I
In Vietnam there is a mountain called Ba Na that rises to a height of nearly 4000 feet and is covered in triple-canopy jungle. It begins near the Cambodian border and ends where its eastern face descends to Nghia Trang Go Ca, which I remember as an abandoned village of burned bamboo and thatch hooches situated in a grove of banyans and maples by a wide bend in the Song Yen. The countryside between Ba Na and the South China Sea, a distance of some ten miles, was broken into countless rice paddies crisscrossed by earthen dikes and pocked by bomb craters. Interlaced among the paddies were flat brown rivers and streams infested with leeches and snakes. Between two of these rivers, the Song Thu Bon and Song Vu Gia, was an area Marines called The Arizona. There, as befitted the name, we killed, and some of us died. The rice farmers who had lived there for countless generations knew it by its true name, Dai Loc: The Land of Great Fortune.
To the indigenous Katuic People, Ba Na means “The Mountain of Them.” The pronoun without antecedent. The syntax of apartness. The ambiguity of possession and identity. Ba Na: it is the mountain’s one, true, eternal name, not to be forgotten or changed.
We called it Charlie Ridge.
I knew this mountain. I knew its steep trails that laced like blood vessels through its impenetrable undergrowth. I knew its dark hump against the night sky beneath the hood of stars in The Arizona. I knew the rhythm of its breathing as cloud shadows moved along its broad flank. I knew its stone-faced impassivity, so Buddha-like in timeless meditation. In the first light of morning the mountain made no promises for the day to come. In the evening its shadow inched toward me like a premonition.
And then one night Ba Na awoke. Fire leapt from its summit and thunder rolled down its valleys and the earth moved beneath me. With each eruption I could feel the heat on my face. These were Arc Lights: waves of B-52s, too high to be seen or heard, dropping high explosive and incendiary bombs on North Vietnamese soldiers coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into The Arizona. There were some who lived. In the morning we went up Ba Na to find them and kill them.
Three days later I was sitting on a rocky ledge high up on its eastern face writing a letter. My M-16 lay across my lap, and my helmet sat on the ground next to me. I unscrewed the cap to my canteen and took a drink. In the soft kiss of a breeze from the east I caught the scent of the South China Sea, visible as a thin blue strip on the horizon. It was April, and the rice paddies below shimmered green and silver in the sunlight after an early morning shower. The air had turned a sparkling blue, and through its crystalline clarity I thought I could descry the coastal city of Hoi An, which means “peaceful meeting place.” Far beyond the city and the sea was home, a brick house on a quiet street in the suburbs south of Pittsburgh.
We rarely used the word home. We spoke of The World, wistfully, sometimes, as if we might have heard of it, might have passed through it once on the way to somewhere else, recalling a here or there with a detached fondness. Everything was “back in the World.” When the plane from Okinawa had touched down at the Danang Air Base, a gunnery sergeant walked up to the front of the cabin, turned to face the rows of anxious Marines, and bellowed, “All you new meat! Listen up! Welcome to the motherfuckin’ Nam. You’re not in the World anymore. Some of you ain’t ever goin’ see it again. Har! Har! Har!” And he was right. We had been shot into space and forgotten, destined to hurtle through the void forever toward an empty, lifeless eternity.
In my letter I described how Ba Na reminded me of the Blue Ridge in Pennsylvania. I complained about C-rations and water soured by iodine purification tablets. I asked for packets of Kool-Aid and Knorr Instant Chicken Noodle Soup. I wrote that it rained every day. I wrote that I humped the bush with a bunch of dope-heads, chicken-shit artists, masturbators, black nationalists, racists, peaceniks, dropouts, gung-ho grunt killers one and all who would rush into the kill zone of an ambush to rescue a wounded Marine without regard for their own safety. I didn’t write that a dead man’s intestines turned an ash gray when exposed to the air. I didn’t write about the first time I saw another Marine killed. I didn’t write that I was aroused by heart-pounding excitement during a firefight. I wrote in the rhetoric of careful circumspection, studious to avoid a thoughtless phrase that might worry the folks back in The World. I wrote that I couldn’t wait to come home.
In another letter buried deep in my pack I wrote that I didn’t want to come home. This place is so fuckin’cool! When I was medevacked, the pack and letter stayed behind. I never learned what happened to them. That doesn’t change the truth of what I wrote.
