heart burn so bad it stops me in mytracks

#Heart burn so bad it stops me in mytracks full#

I’d look in their eyes and get goose bumps. Sometimes I’d look at my friends’ older brothers sitting on their front porches and their stares would scare me. No more teasing, no big brother reprimands to get out of the street and quit picking on the little ones. Guys I’d known my entire life weren’t fun, or funny, anymore. The rest of our boys came home, but the ship never righted. More than 2 million Americans served in Vietnam. I pictured him lying on one of those colorful rafts swimmers used on Lake Erie, and thought Vietnam must be one crazy place. “He’s alive!” she yelled, “He’s alive.” She later said his air mattress had been shot out from under him. She listened for a few moments, and started to cry. I was sitting on the sofa when the phone rang and my mother rushed to answer. I still remember the call that came two days later. My cousin Norman was in Vietnam, and for some reason, Mom knew there was a chance that he had been shot. One time it was our family, but after a really bad scare, the news was good. The assumption was always that another family had gotten bad news from the war.

I would be sitting in school with twenty other fifth-graders, and suddenly a classmate would be called into the hall. I was in the middle phase of a child’s life-too young to know everything, too old to know nothing at all. Soon, Mom was writing notes to other mothers every week, it seemed, filling them with words of encouragement or sympathy in her careful backhand script.

#Heart burn so bad it stops me in mytracks full#

They left full of brag and bravado, but so many of them came home spent, and eerily old.Īs the war progressed, our small town shifted incrementally, like a ship that slowly starts to tilt with an uneven load. Neighbors would take over potluck and beer the night before these boys boarded the first flights of their lives.

By the late 1960s, it seemed you couldn’t drive three blocks in any direction without passing the house of a boy who had gone to Vietnam.

But hope took a holiday in neighborhoods like ours during the war. Twenty-six of the servicemen who died came from my home county of Ashtabula, which was full of farmers who hoped to hand off the land to their sons, and working-class boys hoping to graduate from high school and follow their dads into factories that produced rubber, steel, and automobiles. Ohio, where I grew up, ranked fifth in the number of war casualties in Vietnam. Vietnam was, and is, one of those ghosts for me-because of my roots, not my politics. Issues that push and pull at us in equal measure are the ones most likely to haunt us. Perhaps that is where I stopped reading in 1978, and decided to take the book home, where I wouldn’t be surrounded by strangers. The image of that elephant forces a palm to my chest even now, reminding me to breathe. Fellow asthmatics will likely understand why, more than thirty years later, I can still easily remember shorter and shorter breaths, working myself up to a low-grade wheeze by the time I came to the non-italicized text on the fourth page: “A couple of rounds fired off in the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for a breath.” I don’t remember how much I read before I bought Dispatches. We also knew that for years now there had been no country here but the war. We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people. It was late ’67 now, even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much anymore reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. If dead ground could come back and haunt you the way dead people do, they’d have been able to mark my map current and burn the ones they’d been using since ’64, but count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. I deposited my notebooks on the floor, let my purse slide off my shoulder to join them. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore. I turned to the first chapter, called “Breathing In,” and started to read its italicized beginning: There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. I looked at the bottom for the author’s name: Michael Herr. A single blurb, by John le Carré, appeared beneath the title: “The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.” The cover was the color of a brown paper bag, with a one-word title in headline type at the top: Dispatches. In the fall of 1978, I was racing through Kent State University’s campus bookstore when a thin book, propped in a section where it didn’t belong, stopped me in my tracks.