Machine Dreams

him.
    “He’s so old-fashioned,” she said, “he’ll start telling me we ought to get married.”
    I looked over at her. “Are you going to?”
    “I don’t know.” She wore no makeup and her eyes looked tired. There were beads of moisture along her hairline. “It’s hard to think. This whole summer—knowing about Billy, my dad drinking so much, the heat—I want to sleep all the time, it seems. If I hadn’t already given notice at the paper, they’d probably fire me.” She looked down at the cold glass she held.
    That’s how I remember her. Her face in profile, her eyes lowered.
It’s hard to think.
She must have already known she was pregnant; in two weeks, she married Buck in Pennsylvania. She asked to see the other picture I was going to use, and I showed her the snapshot of Billy at the river.
    She held the image near her face and looked closely. “Evenif it’s twenty years, I’ll think of him as gone. I can’t think of him as not alive.”
    Years were on everyone’s mind. My mother helped me pay for the photographs and the mailings. We sat in the living room, assembling the packages. “If we had enough money to make these pictures even bigger,” I said, “say, billboard size, and pasted them by the hundreds on signs in every major city in the country, I bet we’d find out something.”
    Jean put down the package she’d just sealed. “Danner, we don’t have that kind of money. Even if we did, what is it you expect to happen? If the government paid attention to us and asked personally and especially for Billy, do you think the people who might have him would listen?”
    I said nothing, and she looked away from me into the room.
    “They’re the ones he was taught to shoot at,” she said. “They don’t care what we want. They won’t ever. No matter if the war ends, no matter how many years.”
    Two days after I mailed the packages, before any of the addressees had seen the pictures, a Family Services Assistance Officer visited my father and mother again. He brought an official telegram from the army that confirmed, five weeks after Billy was listed MIA, most of the information in Robert Taylor’s letter. But there was no mention of anyone actually seen jumping from the chopper, only a “supposition that Pfc. Hampson and Sgt. Berringer jumped or otherwise escaped” from the aircraft. There was no mention of an ambush or of an eighteen-man unit lost. I never got a reply to either of my letters to Robert Taylor, thanking him and asking for any other news. Our FSAO told me Luke Berringer’s only next of kin was a grandmother who didn’t wish her address given out.
    I don’t know why the army took so long to tell us most of the story Taylor told me.
We had no word of a hot zone but we came in very hot.
Suppose the army had made a mistake, suppose their Intelligence was mistaken. Did they think my family would make trouble in some way?
Blame
them, maybe?

    I did blame them. I went back to college in the fall of ’70 because I didn’t know what else to do. I blamed the army for what I felt, and sought out veterans; I began working as a liaison volunteer for the Veterans’ Caucus that had been set up on campus. They had no vote in student government, such as it was. They were self-designated spokesmen for veterans’ issues, acknowledged by the administration but not funded. I stopped spending time with nice liberal guys interested in organic farming or tenants’ rights, and started seeing veterans. They were who I talked to, listened to, argued with. Finally, in alliances of a few weeks’ duration, they were who I slept with. Some of them were kind to me. Kindness is not always a specialty with Vietnam vets, not in the beginning, and I wasn’t much interested in getting past beginnings. Some of them weren’t kind; they were guys Billy wouldn’t even have drunk beer with. But they’d stood on the same ground he had or they’d flown in the same kinds of machines; they knew subtle facts about the military, and they were angry. In the first year Billy was missing, that was all I needed.
    One night that winter I went over to Lynchburg State with three vets, to talk to a student committee interested in veterans’ programs. The students were straight and uninformed; the men I was with were impatient and resented my attempts at mediation. The meeting went badly and they walked out; I followed them. We went to a bar in Lynchburg and started drinking. There was a feathery tension