Mike McLaughlin
You never really come back
It was a foreign land Dolan returned to. So different from the one he’d left a year before. It was work, real work taking it all in. In his clear moments he thought learning Vietnamese had been easier. But slowly, he was adapting. He felt a glimmer of faith, of a sort, appearing within him.
He credited Pop for that. Jimmy spent a lot of time with him during the long stay at Walter Reed. Bringing a little of home to him, long before Pat could return to it. His father repeatedly made the ten-hour drive, leaving before dawn to reach D.C. by mid-afternoon. Doing it so often it seemed to the son like his old man lived there. Walking into Pat’s room each time as if he’d just come home from work. No big deal at all. Returning and settling in to pass the long hours. To see his boy through the worst of it.
Despite efforts not to show it, his father had aged considerably. At first Pat didn’t realize, his mind still foggy from repeated rounds of anesthesia. It was a while before he noticed his father’s gray and thinning hair. Pop had lost weight, too, and his face was deeply lined. A legacy of anguish after being informed—twice—that his son had been wounded.
As one surgery followed another, the fog grew, faded, and grew again. But through it all, the son knew his father was there. Feeling the hand on his shoulder. The good one. Feeling his father’s kiss on his forehead. Hearing the soft murmurs, the repeated assurances that soon all would be well.
*
Calling it reconstructive surgery was being modest. It took four operations, not one. The first was the longest, done the day after he got to Walter Reed. They did it on a Monday, the anesthesia knocking him so flat it wasn’t until Wednesday that he could think clearly.
They put him under a second time on Saturday, and a third on Tuesday afternoon. After that they gave him a break. This puzzled him. He wondered blurrily why they couldn’t just get the damn thing over with.
Every time, the gas shut him down so fast, so utterly, that he was always surprised he returned. He would wonder when they were going to start operating. Wondering when they were going to open him like a purse. Cut here, shift parts there, refit his works together again.
He lost an entire week. Each time he surfaced, he knew Pop was there, but distant somehow. Waving to him from the far shore.
He rose and fell. Bobbed and weaved. In place of dreams, he had flashes. Erratic and distorted. Fragments from childhood or high school. From Fort Benning or Polk or some girl’s bed in Cambridge. From behind the rock wall and firing into the red fog that had once been a village.
And Kwan.
Kwan sitting at the desk opposite Dolan’s or in Havilland’s bar or climbing into the jeep with him at Kontum. Kwan always about to say something. Gone before he could.
Shards of memory attacked him now. Forming, vanishing, reforming again. Punishments handed down by some unseen, unknowable power for offenses he acknowledged committing, and for those never had. Seeing them all in a cold and pitiless light. Consequences. Retributions lashing him mercilessly for his sins.
*
He stayed three months.
Naturally, his shoulder hurt—but not the way he had anticipated. It had a grinding sensation that came and went. Often it clicked, even for the slightest movement, and every time it did the pain was worse. Jolting him like electrical shocks.
His hand hurt, too, especially the fingers. Sometimes they burned. Sometimes they felt dead. And doing the countless reflexive, little damn things, whether scratching his nose or reaching for his notebook—always forgetting it was no longer there—required effort now, and concentration.
The pain ambushed him one moment, forgot him the next.
All was well.
All was lost.
*
They said it would be a long haul, and by now he believed it. They told him it had required twenty-two pins, screws, and God alone knew what else to rebuild his shoulder and his arm.
Thirty seconds into the doctor’s explanation, he had slipped away. It was happening to someone else—not him.
This puzzled him at first, and worried him.
His last day in Nha Trang, despite the drugs, despite the shock, he caught everything the first doctor said. Through the storm cloud of his mind, he got it all, and repeated it almost verbatim to the slack-jawed asshole standing in front of him.
You must not do anything to excite yourself, Sergeant.
Typical Army.
No matter what they say, just nod.
They fitted him with a two-angle splint, bracing his arm and shoulder, and wrapped him like a mummy again. Wrapping him again and again until he thought they were burying him alive. Sending him to the underworld.
Sometimes he wished they had.
He didn’t want to die—but he didn’t want to live.
*
They got him on his feet again. They put him against the left side of the hallway and ordered him to grasp the handrail and begin the march. Every sliding step forward was a handful of inches. Two orderlies escorted him and if they had stood any closer, he grumbled, they’d have been wearing his slippers.
