No speeches. No bullshit. It's just going to be kids and parents and grandparents and they are all going to be doing the same thing.
They're going to be laying wreaths of flowers. They're going to be saying prayers. Mostly they're going to be looking for names.
They're going to be talking among themselves like people do, Les.
Some of them are going to be crying. That's all that's there. So you know just what's there. You're going to take your time but you're coming with us."
It was unusually warm for November, and approaching the Wall they saw that a lot of the guys were in shirtsleeves and some of the women were wearing shorts. People wearing sunglasses in mid-November but otherwise the flowers, the people, the kids, the grandparents —it was exactly as Louie had described. And the Moving Wall was no surprise: he'd seen it in magazines, on T-shirts, got a glimpse on TV once of the real full-sized D.C. Wall before he quickly switched off the set. Stretched the entire length of the macadam parking lot were all those familiar joined panels, a perpendicular cemetery of dark upright slabs sloping off gradually at either end and stamped in white lettering with all the tightly packed names. The name of each of the dead was about a quarter of the length of a man's little finger. That's what it took to get them all in there, 58,209 people who no longer take walks or go to the movies but who manage to exist, for whatever it is worth, as inscriptions on a portable black aluminum wall supported behind by a frame of two-by-fours in a Massachusetts parking lot back of a Ramada Inn.
The first time Swift had been to the Wall he couldn't get out of the bus, and the others had to drag him off and keep dragging until they got him face to face with it, and afterward he had said, "You can hear the Wall crying." The first time Chet had been to the Wall he'd begun to beat on it with his fists and to scream, "That shouldn't be Billy's name—no, Billy, no!—that there should be my name!" The first time Bobcat had been to the Wall he'd just put out his hand to touch it and then, as though the hand were frozen, could not pull it away—had what the VA doctor called some type of fit. The first time Louie had been to the Wall it didn't take him long to figure out what the deal was and get to the point. "Okay, Mikey," he'd said aloud, "here I am. I'm here," and Mikey, speaking in his own voice, had said right back to him, "It's all right, Lou. It's okay."
Les knew all these stories of what could happen the first time, and now he is there for the first time, and he doesn't feel a thing.
Nothing happens. Everyone telling him it's going to be better, you're going to come to terms with it, each time you come back it's going to get better and better until we get you to Washington and you make a tracing at the big wall of Kenny's name, and that, that is going to be the real spiritual healing—this enormous buildup, and nothing happens. Nothing. Swift had heard the Wall crying—Les doesn't hear anything. Doesn't feel anything, doesn't hear anything, doesn't even remember anything. It's like when he saw his two kids dead. This huge lead-in, and nothing. Here he was so afraid he was going to feel too much and he feels nothing, and that is worse. It shows that despite everything, despite Louie and the trips to the Chinese restaurant and the meds and no drinking, he was right all along to believe he was dead. At the Chinese restaurant he felt something, and that temporarily tricked him. But now he knows for sure he's dead because he can't even call up Kenny's memory. He used to be tortured by it, now he can't be connected to it in any way.
Because he's a first-timer, the others are kind of hovering around. They wander off briefly, one at a time, to pay their respects to particular buddies, but there is always someone who stays with him to check him out, and when each guy comes back from being away, he puts an arm around Les and hugs him. They all believe they are right now more attuned to one another than they have ever been before, and they all believe, because Les has the requisite stunned look, that he is having the experience they all wanted him to have. They have no idea that when he turns his gaze up to one of the three American flags flying, along with the black POW/MIA flag, over the parking lot at half-mast, he is not thinking about Kenny or even about Veterans Day but thinking that they are flying all the flags at half-mast in Pittsfield because it has finally been established that Les Farley is dead. It's official: altogether dead and not merely inside. He doesn't tell this to the others. What's the point? The truth is the truth. "Proud of you," Louie whispers to him. "Knew you could do it. I knew this would happen." Swift is saying to him, "If you ever want to talk about it..."
A serenity has overcome him now that they all mistake for some therapeutic achievement. The Wall That Heals—that's what the sign says that's out front of the inn, and that is what it does. Finished with standing in front of Kenny's name, they're walking up and down with Les, the whole length of the Wall and back, all of them watching the folks searching for the names, letting Lester take it all in, letting him know that he is where he is doing what he is doing.
"This is not a wall to climb, honey," a woman says quietly to a small boy she's gathered back from where he was peering over the low end. "What's the name? What's Steve's last name?" an elderly man is asking his wife as he is combing through one of the panels, counting carefully down with a finger, row by row, from the top.
