Carry Me Home (95 page)

“Man ... I knew it. I knew it. I knew it before I fired em up. I was the cavalry. I was ...” Sherrick paused for a long time. Bobby did not speak. Slowly, quietly, Sherrick began again. “Man, no matter what you ever tell me, no matter what the reasons, what the cause, what happened afterwards, I’ll never believe we had any fuckin business being there. We never had any right. For me to have done what I did, Man ... no matter what the gooks were doing to each other ... Man, no matter, there was never, never,
ever
, a justification for an American presence. You understand?”

Sherrick’s voice trailed off. He passed the stick.

“Tell it to me again,” Bobby said. He passed the stick back.

Sherrick was reluctant. Bobby nodded. Sherrick repeated the story adding times, dates, units, names of his crew members, the number off the rotor on his slick, details and more details. Again he handed the stick to Bobby. Again Bobby handed it back, saying, “Tell it to me again.”

Sherrick sighed. He began a shortened version. As he got to the point where he was about to fire Bobby held up his hand. “I’m sorry. I gotta wiz, Man. Just hold it right there, okay?” Bobby returned. Sherrick finished the story. Again Bobby asked him to repeat it. Now as he got to the point where he’d just begun firing Bobby disrupted the story to build the fire back up. On the fourth go-through Bobby interrupted again, a few words further in, to get the old army blankets they’d brought, to wrap themselves against the predawn chill. The fifth time Bobby stretched his legs, kicked over the fire, caught the corner of his blanket on fire, had to scramble to beat it out. “Continue, please,” he said.

“Continue what?” Sherrick asked.

“You were telling me about your premonition that you were firing up Americans even before you fired.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess it was a premonition.”

“Yeah. You worried about it all the time, huh?”

“Shit, yeah!”

“They bring charges against you, T
ë
me?”

“No! They knew ... we weren’t the only bird firing. There was no way to tell ...”

“But you know it was you?”

“I think it was me. At least one. Had to be me.”

“Probably was, T
ë
me.”

“Shi—it happened again. Not—not in Nam. But when I was with narcotics investigation. We busted into this one house. And I knew it was going to happen. We blew away this old, unarmed black guy.”

“You shoot im?”

“No. It wasn’t me. But see, I knew before—”

“Yeah.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, T
ë
me. When you’re trained to be aware of those possibilities, like you said before, like doorgunners are always aware, then you always have those premonitions, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“And if one comes true, you’ve got to punish yourself because you knew you were going to—”

“But I fired ...”

Bobby’s legs again shot onto the fire.

“... even when they yelled ‘Friend—’ What are you doing??!”

Wapinski jolted, rolled, yelled, “I’m on
fah-yar
!” The blanket smoldered, the burning wool smelled horrible.

Sherrick burst out laughing.

Wapinski regained his seat. “Tell me again, T
ë
me, ah, from just as your bird was coming in.”

Sherrick began the story but he couldn’t stop laughing. “I was fah-yar-in ...” He chuckled. “God, you stink.”

“Quick Strike, Man,” Bobby said.

“Huh?”

“I’ll explain later. Hey, you know a lot about school. You were a good student. Why don’t you set up the discovery exercises?”

“Those things?” Sherrick gasped. “Those guys are full of shit. They barely read anything. You oughtta set up mock trials. That’ll force them to compete. They’ll have to work as hard on getting facts as they do on their jobs or when playing soccer.”

B
ACK AGAIN. IN THE
big barn. On the main floor. On the table adjacent to the sheet metal break. The court has ordered that the equipment—tables, machines, tools, test apparatus, et cetera—“shall not be put up for auction or for sale or in any manner disposed” until the court has made its final ruling.

Seems like a lot of court stuff affects this place. In late ’78 Gary Sherrick hit Miriam, Joanne and Cheryl with a slap-suit on the grounds of harassment and interference with business. Something like that! Sherrick understood the system, knew exactly how to manipulate it. He obtained, in Bobby’s name, a temporary restraining order or a cease and desist order, something, while the court investigated (at Bobby’s request) whether or not High Meadow, as operated, met the terms and intent of Pewel Wapinski’s will.