He did better the next day, better still on the next. The day after that, they gave him a cane and pointed him to the dining room. With his father two feet beside him, he made it, shuffling to a padded chair and collapsing into it.
“Nothing to it, Pop,” he declared.
“Sure and enough, boyo,” Jimmy replied with forced cheer. “Sure and enough.”
They spent most of the day there, sitting among the men in varying stages of repair. Eating or drinking coffee. Staring at the oversized television whose principal color was pink. Dully following the westerns or cop shows or other daytime passion plays. Ignoring the too earnest narrators declaring this car or that toothpaste was the best. Watching the news intently as John Chancellor or David Brinkley or somebody else assured one and all that things would be no better tomorrow than they’d been yesterday.
After switching him to a more flexible splint, they handed him a golf putter and made him swing it with each hand. Ordering him to knock a tennis ball across the gym. His good arm doing it effortlessly, his bad one sloppy and weak.
They took away the cane and told him to walk. To focus. To stop pissing away energy from swearing and grunting and just fucking do it. Ordering him not hit the other men humping along on crutches to his left. Not to bump the men pushing their wheelchairs on his right.
They made him stand and wave both hands high and wide like a revivalist preacher. The good arm turning through the air like a windmill. The bad one following like a broken wing.
They gave him a kids’ crossword puzzle and made him do it left-handed. After five spastic minutes of c-a-t and m-i-l-k they switched him to the right. It was the first time he’d written anything since he’d come back. To his surprise, the hand still worked, even if the print was bad. The numbness in his fingers came and went. Other times he swore someone had stapled them together, but the pencil never fell from his grasp.
They had let him smoke until then. Now they said that if he wanted it, he had to haul his ass downstairs. When he argued, they replied that he was low priority now, and reminded him of it time and again.
A confidence booster, he supposed, but it shamed him, too. Maybe that was the point. He knew every man on the floor now. Some had been in the hospital before he enlisted. Some had done two or even three tours. He could limp along when many couldn’t walk at all.
After a few elevator rides to the street, they made him start using the stairs. They were getting him used to normal life again, such as it was. Teaching his right shoulder to work with his left once more. The effect was odd, the work brutal. It was like holding a brick with one hand and a balloon with the other.
Somewhere during it all, he noticed his father was looking awfully tired. Jimmy said he had been putting in extra hours at work, and some nights he had trouble sleeping. He said he had cut back on coffee, from five a day down to two. The same for smokes, from two packs a day to one. Likewise for the shepherd’s pie, he sighed—but at Narragansett’s lager he drew the line.
“Nothing to sweat over, Patrick. Let’s get you hale and hearty first, hey?”
*
It wasn’t until they got him moving again that he thought about how he’d got there.
Not the injuries, but the circumstances.
There had been a flash.
Afterward, there was a huge dark tent.
He is dead, said the soft female voice.
A tent filled with screaming men.
Himself mumbling—where was Kwan?
Anh ấy đã chết.
But Kwan was dead.
Your friend is dead.
Tôi xin lỗi.
I am sorry.
And next, the dazzling room with the droning blur hovering before him.
You must not do anything to excite yourself, the doctor-thing said.
And finally, waking up here, where every day felt like the first. Straining to piece together his last day in country. Like wearing oven mitts while pushing the pieces around.
The voices falling onto him, one after another.
Her voice again, both gentle and firm.
We will sit you up now.
Slow and soft and solemn.
Tôi xin lỗi.
I am sorry.
Anh ấy đã chết.
He is dead.
*
At last, he was back in Boston. His head swam from the debriefs, the out-processing, the tedious bullshit the Army deemed necessary. Himself nodding at it all and signing where he was told. Wending his way from one world back to another. Back to the other. The one he’d left behind. The forgotten one. The false one.
The only thing real was the plan they laid out for him.
The follow-ups.
The trips to the VA hospital for check-ups and x-rays and more check-ups.
The meetings they strongly recommended he attend with fellow vets. Men back for days or years. His brethren, home from whichever war they belonged to.
He attended a single meeting.
He left early.
*
Pop was looking paler than ever. Distracted. Easily winded.
