LONG TIME PASSING
MacPherson, Myra
Long Time Passing Eddie's lasting nightmare of Vietnam BY MYRA MACPHERSON One cool, sunlit September Sunday in 1981, South Boston, the Massachusetts Irish district known as "Southie," unveiled a...
...You were better off with your anger...
...And...
...I did real well in courses where I didn't have to write...
...You accepted them on blind faith...
...He is a gentle man, but recalls, "You had to fight...
...A self-confessed wimp in high school corner warfare, he came back violent and unfeeling...
...The young served because, to some extent, the system made them serve...
...He looked me right in the face...
...If you tried to move 'em, if you got too emotional about what you saw, if you grabbed a guy too quick"—Eddie snaps his finger— "he'd be gone...
...Some sniff glue at nine and by twelve are into heavy drugs...
...His daughter feared that when she grew up she would automatically lose a leg...
...He lived in a hallway in the public housing proj-lect, would go to a nearby gas station in the morning to wash his face and hands, and then go to school...
...It became one of the first major universities to admit substantial numbers of educationally and financially deprived black and white students...
...A faded telegram pasted in his scrapbook tells about his lost leg and "second- and third-degree burns on the hands, arms, and face," burns on 60 per cent of his body, and how he was not expected to live...
...Eddie was given an American flag because they thought he had died...
...I know people who were involved in atrocities, but they never got off on it...
...And they called me 'baby killer.' I had nothing against the kids who resisted and went to jail or Canada...
...There is an old saying in Southie...
...When I got hit with the mine, it took the leg, then we got hit with the ambush...
...You know, to discuss logically an illogical situation...
...Brandeis University, believe it or not, was the next stop for Eddie...
...bellowed the sergeant at the disgorging busload at Parris Island...
...Sometimes my burns flare up...
...I never found people who got off killing...
...There are the devout, who wouldn't miss daily mass—and there are the loan sharks and leg-breakers, who enforce the unwritten laws of that other world, a Friends of Eddie Coyle subculture...
...Eddie is deeply concerned for the young poor who go into the service today "for their first pair of shoes and three squares a day...
...We were animals...
...It's pitch-dark and we had half his hair gone before he even woke up," says Eddie, laughing at the remembrance of "this silly-lookin' thing with half his hair to his waist, the other cut off to the ears...
...We should be like Jon Voight in Coming Home, telling them that war isn't glorious...
...Louies...
...Stole my crutches...
...All dressed up, "like Dillinger," he recalls, laughing...
...A friend, whose father had a fifth-grade education and who became a successful journalist, explains the order of life in Southie...
...Eddie feels there is much ambivalence about the war, not only in Southie but in America...
...They felt so guilty about us being there, they gave medals out like candy...
...A buddy was still on fire and I carried, I crawled with him twenty-five feet...
...I slammed him up against a mail chute once and got fired for 'bad attitude.'" There were years of several painful leg operations and recurring sessions with less-than-understanding VA authorities...
...Yet there he was, standing tall in the park with his Jackie Coogan visored cap shoved at a cocky angle...
...I saw her...
...The whole thing was silly...
...I still want to feel the wind blowin' through my hair...
...I was in a coma like, but I could hear the nurses sobbing, 'He's only a baby.' The priest started doin' his mumbo jumbo and I wanted to yell, 'Get away from me!' I was an altar boy and I knew he was giving me the last rites...
...Sometimes he dreams that he is running in Columbia Park again...
...I'm an elbowl" he bellowed back...
...It was just a rule of the corner...
...Next to it is a letter from one of the friends who remained behind: "We got the lady who blew you up...
...That's where Timmy and Kevin lived...
...I told him, 'If you can remember that, then maybe I wasn't a waste...
...This fool guy give me a second chance—and it cost him his life...
...But I didn't think these college kids had a right to say things to me when they didn't even know what 'antiwar' was...
...You can't believe this is you, but it is' Eddie returned to South Boston, es sentially a runaway...