We pressed on. Everything was getting better, falling into place. More of the High Meadow program jelled. The Quick Strike: Raid on the Brain Solvent—disrupting the meaning associated with the experience that causes one to be stuck and inserting a stairway or a ladder—became a formal, structured process, essential to the early phase of every vet’s program. High Meadow was proving to be highly successful at transforming stuck and bitter men without hope into competent, productive and responsible citizens.

At this point I lost count of who came, who left. Between mid-’78 and mid-’79 we had better than a 100 percent increase in population including our first resident families. This taxed our water supply and sanitation facilities. We built a sewage composting plant, and all waste water was directed into a new, separate pond where by biological means—bacteria, algae and various marsh plants—the water was purified then used for irrigation. This worked so well Bobby attempted to get the town’s Water Quality Authority interested in the concept as an alternative to the now $36 million proposal for a town sewage system and treatment facility. They wouldn’t even look. Bobby attended public hearings, meetings, objecting to the town’s plan as ultimately environmentally unsound and as nothing more than a town-wide tax to subsidize the development of South Hill, the New Mall, and Whirl’s End Golf and Country Club.

By mid-’79 High Meadow had lost, via graduation, nine vets. Three didn’t make it through the program: two by choice; one, Kenneth Moshler, was killed in town in a freak accident where a front tire on a panel truck blew out, the driver lost control and swerved into our newest EES van, pinning and crushing Kenny. For a time everyone was thrown into a retro-state—back to when close friends or hardly known unit-mates could be killed at seemingly any moment. Kenny was buried at High Meadow. That brought us all closer together.

Many of the new guys were hardcore dropouts. They had deeper feelings of self-disgust, longer-term drug habits, criminal records. They were victims of society and they played the role into which they’d been cast. “Not my fault, Man,” “Shit happens.” “You gotta roll with the punches.” (“Roll,” Bobby’d interrupt. “Not roll over.”) They had little hope, little trust in anybody or anything. I don’t remember a single one arriving without a bad attitude. They were more fucked up than I ever was. Stuck! They couldn’t get off first base. Hell, half of them couldn’t even get out of the dugout.

Because of the expertise long-term residents had acquired in either the solar business or the farm, there developed what was essentially a chain of command. The cherries, the newbies, the newfers, they came to us almost the way the rotation system worked in Viet Nam—new guy in, lowest of the low, in-country training and acclimatization, then into a work-team and the first mission, the newbies pulling the basest duties but always supported by, and always knowing in turn that they were supporting their team, their unit, the entire complex. Knowing too that via rotation there soon would be a new cherry, and eventually they would rise to the top, become short-timers and return to the World.

This was not basic training. High Meadow never stepped back that far. But there did develop more regimentation and requirements. For example, at work, everyone assigned to EES wore blue-and-white uniforms with name tags. This was no different than any other service company with men going into people’s homes. Team leaders required their crews to be clean, tidy, to walk as if they were proud of their product, their team, their organization; as if they possessed total knowledge of the job, were skillful, confident, focused, learning.

Some of the work crews carried this to unexpected heights. Howie Bechtel’s collector builders became The Energy Cell, and Steve Hacken’s EES installers became The Power Pack. They demanded to stay together during PT. They purchased team uniforms—soccer shirts, shorts, socks—and challenged everyone and anyone, including regional league teams. Eventually they set off a scramble for new guys who looked to be promising wings or strikers or midfielders.

I was sure Bobby had discovered a program that could, if used on a massive scale, turn around not just the ailing vets but any ailing or stuck group. Farming and EES were vehicles. Any honest enterprise would have worked. I was sure it could be used in prisons, in inner cities, with junkies and juvenile dropouts. Linda could barely believe the High Meadow results. She and Sara established a vets’-wives group and used a modified program successfully.

Bobby had so many ideas some had to wait. To his collectors and storage equipment designs he did add a new branch—windmills. We built three to pump water from the ponds into holding tanks that fed our drip irrigation systems. These were towering edifices, one very traditional with large blades and its own house, the other two on poles looking like elevated plane props. Bobby wasn’t finished. He began tinkering with mini-mills that could be mounted on roofs, that looked like weather vanes. These mills turned small generators producing electricity which in theory could be stored for later use, but he never developed a battery system.