"Right there," they hear a woman say to a tiny tot who can barely walk; with one finger she is touching a name on the Wall. "Right there, sweetie. That's Uncle Johnny." And she crosses herself. "You sure that's line twenty-eight?" a woman says to her husband. "I'm sure." "Well, he's got to be there. Panel four, line twenty-eight. I found him in Washington." "Well, I don't see him. Let me count again." "That's my cousin," a woman is saying. "He opened a bottle of Coke over there, and it exploded. Booby-trapped. Nineteen years old. Behind the lines. He's at peace, please God." There is a veteran in an American Legion cap kneeling before one of the panels, helping out two black ladies dressed in their best church clothes. "What's his name?" he asks the younger of the two. "Bates. James." "Here he is," the vet says. "There he is, Ma," the younger woman says.
Because the Wall is half the size of the Washington Wall, a lot of people are having to kneel down to search for the names and, for the older ones, that makes locating them especially hard. There are flowers wrapped in cellophane lying up against the Wall. There is a handwritten poem on a piece of paper that somebody has taped to the bottom of the Wall. Louie stoops to read the words: "Star light, star bright / First star I see tonight..." There are people with red eyes from crying. There are vets with a black Vietnam Vet cap like Louie's, some of them with campaign ribbons pinned to the cap.
There's a chubby boy of about ten, his back turned stubbornly to the Wall, saying to a woman, "I don't wanna read it." There's a heavily tattooed guy in a First Infantry Division T-shirt—"Big Red One," the T-shirt says—who is clutching himself and wandering around in a daze, having terrible thoughts. Louie stops, takes hold of him, and gives him a hug. They all hug him. They even get Les to hug him. "Two of my high school friends are on there, killed within forty-eight hours of each other," a fellow nearby is saying. "And both of them waked from the same funeral home. That was a sad day at Kingston High." "He was the first one to go to Nam," somebody else is saying, "and the only one of us to not come back. And you know what he'd want there under his name, at the Wall there?
Just what he wanted in Nam. I'll tell you exactly: a bottle of Jack Daniel's, a pair of good boots, and pussy hairs baked into a brownie."
There is a group of four guys standing around talking, and when Louie hears them going at it, reminiscing, he stops to listen, and the others wait there with him. The four strangers are all gray-haired men—all of them now with stray gray hair or gray curls or, in one case, a gray ponytail poking out from back of the Vietnam Vet cap.
"You were mechanized when you were there, huh?"
"Yeah. We did a lot of humpin', but sooner or later you knew you'd get back to that fifty."
"We did a lot of walkin'. We walked all over the freakin' Central Highlands. All over them damn mountains."
"Another thing with the mech unit, we were never in the rear.
I think out of the whole time I was there, almost eleven months, I went to base camp when I got there and I went on R&R—that was it."
"When the tracks were movin', they knew you were comin', and they knew when you were going to get there, so that B-40 rocket was sittin' there waitin'. He had a lot of time to polish it up and put your name on it."
Suddenly Louie butts in, speaks up. "We're here," he says straight out to the four strangers. "We're here, right? We're all here. Let me do names. Let me do names and addresses." And he takes his notepad out of his back pocket and, while leaning on his cane, writes down all their information so he can mail them the newsletter he and Tessie publish and send out, on their own, a couple of times a year.
Then they are passing the empty chairs. They hadn't seen them on the way in, so intent were they on getting Les to the Wall without his falling down or breaking away. At the end of the parking lot, there are forty-one brownish-gray old metal bridge chairs, probably out of some church basement and set up in slightly arced rows, as at a graduation or an award ceremony—three rows of ten, one row of eleven. Great care has been taken to arrange them just so.
Taped to the backrest of each chair is somebody's name—above the empty seat, a name, a man's name, printed on a white card. A whole section of chairs off by itself, and, so as to be sure that nobody sits down there, it is roped off on each of the four sides with a sagging loop of intertwined black and purple bunting.
And a wreath is hanging there, a big wreath of carnations, and when Louie, who doesn't miss a thing, stops to count them, he finds, as he suspected, that the carnations number forty-one.
"What's this?" asks Swift.
"It's the guys from Pittsfield that died. It's their empty chairs," Louie says.
"Son of a bitch," Swift says. "What a fuckin' slaughter. Either fight to win or don't fight at all. Son of a fuckin' bitch."
But the afternoon isn't over for them yet. Out on the pavement in front of the Ramada Inn, there is a skinny guy in glasses, wearing a coat much too heavy for the day, who is having a serious problem —shouting at passing strangers, pointing at them, spitting because he's shouting so hard, and there are cops rushing in from the squad cars to try to talk him into calming down before he strikes out at someone or, if he has a gun hidden on him, pulls it out to take a shot. In one hand he holds a bottle of whiskey—that's all he appears to have on him. "Look at me!" he shouts. "I'm shit and everybody who looks at me knows I'm shit. Nixon! Nixon! That's who did it to me! That's what did it to me! Nixon sent me to Vietnam!"