Here is what you need to know about the combat veterans in your life. Seeping from between the lines of every story they tell, like blood from a thousand cuts, is the incomparable joy of battle and the intensity of living that comes with it. This is true whether they tell their stories in a book or across from you at the kitchen table in a flood of rage and tears. Pay attention to the shape and flow of their sentences, for they are theirs alone, never spoken before, structured by the cadence of memory. And yet you will hear the same story as it has been told countless times before. In Homer’s description of the fighting at the gates of Troy under a blazing sky, “groans mingled with shouts of triumph rose from those who died and those who killed: the field ran rivulets of blood.” Of Shiloh, Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce wrote, “the forest seemed all at once to flame up and disappear with a crash like that of a great wave upon the beach–a crash that expired in hot hissings, and the sickening ‘spat’ of lead against flesh. A dozen of my brave fellows tumbled over like ten-pins. Some struggled to their feet only to go down again, and yet again.” The true war story, Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried, is known “by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” This is true. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., remembered his war through a veil of sentimentality: “Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” This is true.
Every war is waged across continents by faceless masses who kill and die in weary anonymity, and every war is a personal struggle by a frightened kid who wants nothing more than to cross a piece of open ground unhurt. He looks a lot like someone you know. The soldier you kill consumes your dreams. He passes you on the street. He turns and stares at you from his seat at the front of the bus. He looks a lot like someone you know. A bombed-out city will take years to rebuild. Gut-shot soldiers will wear a colostomy bag for the rest of their lives. Wars are Chamberlain’s regiment holding the line at Round Top because they loved him and dying on that hill because they loved one another. There is no purer love. Wars are wounded hoplites after the disaster at Syracuse crawling on their hands and knees in a desperate bid to keep up with the fleeing Athenian army that had abandoned them. There is no greater betrayal. The real war, the only war that matters, is the story within the history, the intimacy of the man or woman imbricated with the broad, impersonal sweep of events they dimly understand. Both bookend the entirety of the soldier’s experience. In between is the infinite space of nothing and of all there is.
Here is what you need to know about the combat veterans in your life. They never came home.
I folded the letter and put it in my pack. Our point team had found them, about twenty, a few hundred meters down the trail, camped by a river.
II
Four years later, in March of 1973, the Hilton Hotel on Commonwealth Place in downtown Pittsburgh was overrun with historians during a week of wind and cold rain. They burst into the lobby through the revolving doors as if blown in by the force of an explosion, back-bent under hats and heavy coats. They were here to read papers, listen to papers, attend slide shows on how Hollywood kept reinventing the Wild West, and bask in the boozy ambience of cocktail parties untroubled by the history being made on the far side of the world.
I was here to attend a talk and write a paper for the Graduate Teaching Assistant in the U. S. History course I was taking. Flipping through the conference program, I had found one that looked interesting. An English professor from Yale would be talking about an obscure nineteenth-century American novelist and historian named Edward Eggleston. I had never heard of Eggleston, but the topic, his racist depictions of Native Americans, intrigued me. The GTA had given me a D on a paper I had written earlier about the Judiciary Act of 1801. But I was an English major, not a historian; now I could write about literature, my strength. I drew a circle around the room number and time and went off in search of a cup of coffee.
It felt strange, the college life, but the campus of Duquesne University, a small Catholic school situated on a bluff at the edge of the city overlooking the Monongahela River, was the perfect refuge: within the city limits but apart from the city, literally above it. To get to campus required a steep climb up McNulty Street, a narrow, closed-in cobblestone lane that wound between buildings of heavy quarry stone stained a grainy black by a century of smoke-stack pollution. One of them was the Allegheny County Jail. When I rounded the last bend on McNulty, it was like emerging into a clear sky. From the green space of the Commons I could look south across the Monongahela to Mount Washington, topped with old but elegant houses and the twin-steepled Saint Mary of the Mount Catholic Church. I felt isolated from the throb of the city but also purer for being above its ceaseless rumble and fray. Combat might have stripped me of illusions, but I was receptive to the intellectual stimulation that came from lectures and long hours in the library, and it was on this campus that I acquired a love of books that would result in a substantial personal library. I could talk easily to the younger college kids who might go from an English Literature class in the morning to an anti-war demonstration in the afternoon. I played pickup basketball in an old drafty gym with boys who had come to Duquesne straight from high school. By Thanksgiving their hair had grown to where it flopped over their eyes when they took a jump shot. I was still sporting white walls and a Mohawk strip. I admired the kids for their idealism and for their vision of a new and better world, but I told them nothing about myself. I didn’t want them to think I was one of those assholes responsible for the world needing repair.
