LITMIR.BIZ

      In the decades since that phone conversation with my mom and dad, I’ve often tried to rearrange things in my head. I’ll imagine my mother saying, “Of course, do whatever’s right,” and later my father will come on and listen to me for a while and finally say, “Well, I messed up my own dream. I was too lazy, too scared, too something, and I don’t want you to end up like me. Harvard’s just a fancy word. Go write your books. I’ll pretend I’m you.”

      It didn’t happen that way. But as the years passed I began to feel as if it almost did happen, or as if it could have happened, because my parents were decent and thoughtful people, and because they wanted to protect me from the consequences of failure. Somewhere near the surface of their thoughts, I’m nearly certain, both understood that I was seeking not their permission but a kind of liberation, not their happy hallelujahs but an acknowledgment, however reluctant, that I was ready to weigh the risks all on my own. And of course they were right: the risks were real. I’d be giving up a great deal. By that point I’d completed my Harvard course work, passed my oral exams, and was only a year or so away from a doctorate. Still, I’d known from the start that graduate school amounted to little more than a convenient hideout after Vietnam, a place to put my head together, and my thoughts and ambitions were in no way academic. For more than three years I’d been trooping from class to class, a bit dazed, a bit surprised to find myself alive. I wasn’t unhappy, exactly. I’m not quite sure what I was. Bewildered, maybe. Disconnected. I remember thinking how civilized it all seemed, the campus and everyone on it, so peaceful and abstract and decorous, so weirdly theoretical in comparison to the boonies of Quang Ngai. I was also aware that the war had done things to me that could not be undone. Partly, I guess, I was full of anger. There was guilt, too, and lots of it. I had betrayed my conscience—my own heart and my own head—by going to a war I considered unjust. I had participated in the killing, and I had done so out of moral cowardice. There were no other words for it. I had been afraid of ridicule and embarrassment. I had been afraid of displeasing others, including my parents and my hometown and my country, and when you do things you believe are wrong because you are afraid not to do them, you cannot call it anything but what it is, and the correct word is cowardice. I needed to confront these things. By daylight I was fine, but at night I was not fine. When I couldn’t sleep, which was almost always, I’d get out of bed, sit at my desk, and try to dump the terrible shit on pieces of paper—mortar rounds exploding all around me, a young girl lying dead in a dry rice paddy, her face half gone, one of my buddies telling me to lay off the pity and suck it up and act like a soldier and stop whining about a dead gook.

      I’d scribble these things down and go back to bed, and in the morning I’d head for my 9 a.m. class in statistics.

      My mother and father knew none of this. For them, Vietnam was history. I’d survived, I’d come home, and it was time now to press forward. They never asked about the war—what did I see, what did I do?—and I never offered much. Each of us, I suppose, was trying to protect the others, which we did with silence, as if to talk about things would pick the scabs and exacerbate the pain and delay the healing. This may seem stupid, or old-fashioned, or callous, or excessively Midwestern, or psychologically illiterate, or emotionally unsophisticated. But they loved me, and I loved them. Not to speak was a kind of speaking, at least in our family, and sometimes it was more powerful speaking than speaking itself.

      Surely, though, my parents had to wonder what was eating at me as I considered dropping out of grad school. Surely they were frightened by the prospect. And surely they felt exactly the same helplessness, exactly the same terrified pride, that I feel today as Timmy and Tad begin to move away from what I want toward what they want.