seemed so real. The kind that make you think, well, you don't know if they will really happen or not, like maybe you are seeing the future. The first vision I had like that was when I lived with Scott, when I was eighteen. One night when he was asleep I had a clear vision of him getting up out of the bed, angry, turning on the light which was a pull string right over the bed, and getting a rifle out of the closet. We lived in a house in back of a bar, I would lay awake at night, listening to people coming and going, and think of that vision over and over, not knowing if it was something that would happen or just my imagination. I wouldn't look in the closet, I didn't want to know, I tried to forget about it. But of course when I eventually looked in the closet, the rifle was right there, loaded and ready to go. Probably I had noticed it before and forgotten about it, only it came back to me in a vision.
A moment of terror that lasted a long time. The times my husband actually broke in were few, but the threat was always there, and the only thing I knew to do was to not be asleep when it happened. The times when he did break in, well, I was always asleep. Then there is not much you can do. This was for years, my way of life, we could only live some place where I could hear all the entrances, all the doors, all the windows, small places. Then I would have the TV on to stay awake, but it couldn't be loud enough that I thought I couldn't hear every entrance, any noise in the hallway or the back. And no knives laying around or in the drawer where they should be.
So it really did get to me, listening to my student all summer talking about his nightmares of slitting his wife's throat. Things like that still get to me, like one time when my son was so angry and irrational, right after he was first back in the states, right after Iraq--he looked like his father so much I got scared, I was shaking. I was cooking in the kitchen and just stayed there, trying to look calm, he was mad at his brother and pacing and ranting, and I just tried to stay calm. Then he jumped on his brother full force, I had to think, through my fear, was this just an ordinary case of two brothers trying to kill each other, which I am used to, or PTSD? So these things get to me, all this anger, all these young angry men, all this talk about hurting women, anger directed at women. It's one of those relationships I really won't ever be able to understand yet understand so well, just for survival if nothing else. The relationship between other events in men's lives that cause them to attack women, like war, or any other thing that causes them hardship and pain. But it is there, for some reason it is around me all summer, over and over.
It also makes me realize, all this slitting the throat business, that this story should never have been about Richie at all, but about Randy instead.
Randy was the father of my first son, stillborn when I was twenty. He died in prison in 2004 of a heart attack. He was a Marine in Vietnam, decorated, both with medals for his accomplishments and on his forearm, Semper Fi, I have tried to remember that tattoo since he died for some reason, but all I can picture is a blur on his forearm, I think it was just a regular Marine symbol, nothing different. This was not a romance but, despite everything, I would have to say he was one of the truest friends I had in my life, I have tried but cannot think of one thing he ever did to me, only of how he was always a good friend, someone I could trust. But there was no passion, we were inseparable and very close, but it just never really was a love relationship like that. I think that is why I was safe, this lack of passion, we loved each other but it was different. He broke his wife's jaw before, probably more, she was the kind who kept it to herself, that is the only time I know about. He really loved her passionately I guess. I learned that, they only try to kill you if they really love you, they only hurt the ones they love. That is what they are all coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan afraid of now, I don't know why, but that is the way it works.
Somewhere around 1990, I'm not sure of the year, about ten years since I'd seen him or talked to him or really even thought of him much, and about 20 years out of Vietnam, Randy knocked on the door of an old couple, strangers, somewhere in rural Virginia and asked to use the phone. He called his mother and talked for a while. Then he picked up a kitchen knife from the table and slit the old woman's throat, killing her, and stabbed her husband, although he survived, their son was home and somehow stopped the attack on his father from being fatal, maybe he had a weapon, I'm not sure.
I ran into his niece in a bar a couple of years after this and she told me about it. Before this, I had imagined Randy slowly pickling himself with cheap vodka somewhere in the southern hills, something peaceful like that, kind of mellowing with age I guess. He had VA disability, he could have just lived out his life quietly like that, that is how I liked to picture him. But that is not the way it happened. She told me the State of Virginia wanted the death penalty, but he was too crazy for them to kill, that was how she told it. They found he was so crazy they couldn't use the death penalty. We just sat there for a while, thinking of Randy, talking about him, asking the question--If he never had gone to Vietnam, would he have done something like this? That is what all his family kept talking about, coming up with different scenarios for his life, different strands of fate, what he would have been like if he had never been to Vietnam. No one knows how to answer this question. He was a good Marine.
