This is what awaits Mr. Walker at the very least:
This is from the october issue of Forbes ASAP magazine
Pat Conroy wrote The Prince of Tides, The Great
Santini and The Lords of Discipline
My Heart's Content
Pat Conroy
The true things always ambush me on the road and take
me by surprise when I am drifting down the light of
placid days, careless about flanks and rearguard
actions. I was not looking for a true thing to come
upon me in the state of New Jersey. Nothing has ever
happened to me in New Jersey. But came it did, and it
came to stay.
In the past four years I have been interviewing my
teammates on the 1966-67 basketball team at the
Citadel for a book I'm writing. For the most part,
this has been like buying back a part of my past that
I had mislaid or shut out of my life. At first I
thought I was writing about being young and frisky and
able to run up and down a court all day long, but
lately I realized I came to this book because I needed
to come to grips with being middle-aged and having
ripened into a gray-haired man you could not trust to
handle the ball on a fast break.
When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth's house in
New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about
his memories of games and practices and the screams of
coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30
years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center
for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220
pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and
enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the
nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew
Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a
brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped
in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he
graduated. After we talked basketball, we came to a
subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay
between us and would not lie still.
"Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar
demonstrator."
"That's what I heard, Conroy," Al said. "I have
nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought
was right."
>
"Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened
to you," I said.
On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 for
Major Leonard Robertson, Al was getting ready to
deliver their payload when the fighter-bomber was hit
by enemy fire. Though Al has no memory of it, he
punched out somewhere in the middle of the ill-fated
dive and lost consciousness. He doesn't know if he was
unconscious for six hours or six days, nor does he
know what happened to Major Robertson (whose name is
engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA
bracelet Al wears).
When Al awoke, he couldn't move. A Viet Cong soldier
held an AK-47 to his head. His back and his neck were
broken, and he had shattered his left scapula in the
fall. When he was well enough to get to his feet (he
still can't recall how much time had passed), two
armed Viet Cong led Al from the jungles of South
Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. The journey took three
months. Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the most
impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it sometimes
in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained, and he
slept in bomb craters with his two Viet Cong captors.
As they moved farther north, infections began to erupt
on his body, and his legs were covered with leeches
picked up while crossing the 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 150 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 get sent to Vietnam, here's how they can
help end this war: Roll a grenade under your officer's
bunk when he's asleep in his tent. It's called
fragging and is becoming more and more popular with
the ground troops who know this war is bullshit. I was
enraged by the suggestion. At that very moment my
father, a marine officer, was asleep in Vietnam. But
in 1972, at the age of 27, 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 Viet Cong traded him to
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 trained himself to sleep in the center of huts
when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets
into the thin walls. Following the U.S. air raids, old
women would come into the huts to excrete on him and
yank out hunks of his hair. After the nightmare
journey of his walk north, Al was relieved when his
guards finally delivered him to the POW camp in Hanoi
and the cell door locked behind him.
It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up
every meal he ate and before long was misidentified as
the oldest American soldier in the prison because his
appearance was so gaunt and skeletal. But the
extraordinary camaraderie among fellow prisoners that
sprang up in all the POW camps caught fire in Al, and
did so in time to save his life.
When I was demonstrating in America against Nixon and
the Christmas bombings in Hanoi, Al and his fellow
prisoners were holding hands under the full fury of
those bombings, singing "God Bless America." It was
those bombs that convinced Hanoi they would do well to
release the American POWs, including my college
teammate. When he told me about the C-141 landing in
Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al said he felt no
emotion, none at all, until he saw the giant American
flag painted on the plane's tail. I stopped writing as
Al wept over the memory of that flag on that plane, on
that morning, during that time in the life of America.
>
It was that same long night, after listening to Al's
story, that I began to make judgments about how I had
conducted myself during the Vietnam War. In the
darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, lying in
the third-floor guest bedroom, I began to assess my
role as a citizen in the '60s, when my country called
my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid
boys who wrapped themselves in Viet Cong flags and
burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate
against the war without flirting with treason or
astonishingly bad taste. I had come directly from the
warrior culture of this country and I knew how to act.
>
But in the 25 years that have passed since South
Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of
totalitarianism during the unspeakable century we just
left behind. I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz
and Bergen-Belsen, talked to Italians who told me
tales of the Nazi occupation, French partisans who had
counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and
officers who survived the Bataan Death March. I quiz
journalists returning from wars in Bosnia, the Sudan,
the Congo, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, San Salvador,
Chile, Northern Ireland, Algeria. As I lay sleepless,
I realized I'd done all this research to better
understand my country. I now revere words like
democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and the
grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding
fathers. Do I see America's flaws? Of course. But I
now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the
ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off
that my country had no idea what it was doing in South
Vietnam. My country let me scream to my heart's
content--the same country that produced both Al
Kroboth and me.
>
Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a
conclusion about my actions as a young man when
Vietnam was a dirty word to me. I wish I'd led a
platoon of marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I
would have trained my troops well and that the Viet
Cong would have had their hands full if they entered a
firefight with us. From the day of my birth, I was
programmed to enter the Marine Corps. I was the son of
a marine fighter pilot, and I had grown up on marine
bases where I had watched the men of the corps perform
simulated war games in the forests of my childhood.
That a novelist and poet bloomed darkly in the house
of Santini strikes me as a remarkable irony. My mother
and father had raised me to be an Al Kroboth, and
during the Vietnam era they watched in horror as I
metamorphosed into another breed of fanatic entirely.
I understand now that I should have protested the war
after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty
for my country. I have come to a conclusion about my
country that I knew then in my bones but lacked the
courage to act on: America is good enough to die for
even when she is wrong.
I looked for some conclusion, a summation of this trip
to my teammate's house. I wanted to come to the single
right thing, a true thing that I may not like but that
I could live with. After hearing Al Kroboth's story of
his walk across Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in
the North, I found myself passing harrowing,
remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out
to be the man I had once envisioned myself to be. I
thought I would be the kind of man that America could
point to and say, "There. That's the guy. That's the
one who got it right. The whole package. The one I can
depend on." It had never once occurred to me that I
would find myself in the position I did on that night
in Al Kroboth's house in Roselle, New Jersey: an
American coward spending the night with an American
hero.
>
Pat Conroy's novels include The Prince of Tides, The
Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and Beach
Music. He lives on Fripp Island, South Carolina. This
essay is from his forthcoming book, My Losing Season. |