On the day it happened, Dolan was in the basement and loading clothes in the washer when he heard the crash above. That old cookie sheet hitting the floor, followed by a heavy thump. With the wrong hand he grabbed the railing, his shoulder shrieking black murder, and he was flying up the steps. Bursting into the kitchen. Seeing his father slouched on the floor.
“It’s all right,” Jimmy gasped.
He had landed on his side, and now he was reaching toward the table to get up. Pat helped him sit upright. Leaning him against the stove Jimmy had just put the pot roast in.
“Pop—”
“It’s all right, Patrick. Just need—just catch my breath is all.”
Dolan raced to the wall phone, got the operator, told her what was happening, and came back.
“It’s okay, Pop. How about we get you to the—”
“It’s all right. I—I just…”
He never finished.
*
They told him later that he had meant to break the news himself. He really had. But with his son’s slow recovery, the right time never came.
Later, Pat thought. Always later.
It wasn’t denial, not willful deception, only priorities—and for any father there’s the one that leaves all others in the dust.
Jimmy’s troubles had begun with his blood pressure. He started medication shortly after Pat left but hadn’t wanted to burden his son with it. Sometimes the pressure went up and stayed up. He only went to his doctor after several days feeling twitchy, sometimes with pounding headaches. His doc said not to worry, Jimmy, it happens to us all. He took some blood and shipped it off to be tested, and gave him the right pill and said take two every morning and you’ll be all right.
You’ll be fine, pal, and welcome to the club.
It worked all right for a while, but a few weeks later he started getting chest pains. Again, his doc studied him, gave him another pill to go with the first, and sent him up to MGH to see the cardio team there.
Angina, they said, giving him yet another pill. Explaining that whenever you get a jolt like that you just put the pill under your tongue and let it dissolve. It kicks in fast, so do that, and keep taking the others.
So he kept pushing along.
Hell—it happens to all of us, am I right?
He was managing it well, until they dropped the next one on him.
Coronary artery disease.
The pipes that fueled his heart were failing. As an engineer, Jimmy had no trouble grasping this. This was bad, and he knew it.
And he swore he had meant to tell his son.
Jesus, he really had.
*
Dolan had thrown his painkillers away the week before. He hated the fucking things now. They sanded down the edges but they didn’t kill shit. And speaking of which, they blocked up his plumbing. Hard. Taking a dump had become a grinding nightmare. It was as if he had eaten concrete and needed C-4 to blast it out. He counter-attacked every morning with fiber-loaded cereal and a handful of prunes, sometimes adding a shot of liquor for effect.
The pain came back at him, of course, but not as bad as before. It had dialed back a notch. Four aspirins—and a Jameson chaser—and taking a painless dump was bliss. There was an additional benefit, too. His lucidity had improved drastically and he was relieved for it.
He had always hated being out of it. Reflecting, he realized he had been full-bore drunk only a few times. Been so gone that when he turned his head, his eyes wouldn’t turn with him. Bad news, and he vowed to keep it under control… sort of. Beer and booze remained bedrock pursuits, if he was in the mood for a drop, yet would aim to become just lit enough.
And he was clear, alert, and unblinking the day his father fell, never to rise again.
*
In his will, James Matthew Dolan specified that he wanted no wake, only a funeral. He didn’t want an honor guard, either. On that point he was definite. Those, he said, were for men who didn’t come back alive—and Jimmy had. A flag for his casket was all right, provided the men who draped it over him were veterans from his own war (the good one) or else to hell with it.
Less officially, he had said if anyone wished—and everyone did—they could gather at Foley’s to raise a glass for him. And sure as the saints wore halos, they had better pass the hat around for the Little Sisters of Charity. They did damn good work. He wanted it always to be so.
And that was it.
Jimmy was forty-six.
*
On the day itself, Saint Theresa’s was packed. And it was with faint irony that Dolan felt a touch of the familiar. His parents were married here, and he was baptized here. Sunday school, first communion, the works.
The first funeral he ever attended had been here, for a neighbor down the street. Dolan was four then. The man had passed away in his sleep, succumbing to liver cancer at eighty-one. The boy didn’t know the man, not really. Only to say hello to. The service was sad, puzzling and a little frightening. It was irrefutable proof of death.
His mother’s funeral was the following year. Her illness had taken her so quickly that the loss of her dwarfed anything he had ever known. If the earth had swallowed him, he couldn’t have been more shocked.