...But I was a coward...
...Twelve friends signed up the same day in 1967...
...Your grandparents came over on the boat with your friends' grandparents...
...The fathers, he feels, often maintained the same prewar hawklike mindset...
...I majored in sociology and wanted to work with troubled children...
...More than twenty-five years later, his military image continued to pervade American society and culture...
...The reason I can talk about it now is because I don't believe it any more...
...His anger and violence alienated him...
...Then the day my son was born, I said, 'Well, it may not be me, but another Eddie is gonna go runnin' in Columbia Park.'" He drives to his small house in a working-class town outside of Boston...
...We're proud, a proud community...
...His eyes sweep the windows...
...Copyright © 1984 by Myra MacPherson...
...Tljey had their Black Panther flags flyin', they had their peace flags flyin', their NLF flags flyin...
...I still think the kids are going to talk to their older brothers...
...If I had a turning point, it's when I went down to the monument for the Vietnam reunion in 1982.1 met two guys I had not seen since Vietnam...
...Rage, rather than pity, got him through...
...Success...
...Chiseled on the monument: If You Forget My Death, Then I Died in Vain...
...Southie produces more priests, nuns, and servicemen than any other community of comparable size in America...
...I saw the old woman that blew my leg off...
...Some of the student radicals were livid about Eddie's American flag that flew from his window high on the hill—the flag they gave him when he was wounded...
...To kill just takes a piece out of you...
...If you were a Catholic, you believed in the mysteries...
...They did what their conscience told them...
...That was the most positive feeling—the love the veterans still had for each other...
...He picks seven out of twenty-eight in his fourth-grade class he knows for sure went to Vietnam...
...He shot me in the knee...
...Remembrances of welfare days, the Job Corps, and the Marines, the excruciating pain of the leg and the burns and skin grafts and the hospital, the crazy antiwar days as a GI in an elite university, the downers of unemployment and stress...
...My friends were cruel...
...Looked at me...
...Eddie was one of the marines in the Central Highlands with I Corps in the bloody days and nights of 1968, for seven months, until a little old lady detonated a land mine...
...They refused to make me feel sorry for myself...
...When they tried to taper me down, they'd say, 'Hey, we think this kid's addicted.' Those fools...
...One of them smart alecks...
...Long Time Passing Eddie's lasting nightmare of Vietnam BY MYRA MACPHERSON One cool, sunlit September Sunday in 1981, South Boston, the Massachusetts Irish district known as "Southie," unveiled a monument—the first monument in the country to be dedicated to the memory of Americans who died in Vietnam—with official recognition from the President of the United States and all five branches of the military...
...After the flag was trashed, Eddie's crowd obtained the keys to the room of the student ringleader, crept in at night, held him down, and gave him a haircut...
...One guy's an alcoholic, one's doin' okay, and two are dead...
...One day on campus, Eddie told a student to take a flag patch off the seat of his jeans...
...Eddie hopes enough veterans who feel the way he does will speak out...
...In the old days it was mostly fists...
...Move it...
...When you are a runaway is not the time to hook school...
...Eddie became a demolitions expert who performed the grim ritual of disarming dead American soldiers who had been booby-trapped...
...I have to go in for reevaluation—to see if my leg is still worth 60 per cent disability...
...I was loaded up on Demerol for nine months...
...Now I just think, whether they bump into a veteran that is shooting junk in Harlem or what, they're gonna hear 'The Government didn't do nothin' for me, man.' Or if they talk to a Vietnam veteran who's made it, he's gonna say, 'Watch out and listen before you go.' If it was another war like Vietnam and my son wanted to go to Canada, I'd drive him...
...They served because of the discipline of the Church...
...Just had to beat the shit out of someone to survive...
...It was a command-detonated mine...
...A job with the Post Office didn't last long...
...Growing up tough is the only way to grow up in Southie...
...I used to think that someday there would be a medical breakthrough and they would come out with a better prosthetic...