The Vietnam War was a disaster for the United States in many ways, not least the failure of the armed services to prepare its enlisted members for their return to civilian life. I was luckier than most, but I wondered sometimes how long my good fortune would last. Memories of patrols and firefights have a way of floating free of the actual event and taking on a life of their own. They acquire a vividness that makes them seem more reliable as a record of the past than they probably are. Putting them into words only compounds the problem: edit out the obscenity and evil and you edit out the truth; leave in the obscenity and evil and they come to define you and no one will want to come near you. You are poison, better off left with the dead you joined so long ago.
The conference room was nestled among a warren of similar rooms on the mezzanine. It was windowless, its walls a dispiriting yellow. The carpet was stained, and in the air hung a pungent mix of institutional disinfectant and body odor. I took a chair in the back. What I heard baffled me. I got that Yale was attacking Eggleston for his portrayal of the American Indian as a brutish thug, but all this talk about deconstructing the logocentric edifice of narrative history to reveal the unstable foundation of metaphor underneath: that I struggled to get. I had graduated from high school in 1967, and six years later I was still in high-school English-class mode: the literary text was sacrosanct, the product of the author’s staggering genius; the critic was the high priest who decoded the mysteries of literary writ; and the reader, the poor, benighted reader, was the passive recipient of their Olympian wisdom.
Yale was thirtyish, slender, nattily-dressed, and white, with an insouciant delivery that now and then struck a note of aggrieved peevishness. He needed tenure, and the new radical outlooks storming their way into the academy would help him get it. The terms he used were strange, but I caught his gist: overthrow the old white, male, Western, Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, capitalist hegemony, in law, in politics, in philosophy, in the stories we read and write. End oppression, repression, and suppression by exposing the aesthetic rottenness at the core of the literary canon that propped them up. Yale was among the first generation of college professors a conservative writer named Roger Kimball would label “tenured radicals,” academics who charged themselves with the task of challenging, through critique and analysis steeped in ideology, the entire superstructure of Western thought, not to improve it or make it more responsive to the needs of the repressed, but to replace it with something vaguely defined under the broad rubric of New Left social justice, and as well toss out those old-guard professors and replace them with their own upstanding selves.
Yale turned in a stunning performance. A few times he was forced to hold his own against a hostile reaction from some older listeners who seemed ready to take him outside and thrash him. We younger members of the audience listened respectfully, and a few nodded in mute agreement. I wrote down everything Yale said. My hand moved like a machine across my notebook. Out of the scrawl would come six double-spaced pages of coherent and brilliant prose. But about what? The GTA’s instructions had been maddeningly gnomic–attend a talk, write a paper. That was it. My requests for explanation were met with the unhelpful, “Write a paper about what he says.” Period. A failure of guidance that would leave me with more latitude than I knew what to do with.
III
I have taken the title for this essay from the English poet Henry Reed’s World War II-era poem, “Judging Distances,” because we are both asking the same question: does a name belong to a thing naturally, arising directly out of the thing’s essence, or is it assigned arbitrarily, from a distance, as it were, reflecting our whims and prejudices? How close does a name bring us to the true nature of the thing? Its fate might very well depend on how we answer the question. In the poem there are two speakers, both soldiers, one an instructor, the other a trainee. They speak English, but they do not speak the same language. The poem expects us to take sides.
The instructor is explaining how to report a landscape about to be shelled by artillery. He calls out grid references: “the central sector/ The right of the arc.” He points out a barn, a row of houses, a clump of trees, a flock of sheep, but these “only seem to be things,/A barn is not called a barn.” There are only three kinds of trees, “the fir and the poplar,/ And those which have bushy tops to.” Such stripped down reporting aids in accurate gunnery, but it conceals a darker truth: the houses, the barn, the trees, the sheep will be destroyed, blown to bits, so what need have they for names? To drive his point home, the instructor points downrange to “a dozen of what appear to be animals.” “Whatever you do,” he admonishes, “Don’t call the bleeders sheep.”