There were others, of course. Mostly for elders who departed after a long illness. Some of them he liked and felt bad about their passing. Others he didn’t know at all, and there were a couple he hated. Cranky old people who yelled a lot about things he couldn’t understand. To his shame, their deaths meant little.
In one case—when he was fifteen—he was not only glad the old bastard had kicked it but wished he had gone out sooner. Pat went purely from duty to his father, who said that respect alone for the dead didn’t cut it. That attending the service mattered to the bereaved. The son didn’t argue, but sure as hell didn’t agree.
They piled up, the deaths and rites and rituals, each leading to a hole in the ground. He went to them all because his father wanted him to. Needed him to. And so, the son had complied.
On the way to Pop’s service, he realized that mourning took work. By now his mother had been gone fifteen years. As each year slipped away, his memories of her weakened more.
The deaths of everyone else, and the concern he was expected to show, became less and less a priority. And by the time he had his suit on, looking formal and formidable, ready for the long-rehearsed show, Jimmy’s son realized he had nothing to mourn with.
In Vietnam he attended mass when he could, usually in a mess tent converted to church and restored to its original purpose after. Sometimes, if he was in a city, he went to the real thing. He enjoyed the similarities. The priest’s Vietnamese interlaced with Latin was a singular comfort. A reminder that his faith was universal. And it intrigued him, even inspired him, that the priest’s range of tones and inflections gave everything a spiritual quality. A kind Dolan had never felt before.
But never at funerals.
Not once.
And it wasn’t until Luoc Nien village that he saw dead bodies. They were not tidy. Not neatly made up and dressed. Only things now. Bloody and broken and gone. Freshly, violently gone. Laying out in the open until zipped into bags. No incense, no candles, no prayers. Just sealed up and hauled away like trash.
*
The organist for Pop’s funeral asked if Dolan had any requests for the service. Numbly, he told her anything by Bach would be fine, whose work his mother had loved. The woman proposed Sheep May Gently Graze and Dolan said that would be perfect and she beamed as though he’d gifted her with roses.
His suit was dark gray. It was only the night before that he’d pulled it from the back of his closet and tried it on. The jacket hung loosely on him. It still had dust on the shoulders, despite his efforts to brush it away. When Dolan studied himself in the mirror, a stranger looked back. His only thought was that he had died, too.
The parish priest and two altar boys led the way. The old man resplendent in white with an ornate Bible clutched to his chest. The boys bearing crosses and candles as the Romans would with legion standards.
Dolan stood with five men flanking the casket. He chose the middle, his left hand gripping the handle as the right shoulder creaked and moaned. Silently, he ordered it to shut the fuck up.
The casket was draped with the flag and rested on a rolling cart. The cart was covered by a sheet of green felt and copper fringe. Each corner featured a golden cross. Between them were quotes from the New Testament.
I am the light and the way
He who believeth in me shall not die
As my Father has loved me, so do I love you
That last one grabbed him.
I love you, too, Pop.
In a flash, he pondered the effect of Christ’s teachings if they were replaced with something less genteel. Like, say, God laying waste to Sodom. Always a crowd pleaser, that one.
All its land is burning waste, brimstone and salt, undone and unproductive
Woe to them! For they have brought evil upon themselves
Sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death
The organist finished and the pallbearers stepped away.
Dolan moved to sit in the front row. They had saved him the aisle seat of course.
Of course.
And so, he sat, surrounded by the decent people of the parish, of the neighborhood, of Pop’s workplace.
Nodding silently, because he had nothing left to say.
*
His mind kept wandering and the events blurred together.
He was in a church and a priest was speaking and those gathered nodded gravely.
But he wasn’t there.
He was in the alley. He was rising from the cobblestones and running over to the wall. Crouching in the shade. Watching the soup vendor shrugging it off, as if the explosion was only thunder.
Je suis une optimiste.
I am an optimist.
Seeing the man sitting on his crate again.
N’etes vous pas?
Aren’t you?
The man opening his battered sports magazine again to review scores decades old.
*
Dolan drifted through the motions. From service to hearse to cemetery, then gathering at Foley’s afterward. Doing it in a haze. Accepting the handshakes he didn’t want. Taking the hugs as they were given him and letting them fall away.
It got old. So very old. Getting through it all mechanically, like pushing his way off a crowded train and climbing the steps to the street. Wading through the course.
Nothing more.