...Sometimes his depression so enveloped him that he stayed in bed for days on end...
...After thirteen years, the dam broke, finally, in 1981 when a son was born...
...I woulda finished college...
...I keep telling 'em, 'It ain't gonna grow.' All we want is our benefits...
...I seen marines dismembered...
...I felt comfortable and content, in another world...
...Upper-class communities around Boston sent their sons to college and Canada during Vietnam...
...Children playing have a County Cork timelessness to their look-round, beautiful faces of freckles and red cheeks and large blue eyes and red hair-giving a lie of innocence to their surroundings...
...Everyone else was dead...
...And so, on the day of the memorial, veterans hung together for old times' sake with their friends from the "cornah...
...In Southie there are some who to this day can't understand why we're complaining, who don't understand how meaningless it was...
...I got nephews to worry about now...
...We'd go in and soon spot everyone dead...
...They said it was against the law to fly an American flag twenty-four hours a day unless the flag is illuminated...
...The Irish of Southie took pride in being star athletes who beat other city teams...
...Great news, Dad...
...I told him, 'Nothin...
...That scared hell out of us...
...It shoulda been called the 'War of Children.'" oot camp scenes: Some men, of more sheltered backgrounds, remember boot camp with distaste—for the vulgarities, the sadism they feel is masked in the time-honored excuse for teaching discipline and manhood...
...Eddie leafs through a photo album...
...You know what I mean...
...Over and over, priests and pols, parents and veterans spoke of honoring individual patriotism and loyalty, of honoring the dead, not the war itself...
...You could be a kid from the projects, blown up and hurt, and there would be Speaker McCormack, gettin' in touch to help right away...
...They used to get on us—and some of the Israeli students— about what it was like to kill...
...We didn't have one person over there who actually had anything personal against the Vietnamese...
...Eddie was on his high school track team...
...I said, 'I don't sell guns.' The kids had all their flags flyin...
...They used to laugh a lot because we didn't have the vocabulary of the kids from Scarsdale...
...They always left someone just about to go...
...Adventure...
...Yet, for all the turbulence of these post-Vietnam years, Eddie feels, "If I had come from any other place except Southie, I wouldn't be as well-adjusted...
...When I was on punishment, I'd lower a fishing rod from my bedroom window and my buddies would pass cigarettes up...
...He was up there with the other baby-faced kids with hard messages on their helmets: Born to Lose, Born to Die, Born to Kill, Hell Sucks...
...You can't tell 'em it was a waste 'cause they can't bear to hear that...
...This one VC come up on me and he looked at me...
...But I would have ended up a success...
...We came back disciples...
...He spent the $100 Job Corps pay on clothes...
...My kid brother asked me what the war was all about," says Eddie...
...Move it...
...now there are knives and guns and dope in the projects...
...I'm sorry, I should translate...
...I am surprised when I ask Eddie how he sees himself ten years from now and he answers, "Happy...
...Everybody come home lookin' like Georgie Pat-ton...
...The Vietnam veterans grew up on tales of Ireland—and in Southie today, donations to aid Northern Ireland are plentiful...
...Eddie, half in the bag, started laughing...
...If parents had ever smelled it, they wouldn't let their kids go to that war or any other unnecessary war...
...More than 250 relatives were there to honor those twenty-five...
...As for his own life, Eddie feels, "If the attitudes had been the same fifteen years ago about Vietnam veterans as they are now, things woulda been different...
...Some brushed away tears...
...That's the nightmare I have always...
...To kill just takes a piece out of you...
...I see 'em lying and gearin' up for this, that, and the other thing...
...If it was at City Point [a better section in South Boston], it would not be tolerated...
...Eddie's voice grows hard...
...It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, where they had just killed someone who was close to you...
...The front door bursts open...
...Mary goes crazy with the fighting when the kids tease her about me hopping on one foot...
...Why didn't he just blow me away...
...I told one reporter the truth and he didn't believe me...