The instructor then calls upon the trainee (who has been sleeping) to report the landscape before them:
There to the west,
On the fields of summer the sun and the shadows bestow
Vestments of purple and gold.
The still white dwellings are like a mirage in the heat,
And under the swaying elms a man and a woman
Lie gently together. Which is, perhaps, only to say
That there is a row of houses to the left of the arc,
And that under some poplars a pair of what appear to be humans
Appear to be loving.
By speaking the language of poetry, the trainee flips the instructor’s lesson on its head. West of the central sector is nature’s church, holy ground sanctified by the man and woman’s love-making. The dozen of what appear to be animals are, indeed, sheep, draped in priest’s robe, and when the shells start to fall they will bleed the Blood of the Lamb.
I first read “Judging Distances” in a poetry class, and I was drawn to the moral clarity of its message, because the poem held up a mirror to my own experiences. We called the Vietnamese gooks, a crude racial epithet said to have been coined during the Spanish-American War by American soldiers to refer to Cubans and Filipinos. It must have seemed the right word for what it named: a person of diminutive size, exotic in look and speech, who exhibited unsettlingly strange behavior and was utterly untrustworthy, who was, in their eyes, beneath human. I teach “Judging Distances” in writing classes, because its message needs constant reminding, an imperative that came home to me when I first watched Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War. A former Marine tearfully confesses that after he killed his first enemy soldier he promised God that he would never kill another human being again. But he also says that he would kill as many gooks as he could.
In the same poetry class I read the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest whose daring leaps with language thrilled me. Hopkins sought to capture one of the enduring paradoxes of Christian theology: we are made in the image and likeness of God, but we each have an essence that is uniquely our own. How could this be possible? Sameness and infinite variety in one being? We might expect an infinite God to contain infinite multitudes, but we humans are stuck with the puny limitations of language to explain the paradox. A poet like Hopkins can reach further beyond these limitations than most of us, and so we get such startling sentences as this, from “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”: “like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s/ Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name.” But the sentence is exclusive to poetry—to Hopkins, really–who alone seems able to capture that rare flash of sudden spiritual insight.
Hopkins’s term for this essence was inscape. Corresponding to it was instress, which indicates our duty as human beings to recognize one another’s inscape. Combined, they describe our relationship to God through others, as Hopkins explained in a spiritual exercise he wrote in 1882: “God’s utterance of himself in himself is God the Word, outside himself is this world. This world then is word, expression, news of God. Therefore its end, its purpose, its purport, its meaning, is God and its life or work to name and praise him.” Each of us, Hopkins is saying, is that word, that expression, a world, news of God, and therefore just one of the infinite varieties inscape can take. Inscape is just another name for God. To take away a thing’s name, then, is to deprive God of a name, to diminish Him, an obvious failure of instress. In the end, it is we who diminish by denying our own inscape. Hopkins’ insight is more to be marveled at than analyzed, and it might seem at odds with today’s insistence on multiple, shifting identities, but there’s an underlying argument: a person without a name—without inscape–does not exist, and what does not exist cannot be killed. The sheep, the man in your sights, yourself. To know a thing’s name: this might be the most powerful anti-war argument there is.
It embarrasses me to admit that I don’t remember the GTA’s name. I forgot it a long time ago. I don’t like referring to him as “the GTA.” It is reductive and dehumanizing, as if he were one of the nameless bleeders that shall not be called sheep. The GTA has a name, an inscape that I will never recall, but instress forbids me from giving him another. GTA he must remain.
