* * *
I heard my father’s footsteps long before he knocked on the door. I’d not really slept. That kind of night.
“Gibson?”
Another knock would come—no stopping it. I could all but predict the timing.
Five, four, three …
“Come on in, Dad.”
He looked as sleep-deprived as I felt. Same clothes as last night. Same red eyes and stubble. “Good morning. Did you sleep?”
“Like a baby,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too.”
That’s how the day started, with a pair of matching lies. He sat on the bed, and had trouble with my eyes. His big hands looked useless, too. I didn’t know what he wanted, but words gathered in my mouth, as if they had plans of their own. “I know why the Marine Corps kicked Jason out.”
It’s not what he’d expected to hear. His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Have you been in my office?”
“I have not.”
“Where did you get that information?”
“Does it really matter?” He said nothing, and the silence told me everything I needed to know. “You know the reasons, too, don’t you? Why they sent him home with a dishonorable discharge?” He did; I could tell that, too. “Do you know about the medals?”
My father moved toward the window, looking as if he’d kicked over a box marked VENOMOUS REPTILES, and was in fear of whatever creature might crawl out first. “I do,” he said.
“And the massacre?”
“Jesus Christ, son.” He palmed his eyes, paler than usual. “That’s classified information.”
“They say that without Jason, it might have been another My Lai.”
“You did break into my desk. You read the damn file, the DOD file on your brother.”
“I wouldn’t do that.” But I had considered it. “I’m right, though. Aren’t I?”
“It’s not a fair comparison. American soldiers slaughtered five hundred villagers at My Lai, civilians, every one of them, women and children, even infants. This wasn’t like that.”
“It could have been, though. They say Jason saved an entire village.”
“Few things in war are so black and white.”
“This was. His actions were.”
I saw in my father’s eyes a deep and abiding pain, and understood why he might feel that way. In the church of Don’t Be Like Your Brother, he was a high priest. But what I’d learned from Darzell changed everything I’d once believed about Jason. Three years after the massacre at My Lai, a platoon of U.S. Marines went as war-mad as Charlie Company had at that small village in the Sơn Tinh District of South Vietnam. The village was smaller than My Lai, little more than a clutch of huts gathered along a tributary of the Bến Hải River.
Darzell didn’t know what triggered the slaughter, but Jason and his crew were five miles out of the DMZ when the first body appeared, faceup in the river: a young girl, according to Darzell, a tiny thing, shot four times through the chest. By the time Jason’s gunboat arrived at the village, that platoon of marines had already spread thirty-three bodies along the muddy banks, or left them bobbing like corks in the reeds along the river’s edge. The ARVN troops used the gunboat to carry off what survivors they could find, but for Jason and the master chief, that wasn’t enough. Guns were still firing, people screaming; so they went in alone to stand down an entire platoon of red-eyed, raging marines. Jason took three bullets before the madness broke, and even then beat the commanding lieutenant within an inch of his life.
“We never listened to him,” I said.
“What are you talking about, son?”
“He saved three hundred people that day…”
“A remarkable thing, I know.”
“You didn’t let me finish. He did that remarkable thing, and when he came home hurting, we never listened.”
“Jason didn’t want to talk about the war, not any of it.”
“We didn’t make it easy, though, did we? Mom, like an eggshell ready to break, and you so certain of right and wrong.”
“We did some things wrong, yes. But your brother’s no saint. You can trust me on that.”
“You mean the drugs.” I laughed harshly. “Of course you mean the drugs.”
“Heroin is tearing the city apart. I see it every day. Whatever your brother did in Vietnam, he ended up a user, maybe even a dealer. I can’t condone that. And I can’t have you near it.”
“Whatever your brother did in Vietnam.” I threw the words back. “You talk about a DOD file. Did it include the terms of Jason’s discharge?”
“Yes, son. It did. Right or wrong, your brother almost killed a superior officer. The military gave him the choice of ten years in Leavenworth, or a dishonorable discharge in conjunction with a signed nondisclosure agreement. It’s a cover-up. I understand that. I don’t approve of it, but after the My Lai fallout, I recognize the necessity. Support for the war is already weak. Another massacre. Another black eye for the country…”
“It’s not about support for the war.”
“It says so in the file.”
“Does the file say who was in command of that platoon?”
“The name was redacted…”
“It’s Laughtner, Lieutenant John G.”
“Laughtner?” My father’s mouth opened and closed twice before he could continue. “Isn’t there a General Laughtner on Westmoreland’s staff?”
“Second in command of ground operations.”
“Related?”
“Father and son. And it gets worse.” My father closed his eyes, but I didn’t relent. “They needed time,” I said. “How to spin the killings. What to do with Jason. They held him off books for seven weeks. Drugged. Morphine. If it weren’t for the master chief, they’d have probably just killed him. But the master chief had friends in high places.” I met my father’s eyes, and dared him to blink. “They turned him into a junkie instead. They strung him out and sent him home.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“About the drugs? I have no idea. The rest of it seems to be an open secret in the Marine Corps.”
He showed me his back, and I wondered at his thoughts. Did he feel guilt or shame? Because I did. What about regret? None of us had been there for Jason. He’d come home from war strung out, quiet, and bitter. But did my father ever ask why? Wasn’t that his job? Wasn’t it my mother’s? Or mine?
“Will you give me a few minutes?” he asked.
I said I would, and left him there.
Halfway to the kitchen, I heard the phone ring.
35
Warden Wilson rose early, showered, shaved, and dressed. It was a big day, with a bigger one coming.
“Twenty-four hours. Maybe a little more.”
He spoke to the mirror as his fingers worked a dark tie into a Windsor knot. The suit was brown. So were the shoes. For color, he put a fresh rose in his lapel, cut in the darkness from a small garden he kept beside the house. By noon, the petals would begin to droop. Then they would curl and dry, and he would mark time with those petals, increasingly lighthearted as they withered, shrunk, and died. Thinking of X, he hummed quietly as he adjusted the flower just so.