MUSE MONDAY
Please welcome Dee S. Knight back to Discover... She's always a good read!
When
I was in high school, we were beginning to realize through the nightly news
what Vietnam was all about. President Eisenhower initially sent us to the
country as advisors, and then President Kennedy involved us more in the early
1960s. President Johnson increased the troop numbers greatly. As President
Nixon took over and I went off to college, the war was raging—though with all
the deaths it was never considered a true war. Like Korea, it wasn’t dignified
with the title, though it looked like a war, walked like a war, talked like a
war.
The
war was personal. My dad was in the Navy, my boyfriend’s father had been a
Marine, and I had two uncles in the Air Force, so I was surrounded by military
bases full of young men who could be sent overseas and into what we were told
was chaos at any minute. Jack was attending Virginia Military Institute by
then—thankfully, because his draft lottery number was 69. My catechism teacher
(and the father of the boy on whom I had a wild and crazy crush) was a pilot
off USS Independence and was shot down and captured. Vietnam was there, all
around us, all the time. So is it strange that many years later I used the
backdrop of Vietnam as my muse for a romance?
I’ve
written two romance pieces, actually, using Vietnam as the instigator of the
story. In Burning Bridges (out of print now but soon to be on Kindle
Unlimited), my characters met just before the hero ships out for Vietnam.
Convinced they were in love, Sara and Paul share a night and swear to wait for
each other. Then, Sara discovers she’s pregnant and she never hears from Paul,
though she sends him letter after letter. The war burned their first bridge,
and pride burned the second.
The
second piece—actually, the first I wrote—was a novella called Coming Home. In
it, Tom Stabler is granted a surprise Christmas leave. He leaves the muggy
jungle of Vietnam to return for a week to his parents’ farm in Nebraska, his
mind filled with the image of the prettiest girl he’d ever known, Susan
Swenson. When Susan visits him late one night, the experience is unlike
anything he could have imagined. Her lips were sweet, her body lush and warm,
and her faith in him touching. After Christmas he returned to Vietnam a changed
man—but not in the way he expected. Vietnam played a larger role in this story
than in Burning Bridges. I think here I wanted something good to come of
something horrible and seemingly without meaning.
Here’s
a short excerpt from Coming Home:
With
a jerk and cry, Private Tom Stabler bolted upright, his heart pounding at an
alarming rate. The dream receded, and his eyes shot open, unseeing at first.
His arm darted out, reaching for the rifle that was always beside him like an
extension of his right arm.
The
weapon wasn’t there! In sudden panic, he snapped his head to the side, hoping
to find with sight what he couldn’t with touch.
Then
it came to him.
“Home,”
he whispered. He was safe. Not in a steamy jungle surrounded by the smell of
rotting vegetation, or wading through muddy river shallows filled with
who-knew-what slithering things, or straining for the welcome sound of
helicopters, or…
He’d
been in so many God-awful situations these past eight months he could take his
pick of a different terror every night for weeks. But he didn’t want to. For
this week, these seven days at home, he wanted to put Nam behind him. Why,
then, couldn’t he rid himself of the tension coiled like a snake in his belly?
Tom
scrubbed his hands across his face, willing his breathing to slow and his heart
to return to a normal beat. He picked up his watch. Four o’clock.
When
he’d said an awkward goodnight to his father and made his way to bed, the clock
in the hall was chiming midnight. He’d draped his clothes over his desk chair,
stripped off his skivvies, and climbed into bed.
Unbelievably,
he’d pulled up the quilt his grandmother had made, snuggled into the softness
of the mattress, and drifted off to sleep as though he’d never left the safety
and security of his room.
Awake
now, he wondered if he’d ever adjust to the feeling of safety again, ever truly
believe it existed. He feared he’d always be peering into shadows for the
hidden enemy or listening for the almost silent, deadly snick of a landmine
trip.
Falling
back on the pillow, he stared at the posters on the opposite wall, illuminated
by weak moonlight shining through the window. One was for a rock concert held
in Omaha four years ago. He’d wanted to take Susan Swensen, but her father
wouldn’t let her go the hundred miles into the city with him. Too far, he’d
said in his thick Scandinavian accent. Too much can go wrong with a car. Young
people can get stranded. Alone.
The
last was said with a long, thoughtful stare right into Tom’s soul. How had the man
known of Tom’s evil intentions to fake a car breakdown in order to make time
with his daughter? Eventually, when she was accepted into nursing school, Mr.
Swensen had let Susan go to Omaha. By then, Tom had gone much farther. All the
way to Hell, in fact.
The
other poster hailed the Fighting Hawks, his high school football team, on which
he’d been the star linebacker. Those were heady days. He’d made a great
linebacker at the university, too, but a lousy scholar, which was what put his
ass squarely in the middle of that worthless peninsula called Vietnam.
Now
he wouldn’t even make a linebacker. He skimmed his hand down his chest and
across his stomach. Lean—skinny almost. Where once had been bulk there was
sinewy muscle. He could still run, though. Oh, yeah, he got lots of practice
running. From firing position to firing position, from cover to transport
helicopters—black birds hovering over open kill zones to lift guys out of
danger or drop them in—and from helicopter back to cover. Some days it seemed
he ran the whole damn time.
It
felt that way now.
Tom
sighed. There was no going back to sleep. Throwing off the covers, he roused
himself from the warmth and sat up, looking at the four walls and feeling
dislocated.
This
room held the bed where he’d slept since he was six. In two days, Christmas
Eve, he’d be twenty-one. After all those years, the bed should be familiar, and
it was. The bed fit the room, but Tom no longer did.
Same
with the house. When he arrived early yesterday morning, he’d sensed something
was off but hadn’t been able to put his finger on the problem. Now he knew.
Somehow, while he was gone, things had changed, and no one had told him.
His
bedroom, the kitchen where he’d watched his mom bake cookies, the living room
where he’d beaten his dad at chess for the first time, all felt cramped and
alien, as though he’d read about them but hadn’t lived in them. Even his family
was all wrong. Gray threaded his mom’s hair, and his dad moved slower. As for
his grandparents, they were frail replicas of their previous selves, with
wrinkled faces and almost translucent skin.
This
life, these people, belonged to a Tom Stabler who no longer existed. The man he
was now would have to adjust his thinking to live here again, and learning how
would sure as hell take more than one week.
Loneliness
clawed at his insides. Here, in the one place he should have felt a part of
things, solitude engulfed him. It would have been better to stay in Nam than be
here with everything wrong, no longer a part of his home, his family.
Coming
Home is available for free on the Nomad Authors website to subscribers of our
newsletter, Aussie to Yank (https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/h8t2y6). If you join our
newsletter and read Coming Home, I hope you’ll write and let me know what you
think.
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