Waiting: One Wife's Year of the Vietnam War

Chapter 9

{Chapter 9} We parked facing downward on the side of a steep hill packed with twoand three-story houses whose descending red tile rooftops looked like a staircase for giants. Neatly landscaped with miniature front yards and low trimmed hedges, the stucco houses exuded an air of understated elegance and cautious aging. Connie and I hurried up the flight of Mexican tile steps to the front door and rang the bell, all the while scrutinizing my new surroundings, which appeared to place me much farther from West Texas than what the mileage logged on my car’s odometer indicated. Susan answered the door in dungarees and a work shirt. She was barefoot and wore a red bandanna pulled tight over her hair. I could see from Connie’s open mouth that Susan did not fit her image of a Swiss finishing school graduate. Well, there were certain things about Susan one could only learn first-hand. Susan leaned against the opened door and looked us over for a moment before she laughed and said, “God, you are pregnant. Come on in. We’re just trying to get stuff moved around. Everything’s a mess. Mother said we should try to finish before you got here, but I said, ‘Nah, we’ll just put them to work, too.’” After quick introductions, Connie and I entered the foyer, seeing the kitchen doorway straight ahead, the living room to the right, and a hallway to the left. Stepping over the vacuum cleaner and its snaked hose, we moved into a living room filled with unplaced furniture and moving boxes. Large windows let streams of sunlight into the spacious room and its adjoining dining area. So this would be home, I thought, feeling good about the prospect. It [62] chapter 9 was a lovely old place with high ceilings and a fireplace. Looking at the carved mantle from across the room, I spotted the corner of an air mail envelope jutting from behind a figurine. My heart skipped a beat. “Susan,” I said, eyes locked on the red and blue stripes. “Oh,” she said, grabbing the envelope, “this came for you today. Boy, was I disgusted when I saw your name instead of mine.” Shehandedmetheletterandthencontinuedtalking,herwordsbecoming brisk and busy. “Mother’s getting cleaned up. She’s just exhausted because we’ve been running around trying to deal with the movers and getting her stuff out of storage. We’ve got to get the place in order before it drives us crazy. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble we’ve had getting –” Susan clicked on the vacuum cleaner and picked up the hose, the noise of the motor drowning out most of what she said as she continued talking to Connie, who threw a questioning look at me. I nodded, indicating that we now had the answer to our question about how Susan was coping. But first things first. I sat on the sofa, fingering the thickness of the envelope and smiling as I guessed three pages. The letter was dated 16 June—only four days ago . . . well, five because of the International Date Line. Still, it was so current I felt just one step removed from hearing Lee say the words he wrote from the brigade main base where he was on stand-down for three days, meaning out of the field and out of danger, before heading north, where he would be now. The second paragraph wiped the smile off my face when I read about Lee’s last airmobile mission in “the pineapple”: “Most contact I have seen—We were ducking bullets for 2 hours—We didn’t lose anybody though the company next to us did.” I calculated back to pinpoint what I had been doing about that time and remembered my sense of panic before leaving Roby. I dreaded a premonition almost as much as the green army sedan. Yet there was no concrete correlation, I knew in my heart, only a desperate grasping for a sense of immediate connection with Lee. The letter was a magic one; Lee elaborated about loving and missing me. I felt terrific and reassured. Susan turned off the vacuum, abandoning interest in the floor as quickly as she had taken it up. “How’s Lee?” “Fine,” I said, “just as long as he keeps dodging bullets.” Both of my June 1969 [63] friends looked at me with horror-stricken faces. “He...