IV
Edward Eggleston was born on December 10, 1837, in Vevay, Indiana, and died on September 3, 1902, at his home, Owl’s Nest, in Lake George, New York. As a young man he sold Bibles and insurance and real estate and soap, which he made in a kettle in his backyard. He was living in St. Peter, Minnesota, studying for the Methodist ministry, when the Civil War broke out. It was about this time that he began writing. Among his earliest literary efforts was a collection of eleven tales about American Indians called Round Table Stories, published serially in The Little Corporal, a magazine for adolescent boys. If Eggleston’s name is remembered at all, it is for his novel The Hoosier School-Master, published in 1871, and made into a Hollywood movie in 1935. Eggleston would go on to publish works on American history and the Revolutionary War. With his daughter, Elizabeth, he co-authored four books on famous Native Americans. He continued writing for children throughout his life, publishing collection after collection of home-spun tales with such titles as The Chicken Little Stories, Tales Told on a Cellar Door, and Queer Stories for Boys and Girls. He wrote a Christmas story called Mr. Blake’s Walking Stick. He practically invented the Young Adult genre, and his stories can resemble the stuffy, preachy, moralistic fables found in McGuffey’s Readers. For many years he was editor of The National Sunday-School Teacher, where he sounded the call for reforming Sunday-School education. His slight literary reputation today notwithstanding, in his day he was a best-selling author, highly regarded as a man of principle, admired for his liberal sentiments, celebrated for his penetrating if stodgy intelligence. The only biography I know of, William Peirce Randel’s Edward Eggleston: Author of The Hoosier School-Master, published in 1946, gives us a life that, if not above reproach, was informed by the only reproach that counts, the reproach from within. “He traveled the difficult road from bigotry toward emancipation of the mind,” Randel writes, and some would say that is epitaph enough for anyone.
But not for Yale. For him, Eggleston was a flat-out hater, most notably of Native Americans. From the casually-tossed epithet to elaborate chains of rhetorical cruelty, it seemed that hardly a work of Eggleston’s was free of the crime. Here is what I remember of Yale’s list of specifications and charges. It is not pretty. Eggleston’s Indians were bloodthirsty savages, constantly drunk, sexually rapacious, illiterate and incapable of any but the most rudimentary learning. They practiced strange and primitive rituals, often involving mutilation and torture, including, it was said, human sacrifice and cannibalism, under the guise of religion. Yale had come to Pittsburgh on a mission: like some tin-starred marshal on TV, drag Eggleston out of the prairie and haul him back to Dodge, put him on trial, and then string the bastard up.
In fact, Eggleston’s relationship with the American Indian, among whom he had lived for much of his life, was too complicated to be judged so dismissively by the ideological pieties Yale espoused. A little historical context will suggest that he knew them as human beings no more or less prone to violence than any white man, and maybe more justified in its use.
While Eggleston was living in St. Peter, the Dakota Sioux, who lived along the western frontier of Minnesota, had for years been accusing federal agents of cheating them out of their annuity payments and denying them credit for buying food, thereby violating federal treaties. Finally, on the morning of August 17, 1862, facing a winter of starvation, war parties attacked towns and settlements up and down the frontier. The Dakota scored a number of victories early on, but on September 6 the U. S. Army entered the fray, and at the Battle of Wood Lake, on the 23d, under the command of General John Pope, fresh from his epic defeat at Second Manassas, soldiers overran the Dakota’s lines, killing many and capturing the rest. Sporadic fighting would continue into November, but the uprising, known as the Dakota War of 1862, was effectively ended. More than a thousand Dakota men were placed under arrest. Many of them were summarily tried and banished out of the state. The fate of thirty-eight others was more terminally settled at dawn on December 26, when they were hanged en masse from a single scaffold, still the largest mass execution in American history. The uprising caught the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who in his Second Annual Address to Congress noted that “[N]ot less than 800 persons were killed.” Not counted among the 800 were 200 Dakota men, including the thirty-eight who had been hanged.
Eggleston wanted to fight in this war. He was twenty-four, a patriot, a young man on fire for adventure, but the Minnesota militia turned him down as physically unfit for the rigors of army life. (A few months earlier, the United States Army had turned him down for the same reason.) But the uprising came close to him. As acting pastor of St. Paul’s Jackson Street Church in St. Peter, he officiated at twelve funerals of men killed in the fighting, seven on the single day of November 4. Undoubtedly influenced by the reports from the field of the bloody fighting, Eggleston’s stories in Round Table leave little doubt as to his belief in the Indians’ savagery. Randel suggests that the stories functioned as literary training exercises in realistic fiction, but they also reveal a side of Eggleston modern readers might find uncomfortable. Randel recounts one episode that might confirm Yale’s suspicions. Eggleston was giving a public reading from Round Table when one boy, evidently enthralled by romance tales like Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), expressed surprise that Indians could be so brutal. Eggleston’s condescending reply does him little credit: “They were, for you must learn, my dear little enthusiast, that the Indians the poets write about are very different from the wild and brutal savages themselves.”
