A light rain fell in the afternoon but when I walked to class this evening I saw thousands of stars gleaming in the black sky. Geckos slithered along the steaming tarmac, croaking loudly. The flightline was quiet, the jet bombers sleeping in their concrete revetments.
Inside a quonset hut I teach an introductory class in literature. My students are Army and Air Force personnel, enlisted men from privates to master sergeants. They are here to earn college credit, so that when they return to the world (the expression they use here in Vietnam) they can be that much closer to a college degree.
Many of my students are the first in their families ever to attend college. Some of them are the first ever to graduate high school. As enlisted men they don't fly the planes which this airbase supports; they work as mechanics, drivers, forklift operators. Some are guards who "work the wire" -- they patrol the high fence, topped with barbed wire, which entirely surrounds the sprawling base. The base perimeter is ringed with outposts manned by South Korean troops, but the VietCong often slip past them and get right up to the wire.
Typically we get attacked on Sunday morning. That's the only time during the week that native Vietnamese -- who work in the laundry, the mess hall, the base exchange -- are not present. Late Saturday night the enemy sets up a phalanx of rockets with a delayed fuse. When the sun is well up the rockets go off, smashing into the barracks, the storehouses, the flightline. By that time the VC are far away, but the South Korean guns fire some rounds into the jungle anyway, replying to the message. Oh, you're still here? Well, we're still here.
The reading list for my course is set by the University office in Tokyo. In this introductory course we read essays (Bertrand Russell is good, he's so clear and logical), brief memoirs (selections from Franklin's "Autobiography") and short fiction, usually Mark Twain or Stephen Crane. Each week I have my students write an essay in a different mode: a description of their hometown, a memory of a childhood event, a letter to the editor of their local paper, a reasoned argument for or against a current issue, a review of some movie or concert they saw back in the world (the current film "Easy Rider" gets the most notice: the young airmen love it, the sergeants think it's immoral).
This semester the office put a Salinger story on the list, "For Esme, with Love and Squalor." It' s a difficult piece for these young men, I think, not because of the setting -- these men are soldiers, after all, and most of them had older relatives who fought in WWII -- but because of the complex feelings that are depicted. Some of the senior professors back in Tokyo are veterans, so perhaps they thought this story would be helpful to young soldiers, show them that it's quite possible to get over the stress of war and live a peaceful domestic life.
In fact there's a lot more in the story than a simple moral. I wonder if my students can understand the narrator's ambivalence toward his present life at the same time as they appreciate his wartime memory. Is it my job to get them to see complexity when simplicity is perhaps what they need to sustain themselves in their own wartime setting? Is it fair to have them think about their life at home, what it might be like when they go back?
The men are here for a year, with two weeks of outside rest and recreation (R&R) halfway through, in Bangkok or Tokyo. No wives on base, no sweethearts camped just outside the wire. There's nothing to do but work twelve hours a day, drink, shoot pool, sleep. The military tries to expand the options by providing a library, a craft center, a limited curriculum of freshman and sophomore courses taught by visiting instructors.
I'm hesitant about intruding into their lives. But already some of my students have talked of their doubts. Young airmen, shy products of midwest farms or rust-belt cities, tell me that they considered fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft, but that such behavior would have "killed" their parents, dishonored their friends. Instead they joined the Air Force, learned to service planes but don't fly them and don't drop bombs. They tell me they can see that what we're doing in Vietnam is wrong, that the U.S. alternative is worse than letting the VC take over.
I wondered, before I left the world myself, how active I should be in encouraging dissent. It didn't seem right to speechify, from my comfortable position -- a good salary, a brief stint on a secure base, excursions to India and Singapore during the holidays, a spring semester teaching in Thailand or Japan, a return in summer to an academic sinecure in the USA. A good friend, active in the anti-war movement, had told me: don't lecture about politics, they know more than you do about the situation, just be yourself. So I decided just to be myself, which is a teacher of literature. My subversive act will be to encourage my students to love fiction as I do, to be open to literature, to let a story exercise and educate their emotions.