I find out about his death around the same time I go up to Chicago for the first time since my son has been out of Iraq, to "straighten things out," or that is what I call it, trying to deal with his PTSD long distance, aggravated by constant family problems, and me making trips to "straighten things out," which never happens. I fly up and rent a car, he has a hard time leaving the house, he doesn't like to take the CTA, although he has been taking public transportation on his own since he was a little kid, for some reason this is one of the things he can't do. We don't talk about this at all, I can't mention something like this, but I have figured it out. The rental place bumps me up from the tiny Hyundai I reserved because you can actually park it to a brand new Monte Carlo. So he drives me all around in a nice ride, he has no problems leaving the house this way.
All the people I've known for thirty years or more, we were all Randy's best friends at one time. All the guys, all his old friends, they have cut him loose long before but they will never answer why. It is some kind of man thing, keeping secrets from women like this, like Randy did something so unforgivable but they won't say what. Half the time if you ever find out about things like this, the secrets they keep from you, it amounts to nothing, some kind of male pride thing. I try to make them talk about Randy, since he is now dead, maybe I just need to talk about all this. I don't know what the right thing is to do, to wipe out the memory of someone you were so close to because he is a murderer? He was a murderer before, he was a good Marine in Vietnam, he has medals, but that was different I guess. He could have slit throats in villages all over Vietnam, and come home, and people would have just avoided the subject, the unmentionables of war, but never held it against him.
Randy had a leather coat in the 1970s, three quarter length, there was a pocket on the inside that was the right size to hold a half pint of Southern Comfort or vodka, one or the other. I don't remember ever seeing him drunk or high, ever, even though he sipped on that bottle from morning to night, maybe just a steady small stream of alcoholic haze. I used to sleep under that coat sometimes for the safe feeling of it, he was a lot bigger than me and if I curled up it would cover me entirely. It felt safe, his coat. I think about it often, I long for it, to sleep under it now for safety, the coat of a murderer. I wonder even if it still exists, and if it did, where would it be? That coat, like a symbol of safety and danger, love and fear. I think of tracking down his sister, asking her, what happened to Randy's leather? Where is his stuff? Who has it? She would think I was crazy, but if I could think of the last name she has now, I would probably do it. I don't even know if his family buried him, bought him a headstone. Or if his name is now disremembered by everyone for all eternity. I try to remember bad things he did to me, but I can't because there weren't any, only good loving things, one of the best friends I can think of. That way I could hate him, decide he was someone who just shouldn't be remembered, instead of smiling about stupid things we used to do. I hate it when life is like this.
Semper Fi, Randy.
The Last Time I Saw Richie, Part IVWhen I leave the prison every week, after my class, I read a sign by the guards' lockers that says "Did You Meet The Mission Today?"
I don't know, I think, what's the mission?
Even here, inside the twisted wire and cinder block walls, the war is here. Oklahoma. High rate of service. And because it is a prison in Oklahoma, about half my class is Indian. Higher rate of service. We talk about the war, about relatives. They keep up with things better than any of my students at regular colleges.
After a while though, sometimes in whispers because there is only a thin door with someone on the other side who shouldn't hear, we just start telling jokes. "All up in your koolaid," a young one thinks is prison slang, but there is a reason people laugh about koolaid. Scraping together pennies, when koolaid was only five cents a packet, running down to the liquor store, then stopping by the neighbors to borrow a cup of sugar. All so you can think you are living good to drink koolaid with meals instead of water. It is history, our history. I tell them the Chris Rock joke about his store guys. I don't think people have store guys in Oklahoma, not the same as Chicago or other big northern cities. About Chris Rock's mother sending him down to the store guys with an extension cord, saying "My mama wants to know if we can plug this in because they shut off the electricity again." I have to explain, because this is only funny if you really have store guys, without whom you would not be able to get by. We get further and further behind in history, sometimes we just laugh, what else can you do, here, inside these walls with relatives and war in your thoughts? At the orientation, the safety officer made sure to point out that this sturdy place built to keep people in would just fly apart in a tornado, there were no real safe rooms, right here in the path where the really big tornadoes usually end up. It would all fly apart. It would all just crumble so easily. All of our walls. Sometimes it is better to just laugh.
Then, of course, I think of our own store guys, who are Palestinian. I have known them for so many years, kind of a personal impersonal relationship. I always stop by to see them, to buy some small thing, to catch up. They used to take turns taking trips to Jerusalem, where they are from, to see their family, to bring back really good chocolates they would share. Those trips are few now. We don't discuss this, only small words and looks, but it is enough. In 2003, my voice shook; it was so hard to talk to them, thinking of my son. He used to work in all these small businesses since he was about twelve, they watched him grow up. They used to call him the playboy. Now, there he is, right in the middle of Iraq. We don't talk about the war, just a few words and looks, like we don't talk about Palestine, or why no one is going to Jerusalem to visit that summer. Sometimes you just can't.