Was Eggleston really as terrible as Yale said? I don’t think I was the only one squirming in our seats. And if anyone sitting in that room thought that the relationship between whites and Native Americans had noticeably improved over the past century, all they had to do was watch the news on television that evening. They would see protestors from the American Indian Movement (AIM), led by its first National Director, the late actor Russell Means (Chingachgook in the 1992 film, The Last of the Mohicans), occupying Wounded Knee, a small community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota, site of the infamous mass murder of some 150 Lakota Sioux by the 7th U. S. Cavalry (Custer’s outfit) on December 29, 1890. (Other estimates place the total killed at near 300.) The FBI had the place surrounded, gunfire was exchanged, and by the time the whole tragic and stupid business ended, on May 8, a Cherokee named Frank Clearwater and an Oglala Lakota named Lawrence Lamont were dead, an FBI agent was critically wounded, and a civil rights activist named Ray Robinson was missing and presumed dead. (In February, 2014, the FBI released documents purporting to show that Robinson had been killed by AIM security guards.)
I walked out of the hotel and up Forbes Avenue resolved to find the answers to my questions. I went to the university’s library and looked for any books by Eggleston it might have. There was only one, Pocahontas, published in 1879. I took it home, and when I finished reading it, I knew I had a paper topic. I also knew I was in trouble.
V
The Arc Lights had done their work with apocalyptic thoroughness. In columns we struggled up steep trails whose terrible secrets could cut a man in half and humped across a wide saddle among craters still spinning out vortices of smoke and ash and tramped along a ridge line that left us exposed to sniper fire and slipped quietly along deep squared cutouts used for trucks and heavy equipment by the infiltrating North Vietnamese and stumbled noisily down a steep slope of loose rocks and dirt into a smoldering cauldron where the air smelled of cordite and sulfur and petroleum and steam still hissed from fissures in the taut burnished flesh of corpses flash-burned to the seats of their trucks. Not one of the dead resembled a once living man. I had to step carefully, for everywhere were the rimpled dunes of brown and gray ash that had once been human beings. Every time my boot disturbed one, it rose to life as a small plume of dust and stench, bringing tears to my eyes and settling in the back of my throat with a taste I dare not name.
We took up positions behind the wall of trees and brush. They were spread out on a grassy slope along a swift-flowing stream. Some had been wounded, all looked spent, hardly like enemies, more like us. The order came to open fire.
VI
For one thing, Edward Eggleston was not the sole author of Pocahontas. He had co-authored it with his daughter, Elizabeth, who is listed on the title page as Lillie Eggleston Seelye (1858-1923). Lillie would go on to become a prolific, if minor, author herself, joining her father on three other books on famous Native Americans, plus biographies of George Washington and Christopher Columbus. She wrote two entertaining accounts of upstate New York, Lake George in History (1897) and Saratoga and Lake Champlain in History (1898), that showcase her talents in natural history. Yale might have mentioned Pocahontas in passing, but since the paper I wrote is long gone, I must reconstruct what I wrote from memory and a recent rereading of Pocahontas. My account, therefore, is likely to seem more accurate than memory allows.
Father’s and daughter’s depiction of the American Indian is sometimes surprisingly enlightened for their time but in many passages rolls along more or less as Yale described. It doesn’t help, for instance, that our authors repeatedly refer to Pocahontas as “Indian maiden,” the romanticized teenager we know from story and legend, thereby foreshadowing Hollywood Indian maidens like bullet-bra-ed Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun and Disney’s cartoon abominations. But the same Pocahontas grows up to become a savvy political player. In 1614, at the age of nineteen, she marries widower John Rolfe, an Englishman and wealthy Virginia tobacco farmer. When she makes her debut in London society two years later, she is such a big hit that she becomes the Lady Rebecca Rolfe. She is invited to all the right parties, and the demi monde celebrate her as much for her exotic beauty as for her conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately, her portrait, done by Simon de Passe in 1616, does her beauty an injustice: she looks like Sir Walter Raleigh with Crohn’s Disease. More unfortunately, by March of the next year she is dead, all of twenty-three years old, the cause unknown, though small pox, tuberculosis, and even poisoning have been suspected.