*
Dolan’s last days in Vietnam were his last plugged into the here and now.
At first, he didn’t consider himself damaged beyond the obvious. Within limits, he could still move. He had his senses. Could think and speak. He was getting better. Slowly, to be sure, but getting there.
Life on the firebase had beaten up his hearing, he knew, where the artillery practically went non-stop. And the fighting at Luoc Nien and Kontum were double hits afterward. At Walter Reed, they gave him headphones and sent beeps and burps into his brain, and he raised his thumb for most of them. Afterward they told him his hearing was “slightly diminished” for higher pitched sounds, like a shrieking tea kettle or a cop’s whistle.
No loss, he thought.
He might regain it, he might not. But otherwise, the doctor declared, he was all right. Joking that Dolan might even find this a relief. Maybe it’d give him an edge for enduring a mother-in-law’s ranting.
Ha, ha.
*
Often Dolan was driven to distraction by… nothing.
It wasn’t so much his hearing that seemed off, but his capacity to stay focused on what people were saying. It had never been a problem before. It was his outstanding journalist’s trait, even when hospitalized. That last morning with the doctor in Nha Trang was testament enough.
Now he had to be dialed in completely. What was nothing before took work now. If what they were telling him wasn’t that important, he got the damnedest feeling they were miles away. Hearing the voices, sure, but their meaning kept drifting in and out.
And there was the flip side, and that was worse. He’d be in the market or walking down the street or along the platform under Scollay Square and he would think someone three feet away or even ten yards was talking to him.
They weren’t, of course.
He’d look up and say, “What was that again?”
And they would smile or frown and shake their heads.
He’d go up to the Garden to see about tickets for the Celtics and the man behind him would be waiting his turn and Dolan would look back and ask the question.
“Sorry—did you say something?”
And the man hadn’t.
It was tolerable enough, he supposed, if they were people he didn’t know.
But for those he did, it was troubling.
“Pat?” they would ask.
He wouldn’t always hear.
He wouldn’t realize they were talking to him. He heard their voices, yes, but he didn’t tune them in right away. Sometimes he didn’t tune them in at all. And when they expected a reply, his question was always the same.
“Sorry—did you say something?”
After a few weeks of this he had his ears checked again. They gave him the earphones once more and ran him through the gamut. He nailed most of them yet the results were the same. Better even. His auditory range, they assured him again, was “still slightly diminished,” yet prospects for further improvement were good.
“Count yourself lucky, son,” said the doctor placidly, as though he’d said it a dozen times that day. When Dolan made no reply, the man frowned. He was accustomed to responses but his patient only stared at him.
Dolan’s combat exposure, he added, meant reduction to the high end of the auditory range. He would have trouble hearing, say, the ticking of his watch or someone whispering to him. Further improvement was possible, but not guaranteed. He would have to “self-monitor” for now and re-test in the future.
Dolan made the next appointment and left.
A minute later he was back, asking the receptionist to write it down for him.
She had told him twice and already he’d forgotten.
*
It didn’t work to say Dolan was driven to distraction. That implied a temporary condition. His was permanent. As if he’d not only gone away but paid everyone to forget they ever saw him.
Wherever it was he had gone, Dolan stayed. He lived there now.
His stiff movements were off-putting to those who saw. And even if they didn’t, the scars were inescapable. For the older men he’d known before—who didn’t seem so old now—and for the younger ones he’d never met, the response was always the same. Their smiles would waver and they would look somewhere else.
The cheerful, thoughtful kid had gone away.
A foreigner had returned.
“This story is a meditation on what it means, not to go to war, but to return from it—especially when the protagonist Sergeant Pat Dolan volunteered to go. Seriously wounded in Vietnam near the end of his tour, and suffering the loss of his closest friend, Dolan begins the long journey back. His return is more an emotional one than a physical one. Finding himself back in the U.S. just days after being injured, his attempts to become reacclimated spiritually prove far more difficult than simply stepping off a plane.” —Mike McLaughlin
Mike McLaughlin writes fiction and nonfiction. His short stories have appeared in The Wrath-Bearing Tree, October Hill and The Metaworker. His historical features have run in American Veteran, WWII History and American Heritage. He is a graduate of Fairfield University with a degree in English writing. Mike lives in Boston, an excellent place for any writer to keep a low profile and get real work done.