Gary Sherrick never worked on the farm, never for EES. He became the director of the High Meadow Institute of Southeast Asia Studies. His countenance changed. No one acknowledged that it was a result of the fire circle. No one acknowledged that Wapinski’s Quick Strike had changed the meaning of Sherrick’s experience, of his premonition and role in the deaths by friendly fire.

As I review this I would not want one to think adding new associations to a vet’s experience somehow changed or sugar-coated that experience. The opposite is true. We faced the subject squarely, immersed ourselves in our experience, and the overall American AND Asia experience, expanding our knowledge, our understanding. If anything our feelings became deeper, sometimes more caustic, yet every vet became more mobile with his emotions, became unstuck by the new associations and deeper meanings. One can call it developing proper coping mechanisms. We learned how to handle it, NOT to move on or put it behind us. For us there became nothing “post” about our personal traumas—they are with us here, now, forever, as they should be—but, because of our emotional agility, they are not debilitating. Indeed, they have become sources of personal strength, pride and motivation.

When Wapinski announced that Sherrick would head the institute, there at first arose low grumblings, then a cresting, raucous wave of protest. Sherrick’s posture and expression may have altered but to the vets he had not shown any substantive change. He was still obnoxious, quick to judge, verbally abusive. Yet, within days for some, within weeks for most, the vets understood. This man’s niche was not in physical or design labors but in the volumes and documents of the growing library, within the barn classroom, within the bunkhouse study halls. Quick Raid released in him a sense of urgency, of time wasted. Sherrick was on fire with How Things Work. When someone would ask, “Why are vets powerless?” or bitch, “Why are we voiceless?” Sherrick would respond, “Change the question. Ask, What can we do to have power? How can we have a voice in our own lives?’” If they asked, “Why are we still stuck in Viet Nam?” he’d reply, “How can we become unstuck from our Viet Nam experience of 1966, or ’68, or ’70, and enter into our own lives in 1979? How can we become unstuck from our limited American experience and know the Viet Namese experience? Viet Nam and the Soviet Union recently signed a binding Friendship Treaty. This has set off wave upon wave of refugees. Why? How? What’s going on?”

By mid-’79 High Meadow had moved on to yet a new phase where Gallagher, Van Deusen, Sherrick, Wagner and I were permanent cadre, and both the farm and EES, beyond being part of the program, were businesses in their own rights. High levels of leadership led midlevels. Perhaps it was Gallagher. In his quiet beliefs, quiet management style, reinforcing Bobby while in turn drawing strength from Bobby; and like a conduit passing strength down, accepting and passing reinforcement up. Call it brotherhood. Call it family. Perhaps it was Van Deusen. Once unstuck, once turned on to learning, his enthusiasm was a beacon for others. Maybe even it was me. By 1979 I could answer farm problem questions with the same authority I once ran a platoon. Area farmers sought me out, studied our innovative techniques of water and soil conservation, pest and weed control. Down our informal chain of command everyone became a leader. Call it personal empowerment.

New causes. A dozen of us, at one time or another, had been “incarcerated” at RRVMC. We organized a formal protest. We went to hearings at the state capital. We objected to the warehousing and the drugging of our comrades. Everything was going well. We were having an impact.

I pushed for the development of a winery, drew up plans to carve out a subterranean cavern—cut right into the Pocono sandstone—and put the aging vats there because of the constant temperature. I explained to Bobby we could go through the back of the tractor garage, tunnel in just like Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma. I still had not told or shown him, or anyone other than Linda, the deep bunker.

George Kamp brought Jim Reitmeyer—not to enroll but to speak to us. Jim was the first in a long series of successful veterans of the Southeast Asia war to address a Thursday night meeting. He didn’t know what to expect any more than we did. Jack had convinced him by saying, “Just let them see you. You’re a role model. Don’t hide from them. Tell them what you do, how you do it.” Jim was the principal of a regional high school in the Towanda area. He’d served with Company F, 52d Infantry (Long-Range Patrol), the Ready Rifles, attached to the 1st Infantry Division.