My Losing Season (40 page)

I traveled to Houston to interview Bob Cauthen then flew to Dallas to talk to Brian Kennedy. I spent two days with John DeBrosse in Huber Heights, Ohio, followed by a meeting in the Newark Airport Marriott with Jim Halpin and his wife, Eileen. I could not get Bill Zinsky to answer my letters or phone calls, so I left New Jersey without talking to him. I drove to Charleston to interview Dave Bornhorst, then drove up I-26 to listen to Doug Bridges talk. With Bridges I hit a solid mother lode of information, discovering that he had returned to that year hundreds of times and tried to figure out why it remained so painful and so meaningful. The year had marked him with its scars and had stayed with him.

“I'm not surprised you're here, Conroy,” he told me. “I knew this year was going to come back into my life. I always felt that. I just didn't know it would come disguised as you.”

One night in 1998, I received a surreptitious phone call from Bridges, who surprised me by saying, “Zinsky's in my living room, Conroy. He just showed up from Glassboro, New Jersey.”

“I'll be there in two and a half hours,” I said, then grabbed an overnight bag and raced for my car.

When I reached Doug's lakeside home on the outskirts of Columbia, Zinsky and I embraced and he said, “Mel Thompson ruined me as a basketball player, Conroy. He wore me down a little at a time, until there was nothing left. Mel and The Citadel were too much for me. I left that place and never played ball again.”

         

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
I
TOOK A TRAIN TO
interview my teammate Al Kroboth, I attended the one hundredth anniversary of my publishing company, Doubleday, and stood on the top floor of the Bertelsmann Building in Times Square chatting with Margaret Atwood, a Canadian novelist I admire immensely. Doubleday had included both of us in the
Doubleday 100th Birthday Reader,
and I had opened it to see my name listed with Bram Stoker, Booker T. Washington, Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley, Anne Frank, and Joseph Conrad. I remembered coming into New York over twenty-five years before, proud as a dragonfly and insecure and fidgety as a baitfish, feeling like a con man for staking any claim as a writer.

I walked to a place commanding a view of south Manhattan where I lifted a glass of champagne and asked my agent of twenty-five years, Julian Bach, to join me in a toast to New York City. To the east, I saluted the glorious Chrysler Building and the UN Building and the silken, turbulent lights of Brooklyn. Julian had taken me to my first opera at Lincoln Center, having no idea that I had neither heard of an opera named
Otello
nor of a place called Lincoln Center. I raised my glass and bowed, then said, “I'm thanking the city of New York for its extraordinary kindness to me. It spits boys and girls like me out by the tens of thousands. It keeps asking me back. I'm grateful beyond words, Julian.”

Then I walked to the west windows where I looked out toward the New York Times building and Broadway and the West Side Highway and the great black gash of the Hudson and the glittering stream of lights of New Jersey where Al Kroboth was awaiting my visit. Of all the interviews this was the one I feared most. Looking at my reflection in the massive window and the great spillage of man-made lights in the diamond-braceleted streets below, I knew that tomorrow I would face my hardest encounter with how I conducted myself during the Vietnam War.

         

A
L
K
ROBOTH MET ME AT
the train station when I got off the second stop from New York City after Newark. We shook hands and took each other's measure, then Al turned his truck toward home and began quizzing me. “Why are you writing this book, Conroy? No one wants to read about a losing team.”

“If that is true, it will have serious consequences in my career.”

“Americans love winners. They want to read about people like Michael Jordan.”

“I think Michael Jordan might like my book,” I said.

“Jordan's the best basketball player that ever lived. By far.”

“I agree,” I said. “But I saw Michael Jordan play baseball. He understands losing. He understands coming up short physically.”

“Oh,” Al said. “I see.”

“Eventually, all of us play on a losing team. I'm trying to figure out if you learn more by losing than by winning.”

“You always were a little weird, Conroy,” Al said, smiling as he turned into his driveway.