...You can't believe this is you, but it is...
...you grew up to be either a priest, a cop, or a crook—and some families had all three...
...That's all they got left of their kids...
...The war dead were like family...
...This article is adapted from her book, "Long Time Passing," to be published by Doubleday & Co., Inc...
...His is the jaunty, rolling, side-to-side gait of a sailor—rather than that of a man whose leg was blown off...
...alone...
...Threw urinals at the nurses...
...Whites joined them and a relentless pursuit of unmet demands was under way-through vandalism, class disruption, and intimidation of students and professors...
...Today the flag forms an unconscious montage to war in his bedroom, folded neatly beside the rifles and the crutches...
...References to Wayne appear in virtually every book about Vietnam...
...The truth is, we were kids...
...An extraordinarily common loss among many veterans—a sense of caring...
...The marine glowered...
...want...
...A lot of mothers that raised kids until they were eighteen don't have no kids any more...
...At the time, though, he was seventeen and invincible...
...If your ma got sick, it was automatic 'Come on over for sup-pah,' " says George Landers, a Vietnam-era veteran...
...Eddie remembers the shaved heads, the drill instructors taking pictures out of wallets, saying, "Who is this whorel Who is this pigV and it would be your mother...
...We were animals...
...The student apologized...
...I knew this kid was addicted...
...Eddie knew what war was all about...
...I'm tired of seeing the youth singled out for no good reason, no good war...
...Some of those kids were real radicals...
...The only thing you know is to follow the squad leader...
...You had to disarm them—because everything was booby-trapped—in order to send the bodies home...
...Dedication day was one of those Norman Rockwellian scenes absent from the landscape in the 1960s—bands and Marine brass, babies in strollers, and old men in lawn chairs...
...I had a letter from the hospital sayin' I should have a sittin'-down job, but the supervisor didn't do nothing about it...
...If it was in Wellesley, it would not be going on," says Eddie...
...You couldn't get a full grown man to do it...
...gave their ancestors a home meant even going to a war that most felt made little sense...
...When we talked to the older generation, they told us about World War II...
...Her father's handicap has not always been easy for Eddie's daughter...
...Most of us are against the war...
...I said, 'Okay, you sons of bitches.' I went out and bought the biggest floodlight you ever saw...
...They wanted to write what a big hero I was...
...There are the bigoted and the pinch-minded, consigned to poverty because they do not put much store in education...
...I was gonna kill 'em out of fear...
...Southie's working-class sons went to war—as usual...
...Everyone in the village would deny the enemy was there and then maybe you'd just kill somebody...
...It was sickeningly different in real life...
...My kids and my wife had a lot to do with getting rid of bitterness...
...morning church services and wakelike partying late into the night...
...When Eddie gets in an argument, he grins wryly, touches his cheek, and says, "Kiss my ass...
...No shades...
...When you come home you feel like everybody you touched turned to shit...
...Eddie spaces his words for emphasis...
...He comes up with a classic Catch-22 phrase...
...The world of a young man with a very bright mind born into a nonintellectual life of poverty...
...Anybody who has ever seen war would be antiwar or you're not a human being...
...I forgot how to cry...
...The Jewish-sponsored institution of academic excellence was described as a "veritable wunderkind among American colleges...
...Sometimes my emotions...
...Eddie soon joined the Job Corps and was in the Midwest with other street toughs when a fight broke out in the cafeteria between blacks and whites...
...Eddie laughs...
...I had beautiful blue eyes in them days...
...Is this what you want...
...The hugging and the kissing and, hey, these are not the kind of guys who go 'Disco Duck.' I hugged more guys than Liberace that day...
...Still, it is the peculiar paradox of this tightly knit neighborhood that, for all its insularity, it sent so many of its sons 12,000 miles away to a remote and foreign field of battle...
...With Coleen...
...I did die...
...The pain of third-degree burns on his face and excruciating skin grafts are muted now by Eddie's black humor...
