Carry Me Home (99 page)

Finally, at three o’clock, John Pisano, Sr., along with Linda, Isabella and James Pellegrino, Father Tom Niederkou, Johnnie Jackson, and Albert Morris of Morris’ Grocery (now also head of the Mill Creak Falls Chamber of Commerce) were allowed through the barricade. John Sr. was livid. Sara did not know whom he was yelling at. “You tell Hartley he’s gone too far this time. Too goddamned far. Sorry Father.” Then, “Sara! Sara are you okay? Where’s Tony?”

B
ROKEN, TWISTED BODIES, LIFELESS
yet still seeping blood. Others wounded, in pain, in agony, in shock. Yet others dying, some so recently dead they don’t yet realize it. Bodies. Piles of bodies. Drugged, seeping saliva, drugged, naked, dead, hidden, gasoline dripping, lights sirens bodies rotting buried disrupted. There is pain in my arm, my entire arm, my back, shoulder, legs. More images. A lifetime of images. I cannot tell you how beautiful the angel looks, her eyes—green, her hair—auburn, her teeth—glistening, and her bod—what a bod! She holds my hand, my good hand. Smiles sadly. Turns her head just so. Her mouth moves, emits soft sighs, songs.

Aftermath and change, withdrawal, rewithdrawal, rerage, renumbing. Are we so fragile, so vulnerable, they have gotten to our minds? They had gotten to my body. My wounds were serious.

Odd. The bells of St. Ignatius are ringing. It is noon but it’s Friday and the bells are now only rung at noon on Saturday and Sunday. I miss many things being up here—burying myself in the past. I’m in the library. The bells were faint but I’m certain I heard them. Bobby used to pause when he heard them. More so after the raid. He’d nod, direct our attention away from ourselves, our business, to the community. How badly he wanted for us to be part of the larger community.

After shit hits the fan there are three options: one can either walk away, live with shit everywhere, or clean it up and move the fan so it doesn’t happen again. Bobby, most of the vets, chose to clean it up. Me too, when I returned.

Not so Tom Shallier and his family. They left late the afternoon of the 21st, less than an hour after the kids were returned. No letters, no commo since. Six other vets abandoned the program within a week because of lack of security and new feelings of betrayal.

That first night many stayed up all night. Every sound made them uneasy. They posted guards, maintained constant if laconic communication between the bunkhouses, the barn, the trailers and the house. LPs, listening posts, situated themselves on the orchard knoll overlooking the drive and on the barn roof amid the various collector arrays and minimills. One group sat in subdued light on the main barn floor rehashing the events of the day, speculating on Bobby’s release, on my condition, on if the high authorities had planted recording devices in the house, or barn, or bunkhouses, and if the occasional car or truck passing on Mill Creek Road was really surveillance, a vehicle with night scopes, listening devices, people sniffers. The vets whispered—hush ... they’ll hear.

Except Sherrick. “DAMN! You assholes! How does it feel?!”

“
Sssssshh
.”

“Jerks!” Gary exploded. He stood. He ranted. He paced amongst those on the floor. “It’s exactly how we went into the hootches of the Viet Namese. Into their homes. Probable cause! Now you know how the Viet Namese felt! Now you know! Every time we went into a village: ‘Don’t move!’ ‘Stick em up.’ ‘We’ve reason to believe you’re terrorists!’ ‘Freeze!’ We did NOT have to rape; we did NOT have to pillage; we did NOT have to burn the village down or harm a single individual, for them to feel VIOLATED.”

“
SSSSSSHH
!”

All night they talked, vented their angers, fears, frustrations. Linda returned, stayed with Sara. Bobby, only Bobby, was held overnight. He returned the next day at noon and sequestered himself with Sara and his sons and Josh—poor ol’ Josh, the babysitter, his nose broken, his brain scrambled by concussion, barely able to walk a straight line—until dark. Then Bobby and Josh came to the barn. He vented his wrath and concerns and listened to the vets vent theirs and again every night for weeks, for months, every day at work, at rest, in class.

“We’ll handle it. Grunts can handle anything.”

“Yeah, anything.”

“But not kids.”

