John Tooke

American Fiction

Blog 4

There is a small dive bar fairly close to my house where, from time to time, I’ll meet a few friends for a drink.  The owner is an older man with thin gray hair and glasses.  He is very talkative and funny, especially after a couple pitchers.  When he is not at the bar, he keeps himself busy by managing two other bars and cruising around with his motorcycle club.  One night in particular, a friend and I were talking to him at the bar, as he was buying us drinks.  I don’t know how we got on the subject, but the Vietnam War was brought up, and his part in it.  He was an infantry soldier during the war and his eyes glazed over with memories as we asked him questions.  I kept trying to ask him about how he felt about the response to the war back in the States; what he thought about the music and the art at the time.  All he seemed to want to talk about, though, was being in “the shit” and doing drugs with his outfit.

My landlord and he brother came over to the place I was renting one day to fix a broken drainage pipe under the house.  I had the day off, so I thought that I would help them out (they were quite old, and I knew that it would take them hours to do the work.  I wanted to speed the process up).  My landlord, cursing and cutting pipe, ended up having to go to the hardware store to get some PVC glue, and left his brother there with me.  We started up casual conversation about all the generic things in life, like the weather and the news, until he associated a conflict in the Middle East with “Nam.”  Turns out, he too was in the war, and we focused on the subject for a time.  Like the bar owner, he seemed to have little interest in what was happening at home and focused on his experience in the jungle. 

While reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, I though of the two vets.  I even used their faces as the characters in the book.  I noted that the memories of the war were carried with the veterans, and all that I have met, seemed delighted at the opportunity to talk of them.  It seems as though there is something important and sacred about going through that type of experience.  It is one you would want to share and one you would not want to forget, however awful it may be.  These experiences made the men who they are today, for the better or worse, and I think they feel a certain obligation to tell their stories.  In Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, a character tells another that a man’s story is his “gris-gris,” meaning, in a way, that it is his soul, or his essence. I believe it is the same with these veterans.