On a broader scale, the Egglestons’ narrative of the early encounters between Native American and Englishman, which are sometimes peaceful and sometimes bloody, reads like an attempt to do history Public Television style. The Indians are certainly savages on the battlefield—who isn’t?—and the Egglestons call them (but seldom the colonists) savages with alarming frequency. The English aren’t exactly tourists on a nature hike. Colonial administration comes across as club-footed and half-witted, and not a few of the colonists are just plain ignorant assholes. They are committing atrocities before they’ve hardly adjusted to the time difference. Early in the book, the Eggleston’s recount one episode that might give us a clue as to who the real savages were:
The English had been in the New World nearly a year. They grew more and more fearful of the Indians. They believed that they were forming an alliance with intent to massacre them. They desired an audience of the most influential chief, Wingina, and when admitted to his presence they fell upon him and his principal warriors and killed them.
To drive my point home, I conducted a penetrating analysis of a chapter called “The Massacres of Opechancanough,” which recounts two of the bloodiest episodes in the long-running Anglo-Powhatan Wars (intermittently, 1610-1646). It cannot be denied that as Chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, Opechancanough had led numerous raids against English settlements along the James River, killing hundreds. These were followed by equally brutal British reprisals. Let us not be squeamish. Blood and brains were splattered against rocks and trees by hatchet and musket ball, guts were spilled on the ground from bellies sliced open by knife and sword, limbs and heads were hacked off. The first massacre occurred in March, 1622. To set it up, Opechancanough faked his conversion to Christianity, or as the Egglestons put it, in a rare attempt at understatement, he “seemed to the English to show decided evidences of a religious inclination.” Meanwhile, he planted warriors in English communities with instructions to play nice until he gave the order. He was a sneaky, lying bastard when he needed to be, no doubt about it—the authors call him “savage of the savages, crafty, cruel, and proud”–but he was trying to save his world from even sneakier lying bastards, the kind of savages who bring civilization and the weapons technology to enforce it, and he struck back when the opportunity presented itself. He was in his nineties when he led the second attack, in April, 1664. He was captured and paraded through Jamestown on a litter, blind and decrepit, a humiliation he turned back on the Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, with the comment, “Had it been my fortune to have taken Sir William Berkeley prisoner, I would not have meanly exposed him as a show for my people.” If these were Opechancanough’s last words, they do him a dignity Berkeley could never aspire to. That night Opechancanough was shot in the back of the head in the supposed safety of his cell by one of his guards.
As for the Lady Rebecca Rolfe: she is believed to be buried beneath the chancel at St. George’s in Gravesend, near the mouth of the Thames, but no one knows for certain.
I was proud of that paper. I had stood up for scholarly fidelity to the text and the truth of history, and I had carried the banner of the English Department by writing what I believed to be an astute analysis of a neglected work by an American author whose name was even more obscure than her father’s. I even gave myself an atta-boy for pushing the nuclear button of undergraduate papers by calling out a real professor. I fantasized how it would blow minds up and down the fourth floor of College Hall.
A week later, the GTA returned the paper to me. He had circled six correctly-used and correctly-spelled words in red ink without comment. On the last page he had written one sentence, also in red: “This is not what you were supposed to do.” Next to it was a red D, looking like a fat butler, or a comic-strip bomb about to explode. College students are easily pissed by academic injustices. I was a college student, I was twenty-four years old, I was an ex-Marine, and I was epically pissed.
VII
It cannot be stressed enough: the brutal lesson you will learn as a soldier-in-training is that to kill the enemy you must strip him of his name. Fuck the sheep. It is the man who matters. It is as simple as that.
I learned to shoot a rifle on the range at the Marine Corps Recruit Training Depot at Parris Island, a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. It was a bleak and terrifying place, a land of brackish, unmapped, intersecting backwater channels, teeming with alligators and water moccasins. There were tales of recruits marched into the swamps and drowned and who returned to haunt the barracks at night. It was where the soul went to die.
I had never fired a rifle before, and my scores during practice week showed it. The drill instructor had about given up on me when he had a stroke of inspiration, which I’m pretty sure now was staged to get my attention. He pointed to the cardboard silhouette target two hundred yards down range.
“You see that gook motherfucker down there?”
“Yes, sir!” You must imagine me shouting this at the top of my lungs.