Solemn as they are as they pile into the van, each bearing the weight of his remembrances, there is the relief of seeing Les, unlike the guy cracking up on the street, in a state of calm that never before existed for him. Though they are not men given to expressing transcendent sentiments, they feel, in Les's presence, the emotions that can accompany that kind of urge. During the course of the drive home, each of them—except for Les—apprehends to the greatest degree available to him the mystery of being alive and in flux.
He looked serene, but that was a fakeout. He'd made up his mind.
Use his vehicle. Take them all out, including himself. Along the river, come right at them, in the same lane, in their lane, round the turn where the river bends.
He's made up his mind. Got nothin' to lose and everything to gain. It isn't a matter of if that happens or if I see this or if I think this I will do it and if I don't I won't. He's made up his mind to the extent that he's no longer thinking. He's on a suicide mission, and inside he is agitated big-time. No words. No thoughts. It's just seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling—it's anger, adrenaline, and it's resignation.
We're not in Vietnam. We're beyond Vietnam.
(Taken again in restraints to the Northampton VA a year later, he tries putting into plain English for the psychologist this pure state of something that is nothing. It's all confidential anyway. She's a doc. Medical ethics. Strictly between the two of them. "What were you thinking?" "No thinking." "You had to be thinking something."
"Nothing." "At what point did you get in your truck?" "After dark."
"Had you had dinner?" "No dinner." "Why did you think you were getting into the truck?" "I knew why." "You knew where you were going." "To get him." "To get who?" "The Jew. The Jew professor."
"Why were you going to do that?" "To get him." "Because you had to?" "Because I had to." "Why did you have to?" "Kenny." "You were going to kill him." "Oh yes. All of us." "There was planning, then."
"No planning." "You knew what you were doing." "Yes." "But you did not plan it." "No." "Did you think you were back in Vietnam?"
"No Vietnam." "Were you having a flashback?" "No flashbacks."
"Did you think you were in the jungle?" "No jungle." "Did you think you would feel better?" "No feelings." "Were you thinking about the kids? Was this payback?" "No payback." "Are you sure?"
"No payback." "This woman, you tell me, killed your children, 'a blow job,' you told me, 'killed my kids'—weren't you trying to get back at her, to take revenge for that?" "No revenge." "Were you depressed?"
"No, no depression." "You were out to kill two people and yourself and you were not angry?" "No, no more anger." "Sir, you got in your truck, you knew where they would be, and you drove into their headlights. And you're trying to tell me you weren't trying to kill them." "I didn't kill them." "Who killed them?" "They killed themselves.")
Just driving. That's all he's doing. Planning and not planning.
Knowing and not knowing. The other headlights are coming at him, and then they're gone. No collision? Okay, no collision. Once they swerve off the road, he changes lanes and keeps going. He just keeps driving. Next morning, waiting with the road crew to go out for the day, he hears about it at the town garage. The other guys already know.
There's no collision so, though he has some sense of it, he's got no details, and when he gets home from driving and gets out of the truck he's not sure what happened. Big day for him. November the eleventh. Veterans Day. That morning he goes with Louie—that morning he goes to the Wall, that afternoon he comes home from the Wall, that night he goes out to kill everybody. Did he? Can't know because there's no collision, but still quite a day from a therapeutic point of view. Second half being more therapeutic than the first. Achieves a true serenity now. Now Kenny can speak to him.
Firing side by side with Kenny, both of them opened up on fully automatic, when Hector, the team leader, gives the screaming order "Get your stuff and let's get out of here!" and suddenly Kenny is dead. Quick as that. Up on some hill. Under attack, pulling back-and Kenny's dead. Can't be. His buddy, another farm boy, same background except from Missouri, they were going to do dairy farming together, guy who as a kid of six watched his father die and as a kid of nine watched his mother die, raised after that by an uncle he loved and was always talking about, a successful dairy farmer with a good-sized spread—180 milking cows, twelve machines milking six cows a side in the parlor at a time—and Kenny's head is gone and he's dead.
Looks like Les is communicating with his buddy now. Showed Kenny that Kenny's not forgotten. Kenny wanted him to do it, and he did it. Now he knows that whatever he did—even if he's not sure what it was—he did it for Kenny. Even if he did kill someone and he goes to jail, it doesn't matter—it can't matter because he's dead.