...Then he was lying on his bed with his bluejean trailing into soft, flat emptiness below the left knee...
...No shades...
...They stole a pair of crutches and scratched together $26 for his bus ride home...
...It was because I did not want to be alone...
...Me, today, wouldn't go...
...He couldn't wait to join the Marines...
...They didn't pamper me...
...If I shoulda...
...My wife stuck with me long enough to let me grow out of it...
...These are the descendants of Irish immigrants who left their homeland when the potatoes rotting in the field caused half a million Irish to starve to death by 1847...
...It was a waste...
...On one wall, Eddie's one daughter smiles in her first communion photo, with veil and tiara...
...I was crawlin' on fire with the willie peter [white phosphorous...
...They're cops now...
...We'll straighten you out...
...The best friends in the world...
...We're gonna kill our youth again over in the Middle East if we're not careful," said Eddie, a full two years before marines on the peacekeeping force were killed in Beirut...
...All I want to see is assholes and elbows...
...In Southie everybody knows everybody...
...Deliberately...
...We were behind the infantry...
...Some wore Sunday suits, others work clothes...
...They feel they are misunderstood by the outside world and the press...
...And he says, 'Well, the gooks come over the hill...
...As they marched through that swirl of noise, the veterans were suddenly four abreast—marching in cadence, remembering it by rote from a long ago time...
...Six Bs and two Cs...
...During the Southie parade, Eddie lining back, far removed from the 'park's center, standing with his slender wife and two freckle-faced children...
...The hilly, tree-shaded campus in Wal-tham, Massachusetts, was going through an "unrelieved nightmare of student disruption and growing faculty unrest...
...Mike 'n' Mary inside a chalk heart is scrawled on one wall...
...All of a sudden, the professors built their classes around us...
...There is no grass...
...A lot of mothers don't have no kids any more...
...And there are others, gentle and caring, and those who have made successes of themselves...
...The tribal thing is very strong...
...And I killed 'im...
...I feel sorry for the mothers of the guys who died in Vietnam...
...There were a lot of little My Lais, believe me...
...Bobby was a pisser...
...During the brawl, Eddie and some friends ducked out and headed for Detroit...
...It was a welcome the men, some 200, had never known...
...They had me un-loadin' bags off trucks...
...The list of Southie's twenty-five dead traces the war's history—a huge, terrible bulge in the statistics, when grief came hard and often...
...I came back from class one day and found my flag ripped down off the window, with coffee, urine, and louies on it...
...In the Marines I could run forever...
...The student said he was against the war...
...There is a wistful recall of more stable times when his father had a good job with a machinery manufacturer...
...I don't feel guilty that I killed him...
...As Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima, Wayne's personality became merged with the character and Americans found a man who personified the ideal soldier, sailor, or marine...
...When a cousin got married, I did the most heroic thing I ever done...
...One photo of Vietnam shows a stack of helmets of the dead...
...Parris Island is a science...
...I never know when the leg is gonna act up on me—and I would end up fired—so I have to keep the disability...
...Eddie was hardly original in his devotion to the gravelly voiced monotoned heroics of an actor who never got any closer to real combat than Hollywood and Vine...
...The war itself was not being championed...
...So am I," said Eddie, "but there's other ways of doin' it...
...They must have been incredibly raw and obvious intruders, the young blacks and whites, some of them veterans, who came on campus as part of an Upward Bound program in 1970, right at the time when Brandeis was SDS national strike headquarters...
...Eddie propelled himself on his wooden leg with a furiousness of purpose...
...Eddie pulls the car up near his old project home...
...Bikes and trucks are in a corner of the dining room...
...It just cracks me up...
...You could see it all over Waltham...
...You played baseball together and you got in fights with other gangs and you went to war together...
...All that night this sucker blazed...
...I've decided to get involved, to make sure it doesn't happen to another group of veterans again...
...It put the finishing touch on the Southie macho mystique," said Thomas Irwin, director of the Boston Police Department planning division and one of the five veterans who spent three years working on the memorial...