On a clear fall day in Roselle, New Jersey, Al Kroboth, one of the best big men to line up at center for the Citadel Bulldogs, gave me everything he had taken out of the Vietnam War. He asked that his wife, Patty, be present, and she was. The interview took a long time because I would have to wait for Big Al or Patty to stop weeping. Finally, all three of us were weeping at the power of the emotions unloosed upon us by Al's heart-stopping narrative. The story I tell now is the one Big Al told me in New Jersey as my face streamed with tears, the one told where we could not look at each other.

“Al,” I said, with Patty sitting beside him. “Tell me what happened to you in Vietnam. Not just the facts; I'd like you to tell me how it all felt. I want you to make me feel it. America needs to hear this story.”

“Just one thing,” Al said with severity. “I am not a hero, Conroy. Don't you try to turn me into one.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked Patty.

“No, I don't,” Patty replied.

“Tell me your story, Al,” I said. “I'll let it speak for itself.”

“I'm
not
a hero, Conroy,” he said again and again. “I met guys who were, but I'm not one of them.”

“Just tell me,” I said, and here is the story he told:

On his seventh mission as Captain Leonard Robertson's navigator in an A-6, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload as Robertson began to make his dive for the target area. Somewhere in that dive, the A-6 took on enemy fire and though Al has no memory of this, he punched out somewhere in the middle of this ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. Al does not know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days. As for Captain Leonard Robertson, his name is on the Wall in Washington, and Al wears a POW bracelet with Captain Robertson's name engraved on it.

When Al awoke, a Vietcong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. Al had broken his neck and back as well as shattered his left scapula bone. When he was well enough to get to his feet, two armed Vietcong led Al from the jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. For three months Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the most impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained and he slept in bomb craters with his two Vietcong captors. Infections began to explode on his body as they moved north, his legs alive with leeches picked up in rice paddies.

At the very time of Al's walk, I had a small role in organizing the only antiwar demonstration ever held in Beaufort, South Carolina, the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station. In a Marine Corps town at that time it was difficult to come up with a quorum of people who had even minor disagreements about the Vietnam War. But my small group managed to attract a crowd of about a hundred and fifty to Beaufort's waterfront. With my mother and my wife on either side of me, we listened to the featured speaker, Dr. Howard Levy, suggest to the very few young enlisted Marines present that if they got to Vietnam, here's how they could help end this war: roll a grenade under their officer's bunk when he was asleep in his tent. Called fragging, he explained, it was becoming more and more popular with the ground troops who knew this war was bullshit. I was enraged by the suggestion. At that very moment my father was asleep in Vietnam. But in 1972, at the age of twenty-seven, I thought I was serving America's interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led her to conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia.

In the meantime, Al and his captors had finally arrived in the North, and the Vietcong traded him to the North Vietnamese soldiers for the final leg of the trip to Hanoi. Many times when they stopped to rest for the night, the local villagers tried to kill him. His captors wired his hands behind his back at night, so he learned to sleep in the center of huts when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets into the thin walls. After air raids, old women would come into huts to excrete on him and yank out hunks of his hair. Al Kroboth's walk north was nightmarish, Dantesque, and courageous. It was a relief when his guards finally delivered him to the POW camp where they kept the prisoners captured in South Vietnam.

It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up every meal he ate. An American doctor thought Al was the oldest soldier in the prison because his appearance was so gaunt and skeletal. But the extraordinary camaraderie that sprang up in all the POW camps caught fire in Al in time to save his life.

When I was demonstrating against Nixon and the Christmas bombings, Al and his fellow prisoners were holding hands during the full fury of those bombings, singing “God Bless America.” It was those bombings that convinced Hanoi they would do well to release the American POWs and my college teammate. When he told me about the C-141 landing in Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al Kroboth said he felt no emotion, none at all, until he saw a giant American flag painted on the plane's tail.

“The flag,” Al said, choking. “It had the biggest American flag on it I ever saw. To this day, I cry when I think of it. Seeing that flag, I started crying. I couldn't see the plane, I just saw that flag. All the guys started cheering. But that flag . . . that flag.”