The Salinger story is beautifully written. The shifting emotional states of the main character are rendered clearly, economically, delicately. We discuss the arc of the plot: a WWII veteran remembers his experience of the Normandy invasion. He describes his conversation with a charming English girl, a precocious teenager, just before he goes into combat. Then we see him in hospital, suffering from combat fatigue -- what the medics now label Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder -- dogged by horrific memories, unable to sleep, rude and sarcastic to his buddy. My students are moved by the ending of the story, how a brisk letter from the young English girl, and the gift of her father's watch, bring the soldier out of his depression and allow him to sleep, and recover.
The story is framed by an opening scene which takes place some years after the war. The narrator, now home in America and married, receives an invitation to the young girl's wedding in England, and wants to go, but his wife reminds him that her mother is coming to visit. I ask the class about his life now.
"He's fine now." "Yeah, he's happy. He made it out okay."
The answers come from the front row, from the youngest airmen. The older students, the sergeants, sit farther back. Most of them nod in agreement. What about his wife? I ask.
"Oh, she's great." "Yeah, he really loves her."
In the middle of the back row sits a tall rangy tech sergeant, probably in his early thirties. I have his real name on my list, but everyone calls him Woody. He talked to me once after class, asking questions in a slow Tennessee drawl. I see him shifting his jaw left and right, his eyes downcast.
Okay, I answer. He calls his wife a "breathtakingly levelheaded girl." What does that mean?
"Means she's got good sense." "Yeah, she runs a tight ship."
From the back of the room one of the sergeants quips, "wisht my wife were like that." A grunt of appreciation from the back, a ripple of laughs from the front. Woody' s neighbor, a bald thick-bodied staff sergeant named George, screws up his eyes, puzzled at the turn the conversation is taking.
"And he can't go 'cause her mother is coming to visit."
Does he like his mother-in-law? I ask. A few faces, from the married men at the back, show some doubt.
"Well, yeah, she seems okay." "She doesn't visit too often, you know, that's good, don't impose."
Uh-huh, I nod. Mother Grencher, he calls her, isn't that kind of an ugly name?
"That's her name." Nods of agreement at this obvious fact.
I counter. That's what the author decided to call her. But it's his story. He could have called her any name. How would you feel about her if he called her Mother Jones? Or Mother Bountiful?
The faces cloud up at this question. It's hard to consider alternatives. The written word has, particularly for the young men, the inevitability of doctrine. Finally a voice from the back.
"Grencher's kind of an ugly name." Nods of agreement from the front. "Yeah, makes her sound like an old witch."
"Sir?" George lifts his arm, ramrod straight up from the shoulder, hand pointing at the ceiling.
"Yes, George."
"That line where he says she's the first to admit that she's not getting any younger?" I nod to show I remember. "My mother-in-law's like that, only you know, when she says that, what you're supposed to say, I mean what she wants you to say, is that she looks as young as ever."
Do you think the same thing is happening here? I ask George but turn my head to include the entire room. A few slow and hesitant nods of agreement.
"Seems like it's the wife wants her mother to visit, and he's just going along with it." "Yeah, trying to put the best face on it."
Let' s go back to the wife, I suggest. He calls her "breathtakingly levelheaded." Why not just call her "levelheaded?"
This is a hard one. A slow thirty seconds pass, while men chew on their lower lip or pull on their earlobes. Finally Woody raises his hand. "Yes, Woody?"
"Mr. Wright, it's both things." His words are slow, his voice straining under some weight. "I mean, he loves his wife and all, he likes that she's levelheaded, but sometimes he wishes she wasn't quite that levelheaded. You know, that she would tell him just to go over there and have a good time."
I tell Woody that I agree with him, but I want him to take the class a little farther. What about "breathtaking?" Why not say she's "annoyingly levelheaded" or maybe "too levelheaded?" He ponders. I see tics of excitement in some of the younger faces, as they begin to feel how a single word change can send a story in a different direction. The class waits for Woody.
"If he said that she annoyed him, then he'd probably up and go to the wedding. But this way.. it' s like he can't say anything."
Breath-taking, I suggest.
Woody grins at me. "Yeah, she took his breath away."
The class is quiet, savoring where Woody has led them. I look at my watch. It's five minutes to 10:00 p.m. Anything else? I ask. Anybody?
"Good story." Enthusiastic nods from the front.
A good class, I answer. Thanks. See you tomorrow.
A version of this story appears in the Spring 2008 issue of "Writers on the Edge," a print journal from the University of California (Davis) devoted to writing and the teaching of writing.