...If you read, if you thought deep thoughts, you had to keep it to yourself...
...That got 'em even madder...
...He came back antiwar, confused, unhappy, troubled...
...I was totally against the war, too, and I never bothered anybody's flag, but the more they pushed left, the more the other guys had to push right...
...It had nothin' to do with heroism...
...Row upon row of flat-roofed, low-slung brick apartments...
...If there is a school activity, such as ice skating or roller skating, her father automatically refuses to go...
...Just me and a buddy...
...Yellin' at myself as we got shot at, 'Are you happy now...
...it is brown dirt in May...
...His son stares from a snapshot at his first-year birthday cake—made by his father...
...Theirs is a clannish-ness turned ugly at the sight of intruders— as in the volatile, screaming fight against forced busing in the 1970s...
...That's what bothered me...
...When the bullets start flying—because of Parris Island—you don't panic so much...
...What would you have done if you had not gone to Vietnam...
...Those guys went to Andover for finishing school...
...I remember standing around in a village, all of us laughin% just laughin* our heads off while some villager was dying...
...The whole country's immune...
...Cowboys and Indians play on the icing...
...During a family crisis, when the doctors refused him leave because he was so ill, men in the ward took only half their medication and squirreled it away for Eddie to use during his breakout...
...Eddie was typical of many who went into the Corps seeking a home...
...They're still asking in Washington what it was all about.' So he says, 'But you got all blown up,' and I says, 'Yeah.'" The pause is a long one...
...He joined some service clubs, mainly to work for Vietnam veterans' benefits and to present a voice for peace...
...One of those acceptances was a blind loyalty to defending the country...
...I cannot picture me crawlin' around the rice paddies with a helmet on...
...we went to Parris Island...
...His nervousness, after months of guerrilla warfare, lasted for years...
...I stole out and had to go down that aisle with no legon crutches—just months after I was back...
...It is Eddie's lasting nightmare of Vietnam, that November day when he lost his leg, one of thousands who would lose their legs before they were out of their teens...
...Spit...
...Nobody gives a damn because it's here...
...He had seen John Wayne leading his men gallantly in war film after war film, the embodiment of guts and glory, in a darkened theater rich with the smell of popcorn...
...I still can't pass out in bars like I used to—I'm that paranoid...
...One day the ex-marine taught his daughter's friends "how to fold the flag," he says solemnly...
...It was a different Eddie from the one I had met two years before...
...I knew I was gettin' out of there—if I had to kill every one of 'em...
...I remember standing around in a village, all of us laughin', just laughin' our heads off while some villager is dying...
...Cause I blew him right away afterwards...
...More than half—fourteen of them—died in 1968 during the murderous Tet Offensive...
...Blown up, right in front of you, as you watched helpless...
...They were just "the gooks...
...There were long, hard years—hospitals and school, odd jobs and fights, Brownie Scout leader and loving father, a readjustment that still goes on but has vastly improved...
...Alllllright...
...I don't believe in heroes...
...The pause seems a sad one...
...If I coulda passed my papers in on a cassette, I woulda done fine...
...They only got flags...
...Some of the best days of my life was here," says Eddie, looking at the project...
...I know it, for a few minutes...
...You need a wife, someone there all the time, even when you're being a jerk...
...his daughter Mary is home from school...
...There were irreverence and clarity, wit and bitterness, sorrow and joy in his stories...
...One day on campus, Eddie told a student to take a flag patch off his |eans« The student said he was against the war...
...He wore a coat and tieio work," says Eddie, still with some awe—and they lived in a home of their own outside the project...
...Everybody else was dead and I was sittin' there cryin...
...They never seen a war, never smelled a war...
...They break you down to absolutely nothing...
...I could relate to them...
...You need the school lunch...
...He says, his voice full of wonder, That's what we call 'em...
...We gave them those years to kill us and if we made it back they promised us certain things...