Noah became withdrawn, defensive. He tested his position by misbehaving, purposefully provoking punitive responses, confirming to himself, to his four-and-one-half-year-old mind, his badness, his need for punishment, for terror. Why else would they have taken him away? Why else would they have beat his father, restrained his mother, clubbed his closest friend until his nose ran blood and he could but twitch on the floor? At night, for months, Noah woke, screaming, unable to breathe, to catch his breath, unable to stop crying, becoming rigid when touched, then eyes like saucers, still, silent, numb.

The SWAT team did not use the same high-velocity rounds that were used in M-16s in Viet Nam. The rounds did not tumble, did not shatter. I was hit in the left hand an inch below my thumb, and in my left shoulder or back, near the base of my neck. Because I was leaning forward, and because of the angle of the shot, that bullet entered the upper trapezius muscle, passed through ten inches of meat and lodged in the lower dorsal region a finger’s width from my spine. Both wounds were mainly to muscle tissue—to which the doctors, for days, kept saying, “Amazing! An inch this way and you’d have lost the use of your hand. An inch there, you’d have been paralyzed.” And to which Linda said, “You must be here for some reason, some higher cause. To have had all the close calls you’ve had ... God’s got something planned for you.” Linda. She is so beautiful. I wanted to marry her again, that day, that night, then and there, in postop. I wanted to live with her forever.

More shit hit the fan. Old shit. Old shit as if it had been shoveled and flung and had hung in the air for years, hovering, slowly floating in the air currents toward the blades. I still had to deal with the paternity suit. And I was charged with resisting arrest, assaulting law-enforcement officials, breach of the peace, concealing a deadly weapon (the forty-four-inch oak two by four!), and half a dozen other charges. Incredible!

For all the blustering about High Meadow the vets had done down at the White Pines Inn, and elsewhere, the having mortars, sentries, booby-traps and the tunnels of Cu Chi, the authorities essentially found nothing. Are you surprised? Guys had been vigilant but there never had been sentries. The gates had always been open (except that one time when we hooted at Chief Hartley). As to weapons, High Meadow had the few rifles, a few registered pistols and my old single-shot shotgun. The way it was pictured on the front page of the local paper the day following the raid, it looked impressive. Yet considering the number of vets and what could have been, or would have been had High Meadow been an armed camp, we were highly underarmed.

Sherrick did the legwork but officially I was represented by Mark Tashkor and Jesse Rasmuellen of Williamsport—both veterans, though Jesse Rasmuellen was only an era vet. Charges, and never-filed charges, against High Meadow, against Bobby, against me, slowly disintegrated. Fuming rage mellowed, became fuel, became drive. In the end, local, state and federal officials had made so many errors—for example, the search warrants had been stamped by a clerk, not signed by a judge, and the warrants’ numbers were blank (improperly recorded prior to authorization)—that Tashkor was able to get the assault charges dropped. Then the concealed weapons charge, and all the minor charges were withdrawn, and the breach of peace charge was found unprosecutable.

We did not have the funds for a major legal countersuit, and Sherrick, in spite of his law school years, really wasn’t qualified. For a time he attempted to get the Public Civil Liberties Union to take our case but they were not interested in veterans who seemingly were proud of their service. The PCLU saw our case as contradictory to other cases it had supported over the past decade: draft avoiders, resisters, and service members desiring early release from active duty.

Still Gary wanted restitution, revenge. He struck back. He wrote up the account of the raid, had it printed, names, addresses, every detail he could uncover. Then he mass-mailed a copy to every address in Mill Creek Falls and the surrounding area. He implicated Ernest Hartley, Senior and Junior, and dozens of their cronies in a politically motivated ploy that had illegally involved state and federal authorities. Gary got away with it by declaring his publication to be a biyearly investigative reporting magazine! Freedom of the press! Hartley, after sixteen years as mayor of Mill Creek Falls, did not run for reelection in 1980. Still, the new sewer plant and system was begun (is still under construction at a now estimated cost of $48 million), and the South Hill development of Whirl’s End Golf and Country Club, the mall, the mall extension, and Hobo Hollow Estates never missed a beat.