“Well, turd for brains, he just killed the Marine next to you.” By way of visual reinforcement, he ordered the recruit next to me to fall over as if shot. The recruit grabbed his stomach. “Oh! They got me!” The drill instructor put his lips into my ear. His voice was low and menacing, almost a whisper.
“He’s been killing Marines since you were in diapers, you horrible ass-wipe. And he’s going to kill more Marines because you’re a hopeless cunt who’s afraid you might hurt him, you worthless, disgusting piece of buddy-fucker shit.”
It was a disorienting moment. I’d never been spoken to in this way, never called these kinds of names. Looking back I see myself as Henry Reed’s dreamy recruit clinging to the poetry of naming.
The process of turning a pink, soft kid like me into a Marine requires one of those strange alchemic transformations that only an organization like the Marine Corps can pull off. You must imagine that your brain is reprogrammed to convert a piece of stiff cardboard in the shape of a human being into a real human being. Then, later, when it is an actual flesh-and-blood human being in your rifle’s front sight, you see him as a cardboard target and pull the trigger without a second thought. Training erases instress. The M-16 obliterates inscape. The process will happen without your being aware of it, and the symmetry is elegant to a fault. The trajectory it traces from Parris Island to Ba Na Mountain is Euclidean in its perfection. Except that what is deliberately excluded from the plane geometry of training is any consideration for the fractal mess you’ll make in killing your man, which mess will include, you must understand, the sorrow and pain you’ll leave behind in his loved ones and the scrambled memory channels and cognitive pathways of your now-and-forever fucked-up brain. And yet, despite everything I’ve just said, somehow, in its paradoxical way, the transformation is also deeply humanizing. You cannot imagine how close you’ll get to life when you’re in the presence of so much death, the one you cause, your own always an instant away, and once you’re back in the World you’ll never see the moral choice of engagement with your fellow humans in such clarity again. Instress or the blankness? Because to your enemy you are also a cardboard silhouette without inscape, without a name.
I remember that the ripples reflected the sunlight like a thousand diamonds. And then they turned a pink film surrounding his body as it floated out into the current. One shot was all I had needed.
VIII
I am standing outside the GTA’s office. He shares it with other GTAs, but it is late on a Friday afternoon, and they have left for the weekend. The door is open. The windows are streaked with rain, which batters them with pellet-like sounds. The Monongahela River is gray under gray clouds. A gray mist has settled over the South Side, obscuring Saint Mary, also called the Queen of Peace Parish.
His desk is to the left as I enter. I push the rubber doorstop away with my foot and the door slams shut. The loud bang startles him. I cover the distance to his desk in a matter of four or five steps. I stand over his desk without moving. I say nothing. I make no sound at all. I tower above him. The academic life has rendered him soft. He is probably wondering if he should be afraid.
“I want the professor to grade this,” I finally say, flinging the paper, turned to the last page, onto his desk. “What do you mean, ‘This is not what you were supposed to do’? You never said what I was supposed to do.” I do not address him by his name.
He blushes. Blushing is a response to stress, to embarrassment, to challenge, sometimes accompanied by the need to empty one’s bowels. Blushing is caused by the engorgement of blood in the capillaries just beneath the skin. The number of capillaries in the face and head may well number in the thousands, which explains why facial and head cuts bleed so freely.
“No.”
What disturbs me still is that I had contemplated, to what degree or depth I don’t remember, abandoning words for violence and betraying the core principle of the study of humane letters, which is that language binds us as human beings. It is how we judge distances. It is how we learn and use names. It is how we discover another’s inscape and express our instress. It is what we are supposed to do. Without language we must bear the burden of what David Foster Wallace once called our “existential loneliness.” “I can’t know,” he said in an interview, “what you’re thinking and feeling and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling. And the very best works construct a bridge across that abyss of human loneliness.” To be fully human we must first desire to be human with others, to close the distance, to know the other’s inscape. We must know their name.
Perhaps it is the rumble of the janitor’s work cart in the hallway outside that breaks the spell. It reminds me of the distant rumble of explosions on Ba Na Mountain. After a few tense seconds, I turn and walk out of his office. I ride the elevator down to the lobby and call my wife from the payphone. The rain has gotten heavier. Out of the corner of my eye I see the GTA walking toward the parking lot under a black umbrella. I wait ten minutes then walk downtown, where I’ll catch the trolley that will take me home.
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