...Everyone became a little nutty over there—in order to save your sanity...
...The first time I ever got lucky was up behind them windows over there...
...But some of us kids changed...
...A friend of Eddie's now works to stop the flow of drugs into Southie's housing projects...
...Southie is a community suspicious of outsiders...
...I had no business bein' there," he says with a deep chuckle...
...His parents fought for years and finally, when Eddie was thirteen, they were divorced...
...The scene at the monument: thumping drums, Marine band spit and polish, gleaming Corfams and teen-age acne, several thousand people clapping...
...Eddie is spent suddenly and the voice falls...
...Skin from his buttocks was grafted from the crease by his nose to his hairline...
...Black silk shirt, black iridescent sharkskin pants, black suede shoes with Cuban heels, white tie, black leather jacket, and black stingy-brim hat...
...Who was the hero in that miserable war...
...There are boarded-up windows...
...I woulda been a police officer, working with juveniles...
...I had to carry a dictionary in my back pocket just to understand the conversations...
...I knew how before I went to Vietnam," says Eddie plaintively...
...When his father left, the family moved back into the project, Eddie trundling possessions in his little wagon...
...He had me—and he didn't blow me away...
...I knew they weren't comin' down the streets of Southie...
...A family...
...I just buried my best friend in 1979 and I couldn't cry...
...The laugh is derisive...
...For several days in 1981, Eddie wandered through his hometown and his memories—moments undiluted, even by more than a few beers...
...They were the enemy.' And he got laughed at...
...Those twenty-five deaths spread across many lives—aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, grandparents, mothers, and fathers...
...I was nervous and depressed...
...They were trying to discuss intellectually a war...
...And the Army or the Marines were an extension of the corner...
...They only got flags.' Into that maelstrom limped Eddie^ among a handful of Vietnam veterans and some inner-city blacks enrolled for a remedial program...
...On the top helmet, in white paint, is scrawled: Why Me...
...Eddie put a bull's-eye on his helmet...
...I just see a lot of tragedy out there that could be avoided...
...When I was in the hospital, I did crazy things...
...Eddie thought it all quite amusing and loved the Marine Corps...
...I probably woulda been in jail, gotten in a little juvenile trouble...
...It was what you did for a country that gave your great-grandmother, God bless her, a roof over her head...
...That's one thing I'll never forget...
...You're with a guy one minute, talking about his girl or somethin', and next he is blown up, next to you, all over you...
...Eddie puts his arm around her and studies her report card...
...One buddy, Bobby, was trying to explain about Vietnam and why all the tragedies had happened...
...I remember gettin' mad at myself...
...The place reeked of death...
...For months life was a morphine and Demerol haze, but through it all Eddie knew he had lost something precious in Vietnam...
...Several were wounded...
...In 1969, seventy black students took over one building for eleven days...
...They wanted me to sell guns to them...
...They had a chair for me, but I said no and knelt for forty-five minutes on one knee...
...Eddie's childhood was not without turmoil...
...Ifeel guilty that he didn't kill me...
...Burned my brother with a cigarette 'cause he wouldn't get me a beer...
...His first tears, this time of joy, in more than a decade...
...Raised to be patriotic to the country that Myra MacPherson is a reporter for The Washington Post...
...His son, in imitation, hopped before he could walk...
...For years after Vietnam, Eddie had a hard time adjusting...
...Niggers Suck—the statement of 1980s racism that decorates Dorchester subways and downtown Boston billboards—is scrawled nearby...
...Move it...
...We had lieutenants, for cryin' out loud, who still wet the bed...
...So am 1/ said Eddie, *but there's other ways of doing it...
...Is it real enough for you now, buddy?' Nobody wanted to know the truth...
...The wooden leg goes up and down on the gas pedal, a leg as hard and unyielding as a baseball bat, encased in argyles and loafers...
...The professor admonished him for calling Vietnamese "gooks...
...And he shot me in the knee...
Vol. 48 • June 1984 • No. 6