I am going to see my son. He sublet an apartment in Chicago for a few weeks, to look around, to find a job, to readjust. I have such a deep sadness now I don't even want to go, I hesitate, I don't call him. On his side, he waits till the last minute to buy the ticket for me that I can't afford, I think he can hear the sadness in my voice, my broken up sentences. I feel very self-conscious, because he will know, something, he won't know what, but he will know. I think of all the nights he didn't sleep on my couch, now it is my turn to not sleep on his couch. He doesn't buy the ticket, I don't pack. It is not hard, there are usually different bags and suitcases sitting around halfway packed, halfway unpacked anyway. But I go anyway.
I have to wait at the airport for hours for some reason, some big mess at O'Hare. This is Oklahoma; the airport is full of soldiers always. There is a whole big group, all together. I look at them, young, thinking whether they have been deployed or not. They have the new camis, it makes it hard for me to tell, I'm not even sure if they wear desert anymore. It used to be easier to tell, in the airports, if they were there with desert, they were most likely on leave, coming home or going back, alone. Now it's all confusing, all the coming and going. These ones I decide have never been anyplace yet, they are new, all together in a group with their new uniforms and all their gear. They are all Asian and Latino for some reason, young women and men, probably right out of high school.
There is one really small Asian woman. She is even smaller than me, very young. The bag with her gear is almost as big as she is, you can tell she is having a hard time carrying it, keeping up with the rest of the group but she has her face set so no one can tell. It is hot, hot summer by now, they are probably hot, carrying all this stuff in their full uniforms. I wonder about this, how wise it is to send such a young small woman to war. I think of all the things I carried, four kids up three flights of stairs, strollers, furniture, groceries. All the heavy things I carried. Probably it was more than the bag with her gear. Probably she will be all right; she will be able to do it.
I wonder if she will kill anyone. I know you are not supposed to say these things, the things you think, but that is exactly what I think. This tiny young woman, struggling to keep up. Will she kill anyone? This seems so ridiculous to me.
Later, in the smoking lounge, I find out. They are brand new; they have not even been to basic. They are headed towards something called ESL school, even though they are all speaking English. I don't know what this even is, this ESL school. One of them is saying, " Yeah, I tried to switch to the Reserves because my mom just about had a nervous breakdown. But my recruiter said it was too late." My plane finally looks like it will be leaving. I hesitate, because of course, this young man has not even been to basic yet. It's never too late.
And of course, on the plane, I end up sitting next to a young woman heading for Great Lakes for basic, or whatever they call it in the Navy. I have a hard enough time ever understanding anything about the Army; I don't try to dabble in the other services. She is only 18, just finished high school. She is from Lawton, Fort Sill; her father is a sergeant of some kind. Her father has been deployed, her brother has been deployed, her cousins. You name it. We talk about how stupid the war is, her father retired so he didn't have to go again. When it came her time, she chose the Navy. Even then, she said they tried to stick her with an occupation with a confusing sounding name, pushing her into it--until she found out it had to do with defusing bombs, rendering explosives harmless. No way, she told them. She is going to be a translator. I feel like telling her to stay away from languages, but I don't. Knowing a lot of languages makes me nervous, like it would be a skill they would really want, like they would really want to deploy you if you knew a lot of languages, a dangerous thing to know. But I don't mention it, it is her life, her plans. She is a very nice young woman, very smart, and I really am glad to talk to her. As we start to land, though, she tells me about a stuffed animal she left behind, I can tell it really bothers her. She is that young, where it is such a trial to spend the night without those treasured things you always want to keep with you, she feels so nervous about it. Later in life, after doing without so many treasured things, losing them, this will seem so insignificant she will have a hard time even remembering.
At the prison we will chant Ida B. We will make a shrine to her, that small young black woman, fragile perhaps, powerless, looked down upon and utterly defenseless, who was not afraid to speak the truth when no one else would. Ida B. Wells who, in the 1890s found her voice to speak the truth about lynching and violence and sex and race and rape. In public, no less. Sometimes we all need Ida B. To know that no matter if you are just one small woman, you still have a voice, and you can still speak the truth. No matter what. The only one who can keep you from using your voice to speak the truth is you.