We withdrew further, fought our withdrawal. Bobby had been devastated by the raid, had, like all of us, turned inward. Ty Mohammed was a godsend. If sales is an art, Ty was a true artist. For months Bobby was afraid to speak to new people, afraid they had seen him being taken into custody on Channel Five’s 1st Witness newscast. He was afraid clients would fear their EES systems would explode. Ty was oblivious to the point of ruthlessness. He was the kind of salesman who could sell coal to Newcastle. Given an honest, well-priced product, given the cause of the vets and the environmental and financial justifications, Ty saturated half of Pennsylvania and southern New York with EES’s message. While Bobby called every past client, every distributor, every supplier; while he explained how the misunderstanding had occurred, how EES and High Meadow had been totally exonerated; while he virtually begged everyone to remain with him, with us, and “rest assured nothing is going to explode”; Ty couldn’t have cared less. Black, bearded, in a leased gold Cadillac and three-piece suit, nine-fingered, one-eared, one-testicled, golden-smiled Ty, within six months of his arrival, even with the recession of 1980 grasping the nation, tripled EES sales! He buried our withdrawal in work. EES was rolling again, business was good, the crop was being sold.

Work buried other emotions for Ty. He would not visit Luwan. He was cool to Randall, to Phillip and Carol, to his mother. He opened an account in Jessica’s name, deposited half his earnings there, but he did not let her know, did not let her see him. He told no one. Nor did he tell anyone at High Meadow of his cancer.

Wonderment.
Am
[ahm] is the Viet Namese symbol for the female principle—much as is yin in the Chinese yin-yang dichotomy. They named her Brigita Am until my mother, Jo, pointed out that the baby’s initials were BAW, which to Jo and then to Linda and Sara, too, were terrible initials with which to saddle any little girl. So they renamed her Am Brigita Wapinski—no one objected to ABW except Aunt Isabella who thought Am should be changed to Eva for Sara’s grandmother. They named her on Thanksgiving night, eleven hours after she was born. Some of the vets liked the name Brigita but most called her Amy. Like all the other children—Noah and Paul Anthony, Erik and Lindsey Schevard, even Gina and Michelle when they were up—Am was virtually adopted by everyone at High Meadow. But being the last born—being born when the population was again rising, when we were so badly in need of a lift in the aftermath of the raid—Am became special. We marked her birth with the planting of an oak tree over her placenta, me acting the preacher, saying, “As this oak grows strong, so shall you and as it lives long so shall you.” Thirty men said, “Amen.” Am had more uncles than any girl in history, and that brought us closer, made us feel more like brothers. Through her, through all the kids, with Sara and Linda and Emma’s help, we, and Bobby too, slowly re-began the expansion, the conscious turning out to embrace the community.

Another month passed. The trial of Eisenhower and Dulles, JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Kissinger, was a dud. Not that a lot wasn’t learned but concentration had been disrupted, research time usurped. Had or had not the governments of the United States been true to the nation’s founding principles? We never reached a verdict.

Five months from the day of the raid: There is a statute of limitation on paternity suits. Mark Tashkor wanted to invoke it. I wanted to know if Zookie’s kid was mine. I tentatively agreed to help support, only to find that Zookie had dropped the case, refiled naming Gaylord as the father.

More changes. What changed more than anything was Bobby’s re-realization that the world, that people, run on elation, spiritual elation. It is the fuel that makes things go well. It is what makes life good. Life is supposed to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is a basic human right. Ask Tom Jefferson! Ask Sam Adams!

... whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness
.

And yet happiness seemed to have been legislated out of our lives. Happiness had been destroyed by governmental overcomplication; by reduction to triviality by academia; by a narrowing of perspective by the media’s interpretation of our lives; by fear of risk and loss by insurance companies and school boards; by those who, wishing to provide equal opportunity to all, were seeking to level all by reaching for a common denominator and inadvertently finding that the only true common denominator is mere subsistence. We’d become competent men doing competent work—trudging on without joy like so much of America, without pleasure in our achievements, seeking passive “pleasures” like spectator America, boob-tube America, dumbed-down America seeking lowest common denominator sustainability, forgetting that true sustainability requires work; requires striving for quality, for substantive value, for elation that is an adjunct of hope, freedom and achievement.

Bobby reasoned it thusly. “We made ourselves vulnerable by becoming, as a microcosmic community, stuck. We did not reach out, expand ourselves, except in business and in an antagonistic political manner. For all our elegant, internal solutions, for all our simplifications, we have not gone public! We’re building a tower of cards on a kayak when the structure requires a supertanker.”