It took a full five minutes before I could see the page I was writing on again. Al and Patty held on to each other, weeping. It took another minute before Al could find his voice again.

“Candy-man, our Vietcong guard on the bus to the airport, said to me, ‘Come with your family and visit us after the war is over.' I said, ‘I'd love to come back to your country. In an A-6. To drop a nuke on this whole place.' There was no shaking hands, Conroy. No farewells. No teary eyes. When my name was called I walked in military fashion toward an Air Force colonel at the foot of the plane. I saluted him and said, ‘Lieutenant Alan Kroboth, reporting for duty, sir.' He returned the salute and said, ‘Welcome home, son.' I walked up the ramp and was met by the most beautiful Air Force nurses I had ever seen. They sat me down. Everyone was quiet, the POWs just sitting. When all our guys were on board, the doors closed. The ramp went up. The engines started. Still no sound from the POWs. The plane taxied. The pilot's voice came on and he said, ‘Everyone sit down. We got low cloud cover but we're getting out of here.' Then we're lifting off. That quiet continued. No emotion. No sighs of relief. It was eerie. Then the pilot's voice comes on again. ‘Feet wet'—which means we are now flying over water. ‘Feet wet. We are out of North Vietnamese air space.'

“That's when the cheering started, Conroy. The tears. The screaming. The yelling. That's when I knew it was over. Finally over. The whole thing. Over.”

It took a minute or two for Al to be able to speak again. Then he told me that the POWs had no idea how America would react to their homecoming. Since their prison guards constantly told them that all Americans considered them to be war criminals, and it was well-known that the war was widely unpopular, Al and the other POWs were uncertain what awaited them at Clark Field in the Philippines. They were stunned to be met by an adoring crowd of ten thousand who gave them a hero's welcome. Al was the last off the plane, and he saluted the commanding general of Clark Field, then marched between the surging crowd on a red carpet as people handed him flowers and reached out to touch him. A small girl leaned down from her father's shoulders to hand Al a piece of paper, telling him she had made it for him. Al took it, but did not read it until his bus started moving toward the hospital. In a childish scrawl, the little girl had printed out these words: “Greater love than this hath no man.”

Five minutes passed before Al, Patty, or I could say a word. Then Al continued, “I still have that piece of paper. Got to the hospital. Marine guys separated from the Army and Air Force guys. Psychologists and psychiatrists were there for the guys with family problems. From the moment we got there they took care of us. Really were there for us. In every way possible. Took us to the mess hall. Every table and every tray and every plate was piled high with food. Lobster, steak, hams, turkeys, salads. For thirty guys. All of us piled it on our plates as high as we could, then sat down and ate two or three spoonfuls.

“People on the base kept bringing us pies and cakes and cookies. Night and day they came. On the second day they fitted us out in uniforms and I got a pair of glasses. Basic psych evaluations. Debriefing. Then an enlisted man said to me, ‘Someone on the first floor wants to see you.' We were on the eighth floor and no one got up there. So I had to have an escort to go with me. When I got down there I see John Vaughan. You remember him, Conroy? Class of '68?”

“Sure I do, Al. He was a cheerleader. He was one of the guys who led the Corps in cheering us, on the team I'm writing about.”

It had become common knowledge among the Citadel alumni stationed at Clark Field that the Vietcong had stolen Al's Citadel ring, evidently when he was unconscious after being shot down. When Al came off the elevator on the first floor, Johnny Vaughan, an Air Force pilot, was waiting for him in the lobby. The two men shook hands, then embraced. Johnny began to remove his Citadel ring from his right hand. “Al, I'm not letting you go back to our country without wearing a Citadel ring. I'm not going to let you do that.”

“No, Johnny,” Al protested, “I can't. I lost too much weight. I'm too skinny. I'll lose it.”

“You didn't hear me,” said Johnny Vaughan. “You're not going back to our country without wearing the Citadel ring.” He then put his own ring on Al Kroboth's finger.