Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,43

I’d meant to him. He’d told his daddy to give me all his medals, because he was afraid if Jack kept them he’d make them out to be something they weren’t, like his son was a war hero or something. “I tell you this much, if I die over here you can be sure it was an accident. I’m not taking any chances, not anymore,” Tim wrote. He wasn’t so foolish that he was going to get himself killed for this army. Because what he’d realized over these past few months was that I was right all along. He’d been sold a line.

“You know I didn’t always feel this way, Laura. I started out all gung ho, thinking my country right or wrong, but things kept building until the lies couldn’t hold and I’d have to be blind not to see what a genuine fucking disaster this invasion has been.” It didn’t make any sense, he said. There was nothing there. It was just jungles and hills and villages, and dogs and chickens and people going about their lives. Straw houses and green trees, mothers with babies. “You can’t help but think everything would’ve been fine if we’d just let it be.” And yet here they came with their millions of tons of machinery and ordnance, blowing things up indiscriminately and digging themselves in deeper and deeper until they were up to their necks in shit, and as far as Tim could see, it was mostly their own shit. Charlie’ll have the last laugh yet, he said: “Lookee crazy American up to neck in own shitee!” But what Tim wanted to know now was, whose idea was this in the first place? Because it was the idea of a madman, that much was clear. He couldn’t see any other way to explain it. “This war is the dream of a madman.”

I stopped reading and looked out the window. Fields of broken sugarcane blurred past. The bus swayed and hummed. Could there really be a war on, I wondered, right now, with boys like Tim fighting and dying? He was right, it seemed mad. Impossible. I turned to the next page. It was only words on paper, but I could hear his voice as clear as if he were sitting beside me.

“It’s raining now,” he told me. “The water falls in strings from the edge of the roof outside my door, like one of those bead curtains you see. I’m hoping it keeps raining until the roads are impassable and our next mission gets delayed a day or two. The rain’s brought some cool air with it. A rooster’s crowing like it’s morning and there’s a radio playing Bob Dylan in the next hooch….

“I tell you, Laura, if any good comes out of our being here it’ll be a complete accident. What I mean is, any good that happens here, happens not because of the U.S. Army but in spite of it. The weird thing is that there is some good here. Only it’s not what you’d expect. It’s got nothing to do with the war. I swear, I believe I spent some of the happiest, most peaceful moments of my life right here in Vietnam. I wonder if you can believe that?

“It’s like this,” he went on. “You hike out in a field some morning to take a piss. You’re half awake, and you can already sense the heat of the day at the back of your neck, but right now it’s still cool and a white mist is rising up from the grass all around you so that it’s like you’re walking in the clouds. And then from out of nowhere a flock of brown baby ducks comes waddling past, tripping over each other and quacking soft. A minute later a mamasan comes up the hill after them wearing a straw hat and a yellow sarong, waving a bamboo stick, quiet as a ghost, humming to herself. She stops on the hill when she sees you. You look at her, and you look at the ducks, and she looks at the ducks, and she looks at you, and she sees you holding your thing in your hand. And then she cracks up and puts her hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing. And you laugh with her because you’re peeing, and the morning is so damn beautiful, and people are so damn great.

“Or it’s like Binh, that kid I got to know when we